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Zumi

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  1. Zumi

    Balancing conundrums

    hhhhhhhhookay so I think I need to clarify something and apologize here before more people think I'm blaming the WHOLE audience that's saying they like the challenge Rejuv offers for what we have to put up with; please understand that this is not the case and the comment was not aimed at everyone in that group. I thought it was pretty obvious that the pointed comment of "MUH CHALLENGE" (and pretty much everything else at the start of the post) is directed at the ones who do harass the devs over any changes we make—even if it's a vocal minority who make those comments, we still end up seeing those messages often and it's pretty demotivating if you have to be on the receiving end of those on a frequent basis as often negative comments usually stick out more than the positive comments. Regardless, the comment is not aimed at everyone who says they enjoy the challenge of the game, but it ended up surprising me that more people took offense to it than expected. I am not trying to lump in the intense crew by association if that's what people were getting from it, and we are not trying to alienate everyone who does like a challenge as we're trying to keep options open for that crew through passwords and letting people increase difficulty for themselves that way. But yeah, I can see how it might've come off as a bit too aggressive and how it unintentionally hurt more people than the intended receivers, so I'm sorry if it came across as hurtful in that sense. Apologies y'all
  2. Zumi

    Balancing conundrums

    Sorry but yes! We've closed the survey so we'll be using the data we've collected in order to adjust stuff where necessary. The survey was up for about a little less than one and a half month so it felt that it'd be a good time to close it at this point.
  3. Zumi

