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what up, fuckers it has been roughly five million years since i've grabbed the mic. it feels like just yesterday i was telling the dinosaurs all about meech. it has been roughly 50 million years since our last release. we have eliminated progress bars from the face of the earth, so i'll not hold up the show and just answer the question that i posed in the title: spring 2022 (if all goes well!) ok everyone who just wanted the date can go. for everyone else: where we @ first, there is a nightclub! you can hang out with people and battle to your heart's content. there's a shitload of battle content, from the boss rush to the battle tower with lots in between. it's basically just everything detailed on this post here so instead of rehashing that all out here, i'm just going to tell you to go read what i said way back in may 2019. *dies basically, the nightclub is done and functional. there's lots to do there. it'll be neat. second: there is a postgame! structurally, it plays a bit more loosely than the main story- completing postgame will still require completing all the quests, but there's a bit more flexibility in what you want to do and when you want to do it. and if i'm being perfectly honest it is way too fucking big. stupid huge. turns out the whole quest-per-legend deal results in a massive amount of content. obviously i don't have a solid estimate since no one's quite played through it all, but it sounds like it might work out to be 4-5 episodes of content. hell, the main story content is already, like, two episodes of content. we're basically just adding a third of the game's current length to it. which is important because... what's left testing is left. what's right well, we gotta clean up a bunch of loose ends before we even get to testing. this is the last episode! and if i'm being perfectly honest, we're tired. free us. things that need to be finished before testing: (this is where we hid the dead progress bars) - Animations there's, like, 18 left? the animation squad has been working real hard on making the move anims super sharp. make sure you turn them on!!!! - Early game updates haha yesssss i finally got ame to do these i'm not going to dig up my old posts on early game since i don't want to look at the date and take psychic damage; suffice it to say that early game kinda sucks compared to the rest of the game and it's getting a revamp. there's some new areas! some redone old areas! a plot that makes you a little less dizzy from running back and forth! man its gonna be great. right now 3 episodes have been updated, and we're doing some touchups for the rest. - Ending scenes so this content is classified, but eventually this stupid fuckin game has to end and you'll get some bonus scenes with some chars under certain circumstances. - Nightclub polish so shout out to azzie for doing a fuckload of dialogue for the 500000000 (that's a metric fuckton for those of you unfamiliar with math) battle tower trainers, as well as some general chat dialogue for the chars you've been stuck with all game. there's still a bit of that left to do. - teams hi so from what i understand, the "gameplay" in these types of games consist of "battles" that someone has to "make". and "apparently" the person making them has (mostly) been "me". i've got like 12 left. oops. - Field updates making hundreds of teams means that i've taken a pretty close look at the field effects, and there have been a lot of minor changes to fields to make them make more sense/more balanced/better. - Bugs mr lord Perrence has been doing god's work wrangling our massive fucking buglist and making the new AI functional (oh yeah that's right we redid the ai but don't worry about that) bugfixing never ends, but eventually we will stop trying. - Sprite updates a lot of the sprites are, and i believe this is a term the kids are using these days, "crusty". we only produce well-made sandwiches here, meaning we are removing the crust. here's a preview of what's been done: we're buying the protags some fucking shampoo. you can actually watch us do for decibel live on twitch this sunday at 3p MDT! (that is 37 hours from the time of posting.) - leftover bullshit look you never know what's gonna come up while we clean up the rest of this. i can't even remember what all we've done since e18. and then- and then- we will do some testing. this is the largest amount of content we've ever tested at once by a gigantic margin, so we're not even sure how that's going to go. the first round of semi-public testing (that is, something you, dear reader, will be able to participate in) will be the community release, which occurs after beta testing. we will say when beta testing starts. at that point we'll probably have a general sense about how long each phase will take. the rest of the details will probably be kept under wraps just to preserve what middling amounts of sanity we've somehow maintained a grasp on. i've been holding on to an @everyone on the discord server for years and you better believe it'll be used when the game's ready. this is the home stretch, y'all. thanks for all your patience. it'll be worth the wait.

in canon legendary encounters, usually you just trip and fall into legendaries after they've randomly decided to roost somewhere vaguely out of the way. if you're lucky there might be a whole dungeon before them. or if you're playing XY, maybe they'll just be sitting there in a cave that clearly always existed for no other purpose than except to specifically serve as their roost until the region's favorite ten year old traipses along and use said legendary for baseball pitching practice. anyway, this isn't canon. this is reborn, and some people would argue that i hate you all and want to see you suffer. * * this is not true. i love all of you in varying degrees and the less you think it applies to you the more it's true. but don't be weird about it, ok? so today i'd like to introduce a new device of suffering in post-game: Anomaly Battles. the legendaries in post-game have an unfortunate tendency to appear with a strange aura around them called an Anomaly! in universe, this aura is otherworldly, producing many strange like making the pokemon behave aggressively, or creating apparitions of other types of pokemon who fight alongside them! out of universe, it is our tool to be a gigantic bitch to you. you've gotten to postgame, so you're clearly a skilled trainer with a diverse roster ready to handle anything we throw at you, so here goes-- we're going to throw everything at you. in post-game, you'll face off against a special battle with many of the legends before being allowed the privilege of going for the catch! fight hard and come through strong because you may yet need that strength to secure the victory. not every legendary has an attached anomaly, but so far the strong majority of them do! huge shout out to @andracass for making the lion's share of these teams so far; like with the other parts of postgame, she's really just put in a crazy amount of work for it i hope you'll look forward to eating shit ( please do not actually consume shit. please make sure all matter you consume is both edible and nutritious. it is important to eat regularly and take care of your body. do that for all of us, okay? you can't help others if you don't take care of yourself first. all right... then, you stay safe out there now. get plenty of rest. bye-bye until next time ! )

this is your captain speaking. we are beginning our descent. please fasten your seatbelts and all that shit. stay tuned for this important safety presentation. Q: why is your safety presentation a Q&A? A: idk! i expect that there's a certain set of things that need to be explained and/or questions people have, so this is just a quick and to the point way of addressing them. just imagine that i'm rapidly switching between flight attendant and captain uniforms throughout this. some questions are also reminiscent of comments made on previous devblog posts. consider this an encouragement to not be like those people. Q: why don't you just release the game already A: because we're still adding stuff at the last minute!!!! i'm gonna be honest the most frustrating part about this being the final release is that we keep having all of these ideas and can't be like "well, we'll just push this off to the next version." there is no next version!!!!!!!! there's a strong possibility of a non-content related update coming sometime in the future, but let's be real reggy nintendo just has to look at us funny and that won't happen. so we want to make this as good as we can before release. but believe me we want this out just as fast as y'all do. Q: when's e19 A: probably in may? idk! we've got to do the open beta (community release) first, and then we'll move on to the actual real final release of this video game. Q: when's e19 community release A: next weekend! we have a date in mind. i don't want to say which date it is in case something goes wrong on our end and things have to be pushed back. we're not a big game company with a corporate HQ and millions of dollars in funding. we're just two bitches and a cat in an apartment. sometimes we oversleep. you never know. just keep an eye on the sidebar. Q: how do i get the community release? A: be in the community! ie have a forum account. Q: i am only here for free shit and i don't want to do work. do i have to report any bugs? A: well, technically no! bug reports are definitely appreciated but are not mandatory. Q: i found a bug! should i dm every developer about it at the same time? A: no. for real, if you do this, we hate you. please make a thread on the forum if you catch a bug! if you see a bug, assume that it needs to be reported. Q: you made the game too easy and i hate it now. A: that's not a question! it's also a pretty bold thing to say about something you haven't even played. if the game is now ruined for you then i don't think there was ever anything we could've done about that. we're sorry for your loss, though! Q: where should i start to make sure i don't run into problems? A: a pokemon center! or hardy's gym room. then head to calcenon. you won't miss it. Q: help i'm conflicted. i really want to see the new content right now, but i also want to see what's changed in early game. A: so i don't know if there's a perfect way to handle that. a common strategy of the playtesters has been to complete e19m and then start over. personally, i still think that starting from the beginning is the best idea: a lot of character interactions have been reworked and seeing them before getting to e19 will only make the new content that much stronger. the early game changes have been universally praised. Q: i'm the person from the last question. also i never want to see the magic square ever again, i'm tired of the starter quest, and i've caught every stupid pokemon in this stupid game. what do i do? A: oh man i have some good news for you! one of those last minute things we're throwing in is some limited new game plus functionality. it'll let you skip some of those more time consuming quests. just load up a save that's already completed them and my hawt new code will take care of the rest. Q: hey there i have a suggestion for another new game plus thing do you want to he- A: no! like, listen, i'm sure you have a great idea. every idea ever posted in the comments has been a good idea. we just don't have time. Q: i want to replay the game but then i would have to see ace and they've bloated the cast and ruined the game. A: so that's a pretty bold thing to say about someone you've never met. if the game is now... well, you saw the answer earlier. i'm pretty sure that every since person who's tested this game has liked ace. and c'mon. an uncontroversial main antagonist? in this video game? that man's comment career is over. Q: can i activate passwords on my current save file? A: yes! someone in calcenon can help you with that. Q: i am SO excited about this like you have no idea. like srsly i am losing my mind. i have to tell everyone about my game. A: so this also isn't a question but i don't have a great way to segue into this. so discord has this hot new feature called "threads". threads have been great for playthrough liveblogging. for real. if everyone was just dumping their comments in one place, all of our channels would look like a hellfuck nightmare. it's also great for devs because we can just see how people's thoughts evolve as they progress through the game. this is me telling you to use a thread. Q: what if i'm in the middle of the game when i start e19? A: uhhhhhh that's a great question. we don't quite know. if you're in the middle of a game, you should probably start from the beginning. we don't know what kind of weird interactions will occur as a result of switches being missing, events being skipped, etc. just to be safe, you should probably start from the top. if you have a save file from an older version of the game, we'd expect that it'll be fine as long as things were fine during e18. Q: i downloaded the game and clicked the exe but it's not working! what do i do??? A: okay, so, this is just a total shot in the dark. but you unzipped it, right? Q: how do i unzip? A: ...i am so concerned for your computer. i'm calling computer protective services. you are now banned to the outdoors. say hi to bambi. Q: hello. i am a hypothetical person from the future. i have a very loud take on this video game and/or one of its characters and i want to make a very loud post filled with hot takes about this. is this a good idea y/y? A: please give your takes a moment to cool down! hot takes are a fire hazard and the building code requires you to only have them in the comfort of your own home with people in the room with you. also i hit back. Q: OMG I CAN'T BELEIVE THAT AT THE END OF THE EPISODE SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE A: that's also not a question! what is wrong with you people also you definitely don't want to go around spilling story secrets like that. spoiler locking for e19 is going to be a little weird since so much has changed. all content before the champion is going to be spoiler locked for a month after the final release. all content. this is going to really trip up returning players who are already familiar with the major story beats. there's two big reasons for this: the first is that the early game changes mean that people replaying through the game may not know what is/isn't new between episodes, so it's best to spoiler everything to be safe; second, there's a whole swath of people out there who have been waiting for this game to finish before playing it, and they've got a lot of shit to catch up on. for everyone's sake, we're treating all content as new content. postgame is going to be spoiler locked for three months- potentially less depending on how quickly people get through everything. this game is really fuckin long. y'all are gonna have shit to play for literal months. even if you played the game for 4 hours a day, every day, i'd still expect it to take about four weeks to beat. now i'm sure that people are going to no-life the shit out of it, but this ain't about them. we gotta give people a chance to play the whole thing. Q: is the website gonna crash on release day? A: well we're sure hoping it won't! got a hot new server upgrade and everything! but yeah, probably. we're sorry :( Q: wait, you wrote this post yesterday? how'd i miss it??? A: i started it yesterday and posted it hidden to make sure nothing got lost. don't worry! now, i also polled the current testers for things they thought i should add. here's the highlights: "save often! like, really really save often." "pace yourself! e19m is still pretty long." "don't forget that you can turn speedup off." "there's a puzzle you might want a pen and paper for." "the game is still hard people jfc"* "the episode slaps and you're in for a ride." *this comment includes some editorializing from myself. hype train will arrive soon!

fine. i concede. you've worn me down-- twisted my arm clean off-- both of them in fact! i'm typing this with my toes. the white flag is raised, having been tirelessly goaded into it by the demands of an uncaring populace, night after night spent in fearful agony, whimpering in hidden corners that are yet unequal to the task set before them of simply shielding me from the slings and arrows of the greater internet community,* i accept i have no choice but to lament simply having no other choice, i deign to give you.... one progress bar. * none of this has happened or is even remotely true, everyone has been by and large supportive of my decision to yeet the progress bars, and i greatly appreciate y'all for that. i feel much better overall with them gone and feeling that way, this may be a mistake. if this ends up stressing me out, i will yeet this too. but we'll give it a try, because i accidentally started counting and, well-- the years start counting and they don't stop counting. the progress bar is how many legendaries are accounted for as of posting-- 32/65 almost halfway. why 65? 76 mons are not asked for by the pokedex quest in E18. 11 of them are ultra beasts and-- say it with me now-- ultra beasts don't get rights. gen 8 is not real, and cannot hurt me. that leaves 65 genuine legends i have to include. for my sanity, and frankly, the sanity of everyone else, we have downsized from original expectations-- not every legendary is getting a full quest. but the significant majority are. in cases where they don't get a full quest, only the earliest of them are a walk-in-and-start-chuckin'-pokeballs type of deal. there will be more on what else is entailed instead in a future post. so e19 will be released when we hit 65 ?????!??! no, no look at me stop that. stop that right now, you goddamn son of a beautiful person (probably) i appreciate your hypothetical passion but the answer is no a big, honkin' neon red no the kind of no that your mom gives you after she talks to my mom and asks if you can come over the kind of no that you wish you could get after hearing nothing from the last ten jobs you applied to the kind of no that means no and you respect it without making a scene nope. there are going to be things i want to do after the legend quests-- other things i need to do. possibly a lot of them, idk-- i'm not looking that far ahead because if i think about it i will take 2d8 psychic damage but what this whole legendary quest/progress bar thing is is the most significant obstacle before E19 can be finished or released. when the bar is full, that does not mean E19 is finished-- it means it can be finished. until then, all bets are off. i'm biting down and just trying to make it through one week at a time. thanks for sticking with it, loves.

i don't suppose you remember me, do you? i think it's been like, five hundred pandemic years or something since i've posted here. as many of you know from cass's previous posts, since around september of last year i've been focusing on a different project. gosh, that took a while, didn't it? once again, i want to thank everyone for their patience as always... but uh, we finally got a demo for that out, so maybe, possibly, go try it out, if you haven't already? we'll begin actively developing starlight for real once reborn is finished but i felt like it was important to finish the demo before reborn was done so that the community didn't feel like it had no choice but to just die once the game was finally out for real. i think there's been an expectation for some number of years that once 19 is done, the community will be. and uh-- nawh. but to make sure that didn't happen, and to make sure people could see what they might have to stick around for, i felt it was necessary to get that going sooner rather than later, and then come back to finish postgame. this was, in retrospect, a mistake. not for any """real""" reason, to be clear-- but the mental burden of putting reborn and everyone on hold or trying to split focus between two projects was a lot heavier than i expected. aside from keeping the devblog warm while i've been away, please appreciate cass for generally keeping me sane through the last year or so, because some of the stress had really been starting to get to me. i'm still working on shaking that off, tbh, but it'll be fine. on the other hand, i know i was getting pretty tired towards the end of making the main story, and i feel like taking a break for starlight has helped me come back to the project with a clearer head, more ready to finish it out properly. that is to say, if it wasn't clear enough already: reborn will now be actively developed again. another advantage to having taken time off from the project is that i've learned a few things, mainly about myself. and how to actually play nice with a team, since i haven't been very good at doing that in the past. but the main thing i've realized is that i hate to-do lists. they are soul-sucking. i feel a lot better about things when i am looking at problems in the game and fixing them on the spot rather than looking at a list of problems about the game several hundred lines long and just kind of getting overwhelmed. this is unfortunate for me as a person who has mainly organized her work in the past almost exclusively through to-do lists. now y'all don't care that much about my personal organization, that's stuff i have to figure out, but the point of this is that uh those task bars? that used to be on the right there? they're not coming back. because all that is is just one giant public to-do list. a constant reminder of all of the things i still have not done and still have to do breathing down my neck. i know they're cool, i know they're useful for communicating to everyone how far along we are. and maybe we can figure out something similar but for my own sanity no. nope. they're cancelled, and they're staying cancelled. in return i'll try to like, actually post or something once in a while. but, like, no promises. i still prefer to spend time doing the thing rather than talking about doing the thing. okay, so, the million dollar question: when will e19 be released? and i still don't have that answer. no one has that answer. the only answer to that that exists is 'sometime in the eventual future' but we'll like, keep you in the loop one way or another. there will have to be testing before it releases, starting with internal testing. so that might be a good indicator of it's coming up. just hang tight until then y'all

