First, let’s answer a question that’s been hanging in the back of everyone’s minds for the entire year: Yes, I can!

It’s been an extremely busy month, for more reasons than I can say. I mean that literally. Lawyers are involved. And not in the fun way, where you’re applying for copyright protections for a creative project or whatever. I mean in the bad way, where you’re helping a loved one through a real rough time. Hopefully I’ll be able to talk about it in a few months. In the meantime though, here’s all the actual project updates you’re here for:

Shifty Squares

I’ve been working on a level editor!

After a few months of being on the fence, I’ve decided for sure that the game needs a Puzzle Mode—where you can play premade levels and try to beat them in the fewest moves possible, or where you can make your own such levels to share with friends.

(I’m making the level editor first, before Puzzle Mode actually exists, so I can use the level editor to make the puzzles for Puzzle Mode. But also because it just seemed like a fun thing to do at the time.)

Gaming

The second part of the DLC for Pokémon Scarlet/Violet came out this month. As is tradition, I pretty much put everything else in my life on hold for a few days so I could play it nonstop, complete it, and get back to the rest of my life ASAP.

It was fun! Short, though—which I appreciate, since I only had a few days available to spare for it in the first place. And I was less than impressed with the writing quality of the storyline—but that’s par for the course for Pokémon games, really.

Thanks to the wild Pokémon additions in the game, I’ve finally completed my years-long goal of catching a Porygon in every rare ball. (So, each kind of Apricorn Ball, Dream, Safari, Sport, and Beast.) I had already done this for my other favs Dunsparce and Mawile a few generations ago, but Porygon is a pesky critter that’s rarely catchable in the wild. (It was given only as a gift in both Sun/Moon and Sword/Shield. Annoying!)

Porydex

… And as soon as I finished the S/V DLC, I immediately shifted all my energy and hyperfocus toward Porydex.

Porydex has been languishing behind the times for a while now. I skipped the entirety of 8th generation competitive battling, so my interest in keeping Porydex updated was at an all time low for a while. I never added the data for BD/SP, nor for Legends: Arceus, when they came out. And then S/V, if it followed the timeline set by Sword/Shield, would likely have DLC out within a year of release. DLC that would add new Pokémon, new moves, abilities, items, everything. So even if I wasn’t two full games behind already, my mindset was at the time was “why go through the hassle of ripping the S/V game data now and in a year? I’ll just do it once a year from now when the DLC is all out.”

So that’s what I did.

Of course, that means I’m now three full games behind. Which means I have a lot to keep track of, as I bring the database up to date, one chunk at a time.

This is my spreadsheet to keep track of which database tables I still need to update, and for which games. Database tables are basically spreadsheets. Behold, the most powerful weapon I’ve ever created: a spreadsheet of spreadsheets.

I’m currently most of the way through updating move descriptions (from scratch, as I mentioned last month). After that, I’ll be adding Scarlet/Violet move learnsets pulled from this data dump file. After that, I’ll probably pick at random from the ginormous list of outstanding tasks. There’s enough here to keep me busy for a while.

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Currently reading: Furies of Calderon (Codex Alera #1) by Jim Butcher

I’m only a few hours into the audiobook so far, and it hasn’t particularly pulled me in yet—but I adore Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, so I’m not going to give up on this one so easily.