Battles weren't forced onto you, you could pick them
I should also add that, even with the small number of quests we have now, we've already got ways to avoid battles. Obviously you can use repel to skip wild battles, or just walk around random trainers you'll encounter, but there's ways to avoid some storyline-related fights as well. One idea we wanted to communicate during the story was "Fighting isn't always the best option". As such, there's ways to resolve some situations peacefully (or at least without getting into an actual fight). There's only a small number of quests at the moment, but we already have a few situations where this occurs. Your dialog choices in tense situations may also have consequences besides a battle; People may live or die because of your actions, or various events may or may not occur. This isn't anything like mass effect or the witcher, (there's 2 paths through the story, not a bazillion) but small things might change.
I'm not saying implement all these now or I will show up at your home :P but having something at least close would be cool. Especially the picking our own battles, like the option to run before the battle starts. Players should be given a flexible amount of choices and not be 'forced' to do many things imo.
We're not going to let you run from every fight before it starts, but like I said above, we do wan to allow some non-combat options to various fights.
At some stage you're gonna have to show us all the starmon you have and their info so I can decide what goes on that milestone trainer's team that shares my name. Shock-eve sounds cool but is he steel, electric, and super fast? Wow, it's like magneton and jolteon had a baby :P.
Heh, we'll post something eventually. All of our starmon data is written in xml, so theoretically we could easily create a database or something :P
Will the pokedex give Pokemon locations? Like it does in the game.
Yes. If you haven't captured the starmon before (you just saw it), you'll get a more vague location ("Likes cool, dark areas", "Enjoys shallow water", "Likes extreme heat"). So we don't explicitly name the zone but you get a pretty good idea. If you've captured the starmon already, we actually list off the zones where you can find the thing.
@TheAlmaity: Go
Intentionally hiding mechanics that improve your pokemon is not cool :P. Only hardcore players may research this up and be willing to grind for it.
I said they were hidden in pokemon. They're not really hidden here since the genetics lab reveals all the numbers and allows you to modify them, and the NPCs will explain things to the player should he ask.
As for how fast you can EV train, iirc with all the possible boosters in pokemon it actually went pretty fast. You can get 100 with vitamins. 3 is the highest possible you can get from defeating a starmon. Double it with a held item. Pokemon had the PokeRus virus thingy that doubled EVs again iirc, but we're not gonna add that - I think a consumable would be better. So, that's 12 per starmon. You're gonna need to defeat 13 starmon to max out your EVs in a single stat. Now, unlike the pokemon games, we're gonna add a system that can hand you battles against such starmon on a silver platter. Pick a stat and be thrown into a fight against a trainer with only starmon that award that stats EVs. So, about 120k money + whatever the consumable costs + the held item + KO 13 starmon and you've EV trained one stat. Tbh, 120k shouldn't be hard to get by the time EV training really becomes noticeable. And you can just fight 8 additional starmon instead if you don't have the money.
Money/BP grinding will probably coincide with trying to get your starmon to reach level 100, as you need to fight a lot in those later levels, and the arena is the easiest place to repeatedly get high level opponents.
Yea, it sounds pretty grindy, but pokemon was pretty damn grindy later on as well. We're already doing things to make it easier, like XP rewards on quests, karma rewards, easily accessible fights for all levels and we'll probably add some consumables as well.
As for Repel: I was thinking of having it time based, but making it tick only while in grass is really easy to do (Probably easier than time based in our current system :p )
We recently made a little change to how spawning works. Previously, you always started the game in the main town no matter what. Now, you spawn at the location of closest unlocked teleporter to your last position. Teleporters are usually found inside a starcenter (the really out-of-the-way teleporters will at least be next to a healing machine, if not in a full starcenter). This way, if you die, it's a much shorter walk back to the spot of your demise. Additionally, you can easily get back to town (or to anywhere else) because you're already at the teleporter. The same thing happens if you leave the game and log back in later, you'll spawn next to a teleporter.
We've also been fixing lots of nasty bugs. In fact, that's what I've been spending most of time doing. :P
Intentionally hiding mechanics that improve your pokemon is not cool :P. Only hardcore players may research this up and be willing to grind for it.
One of our design goals for starmon was to avoid the hidden mechanics of pokemon. That's not to say we want to remove those hidden mechanics, but we want to explain them properly and make them transparent to the player. So happiness will still exist, but we're going to explain it to you and give you an easy way to check it. IVs and EVs still exist, but we're giving you an easy way to view them and we're going to explain them clearly. That way, casual players can do absolutely fine and understand the game systems, while "pro" players can train specifically for the best stats.