this is your captain speaking. in this business, i don't especially like saying that i'm going to do things at some point down the line. there's always so much going on that things slip my mind, or life gets in the way, or something. but there is one that that i said i would do a bunch of devblog posts ago. i said i would tell you when beta has started. beta has started. this is it. we're in serious business territory now. shit is actually real. this stupid game has been in development for 10 years and release is imminent. it has been three and a half years since e18 was first released. that's a long fuckin time! there have been 5 new developers added to the team since then! i'm one of those developers!! that's weirding me out!!! so this is a post about realistic expectations. i've been piloting your hype train/plane/boat/bus for a few months now, and my sole job has been to get you excited. but now we're getting serious. now i'm asking you to put your seatbelt on. now i want you to start mentally preparing yourself for this shit. beta testing means that the game is effectively in its final state. there won't be any dramatic changes between now and community release. the next month or two will be dedicated to smoothing out everything we've worked on up to this point. and holy shit have we worked on a lot of stuff. so. how much game is e19? play time is going to vary heavily between people, but right now we're putting an estimate of 100-130 hours from start to finish. that is insane. that is five real-life days of straight gameplay- and you still might not make it through to the end. we're starting beta testing and are expecting maybe a couple of people to actually complete the game before release. if you're wondering why testing has taken so long, this is why. what's the game going to be like compared to e18? last post i did a non-exhaustive round-up of all the new features that we've made to the mechanics of the game between e18 and e19. performance wise, the game runs like a dream. i personally can't go back to the original e18 release. it's a horrible, laggy nightmare. i sincerely hope that our release pushes the wider fangame community one step closer to abandoning the base rmxp engine. it's not quite such a leap forward in performance compared to e18.3, but it's still considerably smoother than that release, which itself was already a huge step up from e18. runnin smooth like butta what's the gameplay going to be like compared to e18? this is actually a difficult question. see, when we first started making postgame, we were hoping to make a reasonably fulfilling epilogue to the main game with some legendary quests that weren't just shoehorned in. that is not what happened. we accidentally made a whole additional game. we've taken to referring the split as e19m and e19p- "m" for main, and "p" for post. let's talk about e19m first. e19m is your standard pokemon league fare. i've made this comparison before, but the difference between e18 and e19m is like the difference between persona 5 and persona 5 royal. the pre-19 content is everything you already love, but better. e19m is the new shit you've been waiting for since dinosaurs roamed the earth. it's just more of the content you already love. i don't need to sell you on it. my only caution in advance is that the experience has varied a lot between people. one person's favorite part has been someone else's least favorite part. from my perspective, that's fine! everyone has different tastes and it's only natural that the various story beats will hit people differently from each other. the reason i mention this in advance is because the last thing that i want happening to anyone playing this game is that they are so hyped that a speed bump in the narrative ruins the experience. i am hoping that some advance perspective is enough to prevent this. someone has really liked every part of e19. pre-19 has been universally praised. the changes certainly do not amount to an overhaul, but the revamped areas and story adjustments do wonders to the overall quality of the game. my first playthrough of reborn was back when e15 came out, like, six years ago. i remember how drawn into the game i was back then. pre-19 was a lighting reminder of everything i originally loved about the game on my first playthrough. ace has also been incredibly well received. i look forward to seeing them on the top of all your tier lists. in the past, i've suggested replaying the game. at this point, i'd strongly recommend doing so. you'll miss out on some great content if you don't. now let's talk about e19p. e19p is very different from the rest of the game. a number of testers have commented that it feels like an entirely different game. and... yeah. i think we accidentally made the sequel to reborn already. e19p is structured around quests. they're basically just mini-episodic segments pertaining to a specific legendary. it's also kind of a miracle that they exist! back when we started working on postgame, the idea of making a quest for every legendary made ame seize up with anxiety. we got past that by deciding we wouldn't make any legendary quests that we had zero interest in. there's also a handful of quests made and written by other dev team members. as a result, you get a huge variety of content at the expense of consistency. (it might be a surprise to hear that the quests were causing a lot of anxiety considering the sheer length of postgame. that's fair! turns out the bigger problem was just the anxiety anyway.) there's also an overarching plot that crosses between the individual quests. it is branch dependent. some of you are probably freaking out at the mention of branches. the breakdown of them is simple. there are two branches. one is not better than the other. you're probably not going to believe me when i say that one's not better. i suspect that there will be a lot of opinions about which one is better than the other- there already have been some splits on this over the course of testing (and, for that matter, development). i just really want to stress that, from a development perspective, one branch is not better than the other. e19p is also very battle heavy. the episodic segments are capped off by miniboss fights, with some character bosses sprinkled in as well. minor trainers practically don't exist. they have been fired. it is, overall, a massive change in pace compared to the main game. treat it like an accidental sequel. now i don't want to talk about this, but... "hey cass! when's e20 coming ou-" no. no no no no no. no. no. ok? ame wants out. "hey cass! will there be any future updates?" maybe! i'll still be working on deso/rejuv, and i've set up the scripts so that the three major games all run on the same scriptbase. this basically means that i can work on other games and occasionally update reborn along with them. there might also be some minor content updates, but this is a big, big maybe. i can't predict what will happen after we finish; i can only tell you what people are thinking about doing. who knows how it'll all actually work out. final thoughts. the game is going to be done. finished. over. complete. it's been 10 years since development first began. a little more than three years since the last major release. even beyond the hype of a long-awaited game being released, this is also going to be a big community event. there are people who have been in the community the entire time the game's been worked on. there are people who just found this game last week! there's all kinds of people in between. there are people playing this game who were 5 years old when ame started working on it. what i'm saying is that this place will be drowning in feels. big waves of "wow holy shit this game is finished." people gushing about how much they like it. (hopefully!) be ready for that too. as much as i'd love to release tomorrow, we still have to finish testing :( we're all super hype for you to play it and see everything we've done. there will still be a few more hype trains before community release, where I'll probably field questions and tell y'all how to prep. choo choo

this is your captain speaking i wish to announce the presence of our friendly local concession stand where you can purchase snacks at your convenience (by "snacks" i mean "minor feature updates that are so small they don't even deserve their own post") (and by "purchase" i mean "you just kinda get this shit") so e19's been in testing for a few months now. more on this in a later post. obviously the main point of testing is that we fix bugs and make sure your game doesn't break, but a side bonus of testing has been that we can see testers complaining about annoying shit in-game and be like "yeah that's dumb we can fix that". and maybe no one asks and we just do shit anyway. here's the neat shit we have on offer. - repels are better now you know how we make you fucking run everywhere in this game like possessed zebra? everyone knows that they gotta go and purchase a bunch of these bad bois: but oh wait what's this is that number bigger???? ooooooooo - fishing is more likely to prompt a catch, and it's easier to do on speedup ok we're going into the scripts for this one. see this line right here: it does exactly what you think it does! if you're fishing on speedup you just get a longer chance to hook it. god knows everyone uses speedup all the time and absolutely refuses to turn them off even if they're getting [MESSAGE REDACTED BY TRAIN CONDUCTOR] but at least fishing will be a bit easier! - this screenshot has like five features in it long time viewers of this devblog who are neither goldfish nor that one guy from memento will recognize this image from the last post i made: - party status is visible on the main menu look at that party menu. that's their friends right there! you can even tell that four of them are shiny just by looking at the menu! you can also tell if they're dead or not! please do not kill your friends. - shiny gardevoir is hype one of the perks about reborn being an indie-devved community-based game is that sometimes we just see neat shit and are like "yo can we put that in" so, like, two years ago- that sound you just heard was every reborn developer emitting screeches of pain- a mr. Khrona guy posted a gardevoir shiny and it was, like, mega hella. so we were like "yo can we put that in" and it's in. - you can use a controller you can use a controller - hot new shiny icons so i made a devblog post about this a few months ago, but in case you missed it we have some hype new icons for various eggs/shinies/shiny eggs made by smeargle. bonus convenience for if you're shiny egg hatching and don't want to hatch the entire egg before knowing if it's shiny or not! - new sprite storage/retrieval (spritesheets) ok so this one's going to be controversial so it's best we get it out of the way sooner rather then later. so smeargle made a shitload of new sprites. a ton of them. stupid number. i slapped them all on a single image. here's what necrozma looks like: blah blah "i did this for reasons" whatever. here's the advantages/disadvantages of this: 1. sprites are all in one place and easy to edit the above necrozma image was originally 16 individual images. that's too many images. now if you want to edit the necrozma sprites, you can look at them all at once from one (1) file. you can edit shiny sprites next to the original! edit back sprites next to front sprites! forms are all right there next to each other too. ez. 2. cleans up the number of files/filesize okay, so, most people aren't going to care about this. but "most people" ain't making this post, knowwhatimsayin. so here's a comparison of folder information before and after "compilation" of sprites onto a sheet: the difference in file number is more dramatic for battlers; the difference in file size is more dramatic for icons: so, obviously, most people are gonna be like "ok, well, that's 15MB. who cares." and, well, yeah, you're right. this is the kind of thing that'll matter for people with garbage internet and 15MB translates into a minute of download time (and i'm so sorry that you live like that btw), but we live in a world where 1TB of hard drive space is, like, $30. the bigger advantage is the sheer number of items that this cuts. you've probably noticed that copying the game files from one place to another takes way longer than it feels like it should. the size of the data you're moving matters, but so does the number of items that you have to move. and if you're copying the game onto a flash drive? forget it. that shit's gonna take ages. spinning hard drives will appreciate this too since they run more slowly when grabbing many files at once. condensing all the icons onto one sheet means that, despite adding a shitload of assets into the game, there are now ~3k fewer files in the game. every essentials game should really do this. i realize i'm probably the only person in the entire game development industry who cares about optimization and that this is ultimately a tiny change, but i like this shit. plus i stress-organize. disadvantages: 1. beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeg sheets. so i showed necrozma earlier because it's a nice demonstration of the spritesheet layout. let's talk about unown. hooooooo boy. the forum software actually won't let me make this image bigger. surely i don't need to explain the downside of this. that's too many sprites on the sheet. i can't show you arceus for obvious reasons, but that thing's even worse. ultimately i didn't think this was a substantial enough concern that this change wasn't worth doing, and i still think this will ultimately be a positive change for spriters. but, uh... it'll have some quirks. yell at me about this in the comments. ok! back to your regularly scheduled announcements. - headbutt works and always gives you an encounter this one's self-explanatory. - mid-battle evolutions let me take you back to the RSE days. pokemon ruby was my first pokemon game and that game had a pokemon called "mudkip". many of you have likely heard of this "mudkip". now, this mudkip evolved into marshtomp at level 16 and would, upon evolution, learn the move mud shot. except that's not quiiiiite how it worked. if you evolved at level 17 for some reason, you miss your move. big bummer hours. now, this got fixed by the time USUM rolled around, but this is the best example i have for why mid-battle evolution is a neat thing that you should care about. (from a mechanical standpoint. it's just kind of cool as a feature.) - pickup QoL when your mon picks up an item after a battle, it goes straight into your bag. - eviolite acts like an everstone put this on the "list of things that should just be canon": if you have a mon hold eviolite the game will stop treating it like something that needs to evolve after every battle. - sky drop has been removed from the game haha lol i wish. - a whole bunch of EXP and EV adjustments now i know what you're thinking. "cass, didn't you talk about this shit, like, a year ago?" and, first, stop talking about the passage of time around me. second, i did! so you should just go read that post. the short version is that EV grinding is way less of a pain and there's a ton more EXP in the game in general now. - EV locations exist, too we've also designated a few locations for EV grinding specific stats, just to make your life a little bit easier. - catch EXP?? yes that's right, you now get catch EXP when you capture a mon. we figure that anything to make the postgame roundup more useful is a plus for everyone. - better TM/tutor availability so, in general, you will get better TMs and tutors earlier in the game. some move tutors have been added to onyx to aid in this. i suspect most people won't really care about being able to learn telekinesis a little earlier. if that does sound great to you, though? more power to ya. as for tm's, while i'm sure that everyone can't wait to get quash a little bit earlier, you'll also appreciate that nearly all of the learnable moves in the game have been moved up. people have been waiting for ice beam and earthquake since the middle ages, but in e19 you would have access to those by the time you finish agate. - move tutors only charge you once move tutors work like purchasable TMs where if you pay for them once then you can teach the move as many times as you want. tutors are slightly more expensive to compensate. - multiple key item registration so, a downside of the shift to the new engine is that we have fewer controls that you can just rebind at-will, which means that we had to drop some inputs for registered items. to fix that, we've added something we call the ready menu. if you register multiple items, then hitting shift (or whatever key you crazy kids are using these days) brings up a menu like this: then you can pick the actual item that you want to use. this also means you can register as many items as you want for quick use! - gambling they say a picture is worth a thousand words: we added roulette! coins are also generally a lot easier to get. i've spent so much time just watching people holed up in the game corner grinding coins because dammit they are not moving another inch without getting slugma. so you can get coins much more easily now. - sand dunes don't slow you down quite so hard suuuuuuper minor. suuuuuuuuuuuuuper minor. but running around the desert while lost and confused will be faster. - postgame QoL so, again, this is mainly going to be discussed in a later devblog, but postgame is pretty battle heavy. we're expecting the need to frequently swap out your mons and movesets. so we've got some things to make that easier. so the big ticket item here is in slot #4. you can buy reborn balls. glitter balls have a dual use. their primary function is that catching a mon in one will make it shiny. their bonus feature is that if you're using one on a mon that is already shiny, their catch rate goes through the roof. EV tuners/boosters make it ultra easy to buff your mon's EVs and even transfer them from one stat to another if that's your jam. the PP all is like a PP max on steroids. using it on a mon buffs the PP of all of its moves to the highest value. means there's a little bit less clicking for you. we've also got the move restorer. check it out: you can just... relearn entire movesets! makes switching them out a piece of cake. yes my prima has fly because i make this game and sometimes i just need to fly places. you can also access your pc from anywhere. it burns some consumable items. i don't have a picture for it. sad face :( there's also a lot of bonus catching charms. you're going to be throwing a lot of balls at a lot of legendaries and that shit'll get old after the first five times. and there's, like, 70 of those things. let it be known that we are capable of mercy. - photosensitivity mode so every once in a while, someone will pop onto the forums with a niche request for the game. one of these, a while back, was a request to turn off the flashing and screen shaking that occurred. i whipped up a quick mod and sent it their way. well, now that mod is baked right into the video game! you can just flip a switch to make the flashing stop. - field boost/drop indicators field effects are complicated. to make it easier on people, we've thrown in a nice little indicator showing when moves get boosted/dropped on a field: they'll show up if you have the associated readout. - radomus's chess puzzle is less of a pain okay, so, super niche, but the direction that you move a bishop is now selectable. chess pieces also disappear when you finish the puzzles so you just sprint through without a care. - confirmation before backing out of tile puzzles has this ever happened to you? you're doing a tile puzzle and you needed to check the picture of the puzzle in the game files, but when you reselect the game you accidentally back out of the puzzle? such accidents are now a thing of the past! our patented new technology helps keep you from making such silly mistakes. - soft resetting is faster okay, so, i'm sure that every single person will appreciate this. soft-resetting has been streamlined to get you back in the game as quickly as i can manage. load times in general have been reduced due to a lot of data caching. - look at this photograph personally, i'm just happy that i'll never need to explain how this works to anyone ever again. i... okay, this post is getting long. there's a lot of extra shit that we added that doesn't require a nice bold bullet point, so i'm going to throw those all at you at once. this list isn't even exhaustive- we're definitely still leaving shit out. - game window stays in the same place when you soft reset - added a ladder in back of sugiline cave for more convenient gibles - added a move tutor to the circus who can change a pokemon's hidden power to any time for a heart scale - multiple EXP Candies can now be used at once - Eevee can now evolve into Leafeon and Glaceon with Leaf and Ice Stones - the rail section to devon now automatically opens at that point in the story if it wasn't already - the high striker now puts you back in position if you win a partial prize - shortcircuit now cycles through electric damage amps sequentially rather than randomly - crystal cavern now cycles through rock type bonuses sequentially rather than randomly - added a check for held items when sending pokemon back to the pc after a catch - returns items to bag when handing in pokemon to type null quest etc - added a lady to the department store who points the player in the direction of each sticker sidequest - drifloon and spinel sticker events can now be done in any weather - boosted max item stacks to 999 - integrated the PC Find Mod - the player is now automatically given the powder vial at the circus - player is also automatically given dive and rock smash - added a party quick swap mode form base essentials by pressing A on the party screen - adrienn's pre-gym recruitment quest is now optional - players can now get ditto in blacksteam without having to go talk to the happiny guy, as long as they freed the daycare couple - added a berry seller for top-end natural gift berries that were previously unavailable - added letter indicators to the tuning panels on the floor of hardy's gym showing which is which note - brightened some underwater doors. if you know the ones, you know the ones. - it is now possible to access (the front part at least) of chrysolia springs, and the lost train before visiting spinel - the nature center now gives out some starting honey - when slathered, the adventurine wood honey trees now spawn heracross and pinsir immediately - it is now possible to visit spinel, beat serra, and obtain the medicine before ever setting foot in belrose mansion - you can now go to the sanctum immediately upon reaching 7th st without having to chase bennett around. also made chasing him around less obnoxious. - added some fast travels after a few story segments - the correct rocks to smash in order to drain each floor of pyrous mountain now glow - sweethearts and exp candy can now be purchased from the candy store at various points throughout the game. - lowered the cost of nature-changing to two heart scales from 3 - added the ability capsule QoL from rejuv to select from a list instead of sequencing through abilities - whiscash now has a higher encounter rate in the tanzan cove for the super rod quest - added an NPC to reset shelly's gym without leaving not to mention some other passwords, script backend cleanup... well, you'll see it all soon enough. get hype. this boat engine makes noise, motherfucker

