Amethyst

Yay for typing out a long reply and then it gets deleted :c Kuro is on point though, as usual. I love gimmicks. My favorite thing about Field Effects is that they can make gimmicks viable. Now, a gimmick for its own sake is goofy, but the goal with them is to bring the character to life in their battle. Let's take Kiki for an example. Her character is based around focus, zen, etc. So we've got this wonderful move called Meditate. And it's total shit. Meditate should never see competitive usage, tbh. But I add a field effect that boosts Meditate to +3 and suddenly it's the scariest damn thing she can do. That's fantastic. That's what we're going for. It's a gimmick, but it reinforces her character, and it still works. Battles like that, or when you have to deal with Julia's booms, or acting out a fai-- oops, spoilers-- are some of the best battles in the game, in my opinion. Now, Radomus. Let's make one thing clear right now. There is literally a 0% chance he's getting anything resembling his old singles team back, ever. Radomus's entire character concept is based on Trick Room, and the idea of black moving first in a chess match. The reason he ever had that singles team was because at the time Trick Room hadn't been implemented yet, and I wasn't about to give him a team that focused around a move that at the time did literally nothing. Those who faced Radomus in our online league will remember that if he got TR up, the battle was basically over. He played Triples, because TR is more effective in multi-battles, and lead with three bulky TR setters. There was almost no way to KO all of them, so as a challenger, you had to figure out which one he was going TR with, and focus that down. Guess wrong, and you get steam rolled. The first turn in Radomus battle was always the most important, and the most intense, especially on the rematches. So you get your tail kicked and come in for another try. Last time his Slowbro used TR, so you focus that down. Surprise, Reuniclus used it this time. Round 3, you find a way to take down both Slowbro and Reuniclus, but, lol, it turns out that it was Exeggutor with TR now. But more than just a guessing game, the odds were stacked in his favor. Sometimes, Radomus would have two or three of his Pokemon use TR at once. So no matter which the player focuses down, TR still goes up. Now, TR will cancel itself if used twice on the first turn. So maybe you try and bait him into cancelling his own TR by -not- focusing down a Pokemon. He doubles, cancels, and you win. Or he outpredicts you again, and despite your best efforts only uses it once, and it's another loss. Mind-games. They're fantastic. Now, the AI will never be up to mind-game level, but the field effect can help TR be more viable. Gimmick or not, it's still an ideal battle concept for him. With the Chess Arena effect, it can be balanced until it's strong enough. (I currently haven't made any effort to balance the field because there's not much point until the AI reliably uses TR. By the way, TR AI works great. In singles. The problem is not TR AI, it's doubles AI, which is so ridiculously fuckeroo'd it's literally painful to me.) But certainly he does not use a TR team because he needed to give out that TM. I will express my lamentations with TMs though. I'm not looking to change the distribution of moves, meaning I can't add any new ones. But in a perfect world, Kiki would be giving a Meditate TM, Julia would be giving Sonicboom, so on. Because this is not a perfect world, I am subject to trying to work in existing TMs. Now, you might say that he doesn't have to use Shadow Claw to give it out, but feedback I've received in the past says the exact opposite. I am certainly not going to change the core concept of a battle, as you accuse me of doing with Radomus, just for a certain TM, but as far as balance goes it is rather tedious to have to work in those moves. For instance, Charlotte gives Flamethrower, and has several Pokemon with it, but tbh she really should never use it because Heat Wave is always almost always the better choice on that field. So that sucks. But it's not breaking her character either way. Because two wrongs don't make a right. Debut Serra was strong because unless the AI flopped, or you had either Magmar or Drought Vulpix, there really weren't many effective options against her. Unfortunately, that just means you throw the level 12 Vulpix in as your lead, let the poor thing get run over, and then sweep her without effort. Raw strength doesn't constitute a satisfying battle; feeling like you outplayed your opponent does. In order to make sure there are ways to do that, I sometimes have to poke holes in previous bastions. When completed, the game will be opened up to community mods, and I imagine various difficulty mods will be among the most popular. They likely won't be adapted into the main game though, for reasons similar to the ones described above. Kuro is correct in saying that the current AI structure is pretty lacklustre, and should probably be rebuilt. That's not going to happen. What IS going to happen is we're going to -complete- that structure, as it's only half-done in the first place. And just for the record, I'm not a fan of pleasing people in itself. I'm not going to nerf something to make people happy; I'm going to change it because I recognize I don't like the pattern of play going on there.

