Passion and Battles

Hey Guys! It's me, your friendly temporary lead postman delivering you the latest news regarding Desolation’s development. In this blog post… we’re back in business. (Insert “wooo” sound effect here) I’ll be going into a bit more details regarding what this means for us moving forward, alongside what we have been up to, a little teaser, and some more goodies! So let’s get cracking.

Reigniting the Passion

 In the last development blog, I mentioned how we would be going on an “indefinite hiatus” until further notice as without Caz at the helm, development couldn’t continue in its current state. Since then, after a brief discussion with the man himself who at the time of writing this, is still absent from the team, we as a team will now be continuing development of the overall story until he returns. So what does this mean? When it comes down to developing Desolation, like with other story-heavy fangames, the lead dev will know the story like the back of their hand, whereas the team will have a good understanding of course, but not the full picture. This was one of the main reasons why we went on a hiatus as progressing with the game without a clear indication of the story would lead to something that wasn’t in line with the original vision. But after a brief conversation, myself and the rest of the Desolation Crew will be developing the story with our current knowledge. Don’t worry, we know how the main story will play out, and we are confident that we can deliver. With this in mind, even though we are “back”, development will be a bit on the slower side, so please bear with us! The creative heads are working in unison here at Deso HQ, putting our own thoughts and ideas into the game, so we look forward to sharing more details with you all soon enough!

 With that said, as mentioned in previous development blogs (a little reminder for those who forgot), you will begin your travels in EP7 exploring the mysteries of the Chryseum Canyon, located north of Fairbale Town, which is currently blocked off by some darn logs. You will encounter some familiar faces, as well as some new faces… Who are these faces? Is it Jarred making a return?? You’ll have to wait and find out! Chryseum Canyon has been something we as a team have been extremely excited to work on for a long time now, even way back during EP5 development. The different areas and landscapes you will be exploring throughout EP7 will be some of the most ambitious places we have worked on to date. Lots of time, effort and thought have and will be put into this area, and like Chef Quackington once said… “Quack. Quack!” (If you can somehow translate Psyduckian then congrats but he basically said “A storm is being cooked as we speak”).

 With the Canyon being the main focus of current development, what have some of the other members of the team been up to? Well moving onto this next section, Yumil has some details he wants to share with you all regarding some updates that have been made to the Battle Logger found in the Cellia Manor!

Logging the Battles

 Dear Diary, Caz still hasn’t come back well after a year. Although I understand his circumstances, I find it hard to continue being invested in this project. Nevertheless, the team has resolved to make an earnest attempt at pulling it off ourselves, and I’m going to see it through.

Today I’m going to talk about the Battle Simulator. 

You may remember that computer in the Cellia Manor that let you refight some past trainers. This thing?

I also don’t blame you if you forgot about it. It’s okay. I think it’s fair to say the thing as it is currently is a neat novelty that is quickly forgotten because, well, there’s not much of a point. Trainers were fought on a neutral field so it’s rarely a good recreation of their battle. Not every major story trainer was available. In fact, not even all of the Gym Leaders were in there! Well, Tristan has an excuse. Sort of. I think?

Reeve’s not in there, Rosetta’s not in there either... Though, we think Caz had a reason about that, but since he’s not around to ask him again, I’m officially going to run with the idea Rosetta simply didn’t want her challengers to lab her before officially fighting her. I’m sorry that y’all live in a world where I get more involved with writing. 

It's actually quite a bit of busywork for Posty to keep the Sim up to date. First is that it would ideally need to be updated every episode to include level-updated teams and all the new trainers. That’s annoying to do once, but doing it every episode for something that doesn’t currently have much of a point just eventually slides out of the priority list. The other reason is that it was also an eventing nightmare. Every iteration of the Battle Sim was a 500+ lines abomination of an RPGMaker event.

Note the emphasis on the past tense.

I took a hatchet to the whole thing and reworked the thing from the ground up to be far easier to work with, more interesting to use, and more rewarding.

First up, the Battle Sim now automatically scales up the trainers to the current level cap. Bam, that’s a lot less teams for Posty to duplicate. (hi Posty here, thank god)

Hi Rudolph, everyone say hello to an old friend now at the exact level cap

Second, the Battle Sim now actually recreates a field fitting for the Trainer you’re fighting. The objective is to recreate the various boss fights of the game brought up to the current level.

And lastly… the rewards.

We’re gonna need to take a little detour for this. Some of you might know I wrote some code to make the NPCs able to comment on how your battle with them went. I, uh, I think this is technically advertised on the page for the game? Truth be told, I’m not super happy with how it got implemented in EP6. Felt very underbaked and surface level compared to all the things I wrote it to be able to do. I mean, I get it. This was all around beneath every other priority for EP6, which were something along the lines of, rework pre-EP5 content, make sure EP6 content is good, and, uh, make sure the migration to the new scripts hasn’t set the entire game on fire. Or frozen over the entire game. While still having Flash Fire as its ability. I’m getting side tracked. Still.

One of the things that did take off quite a bit about the feature was the 6-0. The thing where you manage to beat a major trainer without having a single one of your Mons fainting, and while using no items from the bag. I didn’t exactly make the feature to be an unconventional challenge mode, but hey, might as well lean into it.

We had plans in EP6 to have some rewards for managing to 6-0 the Gym Leaders, but we couldn’t figure out something good for it, so we just made a bunch of switches to keep track of your achievements and put it on the backburner.

