New Beginnings - A Wave of Inspiration

~ Excerpts from Patreon ~

 Hello there! It’s been a good while since our last Patreon post, and today’s post has been written by yours truly… no not Caz, this time it’s your local Postman here to deliver some of the latest updates and developments regarding Desolation. We have a good amount to cover so let’s get cracking.

Life Update 2: Electric Boogaloo

 So for those who have been not keeping up to date with the recent developments behind the scenes… well there wasn’t any for a good period of time post-EP6. Some of this I have spoken about in our development blog post last month, which you can find here. But for those who didn’t see this, since the release of EP6 we have had a lot of personal priorities to attend to, which took the spotlight over actually working on the game.

 We may not be 100% fully back at this current point in time, we have slowly but surely made a lot of progress since that post, and getting back into the groove of things. You could say that some of us (especially me) suffered from burnout since release and that it took a lot longer to start sitting down and developing again. I spent a good three months straight before release managing testing, fixing bugs, updating a lot of stuff in the game, putting out multiple patches and overall making sure the game was not going to explode on us, that I didn’t expect it to burn me out more than it did. Now it’s July and it's safe to say that myself and the others have recovered and are active once again working on the game we’re passionate about. 

 TL;DR we back babyyy

 Now with that boring life stuff out of the way, let’s move into a bit of sunshine. also I mentioned it a few posts ago but if you wanna watch me stream sometime, here's my twitch https://www.twitch.tv/postyhd <3

Catching the Wave at the Resort

 In the last update, I mentioned plans for Keneph Beach to get a little bit of a makeover. These plans are well under way, but of course you won’t get access to the area immediately. Keneph Resort’s construction is set to begin at the start of your Episode 7 adventure, but when that construction finishes? Well, you may have to give them a bit of a hand first before you can begin to relax in luxury at the many facilities and amenities it will have to offer…

 I won’t go into the details but you can probably gather enough information from these two screenshots alone the type of stuff you will be embarking on. You will be rewarded for your efforts, most likely in more ways than one, I assure you, it will be entirely worth your time. I will talk a bit more about some of the features you can expect later on down the line in regards to the Resort, maybe some things that are currently missing in the region of Ayrith will appear here? This is something I’m quite excited about working on, and like I spoke before, it’ll be my main focus for this episode. So expect more updates in the future! 

For this next section, I’ll be handing over to Yumil to talk about some of the things he’s been getting up to this month.

Coding Adventures w/ Yumil!

Hi. Been a while since I’ve been here. Then again, my work for the past year was making the existing game not explode in the new engine instead of making new things, so that’s to be expected. Lemme tell you, it feels good to be back to making new things.

The (Battle) Bus

 Anyways, you may know that a somewhat popular suggestion we’ve been given during the e6 life cycle was for a bus or some kind of easy transportation through the big cities of the game. Makes sense, Blackview still makes about as much sense as the Penrose Triangle.

 So a couple days ago, Ruby brought up the idea again and asked if we could make it a PokéGear feature like the Jinx Scent, where we could choose from a list of places to go and just get there. Assuming it was possible, at least.

 I run the idea in my head a couple times, and I realize that- If you can choose from a map rather than from a list, then this is just Fly with a different skin. So I spend an evening trying to figure out how Fly works, how it handles different maps and how fly points are made, and after another evening of work, I get this.

 And it works for all of the big cities!  Based on which city you’re currently in, the PokéGear will pull up the map of the relevant city and the list of places you can go to and let you decide.

 There’s still quite a bit of work to do on the feature - we gotta decide how we’re gonna handle giving it, I need to make sure it stays off during sections you really shouldn’t have access to it (hi, Blackview raid), and we’ll have to make custom maps for each of the cities, so we’ll have to see what we can come up with - but I’ve got good hopes we’ll be able to deliver something cool for E7.

(We also Probably won’t actually call it the Battle Bus. Y’know.)

