c o m p o n e n t s (Patreon)

every day i wake up and think 'i should probably make a post today', and then don't.
um, except the days i do post.
obviously not including those.
but given the choice between actual development and just talking about development, i feel the strong need to choose the former the majority of the time...

but ame, most game development patreons only update once a month

were it not for the laws of this land, i would call them little bitches.
no not really, that's probably way more sustainable and emotionally healthy.
but i opened this up doing daily updates because i assumed that would just be the standard, and now look at us. look at me.
is it a slow fall from grace or a controlled descent to comfort? vote now on your phones.
unfortunately my vote counter is broken so i worry about it regardless. if only there were a clear cause and effect of poor emotional decisions and outcomes here.

when we last left our heroes, i commented that there were two sets of features* that we had been focusing on to round out the non-combat portions of the game. previously we talked about the VN side implementations with mention to another half. today we get to that other half, which is just a set of improvements for the 'walking around and talking to people' portion of the game. 

*a hhhh i can't do this
i can't in good conscience call them 'features' it sounds far too advertisey
every game wants to boast about all of the """features""" it has, and i just can't. i need to run. i need to get away-- escape to another word. what can we call it. microfeatures. featurettes? as if it is just the feminine form of a feature? no-- t-thesaurus, help me-- help-- 

com·po·nent

/kəmˈpōnənt/

noun

a part or element of a larger whole, especially a part of a machine or vehicle.

yes. ok. let's go with that.
they are not much on their own but they are all necessary to add up to a good overall experience.
these are not sales points,
i am not trying to market this to you,
we are not solving world hunger but i have baked you a muffin and left it at your doorstep.
...you dont have squirrels, right?

components!

ame, you can't just make up new meanings for words every time you f--

components.

move straight? no, move fruity.

8 directional movement. shout out to perry for actually calling it that in the code.

actually, i guess this one does impact the actual combat control system, but i'd like to still do more there, so we're not touting that horn right now, this is just the gif i have on hand. sometimes it's not about the gif you want, it's about the gif you get.

nyoom

this one isn't novel to reborn players, AKA presumably, -coughs- all of you... but running is neat! RMMV is kind enough to include dashing by default, but it doesn't look very good when the sprite doesn't change. which, by default, it doesn't. thanks to nicky, now it does!
to be honest, my running sprites in reborn were mid anyway. needs more hair swooshy.

maybe we'll make it swooshier in the future too. the technology exists at least.

"Are you going to fix the stairs?"

...ok i have a little bit of salt with this one. when we were like 98% done with postgame+updates on reborn i got this tumblr ask:

i dont even remember how i responded to this because tumblr's search system is a real piece of ass

ame that's not what "piece of ass" means--

shut UP disembodied italic voice, you are being very mean to me today!!!
anyway this one kind of annoyed me for one real reason, being that this was the first time i had received a genuine complaint about the stairs so late into development, and a lot of petty reasons like by all means have and voice grievances but please have them for yourself and own your feelings as opposed to outsourcing them to the mythical entity of 'a lot of people'.  you do not speak for the many, you speak for yourself.
and no, they aren't going to get "fixed". with exception to one tile stair bullshit and the occasional cat, the stairs are working exactly as expected.
the issue this person has was how you walk diagonally across them because you still go straight on the grid, which is only really an issue with very wide stairs because we use events on the sides of the stairs to push the player up and down, and those were originally limited by lag.
we could have replaced it all with terrain tags , but i wasn't keen on the idea of mass-updating so many maps so late into the game and not just completely bricking them for what is ultimately a minor cosmetic issue. 

...but fear not, noble anon, speaker of the masses! no longer shall the people suffer their immersion being broken by those heinous widest of stair tiles! we are in a new project, and we can do right by the people from the outset. courtesy of perry, we introduce brand new eventless stair technology:

these stairs will automatically move the player up and down in the right directions no matter how wide they are or what part of the stair the player enters, guaranteeing you and the silent battered masses a safe ascent and/or descent with 100% of your immersion in tact, or your money back.

no idea if or how they'll work in tactical battles though. i think it doesn't apply. let's not worry about that right now.

