a typhoon rages for 72 hours straight just so it can be called long-winded (Patreon)

finally getting to the original mess that i had wanted to talk about in the first place..... basically a couple of changes that have occurred with the development team

first, i had mentioned back in idk december or january or something that i was considering pulling on a couple more team members-- an animator and a scriptor. the animator we got in the form of Vulpes, and i may or may not have reported back that after discussing it with Marcello we decide it was best to keep him as the sole script operator

ok so remember that time like a day or two ago when i said that kuro can be a little intense? they're not on the team anymore by their own choice but they still pop around every now and then and try to be somewhat of a mentor to me. anyway, some share of weeks ago, i got a message from them basically telling me that Lia was on the team now.
and i was like ????????
firstly, bitch
nah i wasn't that rude with them but i did make it clear that it is not his position anymore to tell me who is on or off the team and that i didn't appreciate them assuming that role.

but i do appreciate lia. 

the gal works diligently keeping up on everyone's save files and that has been a huge service to me. mde was in her shoes before and he's proved to be a fantastic teammate. so when marcello told me that he and kuro had been teaching her ruby on the side and thought it might be good for to help out, i was pretty interested.
i don't think kuro knew that i had been looking to take on a second scripter though, and i didn't get the feeling that marcello had told them. so it's kind of like fuckor-- yeah, okay, i'll take the help you're offering me. but not because you're telling me that i'm taking it.

more importantly, marcello and i revisited the topic as a result of this and i expressed to him my concerns that at his current pace, we would likely release with a lot of known bugs again. he's been busy finishing up school and exams but even aside from that he's been bogged down in the eternal function code crawl so it's been a while since our growing bug list was properly attended to
we decided that giving lia the bugfixing tasks while marcello handled AI and future implementations would be a good way to warm her up to the project.

the girl's been doing well so far. one or two hiccoughs but that's less than one would expect from new hands. i continue to appreciate her diligence in new ways.
i haven't announced this yet because i wanted to make sure the workload would work out for her, but i'm sure that'll come in due time.

that's the first thing. the second directly relates to yesterday's post.

in the course of that discussion and thinking about what i can do to improve the team, the production, and the timing of the episode, i came to another conclusion: the extent of my mistrust in others is actually sort outright disrespectful to some of the others on the team.

it's one thing to worry about leaks and a rogue canon just ripping things apart.
it's quite another to fundamentally underestimate the capabilities of the people that offer me help.
i'm frankly embarrassed to admit how much this has been the case.

but i spelled embarrassed right.
that's character development.
why doesn't rpg maker have spell check?
i wonder if it can actually...
[one search later]
there is apparently a spell check plugin for RMMV.

aite anyway
i've kind of had this persistent belief throughout all of development that i have to do all the story stuff/puzzles/npcs/dialogue/sidequests/etc myself
firstly, because i was trying to keep all of that information as hush to the hush as possible, for the sake of not spoiling/leaking anything unnecessary, like i talked about yesterday
but secondly, because i've always thought that others wouldn't do it as well as i would
which.. for some things, may be true. but for others?

for example my NPCs-- i mentioned it on twitter earlier but i kind of hate doing NPCs. all that stray dialogue just sucksssss the life out of me, i can try and give them headcanoned backstories and personality and say things that are useful for the player but it just feels so arbitrary like meeting a limit of mindless characters who have to exist in order to make an area feel adequately populated
they may be good or bad depending on what you want from NPCs but i sure don't care for how i do them

but still i would do them so i can be in control of the dialogue and characters (word here used loosely) in the world, and because i would think that another person somehow wouldn't do them appropriately???
idk what the logic there is

basically as far as outsourcing work to others for the project, i've distributed things that are mostly mindless and tedious-- stuff that's automatic for me and a lot of the time i can't really be bothered with it. laying down hidden items and finishing the cliffs and maps are examples of most of what i've had mappers do. even i recognize it's not exactly fun for them. but they did want to help.
and then i would kind of hog everything that required any real thought
as if somehow the eventing system that i've been using since i was 11 would be Too Complicated For Their Feedble Brains
(i'm saying this harshly because i'm mad at myself for it)

i really don't know where the logic is. it's not like i think poorly of all other people since obviously i have people helping out on scripts and scripts are just like events except they need syntax (which is probably why i can never remember syntax to save my goddamn life-- i grew up not needing it)
but somehow
the basic mechanisms and specifics required to make puzzles work are just too complicated for them..!!! 😱😱😱
sidequests? we can't have that. that would require -movement- commands. nobody else could possibly comprehend the intricate dynamics of Move Left  Move Left   Move Left   Move Left   Move Left   Move Left   Move Left   Move Left   Move Up   Move Up   Move Left   Move Left   Move Left   Move Left   Move Left  

ok dan just read what i was typing and said this is going a little too forwards beating myself up and shaming myself and chopped me on the head so i guess it's time to dial it back 😔
he says it's cuz it's my baby and cuz it's mine and i wanna make sure every part of it is very good
and that my standards are "incredibly high"
which they're not
because have you seen those NPCs
but anyway.

