Heroes of Community Release Present (Patreon)

So last post I talked about how past releases have been super stressful, and aside from user environment issues, this one... hasn't! This is my gratitude post. Let's talk about the primary reasons for this time around being better.

First and foremost, the team! So, I've had a lot of help staying on top of the cats this testing cycle, and I wanna shout out the star players. 

In past releases, I knew that I could pretty much handle everything eventside myself with enough time... but it still does take time-- especially when it's like, drifting through eight pages of typo reports, and then needing to scroll to and fix them in the editor, and then the tile errors and blahblahblah-- the actual fixes are quick, but the time stacks up understanding and locating reports and moving between them.
So anyway, this time we have a Crim! Crim has been bearing the weight of all of those minor error reports on her own strength and willpower, and it's been a huge help to not have to be dealing with all of those myself in addition to trying to troubleshoot the biggest things.
But also, why should she stop there?
We've had this running thing where Crim will slide into my dms like

...Here, the   l ï s t   is from my personal list of things to do and fix-- notes I take hastily for myself that don't quite make it onto the team's spreadsheet (especially when i was trying to keep up with like five streams at once + channels). Since Crim started helping me out with eventing towards the tail end of development, she is also very equipped to help me troubleshoot non-minor event issues. Given her proclivity to detail, her artistic talent, and readiness to explore new horizons, she's been invaluable for helping me clear the plate to focus on other things, or otherwise taking on some projects that just require a closer look for which I don't have the mental real estate they deserve. I also get to throw things at her that she doesn't necessarily know how to handle, and then be proud of her when she's figured it out and expanded her horizons in the process~ That happens a lot.

So, that's the event side more or less done and dusted. But in the past, it's always the scriptside stuff always spooked me because it was often out of my depth, which meant doing things like depending on other people 😱 . I'm quite a bit more comfortable at handling script things now than I was for e18's community, but there are still a lot of things that I'll hear about something being broken, and I'll kind of have a quick [panik] moment, like ah shoot i have no idea how to fix that and that sounds awful
Anyway, it turns out git is a pretty nice software and having full access to both a list of things to be fixed and the tools to fix them is a pretty significant leap forward. So, this time around Perry has been pretty much autonomously chopping through the scriptside cats left and right. Something will get reported that I was worried about, and I'll notice like three days later that
oh
Perry just Fixed it
okay.
everything is fine.
kalm.
I've been quietly depending on him a lot of the past several months and I'm always very grateful for him stepping in and saving us from our myriad script sins

In the same department is Vulpes! Unless I talked about this already and forgot-- and if I did, just pretend like I didn't, okay?-- the careful long term reader might be thinking something like Vulpes? I thought she was one of the animators! ... and she was! Well, she still is! But during all the testing chaos, she has decided to not Just be an animator, but also stepped up to bat, suddenly learned Ruby scripting, and has been helping Perry with script cats and the odd eventside thing as well! It's been amazing to see her grow in an entirely new direction and it's been a wonderful surprise to have the extra help in those areas too~

Others on the team have been helping out here and there too-- for instance, Smeargle's been patching up missing eggs, and doing things like redoing all of the fancy new Judgment animations when they apparently crash some lower end computers, oops-- and Cass has been desperately holding herself back from destroying/improving the scripts in new and creative ways until just after we do the public release...

But anyway...
...Would you believe that I didn't actually make this post to mainly talk about the dev team?

I actually wanna focus mainly on the Support Team. 

Okay, what's that? We had some of these conversations on the server so if you've been around there for a while this might sound familiar. QA and testing are always a chaotic time because solely by the law of large numbers there's going to be a lot of bad reports, there's going to be a lot of duplicate reports, and there's going to be a lot of reports that are just issues with specific machines and software. And that's a lot to parse through for someone (me), especially when that someone (hi) also has to be the one fixing all of the things that -are- valid reports.