It's the good old dilemma of “We should probably give something neat enough to get some people interested in it, but it can’t be anything genuinely good either because it’d be missable content.”

Enter This Guy

What sweet deal do you have for us?

This Guy’s taken up residence in the Cellia manor. His name is Luke and he’s going to be monitoring the data of the Battle Sim. For every trainer in there that you manage to 6-0, he will have a reward for you. And if you managed to 6-0 them back in the story? That’s okay. He knows. He’ll have your rewards waiting for you.

The idea I want for those is to reward the players who put in the extra efforts with some cool shit early. We’ll probably make those rewards available in other places in the game later, but if you managed to 6-0 the final boss of EP5 back in the story, well, you deserve to go and do some crimes early. And if you didn’t, well, maybe your EP7 team can actually win more easily now? That’s cool by me.

Well. There’s just a teeny tiny issue that I fucked up the way I register battle data in your saves and it basically compares the opponent’s fainted team against, uh, your current team… yeah

Listen, this was the first thing I ever made for Ruby (The coding language, not our artist) and I didn’t know what a shallow copy was. Anyway, It’ll be fixed for fresh saves, and I’ve figured a workaround for EP6 saves.

I hope this little thing will add some spice to the game. It’s an opportunity for us to give you more things without creeping up the scope of the game too much, to be a neat side-activity, and to encourage some of the challenges the community seems to enjoy.

That’s all I got for you for today. I’ve got more things I hope to do, maybe I’ll get to talk about them again in another Dev Blog. I wanna try my hand at doing some bits of writing here and there, I hope y’all will like it if it comes to be.

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 I hope this is quite appealing for those who enjoy a bit of a challenge! Yumil has been working hard on adding some additional features to the game, despite being close to complete burnout with the project, so I do hope that you all look forward to and enjoy the content he is creating! I wanted to add a few things in regard to the Battle Sim. Firstly, when it comes down to certain trainers, I will be adjusting teams specifically for the Sim. What this means is like, do you really want to keep fighting Amelia on Forest Field? I don’t either. Some teams will be slightly altered compared to the story while others will be exactly as they were when you faced them. Secondly, the rewards. We don’t just plan on them being items that are either given a bit earlier, maybe you will receive some “trophies” that can be displayed? If we all learnt something from the Lockdown Days of playing Animal Crossing, we love having the ability to get optional decor for our islands.

Rebuilding the Homes

 Over in the artist department here at Deso HQ, our artists have been getting back into the groove of development. A lot of the content that has been produced/in the process of being worked on is sadly spoiler territory which we may cover in a future post, but for now there are a few things I can share with you all. Recently, Ruby looked at some of the houses that the local residents on Amaria and thought “hmm, makeover time.” and she did just that!

 Below are a few things she has been working on, revamping and bringing new life into areas such as Redcliff Town and Addenfall Town!

No, this does not mean door animations are making a return. (I'm not sorry)

Even a certain Gym Leader got a brand new home makeover!

 She has also been working on a new area coming to EP7… Kanzen Temple. This is something we revealed in one of our development blogs last year, having major links and ties to the history of Chryseum Canyon, but we aren’t ready yet to showcase this to you, but maybe sometime down the line? You’ll have to keep an eye on our blogs to find out!

Setting the Mood

 Story and gameplay aside, our musician man of many talents, Darius, has been working on some new tracks for EP7! Having him join us during EP6 has really elevated major scenes throughout the game and helped grasp different types of atmospheres to fully immerse the player in the world of Desolation. We thought that we would treat you all to a little teaser of a new track that’ll be played somewhere during EP7, you hopefully will get a feel and understanding of the sort of tension that you may experience as you continue the story.

       Yeah that's all you're getting, lucky you! 

  You may be treated to more little snippets here and there, or even fully blown tracks, who knows? It depends on how generous I am feeling…

Filing the Cabinet

 Before I conclude this post, I have one more thing to share with you all. We recently decided that we wanted to properly create some “official” artwork for our unique Megas and Forms, though our artists are not the biggest fans of drawing pocket monsters, so what do we do? Who do we call? No, not ghostbusters, god.

 We called upon a fellow artist who you might recognise in the community and commission their services, we’re talking about aGoodCabinet! Over the next few development blogs, I will adding a little spice by posting them one by one, in which they will be added to our Art Gallery down the line. For this post, meet our cute little meech but in their Mega form!

 Thanks again to aGoodCabinet for creating these for us! If you wish to see more of their work, please check them out below, his commissions are also currently open!

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Closing the Blog out

 Before I close this development blog out, there are a few things I wanted to note.

 Firstly, our Patreon page was nuked a couple months ago! We don’t know how this happened, might be due to inactivity, but for the time being it is down and we will currently not be putting it back up anytime soon. This is due to two main reasons, one being that it was run by Caz who is currently missing in action and the other is that, it was on pause for a while anyways due to lack of development, and until we are all back together, it will still be on pause until then. Apologies to those who may have been looking to support us through our Patreon, we will hopefully have it back up later on down the line. 

 Secondly, despite us returning to development, Development Blogs will currently not be returning to a monthly format, we will look to post content when we have content ready to post. A lot of stuff we have been working on and will be working on is extremely spoiler heavy, so even if you don’t hear from us for a little bit, we are back to actively working on the game. I look forward to sharing more with you all soon enough!

Until next time folks!

Posty