soon tm

the hyper beam spam was the idea for this fight anyway. dark pulse is only there for your ghosts. so it sounds like it's working properly. the fact that it spammed dark pulse in the first place was a bug.

On the contrary, it was dropped because it -already- happened. I was able to double-purpose one of them. One step ahead of you. And you. As it is, progress is currently stalled at the big 0 because I'm going through and proofing all of the dialogue in the game. Tweaks here and there, but nothing major. Mostly I'm trimming stuff to make it a little less "Reborn, city of ellipses". Anyway, as you might have noticed, there's sort of a little lot of dialogue, so it takes a while.

Updated to current point. Keep it up everyone! By the way, as a request, don't edit additions into your old posts, please. It's totally fine if you're double posting with updates, but I'm likely to miss things edited into existing posts.

My, my, you guys have some impressively good guesses.

like i said, average time is looking like 3 months per episode currently. keep in mind that number has been increasing over time, so it may be more like 3.5 at this point for average. 16 might be a little longer time than average. If it can handle the current ones, you'll be fine. It's the same engine, just, more consistent. Five. I said six before, but I ended up dropping one. These will include fields for the rest of the game, so unless I get an amazing new idea (and I might) I'm not planning to add any more after this episode.

Hey! So I alluded to this in a couple other threads, but I -was- going to have you all help out with animations directly. I'm sort of going back on that regarding the bulk of the work just because the platform's not quite as friendly as I'd like and I want to be able to quality-check everything. So that may or may not happen, we'll see. However there is something you guys can help me with. So we're doing animations, right? But that also includes sound effects. And goodness, sound effects and I do not get along... But that's a different story. So our current array of sounds for moves is pretty disorganized, and missing a ton. I also think there's stuff from the RTP in there, and most of you probably don't know this (or what that is) since this is a Pokemon game, but I detest RTP resources with a burning passion. Anyway, that's a mess and it's hard to work with, so basically I'm burning it to the ground and starting over. New sound files for everyone. Yayyyy. I found a pack of Pokemon sounds that were put up for free use (I think they might be from PMU?? idk), and it seems to be pretty thorough, so I'm looking to get through those. The problem is, it's also terribly unorganized. Almost every file is just named magic####.wav. This makes it really difficult for me to choose sounds for moves unless I want to scan through all 1500 files myself and try to match them to each move from memory. Or just pick at random until I find something acceptable. Gross. This is where you guys come in. I'm going to post the entire download of ~1500 unsorted files. Y'alls task is to, as a team, sift through these files and post here when you figure out which sound might be good for what (kind of) move. I'll then rename it locally, so that I at least have a chance of finding what I'm looking for when doing these animations. So, example: Say you open file magic12.wav and you realize, hey, that sounds like Hyper Beam. Just post here and tell me that magic12 is Hyper Beam. Now, suppose you open another random number, and you don't quite know what move it is, but you think 'damn this sounds like a sound for an electric-type move'. That's fine! Just post saying that. I'll rename the file on my end, be it to Hyper Beam.wav, or just something like Electric1.wav. Then I'll update it on my end, and periodically update a refreshed file with only unidentified sounds. You don't have to post something for every wav; even if you just do a few it helps. It also doesn't have to go in order, and we don't necessarily have to get all of them done, but I'm not likely to use any sound that doesn't get sorted. Here's the download link to the sound pack: http://www.pokemonreborn.com/soundsorting.zip (UPDATED 6/30)

