What happens after quests are done? (Patreon)

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okay, i said i'd make this post when we finished one more quest, and we haven't, but it's like 95% done, so who cares, here we are. better i tell you all early anyway so that i can put stuff right up on the dev blog when we get there, cuz qqurl, you know the second i say all quests are done, like five different people are gonna be like "ok e19 when tho"

not that they're wrong to be excited!!! there's still a lot to do, but i am out here trying to not use that as an excuse to diminish excitement !!!! (its a wip, lmao)

but okay, what is this fabled 'lot to do' that i keep talking about? 

i realized i've been procrastinating detailing it because i've been procrastinating knowing the details of it myself. it's just another huge to-do list and i don't want to get stressed out by all the tasks that aren't done yet. i want to be focusing on the singular next thing i want to do and be trying to have fun with that!!!
that sounds healthy but i think it's actually a form of emotional avoidance??? i can't tell anymore tbh. either way, it's silly. let's talk about stuff.

Things that still need to be finished before testing:

• Animations! 18 remain, including Z moves. Only 3 have not been started. I think. Smeargle, Vulpes and Robin tend to hit them out of the park when they come in for them.
• Early game updates! I've updated the first 3 episodes. I plan to go through the next 4 holistically in the same way (though I won't be redoing anywhere as hard as I did rhodochrine)
• Mid game updates! Describing separate from above because I won't be going through the entire episode, just fixing bits and pieces I know need to be fixed to improve things or to be consistent with the earlier updates (such as later references to kiki being a gym leader)
• Ending scenes! This will be an upcoming post, Marcello and I are still Conspiring for now.
• The Nightclub! Azzie has been working on it bit by bit but there was so much dialogue to fill in there, especially with the Battle Pavilion. Just gotta make sure everything's covered.
• Teambuilding! The work that is done for the quests is the mapping/eventing/story side of things. A lot of the team-building has been set aside since it's quicker and can be done separately. I'd say about half the quests still need the fights built. Shout-out to Cass for carrying slew of the work to this point too~
• Field Updates! We've got a handful of changes we want to make. Also, updating the Field Notes app is its own tedious headache clusterfuck :c
• Bug-fixing! Perry has made a Big Dent © in our existing bug lists, some of which have been carried over for years. Ideally, I'd like to finish out our list of things before opening testing, so that we are fully ready for new issues (and new issues caused by all of the fixes we just made, I bet...)
• Sprite Updates! Mostly for VS sprites. I am not redoing every sprite, but the more I redo, the more some of the oldest ones stick out. Mostly I will be looking to catch the worst offenders rather than whatever random one I see. In addition to working on quests, Crim has also been helping me out with these~
• Credits!
• Many small loose ends! Like TV dialogue, getting in the last few patron trainers (that's you guys!), the easter egg dev room, etc.
• Maybe some other passwords! So there's more options for future replaying. Those should all be fairly light weight and high mileage to do near the end though.

Because of everything there is still left to do, I am still not promising a timeframe to begin testing.

I have been reminded that everything left to do is much smaller-scale than quests. By a fair magnitude perhaps. This brings me peace. I am trying to continue reminding myself of that. 

That said, this patreon game is gonna change real soon here. With exception to the time spent on that last quest, now that I'm not primarily working on exclusively spoilery content, I hope to be able to be a lot more transparent about what I'm doing, and maybe start streaming development more. I'll keep you posted... no pun intended. maybe.

On the note of streaming, I have been streaming on twitch pretty reliably for the past couple months, but I believe we might be breaking from that this week, as we're gonna try and get a jump start on some of the AI bugs that are still on our radar this weekend. Depending on how stuff goes, maybe I'll see if we can be streaming some work on that, since i don't think any of it needs to directly concern spoilers.... Maybe... We'll see... If we did see, it'd be sunday afternoon though.

Also coming up: Folks are wondering about what testing is going to look like when we get there. Fair. I'm going to make a post about plans for that, and changing some plans for that soon. What questions about testing do you have? I got a few from Discord already, but if you ask them here, I can be sure to drop a mention into the next post with some answers.

much love as always ty ≮̕3҉