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~ Excerpts from Patreon ~ Yeehaw partners! It’s your local cowboy Posty here with your monthly installment of Desolation development update . Okay you can see the theme of this post, but I will get into that momentarily, first a little life update on my side. Firstly, I have started a new job recently (we don’t talk about what happened to the last one)! If you don’t know, I’ve been really diving into content creation and digital marketing, and that is basically my job lol. It’s been going really well so far and I find myself in a better environment than I was with my previous position. On top of that with this job set up, I have more time to dedicate to Desolation (mainly since I’m not travelling an hour there and back 5 days a week… I’m working 3 days hybrid, happy days) With that said, I’ve been focusing on my job and had other bits to do outside of development, so the last month has been just taking time to adjust from having all the free time in the world, to working a nice little 9-5. Also, I’ve started to dive into other forms of content creation as well, involving TCGs (yes I like shiny cardboard), I started an Instagram for my content so if you wish to see what I’m getting up to outside of Deso, you can check it out here! Anyways, enough about all that side of things, let's get to some Deso content shall we? So today’s post is focused around a little gaff that has spawned outta the blue. We streamed mapping this new place on a recent Patreon Stream, but for more context… Fairbale has gotten a new attraction that the locals can go to spend some time to unwind after a long day of farming, or being run outta town by the Black Foxes. An interesting sign, what’s this place called? Ah, there we go Welcome to Drifblim’s Drinkery! A nice saloon that the locals can swing by, grab a drink and take the time to relax, it’s a hard life being a farmer… or a cowboy… yeehaw. So for a little bit of backstory as to why all of a sudden Fairbale has gained a saloon, uh, yeah. Darius felt like making a track that utilised Drifblim’s cry, I told him to do it, we initially thought about this for another area, but then I said “fudge it we ball, I’m adding a saloon to Fairbale”, so yeah. These things tend to happen on the Desolation team. I have many silly ideas (or others give me silly ideas) and I make them happen… I was given too much power when I was handed over the reins for leading the project. Moving on! The saloon has been closed due to the recent Black Fox attack that took place in Fairbale, but after the cleanup crew got to work, it has now reopened and will be available from the beginning of EP7, but that begs the question, what is so special about this place? There will be a sidequest, wow more sidequests! But more importantly, you will be able to buy a few drinks here. These drinks may come with some special effects, but we will reveal that in a later update. But these effects are unique to the Drinkery, so make sure to check it out! And that’s all I have for you for this monthly instalment of yeehawsolation, I mean Desolation. Things are progressing smoothly and I’ve been getting myself into a new rhythm balancing my new job, content creation and Desolation, and I’m really excited for how things are looking! I hope that you continue to join us on this ride of the EP7 train, coming to you… at some point eventually! But since I only really showed off the Drinkery, I guess I should give you all one more little teaser as a treat, and yes this one is an EP7 story spoiler… More to come in the upcoming months, so stay tuned! Anyways, thanks for reading and I will see you next month. Take care folks! Posty

~ Excerpts from Patreon ~ Happy Year of the Snake folks! Posty here with your monthly installment of “what has the development team been cooking?” And we have been, well, cooking in certain departments to say the least. As I have now taken over as lead for the project, I am the one who is now focusing on tackling the majority of the EP7 eventing. What this means is that some of the areas and questlines that I would have been looking to work on this Episode, are now being delegated to other members on the Deso team to work on. With that said, the main part of this blog will be showcasing some of their work with you all, so let's jump into it shall we? I will not be going fully into details about what this area is and where you can find it (you will have to play EP7 to find out…), but it will be unlockable at some point as you continue your adventures through Ayrith. You are more than welcome to take a guess in the comments down below, but we will not be revealing any information at all (or well, at least for the time being), anyways take a look! Where have we seen crystals like that before A giant rock of crystals? Maybe there’s a puzzle instore for you here? So a quick note, this area has not been finalised and things will be updated as we continue to progress with development (the boulders may be placeholders… or are they? Yes they are placeholders), but this is just a sneak peek of a new area that is coming with EP7, so it’s best to get exploring when it releases! Before I close out this month’s post, our music men have been at it again and have provided you all with a little teaser for another new original track coming with the next update, check it out below! Axel's Theme Patreon Snippit.wav Yes, this is quite a shorter post than normal, the main reason for that is a lot of the content we have been working on lately is quite spoiler heavy, you can probably guess why. We aren’t ready to begin showing off some of the content we have been working on, but down the line you can expect that to be revealed, so stay tuned on that front. Next month’s blog post will be a little bit of fun that I’ve been working on as a little break from EP7 content (and from a recent Patreon Stream), all I will say as a hint is… yeehaw. And with that, I bid you adieu, hope you all have a wonderful year and… don’t get bitten by any snakes, hiss. Posty