Additionally, we don't have a wiki like the actual pokemon games do. Curios players can't just google the best ways to level up starmon. So we want to provide all the information you would ever need in-game. If we ever get around to launching a website, that would be awesome. But we can't rely on that.
Hopefully somewhere down the track you'll edit this to say alot easier :P. I agree that it would be interesting feeling like we 'trained' our pets but after a certain point it gets repetitive and boring, especially for several starmon. Sure, you'll include those items but if I have to grind to get them, if they're stashed behind BP hoarding, then I wouldn't get them.
We'll have to see how it goes. In general, leveling up is a faster process in starmon. We're giving you large experience rewards for finishing quests and also providing you with easily accessible fights if you do want to grind. It's tricky to see how grindy it is now (there's only 2 of us and we're constantly making new starmon for ourselves), but I definitely don't like grinding. If it becomes too grindly late-game, we'll change something.
Pokemon's repel doesn't seem practical. I usually zig-zagged alot to find items or other goodies. Repel gets used up too quick and isn't worth the money when I could spend it on other things (like the expensive vitamins). You guys aren't doing grid-based movement so I'm curious how your repels work, how long they last, and if they get used up only if we only move through grass. I'm just gonna cross my fingers that wild battles can be avoided for free :P.
Well, we can just tweak the price and duration to make it practical ^.^ Repel isn't actually in the game yet (although we'll definitely add it), but I think only draining it while you're actually in grass is a good idea. I'm not sure how avoiding wild battles for free would go over... Again, you can skip a lot of "dangerous areas" by using the teleporters, so you won't have to re-tread old zones. I guess we could add something where you won't be attacked if you greatly outlevel a zone, or something like that. We'll have to see what works.
Peaceful solutions to conflicts is pretty cool and was really fun from mass effect. I'm crossing my fingers some more that we'll get plenty more quests that use this :P.
Right, we want to add lots of those types of situations. The reason that there's only one or two in the game right now is because there's only one or two big quests. But we definitely think these "choice" situations are cool. Obviously the "big" choice in the game is whether or not you'll join cipher (and that results in a totally different set of story missions), but we'd like to include smaller choices with smaller, but still significant, consequences.
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EV boosting items is still clunky because you have to switch in and out the trainee, especially if they're low level. Maybe let them gain exp as well?
3 EVs max sounds good so does that mean everyone at the hotspot will offer that? It seems pointless training with 2 or less EVs at a time
Consumable pokerus might be ok if not too hard to get
Which is why its not being added :p
Most training that doesn't use Exp.Share works this way (And it actually makes Exp.Share more efficient as it'll take 75% of the XP if it was in battle), and also isn't a good argument to not include held item EV boosters, but an argument to add more than just held items.
All final stage starmon will offer 3 EVs. Putting unevolved starmon into the list of possible ones would just be a dumb idea to begin with. (This also means there will be a minimum level, probably around 30)
Definitely won't be hard to get. Maybe a bit pricey, but you'll probably have enough money to buy a new one by the time it expires. The price should discourage it being used randomly though and make people only use it when they actually want to focus on EVs.
Ok, I acknowledge you guys are making things easier than pokemon, which is good, but I don't see why you won't take things further to remove as much grindiness as possible. If you're really aiming the project at adults then help us out who don't have several hours every day to play like kids do :P. Quick and 'productive' games have a charm you know ;)
We have to grind to max out levels? Doesn't sound fun to me.
I don't think it's really possible to make a pokemon style game without grindyness. The entire point of it is to capture some creatures and train them until you are the best. Training pretty much equals grinding.
The games "guide" the players through the guide, give him another objective, through the storyline and the massive zones the player needs to get through to reach the next city. But at some point the player just gets stuck due to being too weak and has to take a break to just get a few levels.
Games in which character progression is a big factor generally require some grinding. The first playthrough of D3 can be considered as story focused I guess, but after that its all grinding to get better numbers. Mass Effect doesn't have too important character progression and focuses a lot more on the story - Character progression isn't the core feature there, being too low levelled/having too few upgrades doesn't make the game impossible or insanely hard, so there aren't even any good options for grinding (by "good options" I mean something straightforward and repeatable that gives XP and/or money). Skyrim is somewhere in between, you can just explore and do quests for the sake of exploring and doing quests, and due to how Skyrim scales you generally won't find anything that's impossible to do due to being too weak, but if you want to have a strong character you're gonna be spending a good amount of time grinding skills, collecting crafting materials and gold, doing very specific quests for their rewards (Azura's star for example) etc.
