Amethyst

fine. i concede. you've worn me down-- twisted my arm clean off-- both of them in fact! i'm typing this with my toes. the white flag is raised, having been tirelessly goaded into it by the demands of an uncaring populace, night after night spent in fearful agony, whimpering in hidden corners that are yet unequal to the task set before them of simply shielding me from the slings and arrows of the greater internet community,* i accept i have no choice but to lament simply having no other choice, i deign to give you.... one progress bar. * none of this has happened or is even remotely true, everyone has been by and large supportive of my decision to yeet the progress bars, and i greatly appreciate y'all for that. i feel much better overall with them gone and feeling that way, this may be a mistake. if this ends up stressing me out, i will yeet this too. but we'll give it a try, because i accidentally started counting and, well-- the years start counting and they don't stop counting. the progress bar is how many legendaries are accounted for as of posting-- 32/65 almost halfway. why 65? 76 mons are not asked for by the pokedex quest in E18. 11 of them are ultra beasts and-- say it with me now-- ultra beasts don't get rights. gen 8 is not real, and cannot hurt me. that leaves 65 genuine legends i have to include. for my sanity, and frankly, the sanity of everyone else, we have downsized from original expectations-- not every legendary is getting a full quest. but the significant majority are. in cases where they don't get a full quest, only the earliest of them are a walk-in-and-start-chuckin'-pokeballs type of deal. there will be more on what else is entailed instead in a future post. so e19 will be released when we hit 65 ?????!??! no, no look at me stop that. stop that right now, you goddamn son of a beautiful person (probably) i appreciate your hypothetical passion but the answer is no a big, honkin' neon red no the kind of no that your mom gives you after she talks to my mom and asks if you can come over the kind of no that you wish you could get after hearing nothing from the last ten jobs you applied to the kind of no that means no and you respect it without making a scene nope. there are going to be things i want to do after the legend quests-- other things i need to do. possibly a lot of them, idk-- i'm not looking that far ahead because if i think about it i will take 2d8 psychic damage but what this whole legendary quest/progress bar thing is is the most significant obstacle before E19 can be finished or released. when the bar is full, that does not mean E19 is finished-- it means it can be finished. until then, all bets are off. i'm biting down and just trying to make it through one week at a time. thanks for sticking with it, loves.

hello my children, i have come to feed you since coming back to the project a month and a half ago, a fair bit has happened. i did take some time to warm up back up to thing, we moved over to a new file management system, also cass and i just moved into a new place like, last week so that's been taking up a fair chunk of time.... critically, we also have two new additions to the team: @crimsoncrim and @Azzie ! those of you who frequent the discord server probably already know them, and might've already noticed them popping up in the Developers group, those of you who don't already know them are missing out because they're both wonderful. crim has been helping a lot with various sprites, and will be joining me on mapping, and Azzie is around to put her writing skills to work and spin gold out of dialogue for us in the postgame! but how about that postgame? my focus since returning has been on the nightclub. There were a lot of things in it that were like, half-done. Those of you who fondly remember the progress bars can probably think of some of them. By now, most of those things are a lot more than half-done-- in fact, everything there is properly functional already! Some events are missing dialogue, but that can always be filled in later. Let's take a quick tour of the facilities, shall we? Starting with the one that ties them all together-- The BP Store A classic postgame staple-- you're gonna fite, you're gonna earn points, and here you can spend them. We're not adding gen 8 to E19 for now at least, but that doesn't mean we can't take some of their QoL features We got mints, we got Large EXP Candies sold by as much as 20 at a time, Ability Capsules, a selection of competitive-grade items. Whatever you might want to help you get new team members up to speed for postgame antics and more. But let's get to the real business. All of the following facilities are level-locked to 100 and provide BP should you prevail in them. The Battle Pavilion Bread and butter battle tower, brought straight to your local nightclub's dance floor! Get down or get knocked down. There are a couple changes from the usual battle tower format: Firstly, there's no heat-up period. Canon battle towers drip feed you a selection of low BST sandbag mons for the first couple rounds before putting on their big boy pants, but this is Reborn, and you're in the post-game; there's no need to waste your time with that. We'll be hitting you hard right off the bat, so get ready The Battle Pavilion is equipped for both 3v3 Singles or 4v4 Doubles In Singles, each set of 7 trainers will be capped off by a miniboss that you might recognize from the game! Examples include your local gang leader, corin-rouge, and madame meganium. Fields enabled! Each match will take place with a random field effect, so be ready to adapt fast! You can challenge with or without field effects on, but the BP reward is higher with them The Battle Factory Say whaaaaaaaaaaaat Pokemon Essentials has a built in implementation of the fan-favorite Battle Factory straight outta Sinnoh. But! It's broken. As a result, we had no intention of including it, but then our boy @Toothpastefairy shows up outta nowhere like "hey i fixed battle factory" so guess what y'all are getting. Rent a team from a random selection of nearly 1600 Pokemon sets! You'll fight through opponents with the rented Pokemon in a variety of challenges! After each battle, you can choose to swap one of your Pokemon with an opponent's! 3v3 Singles and 4v4 Doubles are enabled! Three modes exist for Battle Factory Classic mode-- No field effects here. Like canon, you'll be given a hint about what kind of team your next opponent has so you can plan accordingly! Set Field mode-- One random field effect will be chosen and used for the entire 7 battle set. Optimize your team for the field as you go! Random Field mode-- Each battle will have a different random field effect! You'll find out what your next fight is beforehand so be ready to swap and adapt according to what's next! The Rush Challenge After a certain point in postgame, you'll be able to take on our Boss Rush! Face all of the surviving leaders in succession in a battle of attrition and skill. You'll be healed in between, but can one team make it through all the way? They're packing heat! Expect to see some legendaries in their teams this time around. Everyone gets one now! The fun doesn't stop there-- Beat the challenge once and you'll unlock the X-League-esque hard mode! Instead of being limited to one legendary, they can have as many as they want. Watch out! Theme Teams This is where all of our failed Boss Rush teams have gone to die-- and by "die" I mean "live forever in notoriety"! We (and @andracass in particular) made a ton of teams for you to fight on various fields-- every character should have at least two. Wanna see mono-bug on Glitch? A Rock team for Murkwater? Any other silly idea we've come up with in last two years?? They'll be here. You name the team-- they name the field. This one's mostly just for fun and creativity, but they're still eligible for BP and a hard battle! Choose your fighter! (Like the last time Cass showed this off, the characters in the above image are explicitly randomly selected, so don't assume it means anything about the story ^~^ ) Mix 'n Match We've got a lot of characters, don't we? We also made a lot of theme teams... Many of them are just sitting around. But why should we be the ones to tell you what to do with them all the time? Here to put the power in your hands, Mix 'n Match is a customizable doubles multibattle feature! You pick your opponents, you pick their teams (from the theme teams available), you pick their fields. You can also pick a partner! A selection of trainers will register as available to use as a partner for this mode during postgame (depending on their relationship points with you at the end of the main story). Everyone who has relationship points and is alive can technically be a partner, though even I have no idea how many it's possible to pick up during a playthrough. Lonely, or just brave? Go in solo and fight a 6v12 death match for extra BP! Shout out to crim for the Arc backsprite-- and many many others! She and @smeargletail have really done a world of wonder on the sprites in the last few weeks. And that's the show! There will be other events (such as the entire quest hub) in the nightclub as well, but these are the main battle facilities. With all of them just about set and done, I've already started to return to working on quests. I'll come back with more again someday, I promise. Until next time~

