alpha begins .. !?! (Patreon)

....actually it started two days ago !!!

specifically the only group in alpha right now are the dev teams of rejuv and desolation. sharing scripts means what we do is directly affecting them and given we're on an imminent release schedule it behooves us to get all of them playing sooner so that there aren't spoilers in the way of literally everybody's workflow. 

...so i'm going to say this without having looked at the cat reporting forum properly myself yet but the state of testing has been described to me so far as "going really well?"
which is nice!
I don't know how true that is because I haven't had both the time and energy to face all the cats properly yet (this is normal i do this every test) but i will take the positive assessment as i get it

...i think it's going to be a while before anyone tests postgame though!
we've had the first couple people finish the core of e19 today, but both of them are taking the route of [finish e19] > [replay main game to see changes]. most of the others are doing a full replay. but ... ! that's okay ! we'll just be here for a while and will continually pull people in. 

nothing super entertaining yet but it's worth noting that post-script merge we've just had two big overhauls, one to field effects which i talked about previously, and one to multiple forms. the multiple forms bit, aside from being for the sake of organization and sensible handling (file reads so much better now) is primarily to make them operable by the randomizer.
anyway, naturally, most of the major issues we've had have been related to that. like the day care crashing. or some PULSEs not functioning properly. or the pokedex...
or spinda.
spinda just crashes ur game.
we added wild spinda to rhodochrine
you can just
find a wild crash message in the jungle
love it

so we haven't really gotten to anything but the most major issues but it seems like for the most part people have been able to progress and lord above that's all i want for right now

let us pray for the testers' safe journey through alpha
:pray: BLESS :pray:

in the mean time, have a Hardy, courtesy of Falcon!