The pokemon games, including Starmon, are about character progression, much like MMOs. The story is a way to get player through the grind/forget about the grind/keep them from realizing it's just one big grind.
Remember what the popular opinions about every single feature of D3 that reduced the grind were? (Being able to switch spells whenever you want, not having something permanent like a talent tree, less time overall needed to reach max level, auction house, etc.) Not that I agree with those arguments/complaints, just giving an example of what happens when you take grind out of a popular grind based game.
Now, with all that said, there are different levels of grinding. I don't want to remove all the grindibg, but I do want to cut down on the time it takes to get through the game and to level more (alternative) team members to 100. But I don't think that it's even close to possible for us to remove the need to battle outside of quests or so (In other words, allow you to play only the story and side quests to level, like mass effect 3), and we're not going to aim for that. Making quests takes time and space, and we'd prefer using as little as possible of the former and simply don't have much of the latter. We'll make sure that it doesn't take horrendously long, but we're not gonna remove all "grinding". We're not just gonna hand you level 100 starmon with perfectly set up IVs and EVs, you're gonna have to work for them. We're gonna add in quests for all stages of the game and also repeatable quests that don't care what your completion/level is so that at no point the only option left is to grind (Unlike pokemon, which rarely had anything/much after you completed the story. Silver/Gold had the most post-end content, but even then, after you beat Kanto and Red, you've got about 20 levels to go), we'll try to accelerate things and make them as interesting as possible. We'll do our best to reduce the grindy elements of the game, but we won't straight up remove them.
Good to know everything will be made aware. This is sort of a confusing area, even for me, so hopefully I can explain myself properly XD. While I'm sure alot of you guys don't mind EV training, I don't think every player will get into it. Like I said earlier, maybe we just don't have time (depending on how grindy it is), or maybe it kills the simple fun that was pokemon. Anyone who knows this mechanic will likely want to use it cuz why not make your starmon the very best? If that's the case it should prob be treated like a normal thing and not just exclusive for 'pro' trainers (hence made easier to get/use). For those who don't choose to EV train will be disadvantaged against those who do in pvp. It won't always be an issue of laziness and that's not always a bad thing. Like I implied earlier, I find games more interesting when it moves fast. EV training can be a veery sloow process for several starmon if not done right. It's up to you guys but I prob won't play much if late game is like that. This is why I suggested a multiplayer mode that makes things even between players with and without EV training.
I guess we can add a PvP mode where all starmon get set to a specific level (Chosen by the players) and have all EVs, maybe even IVs, set to 0. Zelda already set up a system that automatically evolves random trainer starmon if they are able to (So that we don't have trainers with level 70 metapods), maybe we can throw that one in as well. Probably won't have such matches affect a players PvP stats and won't reward the secondary currency (I think we'll call it Arena Points.)
A quick note here- I'm going to be out of town for about 2 weeks, so I won't be able to work on the map (no laptop, ugh). I may have internet access to post here once or twice, but I doubt it. I know it's at a really awkward time for starmon's development, but we'll get the alpha to you guys eventually, I promise. ^.^ I'll miss reading all your guys's comments in the meantime! <3
Anyways, you'll need to direct all your future complaints to TheAlmaity, because anything that goes wrong is now entirely his fault :P
edit- Also, after reading the above posts I'd like to add another note: I don't like grinding. So I'm going to do my best to make this as un-grindy as possible, at least for the duration of the story. Turn-based RPGs like this tend to be cursed with grindyness by default, but we're going to try and reduce the grind as much as possible. I like the idea of having "unofficial" PvP fights where EV's are equal. We could also add options to equalize levels or IV's. Good idea :P
Quote from Trieva: Go@TheAlmaity: Go
I'm not sure what you're saying here. EV boosting items do make it easier to train (from very hard to hard) but it's still hard :P. I found EV training efficient when I used my op pokemon to OHKO stuff and the trainee gets the exp, and hence EVs, from exp share. It made it very streamlined so what I asked for was EV boosting items acting like exp share too (saving us from excessive switching). But since you guys are doing level scaling it may make EV training even harder (cuz no OHKO use) and the HP mechanic that makes higher level starmon tougher might drive me crazy even further :P.
