Hello one and all!
Would you take a look at this hot diddly darn new spiffy lookin' dev blog we've got for Rejuvenation here! hellllll yeah. From now on, all the important news on the game's development will be posted here instead of in the V13 status thread we used previously. As some probably noticed, the V13 thread tended to get messy and would bury any significant updates in regards to the game as quickly as they got posted. So! After some consultation with Ame and Cass, we finally got our own Dev blog so these updates no longer will get buried and will remain easy to find!
However, at this point in time, there's no actual news we can share, so we're starting off the dev blog with a recap of all the things that have been posted since the V13 thread's gone up. I'm sure some of you probably have missed some of these, so here's our refresher course on the state of the game at this point in time! The current situation:
Development has been... Slow. For several reasons. Here's the current state of matters.
The first and foremost reason that Development hasn't been going as fast is that after V12 came out, we had to wait until November for SWSH to come out, so we could focus on getting Gen 8 implemented in Rejuvenation. This already put a delay on the next update by roughly half a year. We've been graciously getting help from several people with this, and I would like to thank @Marcello specifically for having been an absolutely great help to us for scripting several of the pain-in-the-neck abilities and moves! Godspeed you magnificent bastard. Couldn't have it done without you.
This ties in to that because Gen 8 has been implemented, all the encounters and battles needed revisions to support Gen 8! However, this is taking a long time, and encompasses quite a bit of work. Azery and Alex are doing their best to get everything figured out, but it's taking time, part of the reason being that we needed to implement the mons first before we could actually change the teams/encounters, lol. It's a vicious cycle. BUT, all of the mons have been implemented! So now it's just a matter of going through and updating everything.
Spriting wise only a couple of the GMax sprites are left! I've personally been seeing to getting the backsprites done for them. Honestly, the biggest saving grace to the graphics side of the project was that we were able to use front sprites of many of the Pokemon from Smogon's Gen 8 project (thank you again for letting us use the sprites!), which saved us quite literally half the time and work. All the shinies are done too, which leaves only roughly.... 23 sprites left in total? For base game Gen 8, that is. I'm uh. Not counting Gen 8.5 rn. I don't want to think about it hhahaAAA.............. either way gen 8 on the graphics side is almost complete and i hope to finish the remainder of sprites sometime next week. Would be REAL nice to cross that thing off the to-do list.
Jan has been struggling with his health for a while. This was already prior to the pandemic, but recently posted that he did, in fact, contract COVID-19 and fell sick. He's on the road of recovery, though! It's only very likely that until the worst has passed in the area he lives in (which unfortunately is NYC, the epicentre of the pandemic in the US), stuff will remain slow on his side unless he generally feels better and/or more motivated to work on things again. He's been working on revisiting and redoing old areas in the game for final polish, though most of this is unplanned, hence why there's been not much progress on the "updating old maps" bar, let alone the new content bar. We hope you all support Jan through this tough time! Keep him in your thoughts sometime. He's doing his best.
Last but not least, well, compared to V12, V13 is just.... Absolutely huge. There is SO much content to it. I've said it several times before, but the reason that V12's dev cycle was so short and why it feels as if V13 is taking so much longer was because V12, in comparison, genuinely is just short. I can't go into details for reason you probably can all understand and respect, but it's a TON of content, and there's just a lot of work left for it! However, I can guarantee you that even though it's taking this long, it'll be worth the wait. We're not gonna give out an estimate as of when V13 will be done because there's just too many factors tying in that make it hard to keep up a consistent pace in progress, but we sincerely appreciate all the patience all of you have been showing despite it having been nearly a year since V12 released. We hope to keep your patience until the end of the dev cycle!
Now that you're up to date, it's time for all the teasers that've been posted! Everything will be put in spoilers because otherwise this post gets uh. Very long. But it's nice to have everything in one place now! Content that's exclusively new content to V13 (so not revisions to older areas) are labeled as V13 teasers, so don't open those if you don't want to get spoiled on the new stuff!
October 18th, 2019 - V13 teaser 1 (Jan)
November 4th, 2019 - The reservoir (Route 4 revamp) (Jan)
December 3rd, 2019 - V13 teaser 2 (Jan)
December 10th, 2019 - V13 teaser 3 (Jan)
December 10th, 2019 - Route 4 new theme (Jan)
December 23rd, 2019 - Protagonist VS portrait updates
December 25th, 2019 - V13 teaser 4 (Jan)
January 2nd, 2020 - Gen 8 spriting update 1 (Zumi)
January 5th, 2020 - Volta (Zumi)
January 25th, 2020 - Keta VS portrait update (Zumi)
January 26th, 2020 - Gen 8 spriting update 2 (Zumi)
February 1st, 2020 - Character art part 1 (Zumi)
February 9th, 2020 - New forest backgrounds (Jan)
February 28th, 2020 - Gen 8 spriting update 3 (Zumi)
March 19th, 2020 - Gen 8 spriting update 4 (Zumi)
April 1st, 2020 - Saki twitter (Zumi)
April 8th, 2020 - Zetta VS sprite update (Zumi)
April 14th, 2020 - Character art part 2 (Zumi)
April 17th, 2020 - Character art part 3 (Zumi)
April 26th, 2020 - Character art part 4 (Zumi)
April 27th, 2020 - General update on old content (Jan)
May 1st, 2020 - Rorim B VS portrait update (Zumi)
May 3rd, 2020 - Character wallpapers (Zumi)
...Aaaand that's about it for all the updates we've had! I know a bunch of these are extra content and not really super directly related to V13 development, but it's still stuff for you to enjoy while you wait for V13 to come out, no? hehe.
There's more to show in the future, but for now we're sticking to this recap. We'll show off more when the time is right! For now, I welcome you to this shiny new dev blog and hope you're looking forward to more updates!