i don't suppose you remember me, do you? i think it's been like, five hundred pandemic years or something since i've posted here. as many of you know from cass's previous posts, since around september of last year i've been focusing on a different project. gosh, that took a while, didn't it? once again, i want to thank everyone for their patience as always... but uh, we finally got a demo for that out, so maybe, possibly, go try it out, if you haven't already? we'll begin actively developing starlight for real once reborn is finished but i felt like it was important to finish the demo before reborn was done so that the community didn't feel like it had no choice but to just die once the game was finally out for real. i think there's been an expectation for some number of years that once 19 is done, the community will be. and uh-- nawh. but to make sure that didn't happen, and to make sure people could see what they might have to stick around for, i felt it was necessary to get that going sooner rather than later, and then come back to finish postgame. this was, in retrospect, a mistake. not for any """real""" reason, to be clear-- but the mental burden of putting reborn and everyone on hold or trying to split focus between two projects was a lot heavier than i expected. aside from keeping the devblog warm while i've been away, please appreciate cass for generally keeping me sane through the last year or so, because some of the stress had really been starting to get to me. i'm still working on shaking that off, tbh, but it'll be fine. on the other hand, i know i was getting pretty tired towards the end of making the main story, and i feel like taking a break for starlight has helped me come back to the project with a clearer head, more ready to finish it out properly. that is to say, if it wasn't clear enough already: reborn will now be actively developed again. another advantage to having taken time off from the project is that i've learned a few things, mainly about myself. and how to actually play nice with a team, since i haven't been very good at doing that in the past. but the main thing i've realized is that i hate to-do lists. they are soul-sucking. i feel a lot better about things when i am looking at problems in the game and fixing them on the spot rather than looking at a list of problems about the game several hundred lines long and just kind of getting overwhelmed. this is unfortunate for me as a person who has mainly organized her work in the past almost exclusively through to-do lists. now y'all don't care that much about my personal organization, that's stuff i have to figure out, but the point of this is that uh those task bars? that used to be on the right there? they're not coming back. because all that is is just one giant public to-do list. a constant reminder of all of the things i still have not done and still have to do breathing down my neck. i know they're cool, i know they're useful for communicating to everyone how far along we are. and maybe we can figure out something similar but for my own sanity no. nope. they're cancelled, and they're staying cancelled. in return i'll try to like, actually post or something once in a while. but, like, no promises. i still prefer to spend time doing the thing rather than talking about doing the thing. okay, so, the million dollar question: when will e19 be released? and i still don't have that answer. no one has that answer. the only answer to that that exists is 'sometime in the eventual future' but we'll like, keep you in the loop one way or another. there will have to be testing before it releases, starting with internal testing. so that might be a good indicator of it's coming up. just hang tight until then y'all