Amethyst

that'll teach me to say 'this is the last post for the cycle' ever again. fuck AI. anyway hi, check it out, it's E18, comin' at you now so here's the rundown on things this time around: USUM Updates As expected... and for that matter, promised! Fortunately: unlike E17, there's not all that much to do-- only a handful of pokemon/forms/moves, etc, and Marcello is already hardlining on that to get it sorted. bless Marcello. The biggest issue here is the sprites, but I mean -flips hair- I can handle those. Also unlike E17, I'm not starting with this personally, so it'll be a bit longer before it's checked off. Instead, I'm starting with... AI It's always such a pleasure. Remember when I tried to make the game better, but actually introduced like a dozen inaction bugs that ruined the experience for multiple waves of testing? twice? ...this is the second time. So this time I now know to expect that testing will take several months while we pick out those inaction bugs (they're really hard to pin down!!!). Anyway I talked last time about how there are ~350 function codes for all moves, and for E17 I did 120 of them. That leaves 230 for E18. I am currently cutting my way through a l l of those, as you can see on the status widget on the right. despite the low percentage, i'm about halfway done. So, a couple more weeks and I'll be set. Aside from that our other focus for this episode is potion usage, which we will rewrite entirely like we did for the switch algorithm last time. Maps normally this section is graphics/maps because i do them together, and to an extent that is still true here, however i don't really foresee the areas i'm mapping this episode even really needing that much in the way of graphics (and i'm sure i'll start taking some Liberties™ and promptly ruin that but) so I'm going to just simplify this down to le mappo's for this episod. in E17 there were seven areas i had to map. for E18, there are four. and one of them is not a giant fucking desert. so you know, that helps. Eventing as usual: this is the part of stuff that makes things on map do stuff blablahbalhabljdhfbdjf so i don't really foresee this being even a significant drain on this episode because i don't have any particularly troublesome (to make) puzzles planned yet but any issues or slowness that arises in this section is usually because of puzzles. if you suffer, i suffered first. that's what true love is. <3 Story here we are. the bulk. normally story is pretty quick-- so it's a good place for the bulk to be. but everyone knows i kind of dicked myself in terms story workload for the rest of the game after E17, so everything is effectively doubled. also, looking back at past episodes, E16 was sidequest-focused, and E17 was focused on exploration... E18's focus is the story itself. the last one it's similar to in that regard is probably E15. so we gonna kick some stuff into gear here. Sidequests exist. but i don't have much planned for them this time. there's a handful of events i need to do and maybe one or two or three small areas and other than that this should be ez to the pz like a blue moon fresh lemon squeezy. a good amount of other stuff was done for this in prior episodes. thanks, past-ame. Misc Updates as usual, the throw-away category. this is used for any changes to the existing game, which i have a small handful planned for but due to deliberately shifting focus and limiting revisions for the sake of forward progress, should not be very much. the rest of this goes to bug fixing. AKA fixing the AI we broke six parts earlier. whee. so there's what you can expect and understand from our scoreboard this time around. can i call it that? scoreboard? i dont know if it has a better name but i'm calling it that from now on cuz it sounds cool. like it's a game, or a war against nothingness in a place that has yet to be created so call up atreyu or whatever.