Hello! I’ve been following this mod for a little while now and I want to say!! How absolutely impressed and blown away how amazing it is!! The story and world building is so much fun! And the sprites and the amount of effort you put in each animation is phenomenal! The pokemon look so good and I adore how you made emmet and Ingo’s walk cycles different, and just the! Writing and seer amount of programming done is just! Amazing! Super bravo! You two so clearly but so much thought into (1/?)

First off, I'd just like to say thank you for taking the time to type out all your messages! It really means a lot whenever we get feedback like this!

Kade is brilliant on the world-building aspect of things and coming up with ideas... She sent me a whole google doc with a draft of their schedules a day after I managed to get Emmet in game. Really helped give this project a sense of direction!

I wasn't too confident regarding writing and pixel art at first, but having her take charge with scripts really helped me stay on track towards a higher state. After so many events, I feel like we have a good idea as to how to write their characters. Making Emmet's sprite first did make Ingo's a bit of a pain to draw (since he does not walk like that) but I'm glad I committed to the bit from day one.

I've been staying up late (I get too excited working on the mod...), but I'm making sure to sleep in to account for that! It'll be a while until we get around to releasing platonic versions of their routes (don't get me wrong, it's first on our patch priority- especially since so many people following this are aromantic! We just still have a long way to go regarding the base mod.), but I'm glad what we have is still enjoyable for now. Emmet's part of Ingo's 10 heart event is still one of my favorite things I've written. It wasn't in the original draft and was only added in during the coding phase, but everything is constantly evolving!

As for Chandelure and Ingo, they can understand each other, just not in the way the farmer can understand Pokemon. We actually discussed the logistics and capabilties together but I don't believe we've ever published it in a post. The farmer understands Pokemon as if they were recieving instant translations to English from the noises they "speak". Farmer has a bit of telepathy in a sense because sometimes, they're just making noises, but they can read their thoughts in words. (When writing Joltik, I don't actually have any text in my head... it's just babbles of "bah" and "wawwawawawawa" in my head. Baby noises.) Farmer also has an absurd ability to eavesdrop, so they can just tell if a Pokemon is thinking/saying anything.

Ingo and Chandelure have their souls bonded, but Ingo can't quite decipher what Chandelure's chimes mean exactly in words. He reads her through a mix of tone, how her flames burn, charades, and any visions she transmits into his mind through active effort. In the tunnel, she's just transmitting what she wants to say into the farmer's mind. Ingo can't pick up on that. When Chandelure communicates with Ingo, she has to will his perception, and it's only in images. If Ingo had the image of hand-holding with his crush flashed into his mind, he would just get flustered and eventually assume it's his imagination running wild again. He does get caught up in his ideas, so Chandelure can easilly gaslight him into believing it's his own train of thought rather than her fault.

In that same line of thinking, Chandelure could convince him that he's super down bad for the farmer with enough suggestions since she kind of wants to win a bet with Grandpa saying that they'll get married in three years. Ingo feels haunted about having a crush for a reason.

▷ Station Steward Thylak