#ThankYouPatrons, and a brief word about gen 8 (Patreon)

hi! as some of you have probably been informed of through email already, today is #ThankYouPatronsDay! i had some plans to do a small video or something for the event to express my gratitude in a way beyond my usual rambling posts, but that hasn't worked out, so here we are again. personally, i'm of the opinion that this kind of thing needs to be said a lot more than once a year anyway. nevertheless, this is a perfectly opportunity to say it some more. 

a lot of other creators make a habit of calling out their appreciating for patrons publicly, and i share that desire because right now both reborn and starlight are only coming together because you all have been behind me, and no heroes should go unsung. however, as one might imagine various circumstances with reborn being made of copyright and all that make doing that somewhat risky. i'm not about to do something that i think may jeopardize the project, but please understand that in my heart i am screaming my appreciation to you for the world.
...well, maybe not screaming. not trying to be obnoxious here. but you get it.

the point is, i love doing this and i love you all and thank you.

it's especially meaningful to me to still be treading water during this long development time because (and i acknowledge i'll probably eat these words eventually but) it's hard for me to imagine a case where i'd end up in such a long development period without any release again. the three main reasons for it having been so long since release right now are: 

• most of the postgame dev time is going to be a result gamefreak's legendary bloat, which i sincerely never intend to deal with again
• releasing e19 before completing postgame is risky because right at main-game finish is when most fangames have gotten C&D'd
• it will never be as important to have a demo for the next project out already because, aside from legitimizing this patreon, we won't need to make the jump in the future from a community oriented around a fangame to a community oriented around various general games that happen to include a fangame or two

that said, in many ways i feel like at this point the best thing i can do to thank you all is just to hustle through this desert and get this stuff out for you, so that's exactly what i'm getting back to doing. both starlight and reborn are moving. it's gonna take too long, but we'll get there. as always, your patience, trust and passion are all truly, irreplaceably invaluable to me.

now.
let's talk about gen 8.

the games have been out for a little bit... long enough to beat them. did i beat it? no. i'm still only after the third badge because i play at the speed of dirt and also i've had to take it in small doses to maintain some level of energy for it. i've still mostly been trying to avoid spoilers for content i haven't gotten to but being at the head of a pokemon community and development team does make that difficult so 🤷🤷🤷🤷

that said i (and cass, sort of) have been and will continue to be posting thoughts on the game in this thread on twitter so hit that up if you are interested. i'm not going to go into detail about my thoughts on it yet here because i haven't finished and my moment-by-moment reactions are already there. 

as far as development goes, i have said before that we probably won't implement gen 8 in reborn, but that we would not make a final call until the games are out.
well, the games are out.
and our final call is that
we are not going to implement gen 8

...yet.

cass and i in particular have done a lot of work for e19+postgame already and reintroducing gen 8 and its changes (especially to movesets) would throw a lot of that in the garbage bin. on top of that, having to edit old fights and implement lots of new code introduces a lot of potential for gamebreaking bugs or off-balance fights (after we've already made multiple passes over existing leaders, for instance)...
basically, if this was not our final story release, i would implement it right away, but since it is, i want everything else to be as set and sturdy as possible.

then, after e19's release, we will begin to work on implementing gen 8 in full and add it as an update later.

however, as many of you know, the rejuvenation team is planning on adding gen 8 in immediately. after discussing it with everyone, since we would naturally be reusing code from them at that time, we'll be helping out rejuv with their implementation. we've formed a #TaskForce and are making plans to get the dirty deed done for them.

we don't quite yet know exactly what that's going to look like or what our individual roles will be in the end, but i'll keep y'all posted. personally i'm hoping to at least sneak in a spriting stream or something for you folks since i'm sure there will be about ten gabillion backsprites that need to be done ...........................

speaking of streams, we are approaching the point at which i could possibly do a mapping stream that isn't made of spoilers... so there's that too. but, that's gonna be it from me for today. i'll post again once i've got some more concrete details about-- anything. 

by the way, only a few of you have given me battle tower trainers names, so like, friendly reminder for anyone in Level 10 and above please feed me trainers even if you put one in before ok thanks bye !!!!