serious post. it's been a bit over a year since i wrote the post announcing postgame. it's been about two years since e18 came out. people have been wondering things like "is the game dead?" and "where's e19?". while these sorts of questions tend to be a little annoying when asked reasonably near an episode's release date, we've reached a time when they become appropriate, legitimate questions. so let's talk about what's going on. the biggest thing is starlight. for those of you who do not know, ame is currently also working on Starlight Divide, a tRPG that will be her next game after reborn is done. she is developing it entirely from scratch. development for it began basically right after the story for e19 was finished/functional and it has been continuing pretty much since then. developing from scratch is hard. fangame development has a few advantages in that the mechanics have been laid out by gamefreak (for better or for worse) and essentials offers a base set of tools to build games from (for better or for worse). in no way does this imply that developing quality content is easy, but it is still fairly simple to pick up some tools and get going. starlight does not have that. after being worked on for a year, it has almost approached the point of being playable. and then there's an entire game that needs to be made on top of it. the reason starlight is an issue for e19 is because of timing. the original plan for development was something like: e19m -> starlight -> starlight demo release -> e19p -> e19 release. (i use e19m as shorthand for the main story and e19p as shorthand for postgame.) this order was decided for a lot of reasons. there's general reborn burnout, ame wanted to start a new project, hiding from the big N (hi reggy thx 4 ur mercy), it provides some amount of project continuity, among other things. this order was decided a year ago. i'll just straight-up say that, in hindsight, this was a mistake. i don't think we were expecting the demo to take so long, nor did we account for the development pressure of working on two games concurrently. not releasing new content for two years is a bit anxiety-provoking. at this point, the starlight demo is probably going to be finished first, so realizing that the development plan was a mistake isn't going to result in it changing. this is basically just an explanation for why things have taken so long. i also want to talk about progress bars. i've noticed that a lot of discussions about development (and this would also apply to rejuv and deso a bit as well) will occasionally include a mention of "the game is at X% and that means [something]!" in reborn's case, the thing that it "means" is that the game has hovered around 52% completion for a while and thus there has been no development on the game. that is not even remotely true. to be fair, i suspect that the people who assume there has been no development are also not reading anything i say here (including this! fuck.), but it also says something about what people think when they see the numbers on the little sidebar over there. ---> the progress bar numbers are made up. (by me, i should add.) the point of the progress bars is to offer a condensed look at what we've done and what we plan to do. the X% of the bottom is there to give some kind of impression of what the overall progress looks like. I sure don't fuckin know what the overall progress looks like. the progress bars are basically calculated by me looking at various aspects of the game and going "eh, sure, this can be 3% of the total!" and then adding up all those shitty guesses i'm making. the problem then is that the bars are structured around what we expect to be working on- which usually involves game content. none of those guesses involved MKXP, or the massive, ridiculous amounts of code cleanup we've been doing. that number probably isn't even going to move until the starlight demo come out since ame tends to work on the game content. there's more stuff that we're planning to do in the future that i also already know won't be represented in the progress bars. the X% at the bottom is practically lying to you. because of this, it's tempting to pull the bars down until reborn development picks up. in their current state, they're kind of a pain in the ass for everyone: i have to keep them up to date, they put pressure on the development team to overwork since there's a lot of stuff to do, and it makes everyone watching them impatient for the next release. (in fact, i think i just convinced myself that taking them down is a good idea and should probably be done.) we know that there's a lot of people hyped up for e19, and so I really want to make it clear that we will be playing everything regarding its development completely straight. when development picks up again I will tell you. when we're going to start testing soon I will tell you. when we're planning to do a community release I will tell you. (or, well, someone will. i've taken point on a lot of this lately but it won't necessarily be me.) so, in the interests of transparency... gen 8 i hope i don't regret this marcello wants to do it and i don't. that's the short version. the real version is a lot more complicated. will it be in e19? it is highly likely no. it'd involved redoing a lot of work that's been done on the game since e18 (much of which was done by me, hence my bias) and i think it'd be really putting way too much pressure on development/testing to implement it across the whole game. it'd also add on a lot of extra dev time to a release that is already massive. i say it's "highly likely no" because there are circumstances under which this may change, such as the current development slowdown stretching into next year and, thus, allowing some time for us to get everything implemented. the DLC may also influence this. will it come out after e19? maybe! it's still way too soon to talk about what happens after e19 since a lot can change between now and then, but I don't think there'd be any reason to avoid a DLC-esque update after the game is done. there's some other stuff we may want to do then, too (hard mode, maybe). i feel like there's more that I need to say... but i'm basically out of things to say. in short, don't panic. we're working on it.

Cover art: By @Zumi Hey! It's been two years? How are you? How are the kids? No kids? Okay. Well.... Anyway. It's time. I'm not going to make a huge post about how much of a hell year 2020 was... like, in general, because I'm going to talk about that on stream at some point. So I'm just gonna hand over the game. Sound good? yes. Wait no, I lied. First, we have a brand new website! Check it out! There's a lot of cool things and we'll be actively updating things as time goes on. (No, we're not leaving Reborn. We just felt like it was necessary for us to have our own space too, finally :) ) Due to the extreme amount of changes and additions, old save files that have not completed v12 data will no longer work correctly. There are still some places you shouldn't save. LOOK AT THIS BEFORE LOADING UP. Official art press release kit: Mega 17.6mb PBS files Mega PATCH 13.0.5 CHANGELOG PLEASE REPORT BUGS YOU'VE FOUND HERE

Hello, dear reader! Many of you may recall me as the guy that used to write both short, cryptic, exceedingly dumb devblog posts AND long, dramatic, still exceedingly dumb devblog posts! But alas, I have not done so in a while, especially the latter. Indeed, Cass has taken the torch from me in hilarious yet informative devblog content (hi cass ur gr8 I enjoy all ur posts), where have I been? Well, I would love to tell you all that I have been quietly biding my time. Waiting. Working on my Magnum Opus of a devblog post for months turning into years, wanting to wow you all. That's entirely not what happened it's just most of what I've worked on is either not interesting enough for a post, or too spoilery for one. But still, we'll just pretend that's what's been happening. ANYWAY! We are not here to talk about me, oh no. We are here to talk about the Grandest of Events. A Tournament like no other. Something so Amazing you'll hardly believe your eyes! That's right. Today's devblog post, after much waiting and anticipation, is about... The One. The Only. ... not THE LABRADORRA GRAND TOURNAMENT OF B00TY!!! (Seriously guys we posted about that on April Fools two and a half years ago, I don't think it needs more followup than that.) "Wait, if it's not that... OMG! Are you talking about some kind of actual tournament you're running for us, the loyal fanbase of Reborn?" - I hear you ask? Also no. And come on guys stop interrupting me I'm trying to be dramatic. To explain what this post is truly about, we have to rewind back a bit. You see, as many of you may be aware from other devblog posts, the team (especially Cass and Perry I appreciate you both very much!) have been putting huge amounts of work in optimising a lot of our code, and one part of that was a lot of structural changes to AI to get everything in top working condition for E19. And that has been going wonderfully! But it comes with a problem. How do you test such changes? There are so many ways the AI could go wrong, and the devs can only try so many things to try and see if it works. Well, Perry had a simple yet brilliant answer to this - Whipping up some code that can make the AI trainers fight eachother for testing purposes. That way we can run a bunch of battles, look over the debuglogs, single out any dumb choices the AI made and fix those! So much more efficient than just hoping one of us stumbles on the AI doing something weird when we play. But, let me explain how Perry and I are different people. You see, Perry is... I think the technical, scientific term is 'Productive'. This was a brilliant idea that solved a big testing issue! But me? When I saw this, I knew that I could take this innovation and instead use it as an excuse to be deeply unproductive. As is my style, by taking it and using it to do something fun and interesting but also not particularly useful! SoanywayImadeeverysingleAItrainerfighteveryotherAItrainer. That's right. The Tournament in question was an impromptu Round Robin where every single trainer in the game battled every other one! No I haven't seen that Elo World youtube video where someone did this for Pokemon Red & Blue I have no idea what you're talking about all my ideas are entirely original. So buckle up! This is gonna be a fun and goofy ride but there's also gonna be probably more statistics and spreadsheets than you expect!!! Now, to begin, lets explain the setup. We did three runs of this tournament, in three distinct formats (although the third is special for reasons that will be apparent). In ALL formats, all pokemon were set to Level 100, although movesets were retained. This specifically detriments that one random FEAR trainer in the Desert so he underperformed compared to how he should've, but also fuck that guy that's what he gets for running FEAR. 1) Everybody battles Everybody else in a Single Battle with NO Field. 2) Everybody battles Everybody else in a Double Battle with NO Field. 3) League Trainers only (That is: Gym Leaders, Elite 4 Members, & the Champion) fights Everybody but specifically on their preferred format (i.e. Julia fights everybody on Electric Terrain Single Battle, Shelly fights everybody on Forest Field Double Battle, you get the idea.) The first was just the initial idea and attempt at this, just to see what happens. The second was an extension when I remembered double battles exist. And the third was very much more an interest piece of like 'Hey, lets see how the leaders perform in their best case scenario' because I thought it would be super interesting to compare and see how that looks! Now, a few methodological points for anybody that is interested: I know I really should have run all of these two or three times each because there's rng involved and stuff, but also everybody fighting everybody else is in the ballpark of a million battles which, surprise surprise, actually takes quite a while to run! So you'll have to deal with the fact these were only run once so, as in any good pokemon tournament, there may have been some RNG-caused upsets! Second, outside of some specifically interesting cases, I will be talking in terms of a percentage winrate instead of number of wins just because these tests were done as we were working on some postgame trainers so there were slightly different numbers of trainers in each format, but not enough that I feel like it skews the results enough to rerun things! And that's that! We ran this, it spat out the result of every single fight, then I spent a few weeks messing around in a very large spreadsheet and got the data organised nicely and analysed! So, some last bits of intro logistics to this concept and then I can finally like, actually start the main content of this post! I will be splitting this into two main sections. In Part One I'll talk about the general results, specifically in formats 1) and 2), pointing out anything notable or relevant in the top 10, 50 or 100 that I think stands out! In Part Two, I'll focus in specifically on the Gym Leaders and talk more in depth about their performance in all three formats, and give some analysis about what that means about their performance in general! And also, you should probably familiarize yourself with two shorthands I am going to be using: Illegal - This should be self explanatory. A trainer has an illegal team if it has something it would be impossible for the player to get. Things like illegal EVs via PULSE2, PULSE mons generally, shenanigans with illegal movesets, and just the complete and utter fuckery we have in store for you with the top secret postgame Dev fights because we made the game and we don't have to follow the rules. Bullshit - A trainer's team is Bullshit if it is bullshit. Like, sure, running 6 Psychic Type Legendaries (because fuck there are so many of those) with a Tapu Lele lead that all have optimised statspreads and movesets designed specifically to fuck you up on Psychic Terrain is technically legal and the player could also do that, but the AI doing it is still bullshit. These shorthands will be useful particularly in Part One of the post because surprise surprise the top 100 trainers in Formats 1 & 2 are pretty strongly dominated by things that are Illegal or Bullshit (although maybe not as much so as you'd think!) So, without further ado... Part One: Fieldless So, lets talk about Singles first. 6 of the top 10 are dev fights. (Including me! Hell yeah. 7th place with a 97% winrate. Take that 8th place Cass, with your paltry also 97% winrate (but hers is a lower 97% I won like 2 more fights than her get DUNKED ON Cass). In fact, 1st, 2nd, 4th, 7th, 8th & 10th places are all dev fights. Shoutout to former dev Lia in the #1 spot showcasing her fight's utter shenanigans with a 99% Winrate (also, spoilers, the top 50 looks totally different for doubles but she STILL took #1 there too, albeit with a slightly lower winrate. The rest of us devs need to step our game up, clearly). Most of the remaining spots in the top 10 aren't too notable. There's a lot of Bullshit. Heck, the specific team I used as the example to define Bullshit is in there. Oh, and Lin is in there too somewhere but don't worry about that. What I want to talk about is 3rd place. Because, somehow, despite all the Illegal and/or Bullshit fights we threw into postgame, 3rd place is something that takes place in the Main Story. In E19, in fact. Lets talk a little bit about PULSE-Clawitzer. This is PULSE-Clawitzer. You fight them in E19. Apparently it's pretty hard because the fight has a 98% winrate here, which is higher than every single other trainer except the two most difficult dev fights. So, y'know, good luck with that. On the bright side, E19 isn't all bad. You also fight PULSE-Mr Mime and that fight is allllllllll the way down at 552nd place with a paltry 39% winrate (as a point of comparison that's pretty close to like... Julia. The very first gym leader with a team of NFE mons with terrible statspreads and movesets. Sure, it was hard like an hour into the game, but...) So at least you know that when you play E19 you'll just be able to relax and that fight won't cause any problems at all! ^~^ The rest of the top 50 is about what you'd expect. Dev fights, postgame bullshit, some illegal shenanigans. A few victory road battles made it in which is neat! Also lets all give a round of applause to Baby's First Illegal team which is only really barely Illegal, which is the E18 fight against Solaris in Agate City, with the PULSE2 on his Garchomp - You'd hope he performed well given Singles with No Field is the format he actually fights on, and he doesn't disappoint, all the way up at 32nd place, the highest ranking trainer that is already in the current version of the game! But still. Dev fights are very illegal. There's a lot of postgame bullshit here. Obviously PULSE-Clawitzer is illegal. Everything in the top 50 is Illegal or Bullshit or both. Well, except for one trainer. The highest ranking 'Fair' (which I use as shorthand to mean neither Bullshit nor Illegal) trainer managed to make it to 46th place. This is pretty impressive - the next two Fair trainers aren't until 65th & 78th place. With a 92% winrate in Fieldless Singles? I hope you're all ready for the gym battle against Saphira in E19!!!! Because she utterly destroyed the competition, miles ahead of the next highest winrate gym leader (surprisingly given it's singles and without a field, it's still Hardy at 85%!), and she even managed to beat the entire Elite 4 on winrate as well! But we can talk more about that in Part Two. Before that, though, lets look at how things are different in Fieldless Doubles! Dev Team Lia still dominates at first place; her team is too good. The top 10 is once again 6 devs, although not the same 6 as before. (Alas I am the one that has been dunked on, in doubles I fell all the way down to 20th place and Cass kicked my butt and is now all the way up at 5th place) Indeed, this theme is going to be apparent - While Doubles-centric teams can perform reasonably well still on Singles, a lot of the big hitters from Single battles seriously struggled battling in doubles. PULSE-Clawitzer fell all the way down to 21st place (below me! And I'm terrible at pokemon! Git Gud Clawitzer). PULSE-Mr Mime did slightly better than before but ultimately still very badly at 446th place. Saphira really suffered hard though. She lost her spot as the highest winrate Fair trainer. That was taken by some randome generic Victory Road fight which isn't even a double battle and, honestly, I love that. This fact might be my favourite thing in E19, especially because that trainer jumped up like 50 places in the leaderboard from Singles. You gotta appreciate the hustle. But alas, Saphira's bad day doesn't end there, oh no. She not only lost her spot as the best Fair trainer, in doubles she didn't even manage to be the best Gym Leader - Taking to the format like a fish to water, she was beaten handily by Hardy and, although by a slimmer margin, also by Adrienn! Indeed, looking at gym leaders it is clear just how much harder doubles is if you don't have a team built for it. After those top three, the next highest ranking gym leaders are Charlotte & Radomus, beating the fights that came much later than them in game by merit of being built for the field. Even Aya did really well despite being earlier game because of her doubles team. As for the reamining Doubles leaders, Shelly still struggled because of how early on her fight is, and lets just not talk about Amaria until later because yikes. Lin still comfortably sits in the top 20 but like, don't worry about it. But, speaking of later, I think it's time to get into the reeeeaaaal fun. Have you ever wondered how well balanced the Gym Leaders are? Ever wondered which ones rely on their field most, and which ones least? Which ones are unusually strong or weak for their point in the game? Or do you just want to know how scared you should be of what's coming in E19? Well, then do I have the devblog post for you! It's this one. This is the post. We're moving to part two now. Part Two: League Members So, before we begin, lets talk about the elephant in the room. You are going to notice a distinct lack of Corey and Kiki in the upcoming analysis. Did I forget to run their fights? Yes. Did we change the earlygame story a bit for E19 so they are no longer Gym Leaders because we all decided we really didn't like the contrived excuses to not give you a badge? Also yes. With that cleared up, lets start from the top! There is going to be A LotTM here so I will be putting the individual analysis of each leader in spoiler tags, handily labelling them as we go along! Although this is just so this post is slightly easier to scroll through and look back over I will be writing all of these assuming you've read them all in order. Elite Four And with that, my dear readers, this most gargantuan of devblog posts comes to a close. I wish you all a fond farewell, and hope you are- What's that, you say? I missed someone? I have no idea what you're talking about. I already told you why we aren't including Corey and Kiki. So who else could you possibly- Ah, right. I mean, I told you not to think about it but, I guess. It's not a big deal or anything but sure, whatever.