    Balancing conundrums

    It's not aimed at the casual playerbase. We've repeatedly gotten passive aggressive or downright rude messages from people thinking they can tell us how we should be doing things (Jan in particular has gotten a LOT), and every time any changes were made based on feedback we'd still get shit for it no matter the change, so I decided it'd be best to put my foot down about this stuff up front before we get another slew of these kinds of messages.
  4. Well, here it is, the long awaited follow up to the balancing survey we held for Normal mode. Better strap in for a long read, as I’ve got quite a couple of things to talk about! I’ve been kinda putting off making a post about this because of the inevitable complaints we’re going to get bombarded with in the comments of people who refuse to look at things from our perspective, so before I talk about any of the preliminary changes we’ve come up with at this point, I want to make a few things absolutely clear to people as I don’t feel like having to repeat myself like a broken record in the comments. Yes, the overall difficulty will be toned down for the vanilla experience rather than being adjusted to make fights more difficult. We do not care if you don’t like these changes because “MUH CHALLENGE”, it is not our problem anymore. We want to give the player a smooth experience where you don’t have to get stuck on the same fight for hours on end, and with the current state of balancing it’s just not possible to give that experience. If you really want to continuously get pulped by every single fight in the game, there will be passwords added in either V13.5 or V14 that will manage difficulty on a smaller scale to make things harder or easier– please use those instead. The amount of challenge you give yourself is in your hands from this point forward, we’re not going to make things purposefully insanely difficult anymore as dealing with people getting mad at us for making things too hard is just… so not worth the time and energy. If you're an intense/veteran normal player and want to retain the challenge you enjoy, I suggest you make use of said passwords or look into difficulty mods instead—we're leaving intense in the hands of the community now instead. We are responding to data we’ve collected with the survey. We’ve had close to 350 responses to the survey! Sure, it's not the complete playerbase (it's impossible to collect the opinion of everyone anyways), but it's a much more reliable data source than smaller circles like rejuv gen and the likes are. As a result, it gave us a much better indication of what fights truly are troublesome and which ones are fine. Turns out that fights some people perceive as “too easy” has shown in the survey that they're actually a lot more challenging for people than we thought! From chapter 2 onwards, every chapter had at least one major fight that was giving people problems one way or another— yes, even fights that we as the devs were surprised that people were having trouble with. We are simply adjusting according to the averages and read through the notes people left to sift out what the sore spots were for those fights for most people. “But why aren’t you appealing to the audience that likes the challenge?!?!” I hate to break it to you, but that group of people is a small but vocal minority. And besides, no matter what we decide to change, someone will be pissed off and will disagree. Jan’s somewhat recent post on tumblr best explains how it is dealing with this, it always feels like a losing game trying to satisfy everyone. Balancing Pokémon—which is inherently unbalanced to begin with—in a way that it’s fair for everyone is a NIGHTMARE. So to answer your question, at this point we’re just trying to make it fun for the biggest group of people possible, which is a more casual playerbase. As such, we’re improving overall QOL by making fights not as difficult so the game feels more streamlined to get through. THESE CHANGES ARE PRELIMINARY, AND NOT ALL OF THE CHANGES WE'RE MAKING. Like I tried to explain in the comments about the boss bars in Jan's previous post on the dev blog, if something turns out to not work as well in practice, we will likely change them over the course of testing and see if things work better that way. If a fight is still too difficult, we'll likely make more changes to adjust accordingly. The stuff mentioned in the post is the changes we've made prior to testing, and which we'll have to try out to see if it works out. For now, I would appreciate it if people would hold their horses about yelling in the comments that they don't like the changes (regardless of whether they seem to make things easier or harder) because we've literally not even tested some of these in practice, thus we don't know for sure whether these changes will be definite or if they will receive further revisions. We're communicating this with you guys because we see value in being transparent about changes we make and being honest about what the current situation's like. Sorry if the game’s difficulty is not heading in the direction you want it to, but we've decided that we want to steer the game in the direction that's the most fun for the devs to work on as well, and specifically Jan's. He's the one who has to make the game, and in the end we've agreed that this is the healthiest for both us and the game in the long run. On top of that, I want to stress that just because we're very open about communicating to people about development and therefore are generally very much within reach of the playerbase, it does NOT mean people have the right to send us pointed or passive aggressive messages constantly telling us how you don't like certain things. This is not your game, and therefore these are not your decisions to make. Once again, if Jan (and subsequently the rest of the team) stops having fun, Rejuvenation stops being made. Please, we ask you to treat us with respect over this. ———————————————————————————————————————— *cough* That being said and on a more positive note… Let’s move on to the actual changes, shall we? I'll put stuff for each individual thing that I'll cover in spoilers in the case people would rather not know about specific changes! New additions are marked in green, changes are marked in yellow and things that got removed are marked in red. The new additions are added on top of the existing field, so most of the changes do not fully replace what's already there, but instead will open up more avenues for the player to make use of when going into a fight. (Frozen) Dimensional field & Angie Sky field & Souta Haunted field & Narcissa Bewitched woods & Flora/Florin Some more minor but notable changes... As mentioned before, these are preliminary and definitely not the