The Quest Log

 The Quest Log has been overall very well received and I’m glad that you guys like the idea. That being said, it was made when I was still discovering coding on ruby, before we moved to the new engine, and as a result it’s rough around several edges. 

 Some of y’all from Alpha and Beta may have experienced the annoying bug of a quest becoming bugged for you and only you in release because we fixed a typo in the title of some quests, but because the title is how we identify quests, the game didn’t find the corrected quest name into the quest log in your save file. Yeah. Probably should have foreseen that no matter how careful Caz was, a typo would sneak in there at some point. Ah well, I’ve finally grabbed the opportunity to smooth those problems out.

The main big bit that’ll actually impact y’all is this: 

 As you may know, some quests in Deso just… expire, after a while. The people you gotta interact with to complete the quests leave for plot reasons and there’s no more opportunity to complete the quest. Bummer, I know, but sometimes the plot just can’t really allow some quest to linger on forever.

 So after seeing enough people note that, I decided I’d take a note from one of my favourite game of all times, Xenoblade Chronicles, and add a timer icon next to quests that can expire!

 And while I was at it, I figured, wait, if I know how to add icons inside the text now, why do we even still bother with this annoying [DONE] thing we do to signal a quest is completed then?

Nice.

 There’s some more behind the scene stuff that won’t really impact people but are worth mentioning. Did you know quests were still relying on the old PBS File + Compiler method from Essentials ? I even had a custom compiler for them ! Anyway, I finally got around to yeet it and just have the quests be written in plain ruby text. 

 Did you know that Quests were actually kinda really bad at figuring out how many lines of a text a single objective should take up and this forced Caz to try to fit as many of them as possible on a single line to limit display issues? Well, not anymore, I finally found a better way to do it.

 Anyway, that’s it for me. Now if y’all excuse me, Ghost Trick has finally been re-released on modern consoles and holy shit they made my favourite game from the Nintendo DS look SO GOOD. Y’all better start playing it if you don’t want me to send Amelia to mug you in your sleep real quick.

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 As you folks can see, Yumil has a lot of spicy coding updates coming in EP7! And we have a lot more planned as well. Moving into this next segment, I’ll pass the baton to Ruby!

A Sea of Colourful Mushrooms

 Hi! It’s me Ruby, your local pen on surface rubber. Unfortunately I haven’t been whisked away by my villain faves yet (*sigh* someday…) so I’m still here. Honestlyyyyyyy though I’ve worked on A Lot of stuff at the moment, most of it I can’t really show
 

So let’s do the boring stuff first then the slightly funner stuff.

NPC’s!

 I'm updating them. It’s painful. I’m in pain. Send help.

 Anyway I'd been wanting to do this since the last episode but ran out of time :| The NPC sprites (especially the overworlds,,,) needed a bit of a polish to fit the proper game style and I’m going through them for this episode to make them fit. Here’s a few small examples:
 

Now onto cooler things…

Astraciel!

 Part of E7 will have us venturing into the Astraciel areas. It’s such a mystical sounding name, isn’t it? The little icon on the map gave a smol glimpse into what you could possibly be out for, but here’s a current WIP of actual tiles! To say I was inspired by Ballonlea in SwSh is a teeeeeny understatement haha. Mushrooms are pretty fun to sprite. Y’know, I took references from actual mushrooms. I wonder if anyone can name ‘em.

 Areas in the game sure have been purpler since I joined LMAO. Instead of Ruby maybe I should’ve gone by Ameth- wait no.

 Annyywayyys that’s it from me B)

Closing Thoughts

 Motivation for developing the game is back, and we’re once again getting the ball rolling with EP7. We appreciate and thank you all for the support, for sticking around and ultimately being patient with us. We will have a lot more new and exciting pieces of content to share in the upcoming months, so stay tuned! Also for those who aren’t aware, the Desolation Wiki is now a public project! If you wish to give us a hand in updating that, then check out the Wiki >>here<< and just well, have a crack and write up some stuff! Feel free to ask us any questions if you have any.

 Until next time folks!

Posty