Zumi

[Initializing development blog update...] H-Hey, what's Amanda doing here?! ....*ahem*! Hi one and all! I'm back with another art update! This time it specifically about five characters that finally got art, or received a glow-up in some shape or form. You've already seen one just now! Indeed, while it's not any standalone art, the intro screen with Amanda has gotten a makeover. The graphics are overall more polished and her talksprites have been updated to match! It's one of the bits of art that felt severely outdated compared to all the other individual character artwork shown in the game. As a little comparison for those who haven't started a new file in a long time, this is what the screens generally look like in the current build of the game. yes i know, she does look a little like geara in the new art, doesn't she. welp. that's just what she looks like without the hat!! i had to base it on her artwork with the hat. it is what it is. i think it's also pretty obvious that the third image with me crashing against the screen also won't be in the game so don't even worry about it. Moving on, a character that's been long overdue for getting her own artwork has finally received said artwork! Please take a look at the art for Novae, one of the most prominent recurring sidequest characters in the game! As I mentioned on twitter where I first previewed her artwork, I really have no excuse for me forgetting about doing this. She's a very beloved sidequest character and it's high time that she got the love she deserves from our side as well, so she's finally gotten some official art to make up for it. Next up is another character that's been teased/previewed before, Mr. Luck! This is a character that up until the upcoming update has had a very minor role as he's currently only really there for people to swap between difficulties, and therefore never had a truly fleshed out design. As we're removing intense and instead adding passwords however, the experience is easier to tweak and making it easier or harder for yourself is now done through other means than through Luck. But it's a shame to just ditch his character outright since he has story relevance (remember that flashback from Gardevoir? ), so we've got other plans for him now! Plans that I cannot detail for the time being, sure, but plans that were enough of a reason for him to finally get a proper design as he'll be playing a slightly larger role than before. Perhaps those plans will be detailed at a later point? Who knows! Oh well. Let's see if you'll get lucky enough to hear about it sooner than later. For now, enjoy his full character artwork! Oh, and have his concept art that I drew while I was working on his redesign as well. Figured it'd be fun to show off the full thing considering it's what I used to tease the character anyways! Finally, there's two more characters that have not had full artwork of them yet despite them being relevant to the main story. Honestly, I have no clue why I even skipped over them to begin with. Maybe it's because they're not particularly the most popular characters considering their role in the story? Idk!!! Regardless, to close this post off, have a look at the finalized designs for Spacea and Tiempa! Concept art is courtesy of @Cerise, as shown below! They're the one who did the rough designs of the two, with me polishing the designs to the finalized versions you see above. ...And there's yet still more to come, of course! But alas, some stuff is sometimes better saved for later. I cannot give an estimate as of when the next post on my end will be, but you shall definitely hear from me again for I got PLANS. IMPORTANT PLANS. YUH. Anyways, as is per tradition to close off an art post, hereby the announcement once again that all artwork alongside a link to the full resolution versions can be found back on the official art thread along with new icons and wallpapers! You know the drill. For the time being, I'll be on my merry way again. See y'all later! o7