only things we're looking at to change. Stuff like Geara's battles, boss battles and most other gym leaders that haven't been mentioned before are being looked at—with Saki's fight likely being redone from the ground up due to that the fight is fundamentally a pain in the ass and can't be fixed with just one or two minor changes. It's taking time as people are busy, but we're still working on them and hoping we can find a solution for making the fights more manageable than they are now. ———————————————————————————————————————— That's all for now in regards to changes! We're adding more in the future and there'll probably be another post about it when the ideas have become more concrete, but that'll be a while away from now. For the time being, we'll keep working hard to make the game a better experience overall. What's next on the list to do? Well for me specifically, if you've seen my twitter last week or so, I'm working on fixing up the official artwork for almost all of the characters as I've come to realize I really should've utilized flipping the canvas more often to see if what I drew makes any proportional sense........... of which a lot I'm ashamed to say they did not. BUT I'M WORKING ON IT. Will it get a separate post detailing EVERYTHING? Probably not. But I'll be making a post when everything's been uploaded and fixed! Here's a couple of the more notable changes. Oh, and I'm considering making completely new wallpapers with the character art that doesn't blast your eyes out at 2 am. But that's up in the air. we'll see....................... anyways this post has gone on for long enough. i'm done hogging the dev blog for today, so until next time!!! please don't kill me in the comments!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! o7
  5. So at this point, it's probably not that big of a secret that 13.5 is turning out to be about as substantial as a whole ass version. Sure, it's no V13 tier of copious amounts content mind you, but still plenty substantial in both content that's being added and content that's being updated as well. And with old content being updated comes the tradition of the per-version session where I go absolutely fucking off the shits with cleaning up the sprites because I've come to realize that stuff does not look as good as they could be. It's a fun time! And there's more updates to sprites to come, but I figured I'd show off some of the stuff that's been cleaned up during the first day I sat down and worked on a bunch of the sprites. thank you github fork for making the comparisons far easier to show off because of the old/new comparison display. god bless Starting off with Keta, as I've previewed one of the sprites before on twitter! His sprites were in need of cleanup on several fronts. The first one needed a correction on the hair to be less round and more accurate to his official art, as well as the torso needing to be angled a bit better. He also actually has a neck in the sprite now LMAO As for his bad future attire, the sprite as a whole just seemed entirely inaccurate to what his other sprite looks like, so it's more drastic of a makeover. in crim's words, and frankly, i think that's an accurate assessment. He's also taller and like with his other sprite, his hair has been resprited to be more accurate as well! As a whole, it looks more appropriate for him. nice Next up, Ren! Specifically, his outcast sprites. Nothing too special going on here, just minor cleanup on his coat with the hood up and his face in the second sprite where the hood's down, as it lacked additional shading. Also, the lighting is consistent in the first sprite now!! which it wasn't on the hood!!!! and it was BOTHERING ME TO NO END. so i fixed it. yaaaay Next up is Agent C(rawli)! as you can see, he is fucking MINISCULE in the old sprite. Which isn't entirely inexplicable, because he was a child in earlier iterations of Rejuv. That's a remnant of the past though, and nowadays he's an adult and taller at that so I fixed his sprite to be taller and properly reflect those changes. Erick is next! Both his battle sprite and his vs portrait were rather dated compared to the other sprites. A lot of the detailing felt messy, as well as his face being very round in his portrait compared to his official art, so I elongated it a bit! The horns also look more defined and the sleeves and shirt have slightly cleaner shading. Colors are also accurate across the board now! Next up, Neon & Magenta. Like Erick, these sprites have barely gotten touched at all since they were first made, so I felt after V13 now's as good of a time as any to clean up these sprites. The masks look more accurate to the Puppet Master's overall design, and the colors of the sleeves match the official art now as well. Also the shoes look like actual jester's shoes now!! Honestly for me it also took a little while to get used to the mask looking different, but it deffo looks better regardless. Next up, everyone's beloved *cough* sky grandpa, Souta. His sprite has always been a bit of an awkward one, what with the pose being tilted and the robes being rather detailed. This sprite kinda become more of a rework rather than a simple cleanup, and the difference is pretty palpable if I say so myself. It also includes the change in his staff's design which i still need to fix on the official art for both him and eldest, but w/e as well as a general reshade of the robe to have more accurate lighting and colors. i still hate spriting that robe, by the way. it has no right to give me as much trouble as it does ANYWAYS.......... Next up is Ryland! So while his first sprite actually goes unused as of right now, I wanted the cape to be more dynamic. This was in order to match the second sprite's rework, as I fixed the shadows colors to be less... blue? purple-ish??? it shifted very much towards blue on the color wheel, too much to actually look good, so now it's a bit less saturated. The second sprite I actually made from scratch during V12's dev cycle, but ever since later on in V13's dev cycle, that sprite has started to bother me with how much it stands out proportionally compared to other sprites. It didn't feel right, so I felt a rework was in order for 13.5, and the result you can see here! I like this version a lotttttttt better, feels more dynamic imo Next up, Nim! It's really just her vs portrait that needed a cleanup. Her face felt very small in comparison to the rest of the sprite, as well as the hand feeling too big, so I fixed both alongside with the hair being more clean looking and not as overly detailed! It's the same thing Erick's sprite suffered from, which is the result of a sprite becoming dated over time compared to my current spriting style. And last but not least, Melia. Her first sprite