hey, what's going on?

hi!!!!

oh man. remember dev blogs?

i don't.

in fact, when choosing a title for this one, i had to stumble over all of the other related "i've forgotten what a dev blog is" titles.

this is how we got to where we are today.

so i'm sure that all 5 of you who regularly visit this devblog (hi! thanks for checking and i'm so sorry we haven't done more of these!) are wondering:
what's going on?

i am dying, squirtle. oh man am i dying.

i gotta finish grad school, i gotta find a job, i'm trying to do this whole "coding" thing on the side, and my fun field trip to europe got hit by the Rona (i'm okay! it just sucked!).

life is big stresso. too big stresso. i work great under a nice stable level of stress. i genuinely find cleaning up the code to be stress-relieving (stress cleaning, but for nerds!) but that's only if i'm not already super stressed out.

and oh man am i super stressed out. so i haven't been getting nearly as much done as i would like to. that includes blogging! even though the blog's in a weird state right now.

what's going on? (devblog edition)

reborn's in a weird place rn since it is, as you may have heard, finished!

upon finishing, the team basically split into three directions:

- some people went straight with ame over to starlight

- some people hung around with me for additional game fixes

- some people stayed right where they were! they were on multiple games to begin with and this has really changed a whole lot of nothing for them.

regardless of where people are, the situation is simple: reborn's done and everyone's off doing better things. fangames devs require two things: time and motivation. no one has time, and the motivation is on other projects.

but this is a reborn dev blog! and the only way for there to still be work on it is through the scripts.

what's going on? (scripts edition)

sooo stop me if you've heard this one before....

i really wanted to get reborn/rejuv/deso all on the same scripts.

that basically kicked off the moment that the last version of reborn was out.

it is, uh, very hard.

there's two main components of the script work:

- data structure redevelopment so everyone can share scripts

- everything else

there's a lot of work! tinkering with the scripts is complicated! these changes are very sweeping and require a lot of bugfixing to make sure everything works correctly with the new system. and i swear to god, every time anyone looks at the scripts we run into like five other things that we'd like to fix. i'd like rewrite the battle system!

but, alas. no time.

so: where are the scripts at?

well, we redid the data structures and battles almost work!

this is a pretty significant distance from the original state of the scripts, which was "everything is crashing everywhere all the time". stuff actually tends to work now!

this statement will, of course, come back to bite me very soon. but there's hope for progress!

i also want to take a moment to shout out the whole scripter squad who's been helping out with everything. i have primarily been directing stuff off in the distance (with some brief bursts of my own work) while the individual games' scripters have been cranking away at the myriad things we want to do with the code.

big things we've got coming (that i would expect the average player to care about):

- new pbs! we now use ruby hashes instead of the standard text files for compiling game data. it's internally simpler at the expense of requiring a touch bit more coding knowledge to use.

- new save files! don't freak out, we have a converter. new save files are going to be a little bit smaller than they used to be and will hopefully be a little less prone to corruption!

- quicker animation loading! and data loading in general. i mentioned this before, but i'll mention it again because i really like my optimizations. game go zoom!!

so hopefully one day this'll come to a game near you!

what's going on? (games edition)

oooookay, so, development's a little weird for everything these days.

basically, the script development now occurs in tandem with the development of the individual games but isn't actually directly tied to the games themselves. the scripts are their own thing. legally the game (say, reborn) is separate from the scripts. everyone does their own work and then the scripts are shared between everyone. rejuv/deso will release a new version with whatever scripts we've got, and those scripts will just get progressively better over time. theoretically we'll reach a point where other hot new community games can just take the same scripts and run with them. who knows! 

ideally it'll be really easy to pick up and use, kind of like a reborn-based essentials. (one day i'll get a name for it!) the primary focus of the scripts will be the core community games, but if you're making one and you wanna use what we've got, more power to ya.

this is also why i'm hoping i'll be able to sneak an engine update to reborn someday! that'd be cool. 

i feel like i'm starting to get rambly, so i'm cutting the post here. hopefully this explains some of the stuff that's been going on, and hopefully the other games will start showing off some of the work soon!