Now, since the E18 community test, I was surprised to learn that it turns out, I am not the first human to be running a project or having issues like this. And apparently (though this came as a shock to me), other humans in similar positions and professions have found some strategies to organize and handle the chaos. One of those strategies was having a dedicated volunteer support team who's job it is just to handle the parsing and organization of what needs to be done so that, say, the project leader doesn't need to do that.

So I had some of those conversations with a few people in the months and weeks leading up to testing, and collected three Stellar Folks with some background and experience in managing these types of cases, and had decided to let them take charge of the QA organization.
And that... kind of happened? It did happen. But not entirely in the way I was expecting. 

Let's go through these three one by one. 

First up is AiedailEclipsed, who I've kind of already got a jump on flaunting due to the patcher. He made the patcher.
Patcher patcher patcher.
I hope this clarifies my feelings on the matter.
In the past he also made a link counter too!
(Did you know that the community open beta has been downloaded 17,440 times already? Wowies!)

...Okay, so I have to reign in my hype for the patcher a little bit. Having included a very functional patcher with the community release has... made me realize that even if there's a notification that tells people Hey patch your game! when they open the game... and even if they just have to open a utility that does it for them and click a button... ...a lot of people just won't do it.
I don't know these people.
Who are these people?
What do you have against patches?
Did you have a cat named Patches who scratched you a little too hard as a child?
What--
...No, anyway, I'm fine... Everything is fine.........................

Anyway Aie and I have both just been accruing psychic damage from things like people being allergic to patching their games, or not being able to patch their game because they're on Mac, or because their antivirus ate it, or because... apparently Windows 7 doesn't support Python, and apparently nobody in the patron beta test had Windows 7????
I mean-- if we're wrong-- if you are a patron who successfully used updater.exe on Windows 7, please let us know. But that's our understanding for now. 

Anyway, patcher, testing, trenches-- point is Aie really went above and beyond the initial call of duty when it came to the support team stuff and it was a huge stride forward.

Next up, AyTales! Don't get Ay confused with Aie, that's a completely different vowel sound.... I think............. Anyway, you might recognize her name because she's been the one out there managing that entire spreadsheet of locations for pokemon and passwords and items and gosh knows what else. What you might not know is that she is actually a Spreadsheet Witch and also gave our own internal cat-corralling document an entire overhaul and set us up with a bunch of fancy new filters that have really helped out with keeping everything efficiently organized. 

And like, I didn't ask for that or anything, like I'd pulled her onto the support team and then she was like "hey i have some ideas for the sheet" and i was like ?????????? okay great i barely know how to use spreadsheets because i have been organizing everything in notepad++ texts for years like some kind of neanderthal. Now instead of having everything in scattered notes and a spreadsheet with like eight tabs, we just have one active tab and personal filter views for all kinds of neat things so that we can all choose to ignore the cats that we are Currently Not Perceiving :)
it's great. ay really went above and beyond the call of duty here. 

Last but not least, enumag! enumag is actually one of our oldest patrons, and has been helping us out from the sidelines for a while, including and especially since we got on git. More recently during testing, he's taken an active role with a side project of his that he has named eevee (for Easy Essentials VErsioning Engine). 

So, git is great-- I keep saying that. Unfortunately, RPG Maker is from the year 2005 and all of its maps and information is stored in compiled .rxdata files. The problem with a unique compiled file type is that git can't read it. 

So... example for the non-tech savvy people:
Let's say we have a script file, and the entire contents of the file is this:
[0000]
That's it, that's the whole file.
So now let's say I change the file to this:
[1000]
But at the same time Perry changes the file to this:
[0001]
Git as a program can look at this and say, okay, these changes happened at the same time. The first 0 needs to be 1, and the fourth 0 needs to be 1, therefore this should be the final file if we include both people's changes:
[1001]
This is super simplified, but that's the basis of file merging!
...But if it's in a compiled .rxdata file type, Git can't do that.
It can't see the 0's and 1's, it just sees the files were changed.
I can only choose [1000] or [0001] and then have to go back and make the other change later. This is the basis of file conflicts, and has been super annoying to work around, especially when we have had multiple people doing a lot of work on a busy map, like for instance the Nightclub. We had to be very careful to not overwrite each other's work, because only one person could be making changes to a compiled file at a time. 