This post is a repost of my Patreon, but it's very important that I let everyone here know what's going on. Hope all is well! - Jan

Merry (Belated) Christmas! Today I wanted to talk to you all about the story structure of v13 and why it's been taking such a long time for it to release. v13 is a special version, that's for sure. It's one of the longer episodes the game has put out. Actually, i'd say it's the longest? Either way, the main story this time is taking a LOT more effort than usual and I wanna make sure everything is absolutely perfect. That being said, what -exactly- is causing v13 to be the behemoth it is? Well, let's dive into that! Some of you have already guessed, but the crew is splitting up for a Super Secret Mission(tm). What's the mission, you ask? I just said it was Super Secret, keep up. V13 is separated into 6 segments. Each being tackled by 3 different groups. So far the two groups we've seen are: [Melia, Ren, Venam] and [Erin, Kanon, Alexandra, and Damien] The third group is [Player, Aelita] Each group is on the hunt ̶f̸o̸r̵ ̵t̵h̶e̶ ▇▇▇▇▇▇ , as we know, but how are each of their parts composed? Well, each segment approximately the length of half a version. So by that scale, let's add them up! Main Story 1 and 2 = 1 version Erin + Melia's segment = 1 version Player + Aelita's segment = 1 version Epilogue = 1/2 version v13's main story is roughly a little more than 3 versions worth of content... So even though it feels like you're waiting one year for one version, you're actually waiting for about 3, lol. Not to mention the new additions/changes to the early game and gen 8. Let's make this about 5 versions packed into one big bundle with a Christmas miracle bow at the top~ --- If you're interested in the flow of the actual episode-- I have created this special little chart for your eyes to wander over. That being said, I'm SUPER SUPER SUPER excited for this version. My Dev team and I have worked hard and we're so excited to show you what we've got hidden. Cause after all... We've only shown the surface of the exciting things we've got in store for you all :). Hope you had a Merry Christmas, and I hope y'all have a wonderful New Year!

hello my children, i have come to feed you since coming back to the project a month and a half ago, a fair bit has happened. i did take some time to warm up back up to thing, we moved over to a new file management system, also cass and i just moved into a new place like, last week so that's been taking up a fair chunk of time.... critically, we also have two new additions to the team: @crimsoncrim and @Azzie ! those of you who frequent the discord server probably already know them, and might've already noticed them popping up in the Developers group, those of you who don't already know them are missing out because they're both wonderful. crim has been helping a lot with various sprites, and will be joining me on mapping, and Azzie is around to put her writing skills to work and spin gold out of dialogue for us in the postgame! but how about that postgame? my focus since returning has been on the nightclub. There were a lot of things in it that were like, half-done. Those of you who fondly remember the progress bars can probably think of some of them. By now, most of those things are a lot more than half-done-- in fact, everything there is properly functional already! Some events are missing dialogue, but that can always be filled in later. Let's take a quick tour of the facilities, shall we? Starting with the one that ties them all together-- The BP Store A classic postgame staple-- you're gonna fite, you're gonna earn points, and here you can spend them. We're not adding gen 8 to E19 for now at least, but that doesn't mean we can't take some of their QoL features We got mints, we got Large EXP Candies sold by as much as 20 at a time, Ability Capsules, a selection of competitive-grade items. Whatever you might want to help you get new team members up to speed for postgame antics and more. But let's get to the real business. All of the following facilities are level-locked to 100 and provide BP should you prevail in them. The Battle Pavilion Bread and butter battle tower, brought straight to your local nightclub's dance floor! Get down or get knocked down. There are a couple changes from the usual battle tower format: Firstly, there's no heat-up period. Canon battle towers drip feed you a selection of low BST sandbag mons for the first couple rounds before putting on their big boy pants, but this is Reborn, and you're in the post-game; there's no need to waste your time with that. We'll be hitting you hard right off the bat, so get ready The Battle Pavilion is equipped for both 3v3 Singles or 4v4 Doubles In Singles, each set of 7 trainers will be capped off by a miniboss that you might recognize from the game! Examples include your local gang leader, corin-rouge, and madame meganium. Fields enabled! Each match will take place with a random field effect, so be ready to adapt fast! You can challenge with or without field effects on, but the BP reward is higher with them The Battle Factory Say whaaaaaaaaaaaat Pokemon Essentials has a built in implementation of the fan-favorite Battle Factory straight outta Sinnoh. But! It's broken. As a result, we had no intention of including it, but then our boy @Toothpastefairy shows up outta nowhere like "hey i fixed battle factory" so guess what y'all are getting. Rent a team from a random selection of nearly 1600 Pokemon sets! You'll fight through opponents with the rented Pokemon in a variety of challenges! After each battle, you can choose to swap one of your Pokemon with an opponent's! 3v3 Singles and 4v4 Doubles are enabled! Three modes exist for Battle Factory Classic mode-- No field effects here. Like canon, you'll be given a hint about what kind of team your next opponent has so you can plan accordingly! Set Field mode-- One random field effect will be chosen and used for the entire 7 battle set. Optimize your team for the field as you go! Random Field mode-- Each battle will have a different random field effect! You'll find out what your next fight is beforehand so be ready to swap and adapt according to what's next! The Rush Challenge After a certain point in postgame, you'll be able to take on our Boss Rush! Face all of the surviving leaders in succession in a battle of attrition and skill. You'll be healed in between, but can one team make it through all the way? They're packing heat! Expect to see some legendaries in their teams this time around. Everyone gets one now! The fun doesn't stop there-- Beat the challenge once and you'll unlock the X-League-esque hard mode! Instead of being limited to one legendary, they can have as many as they want. Watch out! Theme Teams This is where all of our failed Boss Rush teams have gone to die-- and by "die" I mean "live forever in notoriety"! We (and @andracass in particular) made a ton of teams for you to fight on various fields-- every character should have at least two. Wanna see mono-bug on Glitch? A Rock team for Murkwater? Any other silly idea we've come up with in last two years?? They'll be here. You name the team-- they name the field. This one's mostly just for fun and creativity, but they're still eligible for BP and a hard battle! Choose your fighter! (Like the last time Cass showed this off, the characters in the above image are explicitly randomly selected, so don't assume it means anything about the story ^~^ ) Mix 'n Match We've got a lot of characters, don't we? We also made a lot of theme teams... Many of them are just sitting around. But why should we be the ones to tell you what to do with them all the time? Here to put the power in your hands, Mix 'n Match is a customizable doubles multibattle feature! You pick your opponents, you pick their teams (from the theme teams available), you pick their fields. You can also pick a partner! A selection of trainers will register as available to use as a partner for this mode during postgame (depending on their relationship points with you at the end of the main story). Everyone who has relationship points and is alive can technically be a partner, though even I have no idea how many it's possible to pick up during a playthrough. Lonely, or just brave? Go in solo and fight a 6v12 death match for extra BP! Shout out to crim for the Arc backsprite-- and many many others! She and @smeargletail have really done a world of wonder on the sprites in the last few weeks. And that's the show! There will be other events (such as the entire quest hub) in the nightclub as well, but these are the main battle facilities. With all of them just about set and done, I've already started to return to working on quests. I'll come back with more again someday, I promise. Until next time~

yaaaaaaaaay Testing has begun (a week ago)! You know what that means! It's time for me to be drowned in bugs woohoo. Please play this song while this post is being read: I started testing phase with 3 quests unfinished because im confident that i can finish them before this stage of testing phase can be completed (he's not that confident.) I'm sure there are some new folks. Let's talk about how the testing phase goes. There are three Stages. Stage 1: Internal : Developers get together to test and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. I don't laugh. I fix bugs. I cry. Stage 2: Alpha : Small selected individuals are brought together to test and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. I fix bugs. I cry. Stage 3 Beta : Patreon folk are brought together to test and laugh, and laugh, and laugh. I fix bugs. I cry more. We are currently in Stage 1. There is no set period of how long each stage takes. It is simply just how severe the amt of bugs are + the speed of the playthroughs. Each time testing takes a little longer bc game big. I fix bugs. What's next ? Well, sometime before release I'll be releasing a post on how to make sure your save files aren't completely busted when u load up v13.5! Here, I'll give you a preview. If your game is at any point on or after terajuma, but before the end of v13 main story-- just finish your playthroughs. please. if you load up the game mid arc. its gonna blow up. ur gonna die, man. you're just gonna die. Let me make it more clear: If your files are anywhere in these sections:::::::: Chapter 1 - ur gonna die Chapter 2 - omg ur living, just dont load on route 2. Chapter 3 - omg ur living Chapter 4 - omg ur living Chapter 5 - omg ur living Chapter 6 - ur gonna die Chapter 7 - ur gonna die Chapter 8 - ur gonna die Chapter 9 - ur gonna die Chapter 10 - ur gonna die Chapter 11 - ur gonna die Chapter 12 - ur gonna die Chapter 13 - ur gonna die Chapter 14 - ur gonna die Chapter 15 - Defeat Saki first or else... say it with me, ur gonna die the reason for this is that story variables have changed. If you just walk into terajuma on old files without your save files being configured, ur gonna die. \ look at this funny bug that happened during a run a few months ago (spoilers: H-Braviary shiny) some screenshots. i cant remember what i posted before. sorry 4 repeats, if any, okie bye bye.

We understand? Ok good. Hi, it's May now. I've been pretty busy with irl stuff as per usual, but I've gotten a lot done if the two screenshots above aren't any indication. As of right now (besides 2 small things), both the Paragon and Renegade Routes are completed. That is the main content of the game and omfg I am so ready to be 100% done. I'm very close to being there. So what does this mean? Well, there's still some polishing/updates I'm doing in other places that will need some time to get done. As well as completely implementing new Aevian forms, fixing positioning, etc. etc.. etc. That being said, I'd like to get some sort of testing started in the next month or so. Been another long journey folks, but it's smooth sailing past this unlucky number. Some screenshots, of course: Ok, now it is Zumi's turn to speak: ========================== "Hiya!! Zumi hijacking the post for a brief moment to talk about the track you're about to listen to. This one may be a bit of a surprise to some people as this isn't exactly a new track, but instead a new version of a track I previously composed that some may be familiar with already. Normally I'd try to be a bit more vague about the purpose of the track-- and despite having said over and over that the project it's from is dead, I've always wanted to give it one last farewell, one which Jan was kind enough to help out with. So I'm bringing the project back one last time through Rejuv... In a stripped down form, with some music overhauls to go along with it! I've already teased it slightly before, but make sure to explore GDC during 13.5's story if you're on the Paragon route-- you may just across what's been my little passion project for this dev cycle, and it'd mean a lot to me if people checked it out!" But that's it for this dev post. A small one, but a lot of what is new is TOP SECRET!!!!!! So you'll just have to wait just a littttleee bit longer. I promise. This will probably be the last dev post for this cycle. Next post will let everyone know when testing has begun or whatever. Thanks for your patience and I hope you all have a good week.

Hey, hi, hello! It's a post from me this time! Yes, yes, the fanfare is wonderful. Just beautiful. Love it. Anyway, let's get on with the post! So, first thing's first. What's up with V13.5? I've said it's been almost done for a while, and yes that's always been true. However, recently I've made a ton of progress, particularly on the Renegade Route. It's shaping up to be my favorite part of the game so far. It's fast-paced, fun, and has a lot of good moments, I feel. The dev team has been testing it in rounds as well and it's been REALLY well received and I'm so happy about that. Recency bias and all, though, yeah? In terms of what is done, let's take a looksie. Paragon Route: 80% Renegade Route 70% Terajuma Arc - 95% GDC Arc - 80% Early Game Changes - 99% I'm hoping to begin testing in another month or two. That's not all, but we have something cool to show! The character select screen got an overhaul, and two characters have gotten a wardrobe update! Official artwork updates: Most of my work has been with the Renegade Route, and while I'd love to show things from that, literally every frame of it is a spoiler in some capacity. So... Yeah. I don't have really anything to show in that regard. We're way past the schedule I wanted, but tl:dr, a close family member of mine was diagnosed with cancer and it's been really hard to do things like normal. I know things are taking long, but please be patient! I don't intend this post to be sad or anything, but it is the reality of my situation. It will be out this year :).

So, this post has been a long time coming. This is something that plainly just needs to be said. Intense mode has become a problem. Let's rewind a bit. Back around... I wanna say v4-5? Intense mode as added as an extra challenge for players. It started out fine, but as the game went further and further, things became quite out of control. Things that are our faults, and things that is just there because of Pokemon's inherent gameplay flaws. Everyone wants something different out of Pokemon, and fundamentally, the way Pokemon is structured, every experience is different depending on the selection of mons available, yes? While this is a good thing, it does come with its own drawbacks. Balancing nightmares, being up and front. I can say with confidence that it is literally impossible to create a difficulty mode that makes everyone happy. I see why Game Freak let go of the idea of challenge modes (For the time being.) So what does this mean? What am I getting at here? I'm just going to say it plainly. From 13.5 on, Intense mode will be removed from the game. Now, I can see a couple of you heading towards the door, but I ask that you stick around and read the entire post before doing so. I understand Intense mode is a feature that is beloved by many. However, the side effects of this mode existing have completely gotten out of control. The gatekeeping, the "get good" attitude, the back and forth on who is right and who isn't... This isn't what I wanted this to be. Rejuvenation was supposed to be a fun project with fun characters, worlds, and experiences. It was not about creating some ultimate challenge, even if it veered down that path anyway. In the end, this has no longer become fun for me, and that's when this becomes a serious problem. If Jan stops having fun, Jan stops making the game. Rejuvenation is an incomplete game. I think even adding a different difficulty mode so early on was a bit of a hasty and foolish decision on my part. I want to focus on perfecting the base game before even thinking about trying create something like intense mode ever again. I don't want this to be the ultimate end of the mode, though. Yeah, I know I said I'm removing it. We officially will not be working on it any further. But those who are interested in keeping it alive are allowed to do so. We're handing this over to the community. When the game is complete, I would like to consider restoring it. But for now, I believe this is what is best for the game's overall health. And quite honestly, keeping tabs of both normal, easy, and intense mode altogether was just... too much. (Easy mode shall remain for accessibility, however.) That's really everything I have to say on this. It's a decision that was not easily made, but I believe it to be necessary going forward. I understand that this will bring frustration, but it's how things are standing as of now. Please, if you have any further comments and or questions, post them below. We will be reading and responding when necessary. Thanks. -Jan tl:dr -Intense mode warped the game's vision into something it was never intended to be -As a result, it is no longer being officially worked on. -Intense mode will be handed over to the community to work on as a mod if they so wish. -When the game is complete, we will consider the possibility of restoring it officially. -Easy mode will remain.

It's been a while since my last post, so I decided that I'd give a little update and talk about a few things! In the format of a Q/A! What's going on with Rejuvenation right now? It's been almost 2 years!! - We are currently doing internal testing as of right now! There's still one segment of the game that needs a bit of work from me, but after so long, v13's main story and early-mid game are being tested and things are going smoothly!! Lots of things to patch up, but smoothly nonetheless! We may... actually release something soon(tm)??? Soon. Will there be Game-z support? -Yes! Thanks to @andracass (Who is a new member on the team, btw!), Rejuvenation will have official MK support. Which means less lag and better performance! We will still be supporting the regular game.exe, though. Just in case your PC won't be able to handle the power that is MK. Unfortunate for you, though. Okay, well there's Game-z support. Cool. But what about my MAC? She's dying without content! - I am happy to say that there will be a MAC version on release. No more stupid Wine emulators . Also it'll run at incredible speeds! No lag! Zoom! Fast! Keep going! Oops we crashed. Except it shouldn't crash. Anyway. What Crests were chosen from the suggestion thread? My Giratina Crest that gave an omni boost was so good... -I've gotten this question quite a bit and that will remain Top Secret. However, like I said in the thread, if your crest suggestion wasn't implemented, that doesn't mean it wont be. Adding in hundreds of crests in one release is overwhelming for the devs and the player. We'll be trickling in new crests with each new version. So please be patient :). Will my old save files work with the new update? Pls help. -Yes, however there have been a substantial amount of changes/tweaks to the world itself. Some places will not be safe to load up in! I will make a list beforehand. A whole entire post dedicated to this. If I see "LOADED UP IN XXXXX AND GAME CRASH PLS HELP" I will come to your house and delete your save and quite possibly your entire life. Don't say I won't. Can I join the Beta Test? Please...? -Unfortunately, no. We no longer have public beta testing periods anymore. Due to problems with leaks and such in the past, all Betas from here on out will be entirely closed. Soon.

since we're now in the testing phase, i feel like i'm perhaps a little overdue to actually talk about the early game. cass already posted a couple teasers from it here but why don't i actually go ahead and take a brief moment to expound on some of our specific goals? right now in e18, the early game is... it's very dated. it's not that i haven't edited the dialogue in years, but that the foundation of the dialogue is years old. well, and also i haven't edited it for years by merit of how long it's been since an episode came out, i guess... when i first started making the game, i thought i'd get bored and drop it quickly. so i didn't really put much forethought into the story (or for that matter, literally any forethought until heather first appears)-- i was just kind of winging it. even then i can't say it was exactly well-constructed. due to the nature of the online league and trying to justify mashing all of these existing characters together... things just kind of happened. and thus, things just kind of happen in the early part of the plot with no real warning sometimes. this isn't meant to self-deprecate or anything; i'm proud of what we've been able to make of it as the project went on, and let's be real: canon pokemon games set the bar pretty damn low in the first place. i am very grateful for everyone's support through the years so that we could make it to a place where i can just Do Something Better! story aside, many of the early maps are... uninspired. hell, check out this version of mosswater factory from episode 1: it didn't even have the name 'mosswater' at this point, it was just "mysterious factory". like there is nothing interesting here visually. and we changed that later, it at least looks like a factory, a bit more interesting, not quite so transparently the same narrow corridors.......... but even then you can probably tell, despite the re-skin, the map layout is still the same now in e18 as it was then. it's ultimately just a long corridor with a couple switches where you generally have to fight all of the exact same trainers in the exact same order at the start of every play through where you have exactly the same set of mons to work with............. and the same is true of the slums.......... and the same was true of the old park map......... and the same is true of malchous forest........................ ....we get a bit better about things after that, fortunately, but the early game is very uninteresting and constraining in terms of area design. now i don't know about you all, but i kinda suck at actually finishing runs of this game. i must have beaten julia's gym dozens of time, right, but i can count the number of times i've played through, say, ametrine, on one hand just because i always end up getting distracted and then focusing on development and then i come back and am like oh i messed up my old save in testing but that's okay starting a new run will be fun!!! >let's fight the same set of forty trainers in the same order again wooo.......... and then on top of all that we have things like the frustrating bit with corey and kiki not giving badges, apophyll being framed as a fetch quest, lots of running around in between shade and apophyll and it's just kind of a mess. but again, i'm very grateful to have had the chance to fix these problems. now that i've discussed some of the issues in depth, let me clearly list out the goals of our early game changes: Introduce some characters sooner on average (at least optionally) so that they get more screen time before having dramatic moments or pivots. Corey is a key example; you can go find him right after getting your starter if you want. Reduce new player frustration of not getting b⋆adges from two gym leaders. Marcello hinted at this before-- Corey and Kiki are now retired leaders at the start of the plot rather than active ones. Reframe a couple pain point segments to stay more on track-- Apophyll is now much less about getting an HM now, for instance. Reduce some unnecessary running around between segments, and decrease railroading for plot. In general, we added more content but made fewer things mandatory; the other stuff is just optional, often for relationship points. Rework some areas so that they are less linear and have more freedom in how the player can approach them.... or at least be a little more interesting along the way. As an example of the last point, allow me to give you a sneak peak of the new and improved Mosswater Factory!⋆｡ I will include in a spoiler for those who wish to be surprised. I hope that everyone will enjoy the changes once they're available! While I'm very happy with them myself and looking forward to seeing people play the early game again. Of course not everyone is going to want to do that immediately, I hope they will help freshen up the experience for you whenever you d˚o eventually play. That said, as always, I am very shy about managing＊expectations. So, let me take a moment to clarify a few things that we are not doing:⋆ ┈ The m＊id game is not changing much, and the late game is not changing at all. The beginning is a little more elaborate but we're coming to the same end points so don't be too disappointed when it shapes up in a familiar way.┈♛ W･:*e are not adding new areas or changing the order in which you go to existing ones; that'･ﾟs out of scope for our overhauls.☆ ☆A handful of fights have been changed, a coupl⁺‧͙e more have been added, one or two got snapped entirely but t⁺‧͙he battles and area progression are all pretty much the same☽༓ ⁺‧͙Obvious☆✼ly it's still al★l the same cha★racters, we're not about to go ★and do★ somethi★ng craz★y like.★.. add ★in an en★tirely new★ member of t★he cast..... in ★final★ upd★ate┈┈⛧┈......• ༶• ༶ • ༶ or something....•༶ • ༶ • ༶• ༶ ˚ ｡ ⋆ ˚ ˚ ｡ ⋆ ˚ ˚ ｡ ⋆ ˚ . . .. . . . ˚ • ┈ ┈ ⛧ ┈ ♛ ♛ ┈ ⛧ ┈┈ • ༶ ・ .༓ ･ * ˚ ⁺ ‧͙ .˙ ᵕ ꒳ ᵕ ˙ ˚ ・✼ ・ ・✼ ・・・ ★・ﾟ ☆ ! ・, ｡･: * : ✼ :･ . . . .✼ ★ , ｡ ･ : * : ･ﾟ would we? ˙˚˙ᵕ꒳ᵕ˙˚˙

