BlueTowel

Hey. It's been a long journey creating and working on this mod and with this community. Pokémon games always felt pretty stale before, but Reborn was challenging enough to make me pay attention to the game. It was really fun. Once I got used to it, it was fun to play monotype runs. I'd been meaning to try to learn coding for a while but never really found a way to make it fun for myself. I did some simple Pokémon edits for my own enjoyment and to spice up monotypes, and someone encouraged me to share them with others. The game had a Mod Market so I made it a mod. I wanted to make sure I stuck with the project for a while, maybe actually finish a project for a change, so I called it v0.1. I'd do nine updates to learn to code and have some fun, then try to apply it to earning some money. I take care of a disabled friend, and not a lot of money is provided for doing so. I'd been having health issues of my own for a while, and I'd recently dropped out of a degree due to struggling to actually get any work done. It wasn't until last year that I had a real idea of what those difficulties were and what had been going on. Autism, ADHD-I, Tourette's Syndrome, FND related to noise. The biggest issue is having absent seizures from noise. Sometimes I don't even know they've happened. I think a few seconds or a few minutes have passed, but it's actually been a lot longer. It made it difficult to find work that I was capable of and that I could fit around taking care of my friend. It makes it difficult to do much of anything on particularly bad days. It was a great emotional escape working on a game project. It helped me to quit using cannabis as a coping mechanism. I used the productivity and quality of work as a way to gauge how much my attempts to manage my condition were working. I'd been on waiting lists for months, years, trying to get answers for what had been happening with me. I had my first witnessed seizures in 2017, and I had my first major seizure in 2019, and I still don't have a formal, written diagnosis of FND over it. And it was a lot of fun making Pokémon, although I didn't learn much coding at first. You can only learn so much from editing data. So I added some new game mechanics, and some events, and I kept growing the scope of the mod just to get more experience. I still really just wanted to do a few updates, I figured I'd do a quick update for e19 and then a final event update before leaving. I'd made so many Pokémon, though, and they needed sprites. People had been contributing them over time, sometimes as ideas, sometimes because they liked a form, sometimes just to help out. But there were still a lot missing. So I asked someone who did a lot of spriting for help with a few. Kixur. She really jumped at it, and made so many more sprites than I was expecting. I really appreciated her, but I wasn't doing too well and I regret not expressing it more often. It hit me pretty hard when she died. I wanted to find some way to honour her memory and the work she'd done, so I decided to stick with the project longer and grow it into something larger so more people would get to see her efforts. I turned it into Plates of Arceus, and I decided to go full ham with scope and features. It just kind of evolved into the idea of making a full on expansion for Reborn with new generation mechanics and content tied into the lore, and exploring more of the setting and unanswered questions and so much more. I wanted to explore all of the possibilities of Pokémon, delving deeper into the implications of the lore and the potentials of the game mechanics. I figured I'd just accept my disability and have it as a hobby while working on the rest of life. The friend I take care of wasn't so keen on me sticking with it longterm, though. He was worried he'd pass away at some point and I'd have no means of taking care of myself. There's no money in modding a fangame. We seemed to be doing okay, but we needed a little more to make life a little less hard. Have a higher income so we could hire a gardener who turns up more than once a year, and a cleaner who turns up more than once a month and doesn't break things. Buy clothes for a change rather than have them donated. So I started work on another game, but it wasn't enough. I had to be making some kind of money for the mod work I was doing, so I started a Patreon that was to support me while working on the game and the mod. I think that was a mistake. It added a lot of pressure on me to expand what I felt I should be doing. Trying to stream, be more visible, keep people updated and interested. I didn't really have the time for that as well. We'd also adopted a stray cat we'd been feeding. He'd been attacked over Christmas and needed medical treatment, so we kept him in afterwards. It was a lot of work to take care of that cat. That started to eat into my sleeping hours as well. He was quick to learn to start using a litter tray, but he never really mastered it. His health gradually worsened over a couple of years, and I had to spend more and more time cleaning up after him. Last year was really bad for that. An uninterrupted night of sleep became a rarity. Some nights I'd be getting up several times to deal with it. Then I'd have a day of taking care of my friend and trying to work on projects. But I had a lot of motivation, the support of friends, and I could see a way it could all work out. 2022 was generally really rough. Rising cost of living added more pressure to use less and earn more, and making a game felt irresponsible. I had an app idea that I'd vaguely tried to create before that would help people reduce their cost of living a tiny bit, and it felt like the time to try to create that to help people out. I ended up spending all day, every day working on something. Burn out was inevitable, but I hoped to reach some kind of income-generating goal before that point. In the end, I did not. I'd mentioned before that if I couldn't generate an income, then I wouldn't be able to continue with this project. I kept on trying anyway. With the app, with this project. Updating the sprites was a nightmare, there were so many, the spritesheet