Seems like my last post was done sometime in... July? What? Time goes by SO quickly. Anyway, I just wanted to crawl out my grave and actually show that yes, I'm doing science and I'm still alive. Before I continue, I did upload a bit of a preview back in November! You can view that here if you missed it: So, besides that, what's going on in the rejuv world? It's been a year! You said this time it wouldn't take as long! Well, I was wrong as usual. Life comes at you fast. To the people who thought the game would drop the february after v13.5 dropped... Uh, no. This game takes time and I will take my time. I still plan on being 60 and playing Pokemon and that's just a fact we're all going to have to live with. That being said, update! Where am I now? Well, Paragon is in its final stages! (Besides one big thing but that's something i need to work on over time, even during Renegade's development.) I'm in the final new area and I'm working on finishin up the story. One event takes me a day. Maybe more sometimes. I wanted Paragon to be done by the New Year, but I always forget that December is my suffering month (aka holidays), so that never gets done. And then I remember January is my annual I'm so fucking burned out from life month. So progress has been a bit slow now, too. But then February rolls around and I'm like hold on I'm a beast? Also, I know I'm going to be asked this. Q: "Will you release Paragon once it's finished, or will you release that when Renegade is finished?" A: I will not release Paragon once it's finished. Paragon and Renegade are meant to coexist together. Even if it means I hold onto a finished Paragon for a year, it is what I've decided. ty. And yes, I did say Renegade probably won't take as long, and that's PROBABLY still true but please don't hold that as a promise. Nothing is a promise. Except for the things I'm going to promise right now. Gearen Laboratory I didn't expect the lab changing to look more sleek was going to be such a contentious topic. Though, I am willing to give some context on the decision. Whether or not you like it is up to you. (Spoilers for v13 story. I can never remember the chapter number/plot correlation.) During the expo drop, it was revealed that Celine went to Reborn City to learn more about their league process and how it was done. Inspired by the way the league is run in that region, she chose to emulate that process and as such, the Gearen Lab (The PUBLIC league HQ) was meant to look more like the Grand Hall. But that in of itself isn't the main issue. People found problems with the way you get your starter. Calling it boring and less exciting than previous versions. I do agree. However, the intent was to streamline the first few moments so that you get your starter as fast as possible. And as of this moment, I'm still quite happy with that. There was another reason for this change, though. Gen 9 was coming out and I knew I wanted to include it. Which means more events taking up space in the mini biomes. tl:dr i was running out of space and expanding the biomes took a lot more technical work than expected and thus just defaulted to tables i could just perma extend. Regardless, I understand that the more personal way of obtaining your starter is important to some people. Especially those who like to create OC's. I hear you, and I understand you. Which is why I plan on creating two versions of this experience! Express Version: Is exactly how it is now in game. You go up to the table and adopt your gerbil. Standard Version: Amanda will take you downstairs into an enlarged biome where you can walk around and find your starter and pick it. Older rejuv versions did have this. But it was removed due to the maps being ugly lol. Now, this is not promised for v14. I would much rather work on new content than spend energy working on this rn. However! I am promising that this will come eventually. It may even come in v14 if I finish things up early! Or who knows, I may gain inspiration randomly during a testing period or whatever and knock it out in a day. These things happen. I have ADHD. It is what it is. Prologue Intro: Everyone knows the intro with lil Maria walking around her house and then somehow finds herself in some horror game! Well, the quality of the intro has been bugging me for several years now. When I take a break from a release, I usually do something fun to unwind and shake off the rust. This cycle, I finally went back and used my current skills to update the intro. Yes, with the Pangoro story still present, if not a bit changed. Old intro: New Intro: (These gifs/images are a quite a bit old as I've shown these off on my patreon like a year ago, but theyre still like 99% relevant minus some polish and detail.) There's also a few new secrets to be found in the intro, so you definitely want to keep an eye out for those :). And also no it is not necessary to play the entire damn game again just for the intro. It's neat! but not necessary. Uhhh, what else do I got to say? I guess I can dump some stuff I posted on my discord? There's not much this time around. but ye. Yeah, that was kind of a bad showcase, rip. Everything is very hush-hush. under wraps. CIA. FBI. Uhhh idk 9/11... never forgetti spaghetti whatever. idc. I do care, but also I'll leave you with one thing. A word to have you prepare a lil better. But. [Image ID: Image of a mysterious room with a Zygarde statue at the very back of it."] You better start collecting those cells.