just got some overall cleanup to make her pose feel less static, as well as her hair color being accurate to the other sprites now as well since I hadn't fixed that yet! For the second sprite, I made her taller because this sprite always has felt kinda small compared to the other ones she has. It still feels like she looks small in it, but she's also bent forward slightly so it's like............................. whatever Though the biggest thing that's changed is this third sprite; her outfit that she wears on Terajuma. Along with V13.5's changes comes the total overhaul of Terajuma, and along with it comes an outfit change for Melia. We've felt like her current outfit for Terajuma doesn't really fit her that well, especially compared to her other outfits later on in the game, so it got a redesign, along with a change to the official art to match! I won't quite be uploading the full sized version of the art to the sta.sh archive yet (I'm writing this post on a small amount of time LMAO), but I will later. That's all for now though! I hope people find it interesting to see the before and afters as per usual, hehe I'll maybe do another one of these a bit further into development, depends on how much else I end up doing. I do have another post I'll have up in a couple of weeks, but that's in regards to the survey we held, so it won't be about the graphics. So for now this is all you'll be getting! see y'all later o7
  6. do i gotta point out that these changes are preliminary. apparently i do so here's a thing i put in rejupdates channel on the reborn evo discord after some discussion that occurred in rejuv gen the day this post came out I get that people are upset that it's looking like we're toning down the difficulty, because................. yes that's kind of what we're doing. HOWEVER, easier =/= bad. It's because for the overall QOL of the game it'll be infinitely better if the difficulty curve isn't as fucked up as it is right now. For people who want the game to remain challenging, hopefully the passwords we'll likely be adding in will help with micromanaging difficulty better and make it so that people can still enjoy getting pulped by every fight if they want that. I want to make something VERY clear though before people get up in arms in that we're ruining the experience for some. You know who gets the most shit thrown at them if the game doesn't feel fun to play through because people complain about the difficulty being unfair at many points? It's Jan. (which y'all shouldn't be doing btw because that's fucked up. stop harassing devs over things that REALLY do not matter that much but which you don't agree with. thanks) He also has told us in the dev server that he doesn't even like testing his own game anymore because the battles feel like a hassle to get through. And as he mentioned in the post where he announced Intense is getting discontinued, if Jan stops having fun, Jan stops working on the game. The vanilla experience NEEDS WORK. And that's what we're trying to do. Besides, it's not like Normal mode is getting COMPLETELY reworked like Casual/Story mode is, the latter is what truly will be the easier experience if people just wanna go through the game for the story. Normal will still keep challenge to it! It just needs adjustments in a lot of places in order to not have people get completely walled as often in the vanilla experience as they do now. The survey results post will go into further detail, but the explanation for the boss bars being removed is because according to our current survey results, more often than not people struggle on the fights that use boss shields, especially from Chapter 8 onwards. We understand that the boss bars are great from a narrative perspective because of the visual impact it has, hell it's literally the main reason why we decided to put those in in the first place—but in the mechanic's current state it's not fun to go against for several reasons and adding those in essentially did not pan out as we hoped for. This is not only a sentiment shared by a lot of people who filled in the survey, it's also something most of us on the dev team agree on. If it's any consolation for those who REALLY do not want them to be gone—and this is literally a development that started yesterday, so we don't have anything concrete yet don't YELL at me—we're currently looking into possible alternatives for the ways shields function, as these are the main reason why the battles don't feel fun as of right now. If we find something that works as a better middle ground that makes the shields less of a pain in the ass to deal, hopefully we can use that instead. But if we cannot find a solution that doesn't feel jank to go up against, we'll stick with our current decision to remove them entirely from main story fights and find a different approach to make boss battles stand out altogether. Please, have a bit of faith in us. We're doing our best to make the game a good experience for as many people as possible. I know it's impossible to please EVERYONE, but please also try to understand that Pokémon is literal ass to balance in such a way that everyone is pleased, especially with such a diverse and huge playerbase. We're trying to keep options open.
  7. See, this is a comment I will never understand-- How come you feel forced to use D-bond? The choice to do so is entirely up to the player because you could as easily just choose to not carry a mon on you with a cheese move, it's not something we as the devs obligate people to do or use. You can make a fight as easy or challenging as you want yourself, we're simply leaving the choice open for people if they don't want to spend a ton of time to beat a fight.
  8. Hi friends, wanted to chip in on the discussion about boss bars and explain that while yes, for more experienced players they feel like less of a roadblock and more like "a slightly bigger hurdle than usual", for new players they can straight up be run killers. I've seen several people grow frustrated and quit the game because they couldn't get past certain fights, and without giving too much away about survey results (as I want to cover some more stuff about balancing in a later post) we've seen the numbers that people struggle more often on fights with boss hp bars than not, so please also understand as of why we've come to this initial conclusion. If passwords are being added, you'll likely can micromanage the difficulty yourself and make things harder again if you want. Things are still subject to change, like Jan said! But we're trying to look at things from the perspective of less experienced/new players too, and make the experience more smooth overall so people don't have to get walled at every turn.
  9. bless y'all and thank you for the hard work over the years!!