compiler was initially broken, Pokémon sprites had been updated, there had to be egg sprites, and shiny icons, and Starry did an incredible job updating so many before Felicity helped to finish that up. It took way too long to get it done. The sprites and form data were the most timeconsuming things to update, and it sounded from peoples' messages to me that the mod market was about to flourish with a wide array of projects. So I needed to put more into PoA, make it bigger, brighter, deeper, stronger. It was too much for me, so I asked for help. I needed to be earning money first so I could work on it more myself, but stressed and pressured to work as fast as I could, I ended up making mistakes and having to redo my app work. So inevitably I burnt out a bit. I ended up taking a break for what was supposed to be a two week job adapting the kitchen for my friend's wheelchair. I figured I wouldn't be able to get much done with the noise of construction, but I didn't expect to not be able to use the PC at all due to the energy costs and the power regularly tripping out from the builders' tools. For a month and a half before they decided to take a holiday, and still haven't finished. The sleep deprivation from the cat's health issues worsened, various online dramas I'd been trying to avoid had gotten under my skin, arguments with my friend over everything and nothing, the fucking seizures... and I ended up trying to take my life on Christmas morning. I just went into some kind of autopilot, fixated on doing just that. In the end I was just too physically exhausted to make the necessary ascent. I should have taken that as a sign that I was trying to do too much, but it was far from the first sign I'd ignored that I was on the wrong path. Looking back, there had been so many times I'd said to myself, "if this happens, or if that doesn't happen, then I should stop this project." There had been so many last straws that I'd said I'd just put up with and tough out until things improved. Offers of help that never fruit, wondering if team members are demotivated because of verbal abuse and other very negative interactions with people related to the main game, feeling like an outsider in the dev community, constantly having to redo work due to engine updates... However much of that is on me, it still results in my motivation being chipped away. Then this year, the best cat died. She was such a lovely girl. She'd play with our feisty rescue cat, and comfort the stray. She lost weight and energy rapidly, and couldn't stand anymore. Then a few days later we took the stray cat to the vets for a checkup, and he was in such a poor state of health that the best thing we could do for him was to put him down. Two cats in four days... I tried to use this project as an emotional escape again, all while I was being constantly updated about my dad's rapid decline as well. No longer recognising family members, no longer able to read or count or know the date, being given a DNR and my brothers already emptying his house... It had been frustrating to talk to him on the phone in the last couple of years. No matter what the subject of conversation, he would end up telling the same few life stories, over and over again. Half of which were about how people had stolen his inventions during his engineering career. Nothing fanciful, just that he'd made modest efficiency improvements only for a coworker to replace his name on the papers or take his ideas to the bosses without him. He would constantly warn me about people stealing work and ideas. It's hard not to let something you're told over and over again sink in, especially by a parent. It's something that's definitely been playing in my subconscious. Feelings that wouldn't subside. And I look back at the last year, at all the drama, all the pointless struggles to work on an ambitious Pokémon fangame mod, at the other ideas I've had and what could have been if I'd worked on them instead without so much pressure from every direction... There aren't a lot of directions I can take pressure away from. I don't feel like myself anymore. I feel like a part of my soul is infected, and I have to tear it out. So for my personal wellbeing, I'm leaving. Permanently, completely. I'm truly sorry to do it this way. I really wanted to try to leave on a high note, or to at least tidy up before leaving, but I couldn't. It's not just my life that this affects, it affects the life of the friend I take care of as well. I can't keep toughing it out when he's grieving his favourite cats, one of whom was the last pet he shared with his parents... Not after everything else. I'm sorry for ignoring everyone DMing me to check on me, to ask how I'm doing and telling me they appreciate me. This is emotionally difficult enough, and I need a clean break to make it through this year. Cost of living continues to climb, the money for disability and being a carer is nowhere near rising to match. I can't use the PC much at all anymore, I sure as hell need to avoid using it for anything besides work. Even the Patreon donations, saved up over the last year, only amounted to half of the last bill. To my Patrons, I am truly thankful for your support that helped me to make it this far, and I've noted down your email addresses. If I manage to make a game, the one I'd talked about in my Patreon posts, and I will surely try to, I will send you all a free copy. It hurts too much to say goodbye to everyone individually. I won't be able to cope if anyone tries to persuade me to stay, and I don't want to risk getting caught up in another loop of rising motivation only to crash back down when finances bite. I need a clean break. So I'm deleting all of my social media accounts. I won't be deleting my Google or Github accounts so the files and spreadsheets will still be there for the PoA team to make use of if they wish. It would be a shame to let all of the work by everyone, especially Starry, Dred, GHOST CHAN and Candii, go to waste. I hope you can at least release a form pack with what's left. But I will be removing the account from my PC and phone, so I won't be able to receive any messages to it.