Hello! It's been a while! A few months have passed since the last update, but we got some Spicy New Art Previews(TM) for everyone in store. Battle backgrounds, battle sprites, vs sprite updates, oh my! We've got it all... and more! Remember that popularity poll back in 2020? I've got something to show off in regards to that as well. Spoiler tagged just in case, as there are spoilers for V13 in this post! Disclaimer that everything shown here is still subject to change (except for the last thing I'll be showing) as we continue development, but without further ado, let's start with the first thing; battle backgrounds. Backgrounds Three of new variations of battle backgrounds being added are for beaches, Grand Dream City and... Zeight? Oh boy. Wonder when that's gonna be used The backgrounds were made by yours truly! Beach Grand Dream City Zeight Battle sprites Our lovely new artist Dallas has been working hard on making and updating some more of the battle sprites for some of the NPCs, as some have gotten a makeover! Say goodbye to the Hardcore Trainer's and the Battle girl's old sprites, for your new ones have arrived! Old sprites are on the left and the new ones are on the right. VS Sprite updates I've also been working on updating some of the VS portraits as some had some crust on them from being outdated compared to the rest. I won't be giving a full on explanation for each of them this time, so it might just be best to see the results for yourself. The updates include Zetta, Kieran, Erin and more! Can you spot the differences? Oh, and speaking of Erin... I mentioned the popularity poll, right? Well, back in 2020 Erin placed third in the poll, meaning she would receive some special bonus artwork alongside Aelita (1st place) and Venam (4th place, getting the prize instead of Melia who placed 2nd as she was slated to be getting artwork for V13 to begin with and has already been featured in official art a ton). And after like 209381029381 years of being too busy to work on this, I've finally gotten around to working on the art that she'd be receiving! Please take a look! As per usual with any official art I make, the artwork has been uploaded to the official art thread as well as having a sta.sh links to two different wallpaper versions (with 1440p being the full resolution version). The only one left to make bonus art for is Venam! Maybe I'll have it done in time for 13.5's release? Who knows, entirely depends on whether I get around to doing that on time. Otherwise it'll be somewhere between 13.5's and V14's release! We Shall See(TM) That being said, that's all for now. Hope y'all got a kick out of these and enjoy all the new work! There's more to come, but some of it will remain a ~*~*~*Little Secret*~*~*~ until 13.5's release, so hold onto your horses until then. Our dev team is working hard to get everything working again and slowly but surely everything's starting to come together, but we ask for a little bit more of your patience for the remaining time! Thank you again for enjoying the game and see y'all on the flipside!!! o7

also known as "zumi has discovered the flip canvas button in clip studio paint" As I previewed in the previous dev post, I've been going back and editing all the character artwork! A while ago I've noticed that qualitatively the old artwork really does not match up with the more recent art. This is both because the more recent artwork wasn't made in a rush and is simultaneously also made after I've gained more skill in drawing. Out of curiosity (and also after seeing some flipped art in youtube thumbnails) I decided to check to see how the art looked when flipped and found out a huge majority of the artwork suffers from what I like to call mirror syndrome, meaning, the moment when the canvas is flipped the face decides to skew itself in 23409823 different directions. I wanted to scream. No way in hell i was gonna let that remain that way, so being the reasonable and completely sane person that I am (that's a lie) (i'm not sane) (reasonable is debatable) i thought it was a SPLENDID idea to go and edit the 120+ pieces of art I've made (including some stuff that hasn't been shown off) to be better! because i'm normal like that. eyup. That being said though, I'm not going to showcase all of the changes because this post would literally take me another whole ass day to write, so instead I invite you to look at the new versions in the official art thread! I've also updated the art post to include new versions of all the icons, and have also made completely new wallpapers of the updated character art to go along with that are generally darker in terms of colors and don't blast your eyes out when changing back to your desktop at 2 am if you're like me!! They're also infinitely easier to set up!!!!!!!! And won't get outdated with every map update!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it's pretty great and they look super nice in practice. go check them out! Before I leave people to their devices though, I did tease a certain character getting artwork on discord and twitter, didn't I? Well, no need to wait with baited breath anymore, for here he is; The new appearance of Adam Might as you first see him in Grand Dream City! Adam's always meant to be kind of a showoff during the time you spend in GDC, but his old appearance really did not do it justice. Jan himself explained that the reason for Adam's somewhat weird appearance in GDC was because of his own perceived lack of skill with spriting at the time, so we ended up deciding that it was time for a redesign. He kept the open blouse and sunglasses, but pretty much everything else has changed. There's a couple of throwbacks to his Blacksteeple/Terajuma outfit worked into his new outfit, though! His sprites have also been updated to match the new appearance and will be included in the upcoming update, 13.5. But wait, there's more! If you take a look at some of Jan's older posts, you'll maybe have noticed that Ariana's sprite has been updated, and maybe have suspected her design got an update. And it's true! That's exactly what happened! Her design has been revised for both her first and second appearance, and her artwork has been changed to match. Her design didn't change too much from her old one, but it does have more detail than the old one as the previous one was a bit too plain in comparison to most other protag designs. That's all for now though! Again, I invite people to look through the new art as I've spent quite a bit of time on making sure the art looks better. The art will also be updated in-game! For now, thank you for your time! i'll stop hogging the dev blog for now i promise. i've been posting too much sdkjsdklfjsdlkfhsdgskdjslfdlskdj o7

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

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