Weekly blog

Just planning on recording a Game N Chill. So I'll probably save most of my talking points for that due reduce redaunacy. But I did want to do a blog of some sort this weekend. I've overall been taking it very easy last week, especially the weekend, watching the TRG Colosseum stream. Hopefully some of you saw my twitter spam or various community posts mentioning it and checked it out, cause it was a good time. But let's get to the point.

Streams and videos...

Still trying to find a good moment to get back into streaming. I was actually thinking about doing a casual stream tonight, but I'm pondering just focusing on other things and wait until next weekend to get back into streaming. Not sure what I want to stream yet either way, since I'm still conflicted about how/if I want to handle streaming Paper Mario Master Quest. Plus we're getting ever so closer to the end of Dawn of Djinn so I still have to figure out the next game series I'd want to record/stream instead.

For now though, the Youtube schedule itself will be pretty similar as previous months. Minus me still just sticking to streaming when I feel up to it rather than forcing a schedule. During the intermissions of TRG Colosseum streams I've just finished queuing everything for the month. Though I'd like to finish recording the commentary for a Dawn of Djinn bonus video before I truly consider the month done. Here's a screenshot for everything scheduled so far (Note the Sundays that don't have anything yet, probably will have more shorts. I just forgot to schedule them while getting everything else up...

The downside is we're almost already a week into March and I have nothing prep or planned yet for April 1st, which is a shame because I've got ideas but just never put the time aside to narrow it down, let alone work on it.

Paper Mario/Golden Sun

As I warp up Sweet Training, I decided to take some time to mess around with Dawn of Djinn again. Speaking of which, my plans for the final things I wanted to add to Sweet Training fell apart, so I decided to just call it done and move on.

Basically, I wanted to get Super Guarding working as a bonus challenge run. I had code to reference and everything seemed to be going great but combining my code with that code sadly results in a bug where whenever Super Guarding is enabled, all enemy defense just disappears. Since I have no assembly experience, (everything assembly I've used so far has just been me slightly adjusting numbers on the code from other mods), there isn't really a good way for me to find and fix the problem. So I've decided it'd be better to move on. If I figure out what's wrong along the way, it'll just give me something to add to the final Sweet Expedition whenever I resume working on it.

That being said, with Sweet Training basically done. I'll be uploading it to itcho and GitHub soon, with source code included on the gitHub release for fellow developers to look into. Probably even later today. It probably would of been ready to go sooner, but Github has been a pain when it comes to organizing things in folders for me. Probably spent several hours trying to find a way to move things around just to give up, delete everything, and just reupload it. Main reason why I didn't just upload source code directly to github in the past. (Not that I can really do that with the majority of my projects anyways because I do zero coding with Golden Sun modding, at least currently.)

I've already gotten a request or two with sharing how I did Element Swapping, but it's basically impossible to just make/share an "Element Swap" patch because it's directly built into the moves it ties from, so hopefully this would suffice. Like the swap itself isn't that impressive, it's just a single variable that rotates values between 0-2, and I essentially write the same attack 3 different times with slight variations depending on the "element" and putting each instance in a switch so that only one plays based on the value of "element". Technically the variable itself was custom made by others in the community, working and completing the new features for Chai's Tea attack confirmed that I could have just used a normal Global byte that already existed in the game and got the same results. Getting too technical aside, the point is being that hopefully sharing the source code will suffice those inquires because there isn't really as much going on with how I got element swapping to work as people think, but there isn't really a good way (or at least an easy way) to share it without just sharing all the changes I made to the partners/moves.

I was going to talk a bit about all the changes I've made in Dawn of Djinn now that I'm easing back on Paper Mario. But that took longer than I thought. For now, long story short. Still working on the new NPC and text editing in Golden Sun finally reared it's ugly face. I think it's working for now, but it forced me to do things the old fashioned way and what I can write will be very limited. So I don't think I'm going to be able to reach my original vision with them, but I'm going to do my best. You can probably see more details of my pain and suffering with that process on my Discord, I certainly feel like I've at least brought it up once or twice. They currently have been added up to Bilbin though I feel like I'm going to have to go back for something I missed along the way.

Mis

Everything else went way longer than I thought so I think I'll save sharing mis stuff for the Game N Chill. Long story short though, TRG Colosseum was a fun stream to watch. That last event was especially magical because everything just came together in the end. So many running gags from other segments of the stream just all came together to form a moment truly beautiful. Because that went Friday-Sunday I didn't have a lot of time to do much else, but that's fine because it gave me a moment to truly take a break from modding for a bit which I kind of think I needed. Plus, the down time was just enough to really catch up on video editing. That made me feel pretty good considering my backlog was starting to get low enough to worry me. Also used some of that time watching the streams to finally get those new "legendaries" in the new Pokemon games before the raids for them ended and got to try out Big Run. Was real worried at first when I discovered the Second Big Run they ever actually did was during TRG Colosseum and I really wanted to play more, but I'm happy I at least got to try it out. Probably would of got sick of it anyways considering Splatoon Rust and not having a good grasp on how to handle the new Boss Salmoniod.

I didn't get out much, but I got a few extra days off from the main job so I'm hoping to make up for lost time to fix that and finish up recording I wasn't able to do during the week. By that time I should of had enough time away from my other projects to be ready to jump back into things. Looking forward to making more progress on Dawn of Djinn and maybe I'll even get back into Sweet Expedition proper. I know people were really looking forward to Sweet Expedition, but I just had a lot more fun focusing on Sweet Training since it was technically a smaller scope and played way more into my strengths, allowing me to make something that felt way better to play. Would like to at least release what I have with Sweet Expedition eventually, but I'm not in a rush to do so, I feel like I've already released some of the best stuff Sweet Expedition has to offer by making Sweet Training. But I suppose the best part about it being not being released yet is that there is still time for that to change.