That's actually a pretty good point that I didn't take in consideration. Maybe we should change the EV formula, increase the number of digits maybe (but still keep it proportional, so in the end its still +63 to a stat) and then to counteract the change to the health formula and the scaling that result in longer battles on average we can multiply EV reward with level (and probably by some constant as well just so that we have numbers line up nicely) or even relative level (i.e. If the enemy is stronger than you, you get more EVs)
Quote from Trieva: Go@TheAlmaity: Go
[About "pokemon game without grind = impossible"]
Nothing is impossible, you're just not trying hard enough :P (which is something I tell myself often believe it or not). In seriousness though I don't believe you ;) .
[About it being impossible for us to add content to guide players through all 100 levels]
Why don't you think it's possible? Just simply increase money/exp rewards? Btw if players are just interested in the story it would be very nice allowing them to play those only. 'Forcing' things onto players is not cool :P. I prefer to respect the players and if want them to spend time on something I made I'd want them to have a fun experience (which includes giving them the choice to do whatever the hell they want) and not that I forced them to use everything because I put alot of time and effort in. That was my decision going into game development and the players could care less.
Quote from 1631377 »
Increasing XP rewards only helps once. What if you complete the story/get a good way through it, and then decide you want to change part of your lineup?
And what I said about "we're not just gonna hand you level 100 starmon" also comes into play here - There's just limits to what we can do, and I'm not talking about technical limits, but time and effort. If we allowed the story to get you all the way to level 100, you'd get such an endgame party in a matter of a few hours. And then we incorporate the previous point - The big quests aren't repeatable, therefore the rewards are only gotten once. So after those few hours during which you level super fast due to reward, you are suddenly faced with a massive grind to change one starmon in your lineup, and you don't expect it at all.
I'm not so sure about pokemon being about character progression. I'm pretty sure pokemon started off as a friendship/battle simulator and stuck with that. Not every pokemon you catch makes it to your party so they wouldn't stay long enough to develop the sorts of emotional connections like you would in massive RPGs like Final Fantasy. Plus there's too many pokemon for players to progress with :P. I don't claim to be a pro with story based games but this is just my opinion.
Quote from Trieva: Go yea, but that battle simulator heavily relies on levels (And evolutions, and moves, but those are all gained through levels). If the game to you is not about reaching level 100 and being the best, then you won't really face a grind in the first place because you have no reason to. I'll touch on this below again.
I don't mind working for my starmon but how much I have to do will be the issue. If it's a grind then I'll forget it, otherwise I'll enjoy it. Although, getting level 100s and choosing their movesets would make a good multiplayer mode giving us sandboxy play. I don't care how little but a game is much more enjoyable when I can very quickly (and in a very obvious way) have gained something frequently. Since you guys are in Alpha, and might not mind what I'm going to suggest, then maybe revamp the pokemon system. Instead of sticking to their formulas and problems you can always come up with a way to make every battle feel awesome and be rewarding. One example is letting us increase stats directly through items or something. In TWEWY level ups hardly gave bonus stats. They came from equippable items and consumables (which are used by by the amount of battles).
Just to clarify I'm willing to give this map a try. I'm planning to play through the entire main story. If things become unbearably grindy/slow/sluggish then I'll stop. I don't think the main story should have too many problems there but you seem really set on keeping grinding which I don't agree with. This will most certainly influence my decision to replay the game or do end-game stuff like EV training.
Grinding is never fun from the player's point of view and I don't see how it helps from the development point of view besides being too lazy to have more story content or something :P. A good game should end short and sweet if it needs to be with no junk appended :P.
I think you may have sort of misunderstood my intentions/ideas/whatever, or I just explained them poorly.
"I don't mind working for my starmon but how much I have to do will be the issue."
