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Comments
There were always going to be changes. I mean, that was evident from like, the second Clockwork mentioned new Pokemon.
Yes, but sprite hacking and switching moves around aren't hard.
Coding things from scratch is significantly moreso.
Also what are we doing sound-wise, if anything?
What?
I thought this was purely hypothetical.
-shrug-
Might end up going nowhere, might go somewhere.
Again, -shrug-
It'll either work out or not.
Hold on guys, I got this.
I dunno dudes, this seems a bit too big for its britches.
It's fun designing a fangame, but some of the stuff you're coming up with is well beyond the capabilities of a hacked ROM. For instance, what are you going to do about the phys/spe split?
Okay what's this now? The other day it was pretty clear to me that we were at least making an attempt. If it's now "maybe" I'm just not going to bother, I have enough pointless worldbuilding on my hands with Flip!.
Well a project's very time-consuming and requires a lot of effort. If we were drawing our income from this project like Gamefreak it would be a different matter, but we have lives and obligations and other more important stuff.
So basically, there's a good chance that this'll wind up being nothing at all.
Come on, El, it's not like you're a stranger to failed projects.
I know that Black/White has been cracked at least enough to start a translation on it.
I am fairly sure we are at least going to attempt it, but I have no idea if we will be successful. There are a lot of things involved, and I don't know if all of them are possible to overcome.
I'll at least give it a shot, though.
So you're using the B/W engine? That's going to be...significantly harder to use than the R/S/E engine.
Well, maybe. CU may want to use the Gen IV engine though.
Anyway, it is not like this sort of project has not been done before.
It all depends, I guess.
I'm going to tell you right now that trying to use the B/W engine is almost certainly a lost cause.
I doubt you'd even get the D/P/P engine. There's a reason no one bothers trying anything higher than third gen, and it is perfectly possible to emulate most of what's in the later generations in the third generation's engine, but it would take a lot of work, and I just don't know that we'd have anyone willing to put it in that much work.
It takes years to make these projects. I hope you're all willing to be patient.
^Basically that.
man i like just linked this shit
^ Dude, patience is something I am good at.
Now if you actually plan to materialize anything, you have to do it systematically.
What I'm getting here is mostly discussion on what you're going to change once you've made things work, but why not focus on how you're going to make this work?
doesn't even matter
For what it's worth, I initially came into the thread thinking CU just meant "what do you think would be cool in a Pokemon game", but this has been fun, and I'm willing to contribute, even if we don't know how we're going to program everything. I'll admit that we should establish our capabilities before trying to radically alter the system, but I'd rather not be made to lose hope because oh my God that would require us to materialize something! That idea was presented on, like, the second page, and look where we are now.
So, back onto a topic worth discussing:
I didn't think the Ghost trio was all supposed to be bad and trying to use the Corrupter as a weapon, so much as they all had different ideas of how to deal with it. I mean, if there's a consensus that the Ghost trio should all have had that sort of agenda in life, I'll roll with it, but I didn't think that was what we wanted. I don't have objections to the placement of plot points, I don't think.
I... I wasn't going for that. Sorry if I sounded like I was.
It's not the Ghost trio that has an agenda- it's whoever captures the Trio. The Ghost Trio themselves are content to stay in their caves and just not interfere with anything. Either the PC or the Team captures them and uses them for their agenda- cleansing or corrupting.
Unless you meant the Team? In which case, I don't know.
Personally, I like mine and Alk's idea, but if nobody else does, I'll accept that.
O.
Wait, yeah, I mistook "The Legendary Team" as "the Ghost Trio". My fault, though that's not exactly the clearest difference, given the normal Team [X] naming standards and the fact that the Ghost Trio was originally a team, themselves.
That sounds good, then. If any issues come up, it'll probably be smaller things that just aren't coming together coherently to fit our ultimate goals. Wait, no. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the Good/Bad Ending differentiation, based on how the player decides to play the game.
The concept that Alk and I had was, essentially, that the Ghost Trio could exert some sort of control over the Poison-type's miasma. Like, each one could either reverse it or spread it further each.
So, Team Bad Guys wants to capture the Ghost Trio so they can spread it further- and, presumably, stop its influence spreading when they don't want a country dead- and the PC wants to capture them to heal the land. Then the ending is determined by how many you caught versus how many they caught.
Essentially, the Ghost Trio act more like tools than anything with an agenda in this scenario.
I kind of had an idea where each one was blaming the other two for their failure and deaths, and you have to somehow convince them otherwise before you can capture them.
(Not being sarcastic here) What's wrong with it?
One of the fun things about Pokemon games is that they're really relaxed in pacing, and there's no real time limit on the things you need to do. If we suddenly assign a time limit to key plot points, we'll probably be ruining someone's fun, and I think the whole thing with punishing someone for letting a match drag out would, at the very least, be an unnecessary mechanical punishment, if not a detriment to certain playstyles, like the guy who wants to use a rather defensive team. Or, if we decreased the difficulty to the point where it's very hard to get pokemon get knocked out, we lose some depth.
Also, CU has a good point. That was originally what I had figured, too.
EDIT: Wait, I have an idea: seeing that, apparently, B2W2 has different unlockable difficulty settings, maybe we could add a high difficulty setting after originally clearing the game--a New Game+, where a more efficient playstyle is encouraged, and Bad Endings can happen.
I have a separate idea for the evil team, but I'll post it later because I stayed up until 4 AM to write shit and I wanna sleep.