Post Smartpath Facing

this is a back-end one. so, in reborn, say I want to move a character from point A to point B around an object that's in the way. I have to manually spell out the path like:

• move up
• move up
• move up
• move up
• move right
• move right
• move right
• move right
• move down
• move down
• move down
• face the thing

and furthermore if i get any of those wrong, like i didn't have enough Move Up's, and i told the game to wait-- it freezes. or, before cass came and revolutionized our lag script, if i moved the event too far out of the camera's view? it freezes. or if another event moved in its way and stayed there? freeze.

more importantly, it was a pain in the arse to event.

in starlight, all i have to do is say hey event, go to this spot. the event asks how, the code implicitly responds figure it out yourself, dumbass and the event will autonomously make its way there, dynamically updating for any interference such as the player or another event walking in its way. this is how I made the whole crowd run away at once in the demo. it is much easier!
....however, if I need the character to turn and face a certain way after having moved to that spot, then I have an issue. because we are pathing there dynamically, I have no way to detect when we get there, and thus when i should normally issue a command to face a certain direction. this was awkward and problematic.

it took a bit of bandaid work, but i edited the pathing script to be able to set a direction to automatically set a direction after moving. feels good! kakuna matata.

while i was in the neighborhood i also cleaned up a few other parameters from the plugin, making what i think should have been default functionality actually default and simplifying the process of calling it. specifically, by default it would keep trying to go to the spot indefinitely, even after it already reached the spot. why? why would anyone need that? imagine if your GPS refused to ever turn off even after you got somewhere. i don't know. there was an option to tell it hey um when you get to the spot, you can stop trying to go to the spot :) , but that was slightly annoying. so now they just assume that once they're there they can stop trying to be there.

if we implemented this in reborn we could have clown music play progressively louder as you approach terra

shout out to march for both the code and that commit title. i don't have a good visual example of this right now because we haven't made the animation yet, but my request was basically "reborn/rejuv's new itemfinder, but automatically activates if you're close enough to the spot". 

so on one hand i like games that give you reasons to explore, but on the other hand I don't like older jRPGs that hide items in random cabinets and furniture with no visual indicator and thus making you feel compelled to dig through every single furniture in this poor NPC's house. to help with this, i want to be very clear and transparent about what items in the overworld are interactable and which are not. however, i also still want to give the player a reason to explore. especially as large as these maps appear on the screen in 1080p, it's less interesting to me to just have it immediately visible from across the realm. 

the compromise is something that i hope will give players a reason to run around and pay genuine attention to the maps, but will leave no ambiguity about what is worth clicking on. this is part of why we needed the particle engine! I want to make the effect subtle-- maybe something similar to the lati quest where it takes a moment to stop and listen. 

this has another application too-- we've also gone ahead and made it work in tactical battles. this was a stretch request from someone way back in the demo testing, but with this feature we can make it so that specific characters in battle can interact with specific spots that are shown if they happen to move close to them!
i recognize there's some concerns with that. i would not like to incentivize combing each map with each unit, so we'll have to be careful to use those sparingly and probably only for lore easter eggs that one wouldn't feel the sting of missing much. nevertheless, it's an open door.

that's about it for this batch of stuff. well... one more bonus

quicker cutscene skip

this belongs in the previous category's post rather than this one, but it wasn't done before so i'm just gonna toss it in here now. in the demo, i implemented cutscene skip in a way that was functional and worked because it's what i had available. however, having to hold down the button for three or five seconds whatever was kind of annoying. so thanks to the combined efforts of myself, raven and perry, we now have this: 

instead of taking a few seconds of holding a button, you can just tap-press-press. you're shaving seconds off your speedrun already. 

...and as a bonus it's implemented much cleaner. i don't want anyone to know the code attrocities i committed to get cutscene skip to work in battle before. don't worry about it.

im sleepy good night