That's what I meant there's different levels of grinding. There's "Ok, I'll spend 5-10 minutes mindlessly doing battles with anyone I see for this bonus I need for whatever reason" and then there's "Yea, I'll spend two weeks running heroics so that I can spend two months doing that raid". I definitely don't want the latter kind, but I think we'll have to resort to the former: (hopefully-)short intervals where you just have to do your own thing and get a bit higher level. You'll still have some form of guidance as early on in the game you'll realise that generally big stuff is going to happen right after you beat the next milestone trainer, so if at any point the story just seems to be standing still, you'll know what to do. If you're missing a few levels, you'll walk out one of the gates (or use a teleporter), wander around a zone, fight trainers and hopefully find a quick optional quest or two for a nice XP reward, or if you wanna do something more reliable but grindy you can just repeat one or two arena fights over and over again until you're ready to fight the milestone trainer. Whatever case it is, it shouldn't last too long. Not gonna mention a specific time as I suck at estimating such stuff, and I also find that time passes quite quickly when playing pokemon/starmon :p It might take an hour, but not the "Oh my god when is this going to end" type of hour, but the "JESUS CHRIST ITS 3 AM ALREADY!?!?!" kind of hour. Ideally I don't want it to take an hour though, was just giving an example.
Unless you stick to your first 6 starmon (or, well, any 6 you've managed to get above the level of captureable starmon) forever, you're gonna need to a reliable way to train alternative starmon. Easiest way is obviously battles. Well, only way, pretty much. Whatever you do will have to include a battle - Even if it doesnt directly, chances are you'll have to walk from point A to point B and there'll be trainers/grass in between.
Levels in pokemon took a decent amount of time later on, and we're keeping XP numbers the same (Well, due to the lack of 3 part starmon chains, most stage 2 starmon have higher XP than in pokemon (Still slightly less than Stage 3 in either though)), but we're gonna make sure that the story quests and a good amount of side quests catapult you through the levels to create as little downtime between milestone trainers (and therefore story quests) as possible. The issue is that the quests aren't repeatable, you'll only get through em once, you'll only be able to give the reward to a set of 6 starmon at once, and if you swap out any of them for a weaker version, chances are you'll have to grin to bring it up to par, unless we can add something else. EXP.Share helps with making new and/or lower level pokemon catch up. Being able to pick fights of any level in the arena helps a bit as well, as you couldn't really be picky in pokemon and the league were the highest level trainers - and I don't think they ever exceeded level 70, if they reached it at all. (Silver/Gold may be the exception since they have practically 2 games in one. Can't remember the levels there)
Right now we're using the "old" XP formula. I think it was Black/White that used the new one, that factors in level differences, and after this discussion, I think that we should use the new formula, as it will heavily accelerate the training of lower level starmon - Imagine you place EXP.Share on a level 10 Probichu, then go fight the level 50 Milestone trainer with your level 55 party. Knock out one starmon, and probichu will get 5-10 times the XP your level 55 starmon got.
And, as fights of all levels are always available, your above-average level starmon won't really be penalized as you either pick what the average is (arena) or the average is adjusted to your party ("Wild" trainers, as I always call em). (I can't imagine what it is like to reach level 100 in Black/White, as I've never seen a pokemon game introduce such high level trainers. There was Mt.Battle in XD which I think went up to 90.)
WARNING: It's relatively late and I slept less than usual the past few days, so below here I kept going off-topic. Will go back on topic in the paragraph after this one.
WARNING 2: Feel free to skip both following paragraphs. I think I might be a bit irritated today and it might be affecting my writing, I go off topic a lot and might unintentionally sound mean/annoyed/whatever. I could just delete the paragraphs, but I think I'll rather just leave em up with this warning. I honestly think this is a good discussion, and also a very necessary one. Relying on your own opinions is bound to backfire, I've learned that and the value of other peoples opinions/feedback during our development of RuneCraft (Eiviyn is probably the best game designer I know relatively personally, I'll probably ask him to join the alpha test and force myself to listen to him criticizing absolutely everything, because he always has good points.)
With the arena, people will always have the option to just do the straightforward really boring grind if they want to. And don't get me wrong, I hate grinding as well, at least the extreme kind that just takes for fucking ever. So, I And I actually want to point out that all these posts are 100% from my perspective without consulting with Zelda first, actually most posts are if we are talking about concepts/not yet implemented stuff. It's rare that he disagrees, and if he does we find a good solution. (He did a pretty damn good job with our party system, I didn't think about flaws in the first place and he not only found em but thought up multiple really good solutions). Back on topic: I want to have as much stuff in the map as possible to have the world "feel alive", that there is stuff to do regardless of the story, so that instead being forced to do a mindless grind you can just run around and interact with the world inbetween battles, find a quest/event here and there, discover some cool wandering NPC/Starmon, find random items, etc. But again, time, effort:reward/usefulness, space. Those are proving to be our biggest problems. The first two especially. [removed a ton of irrelevant text. More than this paragraph consists of at this moment actually.]