Well, that is because the Pokemon games are extremely linear. I don't know; I just thought that it was an idea that was worth considering- rewarding exploration and... puzzle-solving skills, I guess, although the puzzles wouldn't have been at all difficult.
Where the regular games push you along the plot, I was hoping that this plot would encourage the player to involve themselves in the plot, and encourage them to explore the world and stuff.
This one, on the other hand, I will concede defeat on, mostly because that was posited as just an idea on one way to determine whether the Team gets there first or you do. I mean, there are a tonne of other things that could work, but when I typed that up, I was almost as tired as I am now, and 'time limit' was the only thing I could think of. It could also be, say... Fuck, I have no clue. Whether you fail to solve a puzzle in the cave, or something.
I don't think this idea would work. A lot of the plot is dependent on the idea that the player has to actually figure out where the Ghosts are. If the player is guided into the good ending, they will already know what the plot is, and that it involves the Ghosts, so you lost that aspect of it, which I don't think would be good for it.
On the other hand, I feel like the games already do enough to encourage exploration, at least--even the younger players know that you can get cool items and shit by checking all the doors. If we simply have a good enough plot, and cool enough characters, it should become engaging in its own right.
Maybe. I dunno. I, personally, don't mind keeping with the tradition of linear plots, as long as we work to make the characters and events more interesting than in the canonical games.
Provided we went with this idea, we could always move the Ghosts around a bit, so that new clues are needed. And then we could do things like ramp up puzzle difficulty, as well as levels, since we're presuming the player is already used to the puzzle conventions. It depends on how far we want to take these ideas, I think.
I mean, I could get on board with a Pokemon VN-esque thing, but I was under the impression that we were providing our own take on the established template.
I didn't want to be a downer, but I'm with Elektross on this. Making games is hard work, especially games as content-heavy as Pokemon is. And one of my concerns lurking this thread is that there hasn't been a whole lot of discussion concerning actual gameplay design and the like, at least from a systematic perspective. For instance, based on what kinds of player engagement do you want to imitate other Pokemon games, and where do you want to diverge? Can we successfully and accurately identify the means and basis by which Pokemon games are balanced? And if so, do we even want to imitate that?
A lot of ideas -- perfectly good ones -- are being thrown around here, but they're not being developed on the technical design level that makes the difference between putting ideas on the table and actually designing a game. And there's nothing wrong with sharing and discussing ideas for this kind of thing, but if you want to take it from ideas to actual game, you have to alter the way you think about your ideas before ever committing them to code, visual design, animation or sound.
Fuck, it's twenty past two in the morning and I just quoted this empty line six times and typed the 'm' in empty eleven times before realizing that empty is spelled with only one m, I don't even know if my reply to this is coherent and I'm not even gonna try to reply to All Nines until I've had sleep.
But, look. There's a very simple perspective that I am going for here, at least; I don't know about anybody else. However, before we start talking about anything on a technical level, I want to have a coherent idea of what the game will be.
This will help when it comes time to code and shit, because we will know what we actually want, what we need to make it work, and how we can tie it all up together.
Shit, I don't think I'mm making any sense here. It's like...
Okay, analogy time. It's like writing a book. Whenever I attempt to write something, I never start by thinking, "Okay, how am I going to write this? Am I going to use flowery language, or am I going to make the emotion understated? Will I invoke the use of metaphor and allegory, or lead the reader through implications?"
Rather, I always start with the story and the characters- the actual content of the story. "Okay, so there's Rose, and she's a rich girl with absent parents. She hides behind a mask of perfection, but secretly hates herself. And there's Vanessa, who is a poor girl who lives with her step-father, because her mother was abusive and her father died when she was eight. She hides her emotions behind a tough facade, and she's not sure if she can even feel them any more." I decide what type of story it would be- in this case, a hurt/comfort romance thing.
Then, I move on to the what- still not the how, the what. This involves things like what is happening in the plot- what things are going to happen and when. It involves things like the framing of the setting- high school and college- and how that would affect the plot and characters, and whether all this would support the narrative.
Then, I move on to the technical aspects. Would third-person perspective or first-person suit this type of story better? Should I stick to one perspective, or swap between perspectives? This is where I tie it all down together- take all the ideas I had before, and putting them on the table, tying it into a solid idea for an actual piece.
Lastly, the fourth aspect, the work, comes in, and this shapes the previous piece. I experiment a bit, then I go with whatever works. I might trim down the narrative, change the flow of events and such, but I can do this because I have the narrative already and I know how this will affect it.
Fuck, that probably didn't even make sense and there are like a million typoes and it took me twice as long to write it as it should have. My analogy is weirder than the cactus one.
Sorry, here is something more coherent:
rft5yu7trfgrtfg54tyrfg5
Like Nova said (speaking of Nova, she shouldn't be so hard on herself; that was perfectly coherent. She should get some sleep, though), I want to know what we basically want to do before we decide on an interpretation of gameplay mechanics. If we're talking too much about flavor, it's probably because of how few of us are programmers (or competitive players, if that's what you mean), and I'll admit that this probably isn't the time to actually be pitching Pokemon ideas (hopefully it works better next week, when everyone has a portfolio). But I want to at least have the plot and setting before we start with finer details.
How would you suggest we do that? I'm also not quite concerned because this is basically all brainstorming anyway, and I think we need to be on the same page about what we want before we get ourselves onto the same page about mechanics.
I disagree. Pokèmon is about Pokèmon. What Pokèmon we create should help us decide the form of the project, not vice versa.