  10. Yes, Terajuma, Darchlight & GDC got major overhauls in terms of both visuals and story flow.
  11. Everything will be temporarily be inaccessible, including the club, download pages and other links. You can still access downloads and other additional stuff through our own site, though!
  12. ...Because really, I should've done these for base V13. One of them I should've done even before that!!!!!! truly, my brain is a puddle of grey mush that barely functions, but oh well. I'm making amends right now!! Without further ado because I'm sure people are here for the artwork and not my incessant rambling, here are your characters with fancy new artwork! Cera, Erin in her Demoness outfit, Amber in her Ch15 outfit, Xara and Jean! ...Would it surprise if I told you that there's even more art on the way? Probably not. Because uhhhh I have *looks at notes with shitty smudged handwriting* a grand total of 19 pieces of character artwork for V13.5 as a whole. I need to draw one more and then this batch is done! Probably! Unless I think of more things to draw that I forgot about! But I SHOULD be good for now. .........................hopefully. But I'm definitely not done with art in general for 13.5-- there's more planned than just character artwork. And don't worry about the fully fleshed out artwork that I said I'd draw of Erin & Venam for the character popularity poll results; those are still on the to-do list. I've just been busy with working on another project of my own recently so I hadn't sat down in a while to work on things for Rejuvenation, lmao Anyways same shtick as usual, icons & links to the full artwork can be found in the official art thread! No wallpapers yet because 1) I'm lazy 2) I haven't made them for the other characters yet either 3) don't want to spoil v13.5 areas yet and 4) frankly I'm also considering redoing the format so they're not white in color scheme and blast my eyes out whenever I close stuff and look at my desktop at 12 am. And maybe just make them location-free as a whole, so they don't uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh get outdated after an update or two. We'll see what the future brings in regards to that. If it means making my life easier with these wallpapers in the long run then I just might........................ As for progress on 13.5's development as a whole (as I'm sure you guys are curious about that as well), Jan's back in full swing and has been making progress again after a long break! Though stuff isn't quite ready to be shown to the public quite yet, so I ask that you guys are patient a little bit longer. I'm sure he'll have a post up eventually! Sometimes you just gotta let those sweet sweet game dev juices simmer on low heat for a good while y'know? Let them cook thoroughly before they're ready for serving. An undercooked meal is never a good idea!!!!!! so consider this an appetizer from me. :) but that's enough of me hijacking the dev blog again. hope y'all have a wonderful day and enjoy the art! <3 zumi out
  13. It is mentioned directly by Alexandra at the start of V13 that she and Damien were able to make prosthetics out of black shards for Celine after she was grievously wounded by Madame X, which are the same prosthetics you see in her artwork! It's a detail that some might've overlooked when skimming through text, though.
  14. waugh i forgot to put a post here after putting the dev update up but artwork for celine, kreiss and cairo has been added to the thread!
  15. Familiar with an ? because you really haven't seen that much of them in the game, really... But you've definitely seen them before if you've played through V13! As Jan has been on a much needed break for a few weeks, I felt it'd be a good time to hijack the dev blog once again and show off some of the new official art for 13.5. So, lo and behold! Meet Kreiss, Cairo and Aevium's Champion, Celine! Kreiss Cairo Celine I've previewed Kreiss on twitter before and even put up his full body artwork on my own portfolio as a small teaser on the 9th, but he's gotten a complete redesign, which also includes something of an overhaul personality-wise. While appearing classy and sharp-looking, there's a little more to him than meets the eye... But as of what, you'll see at a later point (or for yourself in 13.5! idk what Jan's plans are in that regards). Next to Kreiss we also have Cairo (which I've also previewed before!), a character that was introduced in V13 on Route 4, as well as Celine, who stands at the head of the Aevium League as its champion... Or well, is supposed to. Shame that her current state of being is uh... A little bit Not Exactly In The Realm Of Consciousness! As per usual, the character artwork & icons can be found back in the official art thread! Again, no wallpapers yet because I'm waiting with those until after V13.5 is out. also pls send jan ur strength, he's in finals hell. godspeed you magnificent bastard ok i leave now bye
  16. Artwork of Talon has been added to the post! No character wallpaper yet, but there is an icon! His full resolution artwork has been uploaded to the sta.sh under the Sidequest folder. More characters that appear in V13.5 will be added later as they are revealed. I've also removed the old versions of the artwork for the team Xen members, as they will no longer be used. Volta has also been moved to Chapter 3 as she now appears during the main story rather than only being mentioned a couple of times.
  17. please stop pushing for specific release windows (yes i see it in the other threads as well, not just here), it'll be done when it's done
  18. V15 and V16 are still separate from V14. V14 is simply split into three parts, but how that works? For the time being, that's
  19. Zumi

    Regarding Intense Mode

    by the way, if you throw a shitfit in the comments about this decision, i will bite your head off and that's a promise
  20. All of the Aevian forms do actually have dex entries..... Just that the Pokédex won't heckin cooperate in-game and doesn't show alternate forms properly. I'll probably put together a post with all the dex entries at some point!
  21. i think we've already said plenty of times that the player will not get to date characters so i'm surprised this question is still coming up at all
  22. The Pokédex is currently bugged and doesn't include the A-forms as a result. The wiki's pages work based on PBS files and since the alternate forms of every mon are script-side, they're not included on the pages. They'll manually be added at a later point, we're working on it!
  23. Definitely a story change -- got changed because of Covid and how it seemed in poor taste to keep that part in after everything that's happened.
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