RIGHT. Back on topic! Where was I?
Time, effort, and space. We promised an Alpha in April. Then we got really cool ideas. It's June. Zelda won't be back til August, same goes for Moz. Do you know how far our storyline goes at the moment? Level 25. "Oh yeah, that's a quarter way" No, it's not. XP/levels aren't linear, they aren't even quadratic, they're fucking cubic. Levels 1-25 are fast.
Why am I talking about this? Because we were talking about grinding. We have to invest a lot of time for anything we do here. The core of the game is fight->get levels->try to beat game up to the point where current level isn't enough->repeat. It becomes grindy when the "fight" part is relatively directionless, when the player has nothing real to do other than find a trainer or pick an arena fight. We'll add as many events and quests as we can to keep players occupied to "mask" the grind and make it feel less grindy, but please don't expect or ask us to devote as much time to this as actual game companies do to create massive zones full of quests so that the player never has free time. We're two people and we don't do this as our jobs, we've got a lot of free time, but since this isn't our job we won't work on it constantly and as efficiently as possible. Even Mozared is really damn busy with his new job and rarely has time to add any terrain to the map. And even ignoring the time limit, there's the map space limit. At a certain point stuff will just get really cluttered if we don't handle every optional quest/event absolutely perfectly. We can't make massive zones like in WoW where there is more than enough space for a million quests, we've got a tiny forest and that's it.
Ok, I think I might sound a bit annoyed/annoying and so on in this post... Sorry about that >.>
To summarize all I wanted to say really shortly:
Boring grinding sucks and can go to hell. I want to do my best (And Zelda probably too) to reduce the amount of grinding in this game, and what grinding will be left over we will attempt to make more fun with optional side quests and events. We'll make a lot of them appear randomly or have other random elements to them, so that they don't get too repetitive and you don't actually find all possible quests/events in a single go, so you always have a reason to go back to a zone, see if something new showed up. People who want to grind will easily have the option, but I really want to do my best to just shove enough content into the game to keep people occupied while they level up their primary/secondary set of starmon. And if we can't add quests and events, we can try and add consumables and other NPCs and systems to make stuff easier and smoother (Like what I keep mentioning about fights tailored for EV training)
What we need is two things: Actually get the game developed far enough so that we can actually test and go beyond theoretical discussions on this subject, and ideas on how to identify fix such problems preemptively through the discussion we're having right now by going into far more specific cases. So, first of all, "bigger rewards" isn't really something that should be considered. We'll be using those to dictate the game pace, and we'll try to keep it quick. The bigger issue is that you'll spend most of your time doing the story quests, which aren't repeatable, and therefore not a reliable training method. You'll get one high level party, and that's it. I already talked about this before. So we need to find problems and solutions to them while ignoring the fact that the story exists - It is a quick ride for your first party of starmon to a high level (Story will most likely end a good time before level 100. In addition to time requirements, I think if I have to stretch it out for too long it'll decrease in quality), and it only works once. And this is a game where, if you want to do more than the story, you have to eventually get a large amount of starmon to level 100 so that you can have a more diverse team and try different strategies, so we need a very reliable and repeatable method to have a "pleasant grind" for that.
One thing I suggested earlier was changing the XP formula to include relative levels - It allows you to quickly pull a new party member to your average level. This also makes the story more effective at training new starmon after you did the quests, as you now have a party that is capable of pulling new members up to their level. I think this will be very effective, but it only solves half of the problem kinda - You still need a source of experience.
I might try to think of unique minigames or such stuff that don't involve traditional battles (or maybe do) that can serve as an alternative XP source should a player get bored of standard battles.
also, to touch on your multiplayer/pvp comment: Yea, I think it's very important that we have an easy to get into PvP system. So, as suggested earlier, we can make that battle type that equalized teams. I said no rewards, but I think that may be the wrong thing to do. So, here's my idea:
0 EVs. This makes the battles different than non-equalized ones, as the proportions between stats change, and encourage players to actually reach max level and try the "real" fights.
Undecided on IVs. Probably 0 as well for the same reason
Moves: Little to no starmon learn a move past level 60, which means you unlock your starmons full move list relatively early. The last/level-50+ moves are in most cases powerful TM moves as well. (Fire Blast, Thunder, Solarbeam, Overdrive, etc.), so setting up your moves shouldn't be an issue.