I do. E14-15 was pretty much the longest. I have to accept that development times will probably keep increasing since there is an increasing amount of existing game that requires polish. Animations themselves are going to take quite a time regardless of what I do, too. (That said, that 6 month period included 14.5. Without intermediary releases, we're still averaging around 3 months per episode)

Pokemon Mysidia was an affiliated site/server from way back in the day. Like us, they had their own league, and like us, their admin was making a game based on their community, taking place in the Mysidia region. I don't know what became of that project, if anything, but the site and server eventually fell into decline and were retired. A number of their members came here afterwards. The reference was part because we were sister communities, and part in hopes that their admin would finish his game someday. I probably should remove those references though, since this has gone past a community project. Noted.

Hello, and welcome to the update that's going to take for flucketyfluckin' forever. First off: 0% hype!!! You'll notice two categories have been added to the status thread for 16: The first is Animations. You can probably guess what that means-- Yes, this is happening... slowly. But it is happening nonetheless. I'll be dividing up the battle animations over the remaining episodes so that they should all be in by lucky number 19. I originally planned to have the community help with animations (since neither RMXP nor spriting experience is required, though both are helpful) but I'm reconsidering this.I may end up just enlisting a couple people. In short, how this gets done is up in the air right now, but one way or another, it will. Second is Music Updates. It's not a secret we're going back to the a refurbished city, so it hardly does to have all the same glum music before. The tunes will be largely the same, but you'll be surprised how well some key shifts and instrument changes brighten up the mood. Fortunately, I composed all of the city songs in the first place so that I could very easily do this, so I don't expect it to take long at all. Unfortunately, that and Fields are just about the -only- things that won't take long at all -.- Please remember that posts consisting only of "x% hype" and its variants will be considered spam, and that this thread is here to ask and discuss the upcoming episode, and not to ask how long until it's out. Status Thread

????????? Here's an explanation of what (most of) these categories refer to. Updated 10/19 Discussion Thread

Point taken regarding poison jab, etc. This will be fixed, then.

I've taken this before and got what Ika had. This time I got this:

Remember kids, labels for sexuality are just models for thinking about them, not absolute truths. @ Aeon, from what I've seen we still are one of the most accepting communities on the whole. Even so, we're all coming in with different ideas, and sometimes they clash. Threads like this exist to provide an alternative way to think about things, a practice I believe should never stop.

i didn't name them when i was younger but i used to just sleep in a bed that was just a giant pile of stuffed animals. who needs blankets. the ones i currently have are: Turquoise, a Vaporeon doll Ebony, an Umbreon Volfie, ...which is, in fact, a fox... my mom named this one :x Bran, which is actually a wolf. If you get the reference you're my new favorite person. Rose, a glittery pink cat I stole from Saya. Slutbunny, a rainbow-color rabbit. She's my newest. Faust, a valentine's teddy bear. He holds my knives.

The star for shiny eggs should have been removed in the public release. Was it not?

To reiterate what he said in the first place, he is just stating an opinion. That's fine. As a couple others have hinted at, the game is not for everyone. In that same line of thinking, different people play the game in different ways. As we can see, while may not enjoy the field effects, others do. This happens to be the fan-game that started field effects, so they're staying. Fortunately, there's a ton of others for people who don't like field effects, too. And he's already got that covered in the OP: The feedback is useful. While I appreciate the defense, and I'm glad that so many of our members have enjoyed Reborn, I don't think threads like this always have to turn into an argument, but they often seem to take that tone. That concerns me. In any case, it's sort of a moot point. I'll be the first person to admit that this game is flawed (as is Pokemon on a whole, if you ask me). I am making a second game, but it's not a Pokemon game. Nonetheless, I'll keep it in mind.

