The Beldum Story (Patreon)

so X and Y were just about to come out when I was designing Route 1, and one of the features they advertised was the ability to ride Pokemon, such as Tauros and hop up ledges and such. Well that's neat, I thought, and began scribbling away on a sheet of paper the entire layout of Route 1 and also the entire Aventurine Woods puzzle. I knew as soon as I finished the sketch that it would be a much-hated area. In fact, I recall posting something about making another bullshit puzzle mechanic-- nobody realized the "bull" part was literal. 

So I started making the Tauros puzzle, determined to release E10 before X and Y came out and thereby beat them to the punch at their own mechanic. Although I completed it before the games' release, E10 didn't get out of testing until afterwards. Close enough. 

 In theory, this should have been very simple: 

• Player mounts Tauros, 
• Player changes graphic to having mounted a Tauros, 
• switch is flipped that duplicates ledges with identical event-ledges on top of them but a property that lets the player jump up them. 
• Bam-bam-done.

It was not that simple. 

The difficulty came in an unintended restriction of Essentials (as opposed to RMXP)-- the player sprite can't just be changed through event commands like normal. why? i don't know. maybe something to do with multiple player character options but then with better coding that shouldn't have to be a problem. Anyway, I knew Essentials mucks with default event commands and I knew the event command wasn't working, and I didn't know enough Ruby to feel comfortable going into the scripts and hecking around with that at the time. So what was a gal to do?

She was to make a set of entirely new player characters. Basically there are six characters you can choose to play as, right? But there are actually 12 that the game recognizes-- Vero, Alice, Kuro, Lucia, Ari, Decibel, and then all of them, but on a Tauros. This was a very silly and incredibly tedious, roundabout solution, but since the player-changing mechanic worked to change the character graphic, it would probably work. And as you know, it did.

So I rigged a common event up to put the player on the Tauros and change them to the Tauros character, and I edited the script to make the game think that as long as they were on Tauros they were actually just on a bike (cant go through tall grass). Then I put down all the events to hop up ledges in Route 1. Why couldn't I do ledges through the scripts too? the script works by making tall grass impassable if the player is on a bike or Tauros. however we can't just make ledges passable if on a Tauros because they already are passable normally-- but only from one side. I had to put a second ledge on top to allow #2SIDEZ.

So that was all fine and dandy... until the bug reports rolled in.

It turned out that if people were KO'd while on a Tauros, they would respawn in a Pokemon Center... on a Tauros. People found this pretty funny-- although since the event-ledges only existed in route 1 it (thankfully) wasn't very functional. 

This made sense. I had blocked off every exit to Route 1 with a "get the fuck off that Tauros" script-- but I hadn't considered player loss, and since the Player had, as far as the game was concerned, fused with the Tauros, there's no reason that they would separate on KO. The solution was simple-- just append that the "heck outta here tauros" script to the Pokemon centers' black out event.

But what if I didn't do that?

I forget why the wasteland came up-- I think it was just the first place that was reported when in reality it could have been everywhere. But somehow, it didn't seem inappropriate given  Byxbysion's general tomfuckery. 

I talked yesterday about how I love secret paths in games. And here, I saw an opportunity.

The Byxbysion tunnels were already pretty well hidden, but back then all they had to offer was a few rare encounters, Mr. Bigglesworth's easter egg, and the Mudkip event (now a Squirtle-- I had to cut the mudkip cry out of the BGM too q~q). I figured that a doubly hidden area like that could use some love, so I chose a pseudo to hide there and made it accessible only with Tauros, and had some pun with the signs (including bringing back that obnoxious "bullshit" pun from my earlier post). Metagross was chosen just because it fit the area best. Then I fixed every Pokemon center -except- the Wasteland's and added some dialogue for Lana to make it clear it was intentional. 

I recall thinking something like, "lol there's no way anyone is going to figure this out for a long time"

they figured it out immediately.

to my credit, it was only because somebody looked into the game's code and then posted it on the forum-- which we now have policies against...  but as soon as one person knew, everyone did. unfortunate. between ralts and beldum, i've moved away from adding especially powerful rewards for secret-finding alone. accompanied by a good puzzle or battle-- that's a different story though.

though i guess catching a wild beldum is its own nightmare tbh.

Beldum would be axed several times, including in the most recent releases. I also, probably for E15? changed the Wasteland center event to expand Lana's dialogue and add all those other garbage Pokemon. Now her machine is broken, and by using a Data Chop (typo... but thats funny so i leave it), it just goes completely haywire. This allows bizarre things like the player appearing on a Tauros to happen. It all wraps up nicely.  I made this change to create and clarify a reason of -why- it was the Wasteland machine of all things, instead of letting it be known that it was just arbitrarily chosen based on the first bug report.  

Plus, new players still have half a chance that way.

Or maybe like, a quarter.

Eighth?