the point is
i've stopped doing that a little bit.

when i think about what i kind of development team i'd like to have in an ideal world, the first thing i think of is the time i described recently when it was just dan, inuki and i working on various stuff in a call together. usually we'd have our own tasks but aside from that one of us (or ikaru, who was often hanging out) would always be screensharing our playthrough of the game so we were testing and working and having fun all at the same time.
it was lighthearted and effective and i can totally see how teams that have that kind of dynamic consistently would produce things at an untouchable speed and quality.
but most importantly, it was fun. and i'd like to get that back.

that doesn't work if i'm thinking in such a narrow focus of what i can have others do. that was part of why it fell apart.
(the other part was that Sm4sh came out and PSO had things going on that caused the others to no-life them 😅)

also included in the article from last post was the initial point about the "T-shaped" employee- solid breadth, solid depth. the difference between this team and most of the ones that that article is likely to be addressing, however, is that i can't pay the people who help on reborn yet-- it depends on them volunteering their time and energy. and for logical reason, those who have the time and energy are often still in school and/or often don't have the skill for these things (otherwise they'd already be doing them on their own)

so it's kind of a hang up-- i'd like to imagine a group where everyone can work together on all these different things and have fun and do it well but most people who would be in that position don't have that skill.
i've erroneously stopped here when thinking of it in the past.
marcello hadn't done scripting before kuro taught him.
mde and smeargle had never done animations before i showed them how.
obviously, i can just teach whoever i need-- as long as they're willing to put in the time and effort.

so, the whole point i've been getting to through the past three posts is that i'm having kanaya, who has previously just been on map completion before, do most of the sidequests for the episode. 

she's a close friend, but she hasn't had any real previous development experience. and also, i know she learns well. i've been encouraging her to work on herself and her art for a while now and she's come a long way in the time that i've known her. she still doesn't like people so she'll probably hiss if she hears i'm saying nice things to others about her. buuuuuuuut worth ^^;

so earlier in the week, i finished out the Azurine quest we discussed at the patron stream a few weeks ago with her as a demonstration for how to event. then i assigned her the Starter quest we came up with last stream-- and she just finished that last night.

based on that single quest, i've already observed two positive effects from this: 

first, the weight of my workload has just been like, halved. i'm not actually giving her half the work (and i've already done a lot of things like the graphics for these quests in advance) but the number of large things that i have to be accountable for for this episode is now basically just the episode story.
which by the way is almost done
so now i'm free to not only help out with sidequests as i please (i will probably handle sandy's, just, cuz, you know. sandy.) but also to do all the other fringe tasks like solving AI scoring issues, past improvements i've had stacked up, etcetcetc
feels pretty good

second, i've already been impressed by what she's brought to the table. there are three examples of this that come to mind immediately. 

• the first was in determining what we were going to do for these events- because on stream, we decided both of them separately, but the end result was pretty similar (turn in 2-3 pokemon, get a reward). so in the first place i told her, we should figure out a way to make these feel distinct.
  the solution she went to was require separate genders for azurine's breeding-- makes perfect sense, makes the player have to care about those details a little-- and having the starter quest not just be a few starters... but be any starter. or rather, every starter, and have various awards every three they turn in.
  this was a little bit unfortunate because i demonstrated the azurine event for her so that it would be similar enough to the starter one that she could just copy/paste most of the code for the starter one and have an easy first go around
  still, i really like how the event came out as a concept differing from the original one.
  but with her idea, the start event suddenly became like, a monster nest of conditionals which totally works but man i would not have given that to someone as an intro to eventing had i realized. 
• ..which is the second point, because despite that, she still tuckered through the whole thing. and also, she did it pretty well. in fact, she kind of made me look like a tool at one point. i noticed an issue where the player could get the last reward they got from the quest infinitely if they selected to turn in an egg and then backed out of it. and so i started on about okay, to fix this, let's rearrange this conditional--  and she was just like, can't we just use the command to just end the event?
  ...yes
  ..actually. yes, we can.
  (i had not told her that command existed yet.)
  (nor had i thought of using it there)
  and it was way easier. so go her. that happened more than once.
• finally, the NPC she wrote in for the quest-- okay, it's her self-insert, and that's a little eeeeeh but it means that's out of the way, and it is self-contained so i don't think it harms anything. more importantly, her NPC, despite being a self-insert, is a heck of a lot more interesting than whatever boring-ass techie npc i would've written in for the quest.
  i mean, no one will like her.
  but i'm sure she's fine with that.
  and it's a little funny at times.
  so i'm good with it.

basically, i'm solidly impressed with her overall. and i'm kind of kicking myself for not doing this oh, you know, [any number below 18] episodes earlier.

better late than never i guess.
here's to some more fun sidequests coming from her. 

so there we go-- what i was building up to saying over the past few days: i've had a small host of shifts in mindset and direction recently, and now we've also got one more person on the team, and one more person helping out with the core of the work, and i want to keep reinforcing the team to be better than ever.

brevity is the soul of wit
and here i play the village fool.