Chuggachuggachuggachuggachugga-March 15th! You know what that means – VX Ace released in English! Now I’ll begin the long, arduous process of converting DS into Ace format, something that will surely delay things for at least a good six months.

Ha ha. Just kidding.

Though I’ll admit, I briefly considered it! Ace turned such a seductive gaze onto me that my heart started bulging from my chest, turning each throb into orgasmic agony, and I had to steel myself with iron will that might possibly match the MC’s. (Probably not.)

At any rate, I’m turning all my GAME MAKING ATTENTION to DS now. I was busy earlier, now I am less busy. I’ve been more than a little sick and probably still am, but I’m still going to attempt to work hard! Interestingly enough, the longer-than-expected break did a lot of great things for me. I just feel so excited every time I open VX. And then I just kinda do this when I look at the piles of half-finished stuff I left off with.

I must break off into a tangent about what a terrible scripter/programmer/coder/HARD-BOILED TECHNICAL PERSON I am.

• Don’t leave unfinished code lying around for such a long time that you forget its exact function.

• If you do, comment the everloving shit out of it. Comment your code properly anyways. I found a surprising amount of comments that were just “PENTA FUCK” or “PENTA AUGH GOD” or “PENTA NEW” – you see, the PENTA is just in case I forget who is responsible for this mess.

• Just… just be organized. OTL

I boot things up and the equip scene is throwing errors in window_base, I never finished enemy AI for the battles I’d started it, certain skills are mysteriously not working, the little CUSTOM METRICS SYSTEM I’d made isn’t reading through skill notes properly, the message windows still do WEIRD THINGS I want them to not do… Geeze! However I’ve broken it down into a very clear path of things to tackle. I’m just…not a very good coder, but I really want to get better. Hopefully I can learn by cleaning up after myself. OTL I might break down and ask for help, since you know what I want to do more than becoming better with Ruby? Actually having a game people can play.

Technical issues aside, my biggest concern right now is skills. I HAVE WAY TOO MANY. Not counting some organizational dividers in the database, I’d peg them as being around 120? TOO MANY, THAT’S HOW MANY I HAVE. A lot of this is just based on the fact there’s 8 elements, so for every skill like “Fire shield – protects against fire for 1 round”, there’s 7 other variants to account for the elements. There’ll be a lot of skills no matter what, I think. And there’s only so much I can combine and squish into one skill; some of them are getting ridiculous. “Md. Water/Fire dmg, -RES/AGI, 75% chance of Burn. +Water affinity” – it’s gibberish, I tell ya!

I’ve already cut them down once, and the previous criterion was “can I justify using this in at least half of the battles?”, but… Surely there are things I can do to streamline them further. I’ve been mulling over what those things are. Perhaps I will find answers!

Actually, when I was going through skill tests and stuff, I was finding answers! The most obvious thing is noticing that a buuuunch of skills are just elemental variations of “Do X degree of Y damage and inflict Z set of debuffs”, I could do with less of those.

Okay and I think I'm done rambling. In yet a different area of stuff I’ve been doing GRAPHICS STUFF, nothing major. Mostly a lot of the portrait stuff I’ve done is soon to be one year old! A WHOLE YEAR.

Just…look. The one on the right is slightly better and it didn’t take me that long to do.

Also I have this irrational fear that I’m beginning to repeat myself. I hope no one reads all the blog posts. And there will probably be another one very soon, I'm contemplating STUFF I would love to have outside input on.

Bonus unrelated thought:

She sure is a woman of many faces.