...So, eevee. Basically, what enumag did was found an existing plugin that kinda worked, that converted everything in RMXP to a text readable format.... and he fixed it up for us and made it play nice with git and then also wrote an entire program to support that and quickly generate and upload patches from it. That's a lot!!!!!
This doesn't matter as much for us-- it is very nice to be able to see and smart-merge exactly what changed in a given map, and it is saving us time on not coordinating files when fixing things... but our development cycle is basically over.
However, it is a huge leap forward for, say, mods, which we could potentially just intelligently merge and integrate wholesale now without worrying about scuffing changes that have happened since or before the mod was made. Or, say, for these other games still in development that you might have heard of, I think they're called like (looking at smudged writing on hand) Prejubilation and Desk Hallation?
And naturally it would've been an excellent to have for us sooner, but better late than never for something we didn't originally think was possible. Enumag really went above and beyond the... you get it, right? 

...So, remember when we were talking about the support team organizing cats?
Rather than absolutely popping off with their own projects that have each been huge strides forward?
I mean, what are the odds that all three of the people I originally asked to help would all just be like launching us forward like this all on their own initiative and efforts??

Personally, I'm floored by it.
Just, like, on a conceptual level?
I am incredibly grateful to all of them for paving the way for future developments and strides in the community, and they've all far exceeded expectations. 

...And it doesn't stop there! They've been so busy with their own endeavors and projects that they weren't even necessarily able to keep track of the report-parsing like the Support Team was originally intended, but a couple other folks have stepped up to fill in for that famously. Big shout outs to Felicity and Azery for really filling those shoes through beta and somehow still the entire Community Release rush!!! I wasn't expecting others to step up and offer to help out but they did, and it's been a Huge deal and they've really done a great job with it all

And it doesn't stop???? 

Bluetowel from the altforms/Plates of Arceus mod has been helping us out on the side, including setting up the unrealtime password and as of the last patch, and integration of it with the Set Weather mod.
PS: Blue has their own patreon here, if that's something you might be interested in supporting too!  

And then from the community itself-- Haru, who originally helped us out with the initial implementation of the randomizer has basically taken over maintaining and expanding it. Neither Cass or I have had the time and presence to dedicate to it, so having them work on it directly has been incredible. 

Waynolt, who many of you know from his entire modpacks, not only allowed us to steal several of them and add them to the base game during development, but was helping out during alpha and beta as well with getting things like the stat display and magnetic lure right into our code even when I was like hmmm actually i want to change the entire front end of it lol (also look forward to a future post about all that !)

And then Pyrolusite from the UI Overhaul mod-- I mean, our default UI in game was already his creation from the v1 in the first place, we just integrated it, but we saw that he had made some icons for the new stat display that were very nice and was kind enough to let us steal them too

And Macintosh friends Nuems and Olxinos from the troubleshooting channel on the main server-- Aie and I couldn't get a Mac patcher going during earlier testing. Good god did we try but Steve Jobs was just determined to slap us across the face and make us call him several things which I will not repeat at this time. We gave up and just asked Mac users to patch manually-- and then boom, Olxinos wrote a shell command to do that automatically-- and then boom, Neums put it into an app that we can just distribute. Wacky !!!!! 

There is all of this support and wild stuff that is both so much better than before and wouldn't be possible without the incredible support just coming out of the entire woodwork from the community, and i am INCREDIBLY THANKFUL for them and all of you and everyone who has helped us get not only the project to this state but also help make the act of making it so much better !!!!!!!!!

... And this all is going to lead directly into the third part of this post coming up next time. In the mean time, thank you all again for being here <3

-- 

Follow up from previous post: Thanks to everyone who voted~ So I see that maybe about a quarter of people were ready for spoilers a week ago. I think what I'll do is wait until after Public Release since I'm still kind of scattered, and then I'll start tagging the title of some posts with spoilers and consider those to be on the market.