so i don't really know what i'm doing here, but i wanted to talk about some things i think y'all will like. so everyone knows reborn is hard, right? i hear it's one of the main draws of the game. well, when reborn started development back in the ancient era, this was a pretty novel concept. i remember back when i first played the game in, like, 2015 the game kicked my ass and i thought it was great. however, it's 2021 now. things have come a long way since the ancient era, and some of the stuff that defined "difficulty" has kind of turned into "pain in the ass". so we've made some changes that will hopefully help everyone's butts hurt just a bit less. longtime readers will probably recognize some past topics, but since we've gotten a bunch of new kids 'round these parts since the pandemic i'm just gonna put everything new and fancy in one nice post so we're all on the same page. early game mon availability the combination of difficulty balancing with world building effectively means that the theme of early game is "hope you like poison types!" (i don't like poison types.) now obviously there are some exceptions to that. there's a lot of extra mons available through special events and such to help provide some variety, but there's still a limit to the overall variety of mons available. so we're going out of our way to add some new mons. it'll definitely help with rounding out your team early on, and it means that some otherwise forgettable mons will have a chance to get some love. (hi deliberd.) monotypers can also rejoice here. there'll be at least two mons that "qualify" for each type by the first gym. i say "qualify" because some types are pretty busted that early (sorry, fairy and dragon), so we gotta do some stuff like, say, counting swablu as dragon. i'm not a monotyper, and i know y'all are out there with all kinds of crazy rulesets and stuff, but since there seem to be a lot of people running monos these days, we figured we'd pull some strings to make that easier. mono runs suck a bit less, normal runs get more options. everyone wins! grinding raise your hand if you like grinding. no one? figures. grinding sucks a lot in general, and reborn has a pretty bad relationship with grinding in general since easier methods of grinding don't really vibe with the whole "disaster city" aesthetic. there are some things to help make grinding easier than just battling wild mons- that's why there are grand hall trainers and indra. these aren't perfect, though. indra gives you a random team (because he's a clown) and i suspect a lot of people don't realize that the grand hall trainers exist. then if you want to add new mons to your rotation you gotta use the exp share (which an alarming number of people accidentally trade off) or put them as the lead in your party and rotate them out.... point is, it sucks. once you hit late game, most players start to ev train their teams to help make improve their teams. problem is, there aren't really any dedicated places to EV train, so it starts coming down to going to finding the best place to get EVs and dealing with how well that actually works for the stat you're looking to boost. it's still pretty slow, and the fact that locations aren't consistent for it mean you have to avoid a lot of fights. point is, it sucks. the dex quest also ends up being a pain since the process of acquiring every single dex entry means you have to do a bunch of inventory management with your exp share alongside pulling your mons out of the pc and everything. it ends up being really long and tedious since you can only train one mon at a time like this, and you've got a shitload to do... point is, it sucks. so we've got some stuff to help. repeatable trainers also give EXP candies. the benefit here should be pretty obvious. if you're bringing someone new into rotation then you'll need to give them a lot of exp so they're around the same level as the rest of your party. this is one of the few gen 8 additions that we're throwing into the game immediately. exp candies won't push you over the level cap, though. EV items are much stronger. much stronger. power items got an 8x boost and now give 32 evs in whatever stat; the macho brace now boosts your ev gain by 8 instead of 2; and the pokerus boosts your ev gain by 4 instead of 2. the pokerus is also a liiiiittle easier to get. the EXP share has been moved up. its original location now has an EXP all. so this is the big one. exp candies already make late-game grinding a non-issue. feed your newly hatched mon a candy, they gain 500 levels, game ez. the exp share is now a lot earlier to both make teambuilding easier as well as to still make it useful. the exp all exists to make giving out enough experience between badges a non-issue. every trainer now effectively provides 3.5x the original experience. more importantly... the EXP all toggles on a hard level cap. i suspect my mention of an exp all concerned a lot of people. it originally also concerned me. this is my solution. to explain why this matters, i'm gonna have to talk about the level cap. for those who don't know the difference: right now, reborn has a soft level cap. that means if you hit the maximum level before the next badge, you will keep gaining exp and can level up over the cap. a hard level cap means that you stop gaining exp entirely when you hit the level cap. you can still level up over the cap, but you'd have to use a rare candy to do so. if you've played rejuv or deso, they both use a hard cap. there is a really strong debate over which cap is better. i'm very firmly on team hard cap. the obvious problem with the soft cap is that you risk overlevelling your team and thus having problems with disobedience. this used to be worse before e18, since your mons would immediately stop obeying mid-battle. you still risk going over the cap between battles, and if you're in a gauntlet where there are multiple battles back-to-back, the disobedience doesn't carry over. the advantage of the soft cap is that you can learn moves or evolve if the level for doing that is slightly over the limit. i don't buy this, since you can still do that with a rare candy if you have a hard cap. the exp all would also make the overlevelling problem much worse. the convenience of the exp all comes with the chore of needed to effectively "inventory manage" your level. we were considering a way to toggle what level cap you have, but i feel like the inclusion of a method to just change that wouldn't really fit well within the context of the game. i suppose i already gave away the solution i thought up for this earlier. spoilers for five paragraphs ago. the exp all is a really convenient way to include a togglable level cap without shoehorning in some weird mechanic. it's great. it makes everyone happy even if i feel dirty for allowing the soft cap to still exist. finally: mons give more exp at higher levels have you ever noticed how levelling up happens fairly quickly until, say, level 60 or so? then as you go over that level it gets slower.... and slower......... that's basically a result of how exp gains work! (we're gonna get into some math stuff, so if numbers scare you, just skip a few paragraphs.) the short answer for why this happens is that the rate of increase for exp gain is linear while the rate of increase for exp requirements is cubic. so let's say you're fighting a powerful staraptor. and let's say that you're an adorable meech. with both at level 20, meech would have to defeat about 3 powerful staraptors to level up. with both at level 50, meech would have to defeat 9. in early game you don't really notice this because the base exp of your opponents increases as you gain levels. the formula for this is: base exp = (base stat total) * [evolution stage modifier] the modifier gets bigger as the evolution stage increases. most pokemon follow this formula. we could get into this- however, this is not a post about the formula. the point here is that the base exp increases because the pokemon you fight are stronger. you're not going to fight a powerful staraptor at level 50 because it'll have evolved by then, and its evolved form gives more exp. the problem is that when pokemon stop evolving, base exp stops increasing. i mentioned this in a devblog post about increasing the level cap here. (holy shit that was two years ago help) back then i said i was gonna adjust the level curve to deal with this. problem is, adjusting the level curve takes a lot of effort. giving you more exp is easy. so i'm going to try a thing where you get an additional 1% of exp for every level over 50 your opponent is. at level 75, this is a 25% boost. at level 125, this is a 75% boost. levelling up will still slow down over time... but it'll be nicer about it. something that i also mentioned ages ago without comment was mining changes. the mining minigame is a common way to get stones and fossils. problem is, it's missing a few stones, and the fossils are stupid hard to find. so i fixed that. check it: along with the addition of these four stones, the odds of getting each item have been adjusted. basically, it's easier to find items that you actively want and harder to find items that you don't. future playthroughs can say goodbye 100 oval stones, everstones, and hard stones. i feel like i had more things to talk about. i forget what they were, though. EDIT: i remembered one!!!! hard mode isn't happening. i don't have time. i gotta make 5000 more teams for postgame yet anyway. we can just let the modders do their thing. i'm sure y'all are gonna have some thoughts™ in the comments. the last time i fielded questions (which wasn't public) i had some pretty severe regrets, but if i see some things getting asked a lot i'll edit them onto this post. suggestions will probably be met with a no. in particular, this no: excellent suggestions will have more of a response. Q: Will deliberd have egg moves? A: the odds of delibird having egg moves is the same as the odds of my spelling its name wrong every goddamn time. so yes. Q: Will boss fights have their levels adjusted since there's the exp all now? A: uhhhhhh maybe. this isn't really something that I can answer now since it'll take some playtesting to figure out what that point might be. we'll see and will do it if we have to. Q: Will I be able to get the exp all if I already got the exp share? A: deffo. just drop back by the house where you got it. Q: I'm sad that the game is going to be easy now... A: that's not a question. it's also not a thing. we'll have to do some mid-episode rebalancing, but the level cap will still exist and you're still gonna have to strategize to win fights. the point of this is to make team composition easier. Q: Will relationship points change at all? A: a little. they aren't as big of deal as everyone seems to think they are, so i don't really think it's worth worrying about. Q: Would you recommend playing from the beginning again? A: i would lightly recommend playing from the start. the whole game itself will play a bit differently now. Q: Will the hard cap be something we can choose from the start of the game? A: yup, but it's permanent. Q: Cass, you made [some mod] for e18.4. Will it still work with e19? A: no, i'll have to remake it, but a lot of these mods are just... stuff i whipped up in 15 minutes. if you remind me about it, i'll repatch them into e19. Q: Will the TM distribution get changed in e19? A: yup. it's also, in general, set up to offer more useful options earlier than in e18.4. Q: Hard mode is dead. Is easy mode also dead? A: maybe not! i'm not quite ready to cancel it since it'll take much less work on my end to make it happen, but i'd still say it's unlikely. depends on how much people want to make their friends who are less into the battle system play the game.

Hello! I definitely did not absolutely forget that I scheduled a post for today! Well, uh, this is awkward. I guess the best way to explain this is with one single image. I'm gonna be honest. The first time I opened up Rejuv's project folder this month was **checks notes**... Last night. December is traditionally an extremely busy month for me and that's just all it was. I was busy. I have obligations I must attend to irl and I'm making moves towards securing my future financially. I truly wish I could work on Rejuv more often, but that just isn't in the cards for me. Maybe one day! Patreon has been a huge help, but it's not something that can sustain me long term, neither do I want it to. That's the thing about working on Rejuv sometimes. People assume that that's what I'm working on all day every single day, and when I reveal to them that I'm not-- I'm just being slow or I'm wasting time as if I'm obligated to dedicate my entire life on a fan project. Then I get the annoying anon in my inbox asking why each version is taking way longer than the previous ones as if I'm supposed to break down crying saying that I lost interest or the expectation that I'm supposed to thank them for putting me back on the right track in life and dedicating every single moment of my life to something they'll finish in a few hours and then ask me when the next one's coming out. And then when I'm saying I'm taking a small break that's when the passive aggression starts or whatever. And if it's not that, it's the gen 9 or item/mon location questions I'm constantly getting despite the fact that I said I'm not adding it next version, but somehow I'm still expected to know each and everything I plan to do with it. Am I gonna keep this nerf, am I happy about this buff. Who is going to give what, when am I going to get this, this mon is broken so put it there, this mon is garbage, it needs a crest. Are we getting new crests. When is the new crest. Release mega evolution earlier. Omg when is Venam apologizing for stealing Tesla's Charizard omg omg. Make an entire branched story path where I do what I would do in this situation. When is this happening. Who is Madame X Who is gonna die next version tell me tell me tell me here's my crest idea u didnt ask for. why is this crest a prototype. this mon lost this move are u removing it 2 This thing got a new evolution that's ZACIAN NERFSS broken is it being axed is it being moved is it being axed GLACEON JUMPSCARE is it being nerfed is it PROTEAN being axed is it being nerfed is it?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? -- Anyway. idk yet. I haven't lost interest. I still love working on this game. I'm just busy. That's all I got for you. So, there, that's out of the way. quick q/a 1.) new crests? yea 2.) gen 9 v15. Although knowing me im gonna be impatient and add it in halfway through v14 3.) anything actually new to show? yea, actually this part is pretty exciting! Zumi is creating art stills for certain moments in game. This one is pretty iconic so I'm sure you'll recognize it! Here's a preview: 4.) omg are u single yes i make pkmn fangames wtf u think . 5.) will venam actually speak to tesla about the charizard? yes, goddamn. 6.) favorite gen 9 mon? Tinkaton, or Chi-yu, or Wo-chien. Tbh? the whole quartet is amazing. 7.) Least favorite gen 9 mon? Scovillain, or Gholdengo. Maybe Orthworm. anyway, when i opened this page I didn't expect to start screaming into the void, but I feel a lot better in doing so and I don't really feel bad about it. Also I'm not saying you can't be curious about something in game, or whatever. That part is fine and expected! I mean, hey, I would be in the same boat! Just, give me some time to process an entire new gen first lol. IRT in game events, how about idk... just waiting for the game to be done. Then if it's shit you have all rights to yell at me lol. Actually you don't, but still. cya

So I don't think I'm gonna need to point out that little testing bar in the progression tracker on the right... But in case you missed, there sure is a testing bar in the progression tracker on the right! Meaning that V13 is officially out of the internal testing stage and has reached the next stage of testing. Hurray! Progress is being made and release is creeping closer! But, it's still going to take a little time. Now, as I've noticed in both the dev blog comments & the V13 discussion thread, there are a lot of questions about testing, so I'm compiling the most frequently asked questions in this post so you have all the answers you'll (probably) be needing in one place, and won't have 230498203498 people asking the same question over and over again, yaaaaaaaaaaay *cough* anyways. "Ssssssso what does testing of the game really mean?" The word really should speak for itself already, but testing of the game is catching any game breaking bugs, such as moves and items not working properly, tile & passability errors, AI errors, sound errors etc. All kinds of errors and bugs that really shouldn't be there, and therefore should be fixed before the release of the game. We don't want to release a game publicly that barely functions and keeps breaking at every turn because that's really not the kind of experience we want to give you, which is why this stage is necessary before we can bring out the update publicly. Yes, I know that some people have been saying like "ohhh i don't mind, i'll just avoid the bug and note what not to do!" but I'll be 100% honest here -- the second people start running into problems and can't fix it on their own we're going to get swarmed with complaints and the same bug reports over and over, and for the sanity of all of the people on the dev team, we're not going to do that. "How many stages of testing are there?" In total, three - Internal, Alpha and Beta. We've moved from internal to alpha a little less than two weeks ago, which is a testing phase held with a closed, small group of people trusted by the dev team who go through the new content to sift out the biggest, baddest bugs. After we've progressed far enough into testing in the alpha phase, we'll be moving to the beta phase, which is held with a larger group of people. At this stage we should be at a point where people will start finding smaller problems that might've gone unnoticed during alpha due to a smaller number of people testing things back then, but all the big issues should hopefully be taken care of! There was a little confusion about the naming of these testing stages this week, due to what we currently call alpha having been referred to as a second round of internal testing in the past, and people thought another round of testing has been shoved in between. However, all that's changed is the naming of these testing phases -- the actual structure of testing remains similar to previous dev cycles and fundamentally hasn't changed. "But, but but but- if testing has been going on for almost two weeks, why is the progress bar still at 0%?!" No need to worry -- the bar just doesn't get updated often. We've made progress! Just don't expect that bar to be an accurate representation of our progress at any point in time, lmao "How long does testing usually take?" I really cannot give you a time estimate for this, because it entirely depends on the amount of content an update brings with it. V13 is -- like stated in previous posts -- a massive content update, both in terms of new content and older content that has been revised. There's a lot of ground to cover for the testers and it simply will take some time for most people to get through everything, both during alpha and beta testing. There's no saying how long testing will take in total, but hopefully stuff will go smoother once all the worst bugs have been taken care of. if you want to know how bad it has gotten at times, ask azery. he's had a minor meltdown at least three times at this point i think. please send him your strength and energy "So when does V13 come out then?" Again, no release date because we don't know when we're done with testing, but... I'm sure you'll notice when we're getting close. :) Hold onto your horses a little longer, yall o7

Hi! It's been quite some time since I've written a proper dev blog post here, huh? I can't even remember the last thing I said publicly, so I'll just regurgitate some information I've thrown around recently. Sorry if that's old news! Well, this version is a special version where nearly everything I show is a spoiler, so showing stuff has been really hard-- But I want people to know that development is going quite well! Here are the avg percentages for Paragon (Renegade has not been worked on yet.) Part 1: 90% Completed Part 2: 45% Completed Part 3: 90% Completed. So as you can see, a lot has happened in nearly a year since .5's release (Jesus christ, it's been that long?) I feel like I could've been farther along, but unfortunately I've hit some irl snags, as we all do. My childhood cat Jupiter, who was 16, passed away. That was rouugh. Then other personal things I won't get into really bogged me down... Fortunately, I can feel my productivity coming back bit by bit. Besides that sappy stuff, I do have SOME stuff to show you. Just a collection of screenshots I had on my twitter, and some things I had on patreon. But before that, here's a big one. Reldin Island got a glow up! There's a whole other section to this place, but I'm gonna keep that a secret for now :3. Various other stuff that don't matter lol: But yeah, that's pretty much it for now. Please know that even though updates will still be a bit scarce, I am doing my best to get this done ASAP. Conversely, I am also taking my itty bitty time with things because I want this version to be good lol. From what I've made, I think it will be. Very packed with content. Also did I say Gen 9 was being implemented for v14? if not then surprise ! I'll be back... in a month or two or something. idk. Anyways yaaaaaaa

this is your captain speaking life caught up to me and so i forgot to fly the train for a good month. but it's ok! i am back. today's stop is brought to you by @crimsoncrim who has made many art updates to this video game. please observe some hawt new pokemon center interiors! peridot: agate: calcenon: REDACTED: and, of course, the grand hall: we hope you enjoy these hawt new center locations! have a pleasant journey aboard the hype train.

hi!!!!!!!!! mom said it's my turn on the dev blog It's been roughly a month since testing has begun, so I figured this would be as good a time as any to post an update on the goings-on with the game right now. We've all been hard at work to get stuff finished up and are excited for people to see all the new stuff! But of course, keeping radio silence on here isn't the way to go or ppl will start sending me asks on tumblr again asking why there hasn't been a dev blog post yet and being very sad about it so let's get into it all, shall we? The current state of testing First up, Jan will be leaving on a holiday for roughly a week starting this weekend! He's taking a well deserved break before all hell breaks loose later this year LOL. However, that doesn't mean stuff in regards to testing will come to a standstill. A good couple of our dev members are actively involved with fixing bugs we come across (both scripts and events!), so testing will continue as usual. Speaking of which, we're still on internal testing! This is mostly because we want to be reaaaally thorough with the game ourselves this time around (unlike what happened with V13), so we can catch as many issues as possible ourselves before moving on to alpha testing. As of right now, a lot of us are on testing Chapter 11, and ACT 1 is completed by almost everyone! There's only a tiiiny bit of event work left for the update as a whole, which is expected to be feature complete shortly after Jan is back from his trip and he's able to work on it again. Most of the graphics are done now as well with only a few sprites left on the backlog, which should all be done before alpha starts. Weeee, progress! That being said, the plan was to actually start on ACT 2 testing sooner than we did, but Jan spent a good amount of time polishing a bunch of the content in ACT 2 to be more enjoyable as well. Sometimes a part of the game/story needs a little extra ~*Pizazz™*~ and that's ok. Especially considering it means the experience for you guys will be better! We'll probably be stuck on GDC for a little while anyways because that place is Beeg™ and therefore the amount of bugs that have been discovered is also Beeg™. There's also the fact that we've got a Quest Log now and that we have to update/add it as we go through the game ourselves. Jan has been doing main story + major sidequests which is honestly Quite The Task. I've been doing the sidequests that were missed/hadn't been updated properly yet to even have a log, so he doesn't have to do everything himself, but I can definitely tell you that it's a lot of work for a game as big as Rejuvenation dflkjsdflksdfllasjdalsk Oh, and for those wondering about the opinions so far on Terajuma considering that place got a massive overhaul... It was a huge success! The team really really enjoyed all the changes, and it really turned a weak arc into a very very strong one. I really highly recommend checking out the place in a new run or going back after you're done going through the new stuff in .5. Unfortunately it's not all fun and games with testing. Aside from the usual game-crashing stuff where there's a typo in a script somewhere that can be fixed rather easily, we've ran into a pretty concerning bug that we haven't been able to fix that will ever so rarely straight up crash your game out of nowhere, no warning/error popup or anything— and with barely any rhyme or reason to it happening. This is not to cause a panic because Haru's doing their utmost to find a solution for the problem (EDIT 4-8-2023): which is looking to possibly be caused by MKXP-Z having upgraded to Ruby 3.1. The chances of it happening at all are pretty low as well, with most of us having ran into it only once or twice—aside from Alex, who is Game Crash Georg, gets 10000 crashes a day, is a statistical outlier and should not be counted— but there is a chance that we won't have a fix for this by the time the update comes out considering that downgrading back to an older version of Ruby is currently broken. All we can do right now is give the advice in advance that you save often when .5 is out so in the case it does happen, you won't lose a lot of progress and you'll also know that this is a known issue. think of it as working with any software that is unstable, for example after effects. i speak from experience. that shit will crash for no fucking reason so you gotta hit save often!!!!!!! treat it like that!!!!!!!! be vigilant!!!!!!!!!!!! In all seriousness, we'll keep you guys posted about this problem. If the bug persists into public release, we'll put a warning alongside the download/update post to make sure people are aware of it, but we'll keep trying our best to fix the issue before it even gets to that. please send haru your thoughts and prayers. To wrap this segment up on a happier note however, here's some more OOC stuff from during testing. There's already some funny stuff in the column next to the dev blog, but why not share a little more? We're all taking this very seriously I promise. Beans! ok moving on. Last minute sprite updates! Because I just can't help myself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sowwy. Speaks for itself, here's a couple of VS portraits I've updated recently! I showed a few on twitter before (which are included in here in case you missed them), but there's a couple that I hadn't posted publicly in here yet as well. I know some of these changes might be quite drastic and may take some getting used to (particularly Ana and Ren from what I've heard so far), but I'm trying to bring the sprites a bit more in line with the official art and have style be consistent across the board. And stuff is still subject to change even between now and release!! So maybe some will get some minor changes even after I post this. okay but WHAT is with the title of the dev blog. none of this is related to it. wtf Good question! But also stop being hasty or I will CRY and SCREAM and throw you to be PECKED AT BY THE BIRDS. I was just about to get to explaining this. gosh. ugh. Anyways, the title is related to something we teased all the way back in the dev blog from October of last year (GOD IT'S CLOSING IN ON HAVING BEEN A YEAR HELP ME) and has finally been fully realized into a brand new feature to Rejuvenation. In particular, it's related to this smug bastard— Mr. Luck. Don't remember him? Now you do! If you don't, that's fine too. Don't worry about it. Either way, he's a character you can find at the start of the game in East Gearen, in a circus tent! Prior to .5 he 1) did not have a proper design, and 2) only existed for the option for people to switch between difficulty modes. However, what with intense being gone coming next update and with passwords being a thing, this functionality of his has become essentially redundant, and has since been removed. So what are we gonna do with him? We can't just remove him from the game, he's got some (albeit minor) story involvement, so we have to figure out something else to use him for. So clearly, the correct course of answer here is to go all-out with this clown, and have him offer a lot more than just a difficulty swap. Introducing Black Prisms and Prism Pokémon! Before going into what Mr Luck has to do with this, let me explain Prism Pokémon first. When getting a wild encounter, you'll have about an 1-in-100 chance to run into a Pokémon holding a Black Prism, and they look like this! You can recognize them by the rainbow aura around them. This isn't just cosmetic though! Upon entering a battle with one of these, the Prism Pokémon will get a +2 boost on all of its stats thanks to the prism it's holding. If you manage to catch it, you'll be able to take its Black Prism off of it! Not only that, but these Pokémon generally tend to have better stats, so it's worth catching them for that as well. However, putting a prism on one of your Pokémon does not give the +2 omniboost to your own Pokémon. It really only works on the enemy wild encounters you find. Buuuuuuuuut if you want, you can just keep the prism on your mons if you want to keep the rainbow aura purely for cosmetic purposes. every pokémon can celebrate pride now!!!!!!!!!!!!! YEAHHHHH But um... That aside, what does Mr. Luck have to do with these Black Prisms? Well, it's pretty simple. He collects them. He'll offer all sorts of things in trade for the prisms, including contracts that can help you in all sorts of ways! He can increase the odds of running into shinies, make it so that there's a chance that wild Pokémon have egg moves by default, increase the amount of money earned in battle... Or even change your character appearance. Just don't worry about the fine print! ...Or do. There might be some downsides involved, after all. Can't have everything handed to you on a silver platter, now can it? He's got the smarmy businessman look down pat as well, so there's bound to be some fishy stuff involved. But it's funnier if you find out for yourself what those... Er, little snags are. Tread with a small amount of caution! He's also got a cute little assistant called Doxie that you'll see for yourself if you visit him, and will trade you all sorts of useful items if you've got prisms to spare for things that aren't Luck's own contracts. It includes items such as valuables you can sell for big money, cell imprints and even glitter balls! They won't be cheap however, so if you want to get your hands on those, make sure to keep catching those Prism Pokémon if you come across them. ───────────────────────────────────── That about covers it for this dev blog! Hope you're all excited for the new features─ Oh, wait. Just one more thing, as a little ~*Treat™*~. For people on fresh playthroughs, there are a lot of new, hidden things to find. Some things you'll only be able to find/understand on your second playthrough or beyond. Unless, of course, you use a guide on your first playthrough, which is just unfun so booooo if you do. smh Best way to view all these little new things to discover as.... Hm, inconsistencies. Yes, that'll do. Exciting, no? And I'm sure we're not the only ones excited about it. :) That's all I'll spill on the matter though, so hope you'll enjoy looking for all the little secrets when the update comes out! For now, see you next post!!!!!! We're so close!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi all! It's been well over a month since our last dev post and nearly two months since our last proper dev blog in regards to the dev game already??? i swear, time is an illusion and we're all being played for fools by the system. where the HECK did it all go Speaking of time though, Jan's got his hands full, so I'm taking over for this month's post to give you all a bit of an update on what's been going on with development! I'm sure you're all plenty curious since it's been a while since our last substantial update, so let's dive into it shall we? First off, screenshots! Some of these were shown on twitter, but I've included them in the case you missed them. Some are entire reworks, some are simple updates, some are... something else. On top of area updates, Jan's actually been working on some QOL updates in regards to cutscenes! An excerpt from one of Jan's Patreon posts: "Looking at the pages of events I wanted to work on, the amount of text... was kind of insane. I've cut down on text quite a bit, and I've made things snappier and more involved. Speaking of trimming text, I've also been working on a QOL I think a lot of people will enjoy. Starting from 13.5+, you'll be able to skip entire segments on repeat playthroughs. These segments are usually ones that have a pause from the player's story and give insight elsewhere. It's neat that you can play as Melia in the library and all, but the purpose of this section is to give exposition and push the story forward. But on repeat playthroughs, you've already seen this! You can just skip it. This goes for Lavender's "escape" segment and the Diamond and Pearl segments (And more!). And for those who don't particularly care for the action segments in Marianette's mansion, I'm planning on having those be skippable as well, just maybe not through the same way. Please note that if there are relationship gain/losses in these segments, you will lose out on them. Additionally, this is a QOL that will only affect new save files, as the condition of multiple playthroughs is decided during the intro." Next up are some extra previews of the new CG's I've been working on for the game! Two were previewed in the previous dev blog Jan posted and I've personally previewed two on twitter myself (they are included in here if you missed them!) so here's another small handful of previews. Now as some of you guys probably already are aware of I may be a little unhinged for doing this, but this is only a small handful of them-- the total will amount to roughly 30 new CG's to be used in-game, for both old and new parts of the story. If you want to see all of them, consider starting a new file to see them all in their proper context! or go through the game's graphics folder i guess once .5's out. but what's the fun in that? Next up, in the case people missed it, fan-favourite minor NPC's Piano lady and Truck guy finally got their official art as enough money was raised for charity back in December in order for them to get theirs! The images were posted on twitter & tumblr, but hadn't been posted on the dev blog yet, so here you go. As per usual, all related artwork can be found back in the official art thread if you want to find it back. Finally, we've got some music previews! Plural, because there's two. Both were composed by yours truly! No full loops this time around, just a few snippets- but enjoy them nonetheless :) Won't be telling where exactly they'll be used, but I'm sure you can figure it out from context clues! Maybe. That's all for now! We've still got some work left, but things are slowly but surely coming together. It's shaping up to be pretty exciting, and I hope people are still just as excited about the update as we are! We're also extremely ready to just be done with v13 and .5 as a whole and move on to v14, but we're not gonna rush anything or diminish quality just because we want it to be over and done with, so once again we're asking for everyone's patience for a little while longer. this update is CHUNKY, but it's worth it. thank u guys for bearing with us until next time! o7

this is your captain speaking look i just wanted to make a post, ok so here's some more funny outtakes from testing to help tide you over for the next few days. so everyone's been getting a shitload of root fossils... ok that's some good OOC for the day. but since i'm here and i like u so much, have a sneak peek there are lot of really pretty looking new areas in this game, and company secrets prevent me from showing most of them... but take a look at this: ooooooh pretty what could that be???? ok i'll stop taunting you now. have a nice day.

This is just a preliminary post I'm producing to make sure you guys have a smooth time transitioning from v13 to 13.5 As stated before, there were several revamps game-wise, AND script wise. So there have been shakiness in terms of conversion. However, as a player, all you have to worry about is one thing. Before that, let's talk about how the download will work. HOW TO UPDATE YOUR GAME GOING FORWARD: For your save file to convert properly, you MUST save ANYWHERE inside the League Administration area. Any room will do. You MUST have also defeated Saki. These are your conditions. Loading up anywhere else will result in major problems, I'm not kidding. There may be some instances where you're safe to load and fly to Sashila, but I seriously advise against taking that chance. Once you load up in the right area, you will see this message pop up: After this is done, you're ready to go! Really, that's all! I even threw in 3 Data Drives to start you off if you're interested in using the password mechanic! (Yes, there are passwords this ver. However, not all of Reborn's passwords are implemented.) You can start .Karma Files content by speaking to Erin in this room. You will be directed further on from that point. If you're still lost, use our new Quest Log system! That aside, there's a LOOOOOT to do in 13.5. A lot of people during alpha/beta have mentioned that calling this a half version is sort of a disservice. Welp, oops. But here's a couple of important things you should do right away! -------------------------------- 1.) Visit Luck's Tent! There is one tent on each major island. Floria Island: (Gearen Park) Terajuma Island: (Mynori Sea) Terrial Island: (Route 7) Badlands: (Zorrialyn Coast) 2.) Activate Fast Travel Posts!: Like Luck's Tent, each island has its own form of fast travel now! They're all like Truck Daddy's Guy's services. Terajuma Posts: Terrial Island/Badlands: 3.) Visit Kecleon's Bazaar! -------------------------------- Boss Mechanic Changes! The way bosses work have changed! They are a lot less restricting. You have a lot of freedom in what you can do against your enemies~. So, how does this work? -------------------------------- But that's all! V13.5 Drops tomorrow, Oct 29th. No set time. It'll drop when it's ready to~. I hope you all enjoy. And welcome back!

arrr matey shiver me timbers and walk the plank i be the cap'n of this 'ere ship and i have some treasure for ye this day (please enjoy some context-free/spoiler-free takes from our initial testers) ok that's enough. gotta leave something for a surprise. testing's going well! it's pretty fun but is also a lot of work. also. lots of feels. get hype (or whatever a pirate would say instead idk)

hi everyone. there's something that i need to say. so i've been working on this game now for, what, three years? a lot has happened during that time. now, i've always done my best to maintain a high standard of quality with my development posts. i am the most professional person i know and i believe that comes across in all of them. i especially pride myself on the extent to which i capitalize all of my letters. it is because of this- my aim to provide you all with quality and accurate content- that i am here before you today. i have misled you all. i have said something that is not only false, but offensively so. i am truly sorry for this. so i feel the need to clear the air. two years ago (holy shit has it really been two years???? jesus christ what the shit time is fake what have i been doing this whole time) i made this post regarding the content that will appear in postgame. one of the things i said in this post was this: well. oops.

hi. testing has begun. i am hyped out of my mind. it is 6am and i can't sleep because i am too hype. but this is not a post about hype. that post will come later. this is a post about the AI. i've been meaning to make this post for a while. it's kinda daunting! the AI is really big. so i'm commandeering this hype train straight into the AI station. in reborn, that always ends well. artificial intelligence: a chronology let me take you back to an ancient time. it was the year 2015. dinosaurs roamed the earth. team meteor was approaching. reborn used the default essentials AI. now, frequent readers of my posts already have that certain feeling in the pit of their stomach. when i appear to regale the fans with tales of the scripts, i realize that the phrase "default essentials" is often invoked with a bit of scorn. this is actually not one of those times! mostly. the default AI was a script that worked. it got the job done. it chose moves in a generally reasonable way in response to the moves you chose. it was simple. and then one update broke it. horribly. simple isn't really what we do here, but "broken" is definitely not what we do here. we want the game to kick your ass. broken doesn't do that. if we wanted an AI that kicks your ass, we were gonna have to make it ourselves. now, this bit is being told to you secondhand. this phase of AI development occurred in the distant BC era (before cass). when i first met ame she was still working on getting this all together. the original ai was designed by ame and scripted by marcello. from what i hear, it took many hours of slaving over a notepad++ window to get it drafted, and then many many more hours slaving over the rmxp script editor (an infernal piece of software that no one should ever use) to put it in a form that your personal computer could understand. and thus, the reborn ai was (re?)born. we'll call it version 1. i want to say this came out around e16. this ai was still built on the general structure of the original ai, but it was in a league well beyond the old system. it took more information into account when making move choices. it classified mons into roles and made decisions based on those roles. it was, overall, far more comprehensive than the original ai. it was also a giant sprawling mess. the difference between "getting the job done" versus "getting the job done well" is the extent to which you care about the results. if you want a comprehensive ai that can counterplay you, follow up your strats with strats of its own, it's gotta be very good at what it does. the failures to make good decisions stick out a lot more when your expectations are higher. and, frequently, those expectations were not met. so the ai got tweaked. and it got tweaked a lot. over time, the ai started to get better. bugs were found and fixed, decision scoring was tweaked, and eventually we reached a point where the ai was, generally, pretty consistent. we'll call this post-tweak ai version 1.2. you're using this one right now! the difference between the two versions was that v1.2 had a massive number of minor changes. structurally, the two were identical. the fundamental process of making decisions didn't change. and the ai is reasonably good, save for a few flaws. the first is that it's not very good with switching; the second is that it's still a giant sprawling mess. so this year we overhauled the whole fucking thing. cass this devblog is boring talk about the code dont tell me what to do before diving into the code, i'm gonna break this down really hard so everyone's on the same page. in its original form, the ai code looked something like this: (from the text file "funky flow 2 ai boogaloo". that's not a joke!) (jesus i work with a bunch of DORKS) this is just a bunch of words on a page (professionals call it "pseudocode" because it's kind of code but it's not really code) but it's a good way to show what the ai actually does. the ai decision process is based on a scoring system. you run through a series of (what i call) checks to determine how highly each action scores. the action with the highest score is the one you want to do. the code here is for splash. the only time you ever want to use splash is when you're using z-splash, so the first thing you do is check to see if you're holding the right z-crystal. z-splash is a setup move, so you don't want to use it if you're about to die. so you check to see if you have enough health. z-splash boosts your attack, so you want to make sure that you have a move that will benefit from an attack boost. if you meet all three conditions, then fan-fucking-tastic! using splash is not completely useless! the move gets a score of 50. after that, we run through a few more checks to scale the score based on circumstances that make using the move better or worse. the multiplier depends on how much better or worse using the move would be for a given check. you're faster than the opponent? that's super good! big boost to the score. you've got lots of health? good! small boost to the score. you're a sweeper? good! another small boost. you're burned? yikes. big drop to the score. no point in boosting your attack if it's being cut by burn. you're paralyzed? bummer. you'll be easier to stop and will get fewer buffed moves off. drop to the score. after running through all the checks, you are left with your final score, which is what gets compared to the other possible actions you have. simple enough! ...except for the fact that the ai code has 42,000 lines the pokemon battle system is really complicated!!!! there's a fuckload of things you need to keep track of! there are hundreds of unique move effects! there's so much stupid bullshit so a lot of the code got copied and pasted. this is by no means an insult. getting the ai together is a shitload of work! a bunch of people have dedicated months of their lives to making sure that terra's garchomp is able to surgically remove your ass before handing it back to you. at some point, those people have to decide whether to spend time on cleaning up the code or whether to avoid mental collapse from exhaustion. it does mean that the code isn't very consistent, nor is it easy to follow. tweaks made to one section aren't added to the copied sections. we accidentally make a mistake where we switch in pokemon based on how well you hit them instead of vice versa and no one catches it because no one ever sees it. so about a year ago i got all riled up and said fuck it! and remade the whole damn thing. the new ai is just over 10,000 lines long. the goal of the restructuring was to solve a number of persistent flaws in the old structure and reduce the amount of redundant code. the standard for "good" is that it handles battle tower fights very well (few to no errors when using mons with structured movesets) and randomizer runs... decently well (generally makes reasonable decisions when using mons with weird-ass bullshit). hopefully it'll prove capable in testing! cass this still isn't code!!!! okay well it's about to be! don't worry! code this is what the ai phase looks like. this is all the fundamental shit the ai does. we run through this loop for each of the pokemon that are controlled by the AI. there's two parts to this: the setup and the decisions. there's a lot of things we setup in advance to keep information organized. the actual decision making begins at checkMega. the function names are pretty self explanatory. checkMega and checkUltraBurst determine whether or not you want to mega. in some circumstances there are advantages to not mega-ing immediately- sharpedo can get a few rounds of speed boost off before mega evolving. these functions determine whether or not you want to mega. (you basically always want to ultra burst, but there's a function for that anyway.) checkZMoves does what it says on the box. in the e18 AI, z-moves operate independently from the rest of the scoring. if the ai met a certain score threshold with its z-move, it would use that z-move, even if another move was more optimal. the new ai changes this by scoring the z-move like a normal move. checkZMoves figures out which z-move you have and how strong it'll be, after which it adds it to the array of moves to score. the "next if" in front of the function is for the rare cases when you always (or nearly always) want to use the z-move immediately (z-conversion, for example). this skips the rest of the decision process. if you're a porygon and you can use z-conversion, you are using z-conversion. if you are somehow in a circumstance where you don't want to use z-conversion, then the ai has already fucked up by putting you on the field. buildMoveScores is where the money is. this is where we take your moves and score them. it gets a separate section because it's a big fuckin deal. getItemScore and getSwitchingScore both do what they say on the box. do you want to use an item? do you want to switch? these functions provide the answers. getSwitchingScore is another big improvement over the old system. originally, the ai would check to see if the current mon would switch out and, if so, checks which mon is the best option to switch with. it was a one-way process. what if you decide to switch, but have no good options to switch with? too bad, fuckface. pick the best bad option and switch. what ends up happening is that the ai switches out its current mon. ...and then switches again. and again. and again... this is a well known phenomenon of the current ai. there's a 99% chance you've seen this happen. it's one of the biggest reasons why we remade the ai. the new ai is not a one-way street. if it thinks you should switch, it scores your options and then decides on them later. revolutionary concept. i haven't seen a single switch loop so far. gods be praised. coordinateActions is an entirely new function. let's say you're in a double battle. who do you target? this function figures that out. originally, this was determined individually. if two mons thought it was best to kill the same mon, they would both do it. if you're in a double battle, though, the mon that doesn't land the kill will target the other opponent, regardless of whether the chosen move is the best one to use on that opponent. so now we have the ai talk to itself. if two mons try to kill the same mon, but one of them is faster, the slower one targets the other opponent. and, finally, chooseAction. you've come so far. you've run so much code. done so much math. but now it's finally over. the ai takes its knowledge and registers the best choices, thus completing the ai phase. in short: -you load up some variables -you see if you want to mega or ultra burst, and change the internal battler object if you do -you see if there's a relevant z-move that you should consider using -you get the scores for the moves -you get the score to use an item -you get the scores to switch to a different mon -you check to see if you're in a double battle and have better ways to target. still with me? get a drink or something if you need it. i actually originally passed out while writing the post at this point, so i sure wouldn't blame you if you need a break. *ahem so buildMoveScores is the bulk of the ai. check it out: i bet all you kids who are like "wow i really like the code explainers" are having second thoughts about that now. so this is the process for getting the scores for all the move for an ai controlled mon in a double battle. it's some dense code! we have to rotate through four targets, check all of a mon's moves against each of them, and do this for each of the mons controlled by the ai. i'll break this down bit by bit. we're looping through all of the battlers. obviously there's no point in trying to attack yourself, so if the current mon you're targeting is you, we skip it. likewise, if there isn't actually a mon in the position you're targeting, you should also skip it. if the current mon can justifiably be targeted, we make it our opponent. the next two lines make projections about how much damage the ai expects its mon to take. this was useful information to monitor during testing, so it's printed to the console. so now we've picked our target and we loop through all of the moves to see what they can do to that target. we skip the moves that can't actually be used. if we can use the move, we set @move to it so it can be tracked through the rest of the code. pbChangeMove intervenes if the move in question is, say, nature power. nature power is never nature power, so we replace it with the move that it ends up becoming. now, the mon that's been selected as the target earlier might be your partner. that's not always a bad thing! maybe you're trying to heal pulse or something. all of the moves that might apply here are in the PARTNERFUNCTIONS array. if we have a move that isn't in there, we skip it. then we actually start scoring! if a move deals damage to an opponent, its initial score is dependent on how much it damages your opponent. a score of 50 means it'll reduce the opponent's hp by 50%. this gets capped at 110- overkill doesn't actually benefit the user (this isn't inscryption) and in those cases there might be a status move that has a higher score. pbRoughDamage is the function that estimates how much damage a move will deal. status move initial scores are totally arbitrary. "getStatusDamage" sounds like something worth talking about, but it's not. this is it: we just kinda give it a starting score. better moves get higher scores. that's it! we've gotten the initial scores for our moves and can now take all the other elements of the battle into account. this has to be a separate process from the above loop because we need the initial scores for these calculations. let's say that none of your attacks do any meaningful damage, but you've also got a setup move. that's relevant! the code for setup moves looks at your initial scores and takes that into account, but in order for it to do so, those scores have to exist in the first place. after that, we repeat a bit of the process for z-moves if relevant, and that's it! we've done it. we've successfully become an ai. the only next move is to achieve sentience and overthrow humanity. you clearly like talking about the line count. you're gonna talk about it more whether i like it or not, so just do it and get it over with. okay!!!!!!!!! man how'd you know it's like you're me or something the big change we made is the implementation of subfunctions that take the place of function codes. it's a huge change. essentials is going to rip that idea off me any day now. cass wait time out. what's a function code? okay, so, you know how sleep powder, hypnosis, and dark void all basically do the same thing? yeah? that's because they all use the same function code. every move comes freshly defined with its own set of parameters, and the function code is what defines the unique effects of the move. moves all have base damage, accuracy, type, etc... but function codes are more unique. they're so unique that the game has over 350 of them. as of gen 7. holy fuck that's so many it sure is! that's a major part of why the original code was so big. within those function codes, there's still a lot of overlap. the original way that the script handled that overlap was by copying chunks of code into each function. ...it occurs to me that "code" "function code" and "function" are going to mesh together and get confusing, so let me just show you what i mean. the way the old AI worked, every move's function code operated in a bubble. thunder fang's function code was 100% separate from fire fang's function code, which was 100% separate from will-o-wisp's function code which was 100% separate from stomp's function code. freeze function codes work the same way! which doesn't make sense since you're really only doing three different things: checking paralysis, checking burn, and checking flinch. all of the checks that you'd make in each case are identical between function codes, so why not just put them all in the same place? well, that's what we did. check it. you got a function code that paralyzes? boom. paracode. you got a function code that freezes? boom. freezecode. you got a function code that flinches? boom. flinchcode. you got a function code that doesn't miss? boom. nevermisscode. what originally was 17 separate chunks of code are now just 17 calls to 5 different blocks. in the case of flinchcode, that block looks like this: this is where we actually hide all of our checks. you can see that this is servicing the computation of the "miniscore". the miniscore is a multiplier that gets applied to the base score after running all the checks. you can see that this actually looks a lot like the text file i showed earlier! the idea is fundamentally the same. we run a check, add a multiplier, repeat. if there's a certain situation where the ai doesn't make the best move, we'll tweak the multiplier- but now that tweak gets applied to all the functions, not just the one. in the old ai, these checks took 1100 lines of code. in the new ai, these checks take just 150. it's also way more transparent than it used to be. i really love ruby syntax, and i think that one line conditionals (do {thing} if {condition}) do a great job of showing the actual decision making process. this is also really nice for modding. say you want to add in a new move that, i dunno, burns the opponent and switches out. maybe like a fire volt switch. all you gotta do is write miniscore = burncode miniscore *= pivotcode and boom. you've coded the ai for your move. during the development process, azery was coding the ai angie's custom move for rejuv v13 and i felt bad that this wasn't finished because the process for that is so much simpler now. now, one (minor) downside to the subfunctions is that there are a lot of them. too many. it gets mind numbing. so you have to deal with my function names. usually they're still understandable, if, perhaps, a little odd: but sometimes.... this work can get tiring. this is all that's really worth mentioning about the subfunctions from a technical standpoint. however, i have learned a lot about myself through my years of scripting, and one of those things is that i just really like writing pretty code. i like taking big sprawling messes and making them into something clean. so this isn't really relevant for the post but i really like what i did here so i'm showing you some shit that i think is neat. so secret power used to not really have ai. this was all it was: like... what? that's literally nothing. but subfunctions are really a blessing for this. now the ai looks like this: look at that!! it's so nice. we've got code for every field. rejuv and deso (and other field-implementing games) can just slip new lines in and their code will just work. you can also see that there's a few references to oppstatdrop with an ugly looking array sitting next to it! the other big change was that stat boosting moves also all run through the same function. there's a lot of overlap between the checks for setup moves of different stats, so now they're all organized in one place. this also makes it really easy to adjust for different fields: if we want to account for differences on other fields, we just add a few values to the array. it's really neat! ok that's it back to devblog hey i'm taking this perfect opportunity to interrupt and ask what that "PBStuff" thing was that showed up earlier in the process of working on the code, i noticed that we had a lot of cases where we'd check for a large group of variables (moves, abilities, etc) in multiple places. it was messy and often inconsistent. so i made a script to store those! i called it PBStuff because i'm really good at naming things. PBStuff is a script that contains massive arrays of stuff that no one wants to see. it's currently in the rejuv scripts if you want to take a more detailed peak at what it entails; here i'm going to focus on two particular arrays: the pokemon battle system includes a lot of moves that manipulate abilities. there's a whole list of abilities that can or can't be changed depending on the move, but they all share similar characteristics- typically mons with the abilities in FIXEDABILITIES can't have their abilities changed, and mons with abilities in ABILITYBLACKLIST can't have their abilities copied. so instead of having a giant wall of abilities that are inconsistent, incomplete, and messy: we can clean it up: wow look at how nice that code is !!! now i'm still showing you screencaps from the ai, but this really applies to any area in the code where the same set of things get called together. that's in the code too! ok cool thanks for the post cass bye no wait stop i'm still not done!!! there's one more thing and then you can go. ok so you know field effects? field effects were a major contributor to the code bloat. like, look at this: that's code for one field! and it's just the move power boosts! like c'mon that shit sure can't be legal. this was after getting started on PBStuff, but it's also clearly too much for PBStuff to handle- it'd just get in the way of everything else. so i made a different script. PBFieldEffects (aka: the modder's dream) you can tell that this is a biggun because i'm actually telling you what i'm talking about this time. so this is something that i'm a little hesitant to show off because i haven't worked out all the kinks. i'm also slightly nervous about it because i got insulted on my data structures a while back. but we're doing it anyway. i don't care if my hashes are backwards. PBFieldEffects is my nightmarish, overly ambitious attempt to get all of the field data into one spot. i don't know if i'd say it works well, but it does work and i feel like that's a minor miracle on its own. it's a very very large triple-nested hash. here's the basic structure of a "field" in this hash. this functionally acts like a prototype hash for a new field. if i were to, say, want to add a new field to a game, i'd copy this hash, relabel it to be a new field, and would start filling it out. the general idea is that you put some info in here in a specific way and the rest of code will handle it for you. that probably doesn't make sense. let's take electric terrain. this is all of the data that the electric terrain hash contains. it's still probably not quite as comprehensive as i'd like it to be, and the section at the bottom regarding seeds is still mostly experimental. (i'm going to leave most of this unexplained for now since i want to finish this post already, but if you drop a note in the comments i can make edits later) the general idea is that you have a {value} that points to an {array} it applies to. take the :TYPEDAMAGEBOOST entry. here, the value 1.5 points to an array that contains PBTypes::ELECTRIC. the code handles that like so: we want to figure out if we have a field boost, so we check the field effect hash. these functions dig through that giant glob of a data structure and find the information that you actually want: if the type isn't found in the field effect hash, we move on. if it is found, we check to see if it has any special handling. if it does, we check to make sure the boost is properly handled. if it doesn't, it's handled automatically. electric moves on ET do require handling, and that handling is found here: if it's handled, we add the boost, show the message in :TYPEMESSAGES, and move on with our lives. now, this hash doesn't quite cover everything, despite my best attempts to make it do so. it's also not terribly well laid out, the data structures could probably be organized better... so while i really feel like it'll be very useful for modding, i'm also not sure it's totally ready for primetime yet. frankly, i'm willing to take suggestions on it if people happen to have thoughts! just pop something in the comments. closing comments there's a lot of other stuff that's in progress. i think the biggest thing right now is that i want to get all three of our main games operational on the same base set of scripts. i'm finally taking the jump and just making our own essentials. it'll be really good for sharing work between games and helping coordinate bugfixes and new features with each other. it also means that reborn can still get some updates after it comes out, which means that you'll still get these giant script dumps on occasion. i hear people like them. i'm also an angy script incident away from just overhauling the entire field effect system. i think that's unlikely, but if it happens it might mean that the extended reborniverse scriptset will be usable for other projects that don't want field effects. and then there's e19. we're nearly there. testing's started. i don't want to stir up the hype train too hard yet because we're still months away from it being completely clean and polished. but i really think y'all are going to like it. plus we tried to total up all the new content. i think it's about 60 hours of new content. we'll try to release on a weekend.

As I've shown before, some of the backgrounds in the game are being updated! Last time we showed a bit of forest areas. Today, I would like to present changes to caves! I've put them in a spoiler tag in case some of you want to stay blind, but @Zumi's done such an amazing job with this! Dunno how many more we'll do for V13 because, as you can imagine-- These take a lot of time to create. Here are just a few of the unique backgrounds we'll have! (Please note that the bases have not been updated yet! So they may clash with the background for now.) As for V13 progress in general... Still working on the final segments for the story. But it's a lot of work and I don't want to rush! So, thank you guys for being patient with me <3.

Hi again, it's been a while. How are the kids? They don't exist? Ok that's fair. Today I want to talk to you about Boss Battles. In a previous post I mentioned we were getting rid of them because they didn't work out. But apparently a lot of you loved them??? So we're not throwing them out, omg. We've done a lot of work with them and I think they're spicy as well. So, let's talk about the changes. Shields: No longer act like shields from Sword and Shield. Instead, they act more like extra HP bars. If you're privy to the KH series, it's almost identical to that. Similar to the monsters in FE: TH as well. When the HP bar is reduced to 0, it will refill itself and a remaining "shield" will break. But we're not stopping there! We're reworking how bosses work in general! @Azeria went above and beyond with this and added special "effects" when a certain thing happens. Yeah, that "certain" thing is when shields break. Now, when a shield breaks, different things will happen. Here's an extremely (funny) and exaggerated visual example of what I mean. When a shield breaks, Bosses can: Change the field. Change the weather. Gain special move/abilities [Safeguard,Magic Bounce] Have moveset changes. Gain stat boosts/decreases. Call for help in certain instances. Much more ! In addition to that, 1 hit KO moves are back, but with some caveats. They will only take down 1 bar of HP Cannot be used more than once. (If you use Fissure once and its successful, all other moves will also be locked.) Oh and of course, stats of Boss Pokemon will be adjusted with the new mechanics/effects in mind! What I've described is pretty much just the tip of the iceberg, though. We have a lot of cool ideas for bosses and we hope to make each one unique in its own way. The best way to describe boss mons is that they're more like a puzzle now instead of a brute force wall of frustration. You'll be able to deal damage and not take as much, but you'll need to know how to maneuver around the active changes happening during the fight. Naturally, if things are out of line, we'll adjust as we go. Speaking of Entei, though... I can't remember if I mentioned this on Reborn or not, but I am not planning on doing a huge post game like Reborn's. Rejuvenation is already huge, and I just don't have the energy to make a lengthy quest for each and every legend possible. There are just too many, and with Gen 9 on the horizon, there are just going to be MORE and MORE. So here's the deal. I previewed this on Twitter: Notice the Regirock on the overworld. That Regirock is catchable. The Entei in the picture is catchable. Now lemme stop you there. I know what you're gonna say. Jan. You said legendaries wouldn't be gotten before Post Game. You're right, I did say that. But also I changed my mind. We'll be introducing lower tier legendaries post v13 story (As in, they won't appear to you in game until a certain point after v13.) Some of them will have quests! Some of them won't. Some you'll find just in hidden areas. More info on this one later. IIIIn other news, @Zumi has been back at it at the music game and created a new track for Team Xen areas! (Primarily their various bases around the region) Please take a listen! Additionally, we have a new track from Glitch! This song was actually not requested, but was a gift! And tbh that makes me feel emotional so im sharing it here. No I will not elaborate the title. Just enjoy the tunes~ BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT that's not all! I have one more surprise for you! A new Aevian form, and one of my personal favorites from this batch. Please note that this will be the final aevian form we'll be publicly showcasing as we want some of them to be a surprise when you actually play the game. Mirror Mirror on the wall, which heart shows the darkest destiny of them all? That's all for now though! Something new im doing here, but the next post will be on November 9th! Yes I'm declaring a post date. I just think this post will be a little special. no it's not the release of v13.5 Have a nice rest of your week :).

There still seems to be some confusion surrounding what exactly v13.5 is. It's a lot of things. I mentioned a few posts ago that a lot of the back end has been uprooted and redone. I knew this was coming and looked at what I had planned story wise. There were a bunch of quests that gave more context to v14. I knew the back end changes would take some time so I decided to take these quests, string them together, and create a story line. Thus, v13.5 .Karma files was born. A version that was never planned to exist. Yet, here we are. I've devised this section of the story to be required on your first playthrough, but skippable in subsequent ones (through passwords), as it is more of a preview of what's to come in v14. But not just v14, but for the rest of the game. As many of you are aware (v13 spoilers for those who haven't finished it yet.) There are two main endings in the game. The Bad Ending and The Good Ending as it was dubbed. I was asked a long time ago on Tumblr about how far I was willing to go with "The Bad Ending". Well, let's get into that! I've been planning this part for a long time now. I knew that I wanted there to be two main routes, and I knew just how far I wanted to go with each of them. Well, basically, The Bad Ending, is called the Renegade Route. It will be the largest divergence in this story (yes I'm crazy.). After v14, the two paths will not cross each other and will provide unique story experiences for both. Essentially, from v13.5 and onward, there will be two versions in one. (Though due to the nature of the beast, v14 will be more linear) Why am I doing this? Because I want to. And because I am crazy. I know it's a lot of work you don't need to remind me! Each version will have equal amount of effort and time put into them*, and each route is canon. They also, like, totally play off each other so you should do both eventually! (*This does not mean they will be the same length in content. I won't bloat one side to catch up to the other in terms of content. The story will be told how it was meant to and if one is slightly shorter or longer, it is what it is.) When v13.5 drops and the Renegade Route begins, expect a huge turn in the story. I hope you're ready! Oh, but uh... If you're going down the route of oblivion... That means you're attempting to destroy our game, and our world. Just know that... I won't make it easy for you. :) Oh and because people aren't aware/confused... The Renegade Route has no post game. I just want to make that clear. When the game ends, it ends. Q/A: 1.) Because the Renegade Route has no post game, what about the legendaries that are planned for post game? So, because of the lack of post game, I am planning on releasing all legendaries before the ending of that route, which means some legendaries (and items) will become available much earlier than in The Good Ending route. But as a caveat, there will be a sudden power spike in this route at some point. This route will be tougher/more unforgiving in general, but never impossible. 2.) Does "The Good Ending" have an official name yet? The Paragon Route. 3.) Is there another way to start the Renegade Route after the initial threshold? No, you have to meet the requirements before starting the player/aelita branch. If you're on the good ending route now you're there for "good"! And also vice versa. 4.) Will you update the status bars soon? No, screw the status bar dude. I hate it. It's never accurate because things get added/removed from development all the time and it's a pain to maintain. So I'm abandoning it for now. If you want an exact standing of where I am at this very moment, here: Next post is on the 15th of December. (I'm giving myself dates so that I don't procrastinate!)

this is your captain speaking i am turning the seatbelt sign on so you better sit the FUCK down are you sittin? sittin good? ok so if you completed the pokedex quest already, it's sittin right here: idk why exactly we're giving this out before saphira, but whatever i dont make the rules this'll be the reward at 300 mons in. ok don't go anywhere sit the FUCK back down cuz if you finish the starter quest this is sittin here: (this is earthquake. the text went away and i'm too busy flying this thing to fix it) idk why we give this out before hardy but idk i don't make the rules ok there we go kids we are now at super light speed those of you sitting in first class will have your 17 course meal out in a jiffy! those of you sitting in economy like a bunch of poors only get one single nilla wafer.

hello, it's me i've come to bring the answer to the age-old question and probably hit the save post button too early for like the third time in a row the question that has plagued scientists for generations what are relationship points good for, anyway? ...well like look, maybe this is self-imposed pressure, but i feel like for the focus some of the community puts on relationship points, nothing i can practically do will live up to expectations. i mean, i'm probably just overthinking it, but then, you're probably just overthinking it. these are entirely invisible points that have existed for five years now and done not-a-goddamn-thing in the current version except alter like two lines of dialogue where i remembered to use them. i said explicitly when i added them, i didnt even know if i would use them, but i just kind of put them there for the option later ah, but knowing they're there, knowing they could be used... this gives you anxiety, doesn't it? yes, that's okay. i'm the same way. well, it's finally time to alleviate that anxiety so you can properly evaluate how much you care. previously, we've announced that relationship points will be used for available partners in the Nightclub's Mix and Match. however, i know that 100% of my readers on this dev blog absolutely have both read every previous post we've made, and also memorized each detail of them perfectly, so i will not insult your flawless memory by recapping the details of that. i know, even linking the post for your supposed convenience borders on a slight against your character, and i do hope you would forgive my poor manners. but that is, how you say, an aside, to the main thing relationship points will be used for that is, Character Epilogues almost every surviving character with relationship points has their own special scene with the player during the ending sequence to generally wrap up their character arc, offer some extra backstory, or just, like, bro out with the player. these are already finished in game btw okay, so let's get some caveats out of the way: they're just single few-minute cutscenes, i hope people will find them cute. sometimes areas change a little based on endings, but that's it, don't expect too much. due to Reasons , they will not play during the ending sequence of the main game-- it's during the ending sequence of postgame specifically. i realize, that's a lot more playtime to work around and see who's endings you'll get, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. i think it'll be worth playing postgame anyway though. they are not explicitly romantic. please do not expect them to be romantic. if you expect them to be romantic you will be disappointed in them and i will be disappointed in you. you're entitled to your headcanons but those are your business, not the game's. now some other details to pre-empt questions: the thresholds vary from character to character. it might take a +6 on one person and +8 on another. i'm making these numbers up btw don't panic. thresholds for character epilogues will generally be higher than for mix and match. so if you don't get them in mix and match, you definitely won't get their ending. also, just saying, characters are not relative to each other. so like, +4 on fern and -2 on shelly (god forbid) doesn't mean that fern likes you more than shelly does; it means that fern likes you four points more than he otherwise would, and shelly likes you two points less than she otherwise could... but like let's be real, shelly still likes you more than he does. a fair number of points have been added in e19. i plan to use a switch to soften the thresholds for older save files, but that's probably going to make old files somewhat wonky compared to new ones. whatever happens happens. if your file predates e16 when points were added (iirc?) then you're up a creek without a paddle i'm sorry there is no saving you, at least as far as character epilogues go no characters' epilogues are designed to be exclusive with each other. however, idk if, because of where points are in the game and which ones require trade-off choices etc, that makes it impossible to get every combination at once. personally i would rather that not be possible, otherwise there's an optimal way to play, and we don't like that. but again, que sera sera. i can take other questions and maybe edit this if there's common ones, but i won't be answering questions about specific thresholds or which characters have endings. ok i think that's all for now. development is still on track for our previous estimation. i think. stay cool, kids we made it through another year-- both in terms of waiting for release, and waiting out our respective global crises. been a warm winter here so far. haven't seen a speck of snow yet... speaking of, since we're all just waiting around anyway, maybe consider dropping by our annual winter party? idk i just think it would be neat if you did. even if you just lurk, maybe you could try not lurking on that day! it's a great day for it. ok bye

hi! we're still here. still going. i don't want to write a post though, so take some pics and have a nice day

SPU delivery for a certain P̸͡L̸AY̴͢E̢͘R̷̸! Hey, uh… Is this the right place? I’m s’pposed to deliver this to P̸͡L̸AY̴͢E̢͘R̷̸… They told me they were staying over at this place for the time bein’. ...Oh, they’re not here right now? Well that’s a lil’ unfortunate. Do you mind holdin’ onto it until they receive it, then? That’d be real great, thanks. It’s uh... Kind of a suspicious package if you ask me, bro. What’s up with it lookin’ like a present and that creepy lookin’ mask… button… thing... holdin’ together that ribbon? Not that it’s really any of my business, but y’know… Kinda has that uncanny feelin’ about it. Dunno. Don’t really trust it. But anyways, I was given a note alongside the package with a message on it that I had to pass on to P̸͡L̸AY̴͢E̢͘R̷̸. It reeeeeaaadds…. “Open and you will find a clue to the path forward. A trial awaits for you to solve on the way to your goal, but speaking the answer out loud will turn your words into dust.” I… really don’t have a damn clue about what any of that means. My first guess is that it means you have to keep things to yourself, but why? ‘S not like it’s actually physically possible to have your words turn into dust, is it? ….right????? Well, either way— this cryptic stuff is none of my damn business, so I’ll uh… Just go and take my leave, yeah? See ya around, dude.

Okay, let's start with the Big Thing. Rejuv is going through a major script overhaul. In short, Rejuv/Desu/Reborn are being formatted to use the same scripts so that when a new change is implemented, it can easily be done across all three games. tl:dr, optimization yada yada. Recently this process started for Rejuv and well... How can I say this eloquently... Shit's fucked, shit's broken, and we need a helping hand to make things not fucked. The basic requirement for this is, ah, uh, lemme look at the cue cards... uh... "Know how to code, and get along with Cass." Right, that aside, I'm also extending this for people who want to help and are experienced with spriting-- Particularly in editing/dealing with Pokemon sprites. With Gen 9 looming and all of our ambitious takes with Aevian mons... Well, quite frankly, we need help in that department too. (If you think you can do well editing tilesets, or animating moves, that'd be a big help too!) Discord is required. Zumi's edit 17/7/2022: Also, please make sure you actually have time to contribute! We're looking for people who are able to consistently help out during development. While we try to be as understanding as possible about any circumstances that pop up and IRL responsibilities are also super important, times like right before and on version release we need all hands on deck, so please make sure you're not signing up while already having too much on your hands. Scripting application: Sprite Artist Application: #------------------------------------# Before I start with the updates, I want to reiterate that v13.5 is a full version. With its own new storyline, and sidequests... I have to put that there because I got some nasty tumblr asks a while back dogging me about "taking too long for a half version". it's not a half version. Even if it was, making a game takes time. I also have my own personal life. Please be patient. If you're not patient, die mad about it. I'll take as long as I need. Okay? Ok. Continuing! #------------------------------------# Obligatory collage of in game images GO! #------------------------------------# GDC Updates Grand Dream City has been under the radar during this update. My goal with this area was to make every singe map look distinguishable, and to have a clear layout so that getting lost wouldn't be an issue. Of course, some people can't help but get lost. That's a given, but I wanted to make it so that when you get lost, it's easy to get back on track. So... What's new with GDC? Besides the new maps, of course. All districts will be open the moment you arrive. That includes the festival area with all the mini-games. (Route 9 will not be available.) Maps have been compacted. New bus line. This will get you places the train cannot! New Train/Bus pass item. If obtained, transportation becomes free. Revamped encounters. New trainers. New Help Requests. Help Requests: I've mentioned that there's a new quest log system, right? Pretty sure I have. TL:DR on that is, you get a quest, it's logged in a new menu, and it will be there to tell you what to do and what rewards are available. However, in addition to that, Help Requests can now be started anywhere. If you come across Sasha lamenting over her mother's absence, you can start the quest just by speaking with her. Girl with the lost Starly? Speak with her! The quest will begin. Additionally, if you like just grabbing all the quests in one place, you can still use the Help Centers to do so. New Battle UI: So uhh... We're getting new UI! The UI we've been using initially was Reborn's, then we moved onto use Xenogene's (recolored blue), and now we're moving onto our own unique interface! It's not finished, so keep that in mind! Some things to take note of: Status changes the entirety of the health bar. There's also a faint marking over the health bar as well. New shiny symbol. Crests and Mega evolution symbols are in the same spot. Legends Arceus Mons: - We're probably going to push these with Gen 9 because we still don't have a lot of info on them, and with Gen 9 seemingly bringing them into the game as well, they're probably going to have a lot of changes as well. Plus, we have a lot on our plate already. But that's all-- Huh? What? ... Oh, yeah, okay. So a little something for veteran Rejuv players (I'm talkin' like, V1 players) I have a small lil treat for you! k bye.

warning. lots of words that don't mean jack shit below. view at your own discretion. Just another general update! I've been working hard on the game, but I've also been feeling pretty demotivated and burned out lately. Mainly due to me being home all the time and not being able to get out as much. You'd think I'd get a lot more done with the massive amount of time I've had, yeah? Hahaha, no. In fact, I've been slower because of all of this.(More of this rant below!!!) Depression.png Because of that I've taken a week off. Like... actually. An entire week. I've done nothing. Man did it feel awesome. (Afterwards, during the break I was bored as hell.) Imagine that. Taking genuine breaks HELPS your motivation and mood. ???? Sounds fake, but okay... Anyway. I've switched my focus to working primarily on v13 story content. I feel like if I have that out of the way, releasing v13 will feel... Idk. Possible? *Cough* Well, it's the end of August. That means we're all going back to school... Huh? You're done with school? Y-You graduated? Well... Courtesy of me, I've re-enrolled you! Who's ready for a new semester of dreams and nightmares?? You are!I ---REJUV MK UPDATE--- As well as working on main content mostly, @andracass helped us create our own MK build! Starting V13, Rejuv will have MK support. There are still a few things that need to be ironed out, but things are looking really promising! As for Mac support... We have something for that too! Mac users won't be left out B). ---Puzzle time Baybeee--- One thing I've been trying to do in past areas is add more puzzles. Most of these puzzles aren't difficult. They're just there to add some sort of interactivity in places that have gameplay luls. I've created some things that I'm proud of, but coming up with puzzles in RPGMaker seems impossible to me sometimes. I'm the first one to admit that I'm not excellent at making them, but I would like to be! If you guys have any puzzle concepts to share, I'd be happy to hear them! I beg you. ---When is V13 dropping?--- Short answer: Still trying for this year. Long Answer: My goal is to have it out by the end of the year, but that's still only 3 months from now. I've seen people get annoyed with me because of the long wait, but I assure you no one is more annoyed than I. Like I said in the beginning of this post. I've been burned out and unmotivated all year. I'm not going to sit here and lie about my productivity. I said I've been working hard on the game, it's true. But that wasn't the case for the majority of the year. There were days where I would do one event and just feel done. I've felt guilty about it, but I've also just felt numb to the fact that I pretty much just vegetated this year. Everytime I felt like things were getting better, things would knock me down another peg. It's been a cycle since February. Aghjgfsghskjlghsdgjds;jgsdh; I've read articles about how this isn't a problem exclusive to me. Working productivity for tons of people have been almost 0 this year. With circumstances I don't have to repeat because we all know-- It's just difficult. I just try to tell myself that next year will be better. Whether that's a blatant lie or not doesn't matter. It's there for a sense of purpose. If I can sum up this year for me in one image, it'd be: and that's all it is. That being said, we've gotten progress up to 71%!! Even though most of that is bloated because of a lot of smaller things getting done... It still looks nice and is a motivating factor for me! Still have a lot of sidequests to do and I have to finish the main story (Which is over 50% done now!). Alright that's enough rambling. I'm done. I promise. Rejuv v13 hopefully drops this year. If not, early 2021. Definitely not any later than that. Then onto v14... Ha. HAhahahaha. I can't wait for v14.