[june monthly] recaps, reborn, and all the usual (Patreon)

for new and up-coming patrons who pledged during the month of may:

• everyone's been added to the credit list! if you want to be disincluded or listed under a certain name, please let me know!
• accounts have been hooked up to the supporter status where applicable and where i could find emails. patreon's website is being some megastupid right now, so if i missed you please let me know!
• messages have been sent out for trainer names but if you'd like to call in a higher reward please let me know
• basically whatever it is, please let me know

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a summary of the past month in gaming history:

• we finished and parallaxed the battle map for the demo and posted a bunch of screenshots!  ..ah, wait, what do you mean that was in the last month? that feels like it was at least two months ago. i felt like i've done nothing. could it be that i actually do things? no, that can't be right...
• we finished the options and control config screens 
• and also made loading graphics, a cursor graphic, stylized the cutscene skipper and the splash screen, thus finishing off one of our big ticket to-do categories 
• and did some more overworld sprites and finished another combat model + animations 

ok yeah yeah starlight this starlight that, first star that's up to bat, whatever, what about reborn?

even though i've been focusing on starlight, the others are still making progress. it's not as direct as probably most people hope, but cass has pushed another legendary quest closer to completion (to the point that it's now waiting on me again, whoops), smeargle is animating up a storm as usual and thanks to toothpastefairy, we now have a functional game-z animation editor which should speed up their workflow significantly.

seriously, like, if you haven't seen me complain about the base animation editor during review streams? then i've exercise a lot more self restraint than i believed i had. it is, like most of essentials, insufferably laggy. this was highlighted most emphetically at the animation stream a few weeks ago when i tried to load the cue menu and it just outright crashed. my computer was having a bad day that day, and the cue menu normally lags for a minute or so but crashing? yikes. that was a rough stream though.

and yet it is so much better now! we've also since integrated MKXP into e19 properly (we were holding off before in case of any more weird bugs. and we've got plenty of weird bugs. but most of them aren't our fault at least...) so that helps to.

anyway the point is bless toothpastefairy.
in fact, we blessed him so hard he's a dev now. it was briefly mentioned in the patreon, but we've recruited him to the team to help out with bug fixes.

y'see, in trying to prioritize when we pull marcello into starlight work, we undertook a project to collect and organize all of our script-side bugs. this took a few days. in addition to everything we already had written down, we also went and combed through all of the forum reports since the release of e18. frankly, for it being a year and a half's worth of bugs, it wasn't so bad. but still, there was enough that we didn't want to make azery deal with it alone, so we got some help.

and frankly, that's been going well. but one of the difficult decisions i've had to come to terms with over the past few cycles of development is that i... i simply cannot fix everything. because of the sheer volume of bugs, there are going to have to be a number of them that go un-fixed. i don't like this-- it feels like admitting defeat, or releasing a broken game. but if we want e19 to ever be released we have to pick and choose our battles,
she says, still trying to convince herself.

so we've organized all of our script-side bugs into categories like "required before release", "we should probably do this but if it doesn't happen, whatever" and "this bug is a feature now". that last one is our favorite category. to give an example of something recent that we've had to put there, one of our bug reports was that clangorous soulblaze doesn't work as an AoE move in double battles. it's true, it doesn't, and it's supposed to. but unfortunately, making it do that would actually require a huge rewrite of the z-move system altogether (which was created before soulblaze, or any other AoE z-move existed) and it's just not practical to do. so, this is just going to be a Quirk of the move that an NPC mentions in game somewhere. 

it kind of sucks, but this is how it's going to be.  hopefully we don't have too many cases like that

other bugs that become 'features' are things that just don't matter enough to be worth our time. for instance, there's a visual inconsitency with minior between reborn in canon. in reborn, wild minior are sent into battle in core form, and then puts on their shell.  but this is incorrect-- in canon, they start in shell form when wild; only trainer-owned minior start in core form.
and to that i say, who cares.
we are not redoing shields down, which was already a mega pain to implement in the first place, just because of that ^^; no. you can't make us. nope nope nope. gamefreak don't interact.

in this way, we will hopefully survive our buglist.

hopefully.

actually as of the time of this writing, we've almost gotten through all of our 'required' bugs already. a few stragglers are still being worked on, and there's some work on the online system that will be done during the testing phase. and one of these bugs in particular has us blobsweatin' real hard. but... bewteen our three talented programming folks, it's been working out.

we will pray for the bugs to perish in this summer's heat.

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once upon a time this post was going to be about the riots, us watching the world burn for yet another month, hoping anything will come of it. i've talked a bit on the server but our city was one of the first remote epicenters for these protests, and while it seems to have gotten under control now, watching videos of some of the violence in my own city was just, overwhelming. definitely practicing some mental distance from social media and stuff right now, 

a week later though, i don't know that i have anything to add that the internet hasn't already hashed to death. for good reason, of course... but i think we're all just exhausted, so i'll let this post end here. 

i hope everyone stays safe, and that the number of months i have to end a post with this kind of sentiment doesn't continue to grow through the rest of this year...