I'm a little confused. Certainly Steel Types should not be poisoned in any case-- is that what's going on? If you're referring to the damage component, then that is intended since with spikes or needless shooting out of the ground, they're still going to hurt even if something is immune to their poison. That said they hurt much less than normal spikes, which are full stalagmites vs just needles or something

*screaming in the background* *screaming in the foreground* actually i have mixed feelings about that but my ocd side will be glad to feel comfortable using something besides iron/bronze weapons for once but actually im way too hyped for this, fuck 2016

cut scene animations are great, but they, well, need to be animated. to do so at an acceptable level of quality and consistency would take much longer than i think anyone here is willing to wait for a new episode. spoilers :] Believe me, if I could do Triple and Rotation battles, they'd be seeing a lot of use. Unfortunately, nothing about Essentials even remotely supports that currently, so it had to be let go. Correct, and that's exactly the problem. In game text, I can reference the player's name, but trainers' Pokemon is pulled from a pre-set data-file. It can't even remotely think about the player name, much less detect it.

In a case like this, isn't Hyper Voice actually the better move? EQ = 100 * 2 SE / 2 burn = 100 BP total Hyper Voice = (90 * 1.3 pixil * 1.5 stab * 1.5 field)/ 2 NVE = 120 BP total Now, that's admittedly not counting the Field Bonus on EQ, but that's random, so it's tough to rely on that for AI anyway. This is what I'm struggling with. That said I also have to remember people on this forum are over-prepared compared to the average player. Nonetheless, there's room for improvement here. I held back on some things, such as the Dragon Dance set posted. I did want to give Hyper Voice some love though since we already had a dance sweeper, so I tried to make it work. The thing is, it seems like it has. M-Altaria already seems to do most of the work on the team; it's the other stuff that falls through. Like I wanted to save Sing for Altaria, for sure, and Chatot is Taka's territory. Crobat was considered, but Ciel's struggling a lot with steel/rock types so I wanted Archeops's EQ. Like was mentioned, Aero doesn't get Acrobatics, so Archeops has to be the one to abuse the field. (did i really give aero acro though? awkward...). Currently I'm looking at a base damage increase for Acrobatics in that field for E16, and if I can figure out something to do with Fly that -isn't- just base damage but also isn't totally broken that would open some other options too.

That said, how many people are trial-and-erroring this as opposed to actually taking guesses? And, how obvious or not is the third rooms' one?

Abra/Arceus spamming Dark Pulse was an AI problem that was resolved with 15 (the AI used to really, really, reaaallly like flinches....). If it still refuses to use Hyper Beam against neutral targets in the new release, I want to hear about it.

It is, going forward. Probably for Starlight as well if it's distributed similarly. There's a lot of gravity in what another user said about you developing as a player too, even if you don't notice it. I've found this to be very true over the time of watching people play. You eventually acclimate to the game from the main series. Knowing what to expect in itself makes it a lot easier. Now that's not to say the AI is great. It's not. E14 AI is dismal. Changes as of 14.7 make singles AI passable. Doubles AI is a disaster still. We're looking at that for E16, and then in E17/18 we'll be adding code to make it actually advanced. In E19 we should be able to add field-specific AI too. It's a work in progress. But, it isn't being set to half. Almost every gym leader has their AI set to maximum. The code itself is just incomplete from Essentials. Regardless, I think we can all agree that it isn't like average Pokemon games. Leaders in the main series are jokes. Two pokemon and they're done? Nawh. Now, almost no reasonable fight is going to be unbeatable. The problem is we don't want to pigeon-hole players into a single strategy to beat each fight. Examples of this are the original Charlotte and Serra, where you either bring Rain Dance, bring Drought or Magmar, or you don't have a chance. That's not fun, it's frustrating, especially in effectively forcing players to use those Pokemon. While Reborn is supposed to be harder than the main series, it's not meant to be a nightmare mode. My goal with gyms is not for it to be impossibly difficult, but to make you, as a player, stop and think about how you're going to overcome it. If you want Nightmare-Mode Reborn, the game will be open to modding after it's completed.