Levels: I think letting players pick the level of the fight would be best. Would probably add a minimum limit of about 30-50 though to avoid as many possible issues with my next point as possibe.
Auto-evolve: We've got this in place for AIs, when they are generated, the system checks whether the starmon is at or above its evolve level and evolves it if yes. This doesn't work on non-level evolutions though (Happiness, trade, stones). We could add this so that really low level players (<25) can still try relatively fair fights against higher level trainers without suffering from crappy base stats due to unevolved sarmon.
The reason for the minimum level on such fights is so that you can't run into the reverse evolution problem: Doing a level 10 fight, meaning the low level players starmon don't auto evolve and have crappy base stats, while the other player has a fully evolved party.
Would also add auto-learn moves in case a players starmon has an empty slot - It would just grab the last move it could learn for that level. Starmon usually have all 4 move slots filled by level 13-17 though, so this would very rarely be used.
Rewards: No rewards would probably be a bit extreme and annoying. Not sure what rewards to give though - I want proper battles to be better than equalized ones. Money earned will be determined by players (Each player pays the same amount of money for the battle, winner takes all), so what we have left is pretty much Arena Points. I guess we could have equalized battles give an XP reward post-battle based on the average level of the party (So starmon participation doesn't matter either, it'll just be a number give to all party members), and maybe a low amount of arena points. "Real battles" could award more arena points, or maybe yet another currency used for more special items (OP PvE items maybe?), and maybe a good amount of recorded stats (Could easily implement an Elo system I think)
Ok, I'm tired and wanna go to sleep. Feel free to leave feedback :)
I see what you mean by exp rewards only helping once by quests. Why not increase them for wild battles too? Or perhaps give us comsumables like rare candy that give us levels or bonus exp. Maybe even give us ways to get reasonable money from wilds like meowth's payday but much better OR they drop items that sell well.
We're definitely going to be adding something like this. Rare candys are likely (Though very probably rare enough to not be a super reliable levelling method), XP boost held item and maybe even an XP boost consumable (Probably via Arena Points, so that it can't be spammed too much, and is harder to obtain if you're only doing the story, so you don't outlevel it)
We'll balance money once we can get a good look at how it will all work out - Our current numbers might be stupidly high at the moment, or absolutely worthless, hard to tell :p
Good idea with the arena. I hope we can fight levels higher than us if we're feeling confident. Just in case I found a godly combo of good movesets and types, then I'll send my lvl 1 caterpie against that lvl 100 charizard for massive exp :P. About exp share I wonder if we can get the option to modify its distribution. Instead of 50-50 maybe 25-75 or 0-100 would work better.
You'll have to unlock fights. Every win unlocks the next two in the list (Unless the next one is a milestone trainer, you can't unlock anything past them without beating them). So if you have a high level party and fight your way through the arena, you can easily just grab weaker starmon and retry some of the higher level fights if you think you can beat them, but you won't be able to just fight really high levels without reaching them once.
I completely understand (by going through it myself) how there's only so much time and effort can be spared for the project (even if you guys love it) and I personally think it was healthy for you to let me know that. Better out than in ;) . I actually recently acquired that mentality when I realised SquadCraft 2 was getting too difficult to maintain. I'm going to start a thread in the project workplace soon for my new project if you're interested :P. Unfortunately that's how things are. From the dev's point of view we worry hard about deadlines and how we go about the project. The people giving feedback have it easier where they don't worry about that but just want to suggest lots of cool ideas (some are bad, some are downright awesome). Sometimes we're too close to our projects, as devs. But yeah, not all feedbackers are like me and can take it when you let them know how your love of the project has turned into a stress or a nightmare :P. We can't really blame them though and I'm learrning to be more understanding and forgiving ;) . Btw to fix grind I didn't exactly mean add more events or quests. That will prob achieve the opposite because mass effect 3 had an overwhelming amount of side quests and they sort of forced you to do them. If you can somehow but the story or as many parts of the game easier and faster to move through, that's good enough for me.
Sorry if I came off a bit rough or rude. To fix grinding I don't believe it needs to be that complicated. Have you played any of the super mario rpg's like partners in time or superstar saga? Maybe you could copy that level up mechanic which I think is really awesome. I don't know how much impact our choices had but it was fun choosing stats to receive bonuses, getting potentially higher amounts, and makes level ups all the more enjoyable. If you did that then I wouldn't feel like I'm grinding, ever. OR every 5 battles or so let us