Misleading. I haven't spoken to you since July last year. After you used my work a second time without permission, while also removing credits, after I'd previously messaged you to politely ask you to ensure proper credit in both the thread and the download. You did this in a hurry after I'd mentioned in chat that someone else was working on a vanilla gen 8 mod. When I checked your code for the gen 8 mod, it was almost entirely from PoA (if via updating Radiation Reborn that was using PoA as a base and then removing the Uranium content) with what looked like vague attempts to hide usage of it. Even besides the code I personally did, I put a lot of work into assembling the graphics, data, etc. from various sources, and modifying some of them for bugfixes and to fit in Reborn, which you used as a base for your mods. I didn't think I'd need to be too anal about crediting myself because I didn't think anyone would actually strip down the mod and try to pass it off as their own work in the same place without talking to me about it. I told you to remove PoA-specific content from your mods at the time and warned you that your future actions would show if your apology for "accidentally" removing credits was sincere. Frankly, I didn't want to continue engaging with you on it while already being buried in other problems, and it didn't go unnoticed to me at the time that you didn't apologise for using my work without permission. I later saw you admit that you'd barely played e19 before taking my work, and the person who was working on the vanilla gen 8 mod told me they were giving up because they didn't think anyone would want to play it, and I regretted not taking a harder line. Compounded by the continued liberal use of my work and what seems like a pattern of misleading behaviour, I do not believe the sincerity of your previous apology, and so permission to continue using my work is revoked. I'll admit to being mistaken over your gen 9 work. It sounded like you'd hastily imported the Essentials project regardless of whether or not things worked shortly after a reveal of a working implementation in PoA, but on closer inspection this does not appear to be the case. However, this work is redundant since I've been adding gen 9 directly to the new engine for all of the games and mods using it. This mistake also does not invalidate the previous issues regarding use of work without permission and removal of credits. Stealing my work, undermining my work, and then continuing to piggyback off of my work in future without so much as an apology is not acceptable. I hope your apology is genuine this time.

Hi! A new dev blog post appears! It's just a few pictures really. Check it out!!

So let's cut straight to it. Gen 9! In Reborn! Woo! It's still a work-in-progress in the alpha testing. Things are buggy, there are errors, sometimes scripts drift away in the git. There is still a lot to do, but PoA now has my focus. That kitchen work I mentioned? Still not finished. The people doing it are liars and cheats. It is pain. I have become burnt out by a great many struggles and dramas. I am now recovering and trying to minimise stress for a while. Anyway, you may have noticed a whole bunch of slicing moves on Harpy Gardevoir there. That's because old altforms are getting updated with gen 9 moves and abilities too! Check this out: If you haven't played SV yet, or read about it, well, there's this new ability called Sharpness. It increases the damage of slicing moves by 50%. The users of it are all physical attackers! But Air Cutter and Air Slash are slicing moves! So this just makes sense. Mixed attacker! Spec it special? It's up to you! So many choices, so many Pokémon! Did you also notice that unrevealed new Pokémon form? Who's that Pokémon?! Let's reveal it! Isn't she lovely? You can thank Felicity and GHOST CHAN for the design and spriting! This is Embroidery Leavanny. It's taken its stitching skills to the next level! What quirks does it have? You'll have to wait and see! Also check this out: New maps! Dred has been working hard on updating old PoA maps to look awesome and have more awesome content in them! Can you guess which one this is? Also forget the progress chart thingy! It sucks! I hate it! Quantifying progress when it keeps changing is too stressful! March/April is looking like a reasonable release time based on progress. The episode content itself may be squished to prevent more release date slippage. More on that next dev blog in February! We'll be finding out ourselves how that will be going throughout January! Now I must sleep.

Sunday. :) sorry

The exact implementation is still to be determined. Thank you both for the feedback! :D Spritewise it'd either be an icon or a sprite filter rather than a new sprite for each. I like the suggestion that only certain mons can Terastalize. It may get a similar treatment to how Dynamax is being treated, in that only a small selection of Pokémon (and opponents) will have access to it. It fits very neatly into the story, which is why I'd very much like to include it. Feature bloat is definitely on my mind with this. I may remove the PLA-style battle mechanics in favour of it. These features will likely not be heavily explored until later episodes that take place post-postgame.