Disclaimer: You can consider the initiative still open to new applications even if you’re reading this a long time after posting. This is most likely the last blog post before the 19.5 community release. But in a way it might be the most important one for the future of the game. Since I started working on Reborn I took the initiative on several occasions to put together the new team, set up some workflows and good practices. This time I’m going a step further because this initiative isn’t targeting just the team but the community as well. Let’s see how this goes. Okay, here is a little confession. I’m a big fan of open-source software and have a lot of personal experience with both contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. When I look at this community with 3 different games sharing the same engine and how many mods the community made for these games I can’t help but think that the games could be even better if we involve the community and modders more actively. So today I’m introducing an experiment I proposed to Ame and the team and which we decided to try. No, we aren’t fully going open-source but it’s somewhat close to it. The idea is that we can give the more experienced community members and modders an opportunity to improve the game directly. You can help to fix some annoying bugs, make changes in the base game to make modding easier, and if the dev team likes your idea you can even contribute a new feature. We have a private Discord server for this purpose. The way to get in is to apply by filling our form. The development team will review your applications and decide who to invite. We decided against having the Discord server public in order to keep the discussions productive and avoid having too many random people discussing things without actually being there to contribute themselves. How strict we’ll be when selecting who to invite depends a lot on how many applications we’ll get. But there is no need to be shy to send one! It is also alright to send a new application later if your first was denied and your situation changed since then in some relevant way - for instance you learned new skills, started working on a new mod, joined a team which has other members already part of the initiative and so on. We can reconsider. Next, we have private GitHub repositories for the game and the scripts. Git is a version control system - if you’re not familiar with it, here is a nice introduction video. You don’t necessarily need to have previous Git experience to contribute. You will only need the basics mentioned in the video and a bit about submodules which we will explain. We can help you learn more if it becomes relevant. Our motivation is to invite the authors of the large mods who often need to make many changes to the scripts and tend to add new features or fix bugs that should preferably be made in the base game instead. This is also intended to be the place where we give you some support to update your mods to the new engine and give you tips on how to maintain the mods afterwards in order to make future updates easier. And some good practices to have your mod compatible with online features and such. Challenge runners who often find or hear about a bug and aren’t shy to dig into the code to fix it are also very welcome. This is how Stardust started after all! But the initiative is by no means limited to these cases. If you just want to try and help make the game better, you can. Some examples: We want to make modding easy and who would know better what’s needed than the modders, right? The engine should have Gen 9 battle mechanics implemented for usage by mods even if not by Reborn base game. Rejuvenation or Desolation might also want to add Gen 9 in a future release. Gen 8 dynamic speed mechanic. We still don’t have it implemented in the engine even though Rejuvenation and Desolation are using Gen 8. Reborn doesn’t have a quest log like Rejuv and Deso. But if the community implements one it could become part of the game. Text-to-speech support for blind players doesn’t work for all game screens and features yet. It would really help them to have the rest implemented. We also have other ideas on how to improve their experience. Contributing to graphics and other assets. We could use a few spriters to help out with some work. For instance we’d like to update the overworld player sprites and will need some help to create all the variants (running, bike, surf, mine cart, fishing, riding). Fixing bugs discovered by yourself, the devs or the community. Your own idea which you think might be good for the base game! Even if the feature may not be suitable for all players we might still accept it as a password. And last but certainly not least, this is also a good opportunity for those who would like to join our team as actual developers. If we’re happy with your contributions, it’s a real possibility. Of course not every suggested change will actually appear in the main game. Our team will discuss the ideas with you, review the changes and decide if both the idea and the actual implementation are something we want to include. Application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfwtMIEZTDqEEdBDHTELuoSawaO2tKPOAP3HAgamS52XgG97w/viewform FAQ: > How demanding is the role? How much time do you expect the applicants to dedicate to this project? You're not applying to become a dev here. There are no big expectations, we do understand ppl are busy and modders already dedicate lot of time to their mods. Occasional contribution is enough. It would be nice to have some regular contributors as well but it doesn't need to be everyone.