[Rewards/Recap] first review, and also cal i guess. (Patreon)

okay, so first the usual bits, this applying for new patrons pledging during the month of january!

• everyone's been added to the credit list-- if you prefer a certain name please message me!
• level 5+ accounts have been connected to the supporter status on the forum
• messages have been sent out to others
• there was some talk about the higher tier rewards recently so i want to reiterate that if anyone would like to call in something like a custom character or a sprite request please do me a message!!!
• also message me if i missed you somehow. we fix it, ok?

ok.

so, like i said before, i'm going to start making these monthly posts sort of a recap on what all has been done since the last one so that people who don't necessarily read every post have a quick way to catch up, and so the rest of us can get a better sense of progress over time. especially me, since i tend to feel like i've done nothing at all recently, all the time. even right now, i feel that way, even though january was kind of the get-back-on-track month. so, what's the actual record look like?

• well, in the first half of this month i was still wading through the Big Story Block. this one's gonna account for a lot more work than i can realistically elaborate on but lemme put it like this...
  i'm about halfway through E19, not counting postgame. as i said on the dev blog, if this were a normal episode, i'd be finishing it up right about now, but of course there's victory road and such. for every episode i have a separate story variable that i tick up as the player progresses to control the story sequence. for a frame of reference, E18's variable maxed out around 60. E17's was only 20. 30-50 is probably an average range for a typical episode.
  E19's is currently at 105.
  there are some extenuating circumstances in there, but like, still. that's a lot of number for only being halfway through the episode's development... not even half, if you believe scoreboard percentages.
  point is: many story.
  
• we caught up on about ~60 animation reviews that had been backlogged from my time in the world of chaos, and passed 11 of them
  
• the last bit of new AI code in the form of ally-targetting moves was finally finished, after being put off since last episode
  
• we finished the full combat model for nova in starlight, and started animating it! ...actually, i haven't posted the other animations but i'm done animating it by now. wowie.
  
• we made the entire gym... as of last night, the whole thing is finished but that took some time because it's including
  - the map
  - some custom graphics
  - the gym puzzle, which turned out to be much more complex to implement than i expected, but we made it through with no losses!
  - and of course, as of last night, the actual story and battle itself!

• we made a department store card, so the player can track which stickers they have
  
• and finally, a lot of loose ends that had been left through last parts of development, like the PULSEdex images, accounting for whiting out in various inconvenient story positions, and cleaning up some graphics that were annoying me. like this one, from the year 1856: 

in my opinion this sprite is one that has so little logic and order to its wretched messiness that it only barely operates with that impropriety on a fine knife's edge, so that changing anything about it just results in it visually combusting.
not that i'm self-critical or anything.

not a big change, but much smoother overall. the hair on the shading has any logic whatsoever, and half the shirt isn't competing for who can best pretend to be solid black without actually hitting it.

...and that's about it! i can't say i'm satisfied, but most of those are important steps. so bit by bit, we'll get there. thanks as always for hanging around for everything!