Hey! The best way to enjoy it will be from the beginning, almost all of the new content in Ep1 will be in the maingame. You'll still be able to play from a beaten game, but there won't be as much to do! And much of what there is may not be very challenging. There's a new dev blog post as well. In it I talk a little about adding Gen 9, the new engine and show a new form!

Hello! Now you've surely noticed there isn't a header image for this post. Does that mean it's not a substantial dev blog post? The answer to that question is... actually kinda yeah, sorry about that. So the building work I mentioned a while back is now actually happening! I haven't been able to use the computer much, it is physically inaccessible for most of the day and I'm having to do an awful lot of noise-avoidance and cleaning up. When I have had access, I've been working on implementing Gen 9 for the most part. We've all been generally living life and playing Pokémon SV. So let's talk about implementing Gen 9! As you may or may not know, there is an engine update for Reborn underway. Rejuvenation and Desolation are using this new engine, and Reborn will be getting an e19.5 that updates with it. This new engine allows for the games to share scripts more easily, which is great in that it enables us to implement features from those games, such as the new Boss Battle system, with much greater ease. It also means the scripts can be worked on by more people, becoming more efficient for better performance and so on. For my part, I'm working on implementing Gen 9 into this engine. This means that when it releases, the code will be freely available for anyone to use for creating or updating Reborn mods with Gen 8 and 9 content. Hopefully this helps people out with the transition to the new engine! Current mods will be very broken otherwise. This has been a struggle for working on PoA this year. For how it'll be implemented into PoA, I think the main things people are wondering about are nerfs and Terastalization. Movepool wise, we will not be removing access to any moves. There will be only gains. Protean is getting nerfed, but a new Plate Interaction will restore it to its pre-nerfed state. Other nerfs will be getting implemented fairly straightforwardly. Battle Bond Greninja will still be a form change rather than a stat boost. Terastalization will not be immediately available, it's likely to be added in an Ep1.5. Pokémon will have Terastal types rolled from their current types, it may replace Hidden Power types. Pokémon with different Terastal types will be available at certain points in the game. Items to change a Pokémon's Terastal type will also become available at certain points in the game. Snow may end up being implemented as a different weather to Hail, which may remain. This will be decided in testing. As for working on PoA, I'm taking December for it to be the only project I focus on. The new engine is starting to feel pretty stable, and alpha testing has technically started for PoA! However, due to the difficult circumstances IRL, I can't so quickly grab some good images of it. There is also a lot of work still to do on it. One last thing before I have to rush off once more... Forecast Meganium (Winter) by Candii and BlueTowel If dev blogs are now monthly, does that mean the next update will be on the 2nd of January? Maybe, we'll see! Then at the latest for sure.

Hey! It's the 11th day of November! Two weeks is probably too short of a time to make dev blog posts, haha. I see why they're generally a month for the main fangames! Let's make this a light one. I've mostly been working on adding in Gen 9 content from the leaks, but since there aren't sprites for them yet there's... not a lot to show there! Graphics work has mostly been new altforms. The team have been working hard on sprites for them! While it looked like there may not be time for a lot of new altforms, there will be a good number of them in Episode 1 after all! The game engine is still a work-in-progress as well, and I'm afraid there's no images of gameplay this time. What a pain! Let's come back on the 2nd of December with a more substantial dev blog post.

Hey! It's been a while since I've posted in this thread. Life is still hectic and Ep1 has been delayed until after SV releases and will be updated with Gen 9 from the start. There's also a team now! Check out the dev blog to hear more about that. https://www.rebornevo.com/forums/topic/61941-plates-of-arceus-episode-1-development-blog-e19/?do=findComment&comment=977220

Hello! I'm happy to announce that applications to join the team have closed, and several people have joined the development team! Before I let them introduce themselves, I'd like to take a moment to update on what I'm up to. The short of it is that I can't use the computer as much anymore, which is a real pain. That time is going into more self-care and while life is a constant rise of stress and responsibility, I'm managing to deal with it fairly well. As long as I don't stare at the dark swirling cloud up above. The app is still a work in progress, largely due to disruptions and honestly trying not to burn out. It's coming along pretty nicely, but trying to sprint to releasing it seems unlikely to work out. It's not something I'm going to be talking about much if at all in future, but it feels right to me to get it out there that I'm still working. I'll be trying to balance working on PoA with working on the app and hoping nothing dramatic happens to make things even more difficult. Now here's the team! I'm really glad to have so many wonderful people helping bring this project forward! I'm running out of time again so here's some quick feature hype! Totems and other Boss Battles Thanks to the amazing work by the Rejuvenation team, especially Azery, and with permission from Jan, we can bring forward a lot of future planned game mechanics into Episode 1! Totems with SOS calls is the big one there, as well as raid-like battles. While Episode 1 will largely focus on maingame content, there may be room to implement Dynamax thanks to this and allow for a few more kinds of boss battles aside from Totems. Episode 2, though, oh boy, so much Dynamax! So many raids! Battle Bond Greninja and new Partner Pokémon?! With the fantastic help of GHOST CHAN and Candii, spritework on the Battle Bond Greninjas has leapt forward, as well as adding other new forms. Three Pokémon with six new forms each form a special starter trio, in addition to the Partner Eevee and Partner Pikachu from the Let's Go games. These special forms will only be accessible before postgame for those who select their species as their starters at the beginning of the game; their Partners. I'll go into these in more detail in a future dev blog! Things are moving! Vero-Greninja vs Deep Volcanic Magcargo, by GHOST CHAN and Candii respectively Okay, that's all I have time for right now! I have to go cook. I'll be updating the development tracker in the first post over the weekend, as for when the next dev blog will be... Let's say the 11th day of November? Have a good one!

Hello. This dev blog I'd like to talk about release dates, delays and ask for help. So firstly... Release Dates and Delays or why Ep1 is now coming out after SV release I'd initially been very keen to get Episode 1 out by 30th September specifically for three reasons: 1) In October, the cost of living in the UK where I live is expected to rise again, reducing the amount of time I can use the PC to work on anything. 2) Also in October, further disability modifications are being made to the house, which will create a lot of noise and disruption for a couple of weeks or so. 3) I wanted to release Ep1 far enough from SV to give people a chance to finish a playthrough before it. However, life has been difficult. Without going into too much detail, every time I thought things were going to get easier, a new obstacle appeared. Nothing given without something being taken. It's been a real struggle for me to find time and energy to work on this with everything else in life going on. The new Reborn engine is still a work in progress as well, making it awkward for me to work using my typical scattered method. I honestly thought I'd have more time and energy this year, and I was only half right. While I have more energy, I'm spending a lot more of it dealing with my health issues, my friend's health issues, and the cat's health issues. Added pressure to generate an adequate income to offset the cost of living increases has not been helpful. At the start of this year I thought I was working towards long-term prospects, not medium-term survival. I really don't think a release before SV is likely, even a simplified one. It's not the end of this project, though. Far from it. I'll be postponing the release of Episode 1 until after SV releases, and including Gen 9 in it. Which makes sense! Full array of latest generation starters to pick from at the beginning. I'm also asking for help. Recruitment to help speed up releases There's a lot I'd like to do with this mod. It's quite ambitious, even. Expand on existing mechanics from Reborn and the Plates, add more generations to Reborn, integrate game mechanics from across the generations, expand on and continue the story of Reborn, as well as add more Rebornian and exotic regional forms, and maybe some more fan forms such as Megas and Gigantamax. It's a lot to do. It's practically a fangame in itself. There's also the issue of having to wait before working on a lot of aspects of it due to a shifting new game engine. When that game engine is finished (at least to a degree that games are releasing using it), and when SV releases, there will be a lot to do. There will likely be cross-work between the Rebornian games, with Rejuv and Deso sharing the same base game engine as Reborn now. However, some PoA mechanics need importing as well. There's also a higher demand for sprites when creating new forms now, with the addition of more icons and egg sprites. Making new content also takes up a lot of time with mapping and eventing. There's a lot to come across the episodes, with adding new maingame content towards the PoA sidestory and adding new character interactions with the Reborn cast, and adding anomalies and other events for Gen 8 and 9 legendary Pokémon across postgame. There will also be new content following on from postgame, with an increasing level cap. It's a lot to do, and it may come very slowly without help. But it will come. If you're interested in helping, please consider applying to join the team. ####---- Application Form Link -----#### Applications will be open for the next 2-4 weeks! Please let me know if you have any questions!

For Kixur

Hi! I'm afraid there won't be a dev blog this fortnight. I've been feeling particularly unwell this week. It is looking like September is an unlikely release window for Ep1. Maybe Oct/Nov like initially given is more realistic. We'll see.

Sure! Personal use is absolutely fine. You'll have to change form numbers ingame or the sprite positions yourself, though. Here's the Battlers spritesheet and the Icons spritesheet: