Purpur - v0.5.7

Hello everyone, lots of things to say, as always, changelog and discussion first, and links at the end.

If you're loading your save from an older version, make sure to check if you saved in one of the following safe locations before loading, otherwise you risk crashing your game or appearing in a deprecated location of the map:

Player House

Juniper Lab

Dawn House

Sayoko House

Glade

Insela center

Insela Gym

Now, what's new, not much, as I said before this was a cleaning update.

The whole gallery got reworked, you won't notice much change, part of the point of its that you don't, but this rework will helps me a lot to more easily implement new content to it.

Continuing with the gallery, you can now replay animations inside it.

Similarly, the whole logic behind the ways the game put pictures on the screen was changed, and again, you aren't supposed to notice the change, just me.

The Voice at the Glade now properly keep track of your progress and helps find not yet unlocked content.

Rewriting wise, all the scenes involving Juniper and Sayoko got rewritten, with the exception of Sayoko repeat events. Similarly, all main story events up to halfway through the Alexa and Viola event were rewritten. This leaves the last half of Alexa and Viola event, The Mawile quest, and the lewd events you unlock after this as pending, as I ran out of time and I don't want to keep delaying updates. (the old versions are still there).

There are also a small balancing changes, I nefted Viola a little, and increased the level of the wild pokemon you can find afterwards to help an easier teambuilding.

A few bug fixes, notable, the potential unlocker should no longer trap you in an endless cycle.

Now the discussion.

I honestly underestimated the amount of content the game has, I thought the rewriting process would be a week of work, two weeks top, but as I slowly made progress, I noticed how fast time was passing, and I ultimately took de decision to not rush the process, and put more effort in the detail.

Revising the content after a while also helped me see the weaker points in my writing, the first half was specially hard to deal with, due to the very broken english, but it also helped me a lot to strengthen the characters characterization, obviously Sayoko was the most well defined character, but she's also a bit cartoonish so she's easier to express in that sense, and while I think Juniper and Dawn does gave a general sense of who they are, there was also a lot to improve with them.
Curiously the weaker characters ended up being the last ones, Viola and Alexa, I think is because they were a bit of a last minute addition, as Viola was the winner of the Gym Leader poll, I just shoehorned her and her sister in the game without much thought. I think I did a lot to rewrite them in the little I managed to revisit this last week, but I will come back to the rest of their already in game content, and future content.

Continuing in that line, with Sayoko and Dawn, being an archetype and a silent protagonist respectively, taking creative liberties to write more interesting characters with them is easy, and with Juniper I also kinda just exaggerated the parts of the character I like to write essentially a new one.
I think there's where my issue with Alexa and Viola was, I played it too safe, I tried to stay to close to a base material that is infamous for playing it safe and cheap. I need to be more bolder with the changes to make more interesting character, otherwise half the cast will end up being "kind person with one very specific quirk who only exist for the character to make wordplay about, who also likes to battle, but not to much so the player doesn't get frustrated".

Next are the Lewdmon, since they don't talk, characterizing them is a challenge in itself, and the easier solution I can think of is to make them gesticulate, but of course, that means drawing it all, and that's easier said than done. IDK I still have to ponder about how to handle that, because both Mawile and Braixen have very defined personalities in my head, but I have no way of depicting that in game, yet.

I said this before, and I'll say it again, next update will be 0.6, and will mark the start of a new way of handling updates that will, I hope, stop me from taking long hiatus and falling into creative blocks again. and if this doesn't work, I can still try eating a barrel.

There are some things I want to talk about regarding the direction of the game... but I'll do it next week, I don't think they relate to much with this update...

Also, I don't know if it is worth it, but maybe you can try replaying the game, check the revised content to see if I did a good work, IDK...

I replayed it whole to check everything works, and to double down in the balancing, this is the team I ended up with, fighting every trainer and only going against wild mons to catch them, with a team of five until getting Mawile, so I think I did a good work regarding the level curve, I do get that if you want to try a lot of pokemon you might miss the exp share, but the game is balanced around not having it, so I don't know what else to say...

Now the links, make sure to read the notes at the start.

PC:

Drive .................................................................................................... MEGA

Joi:

Drive .................................................................................................... MEGA

The Itchio post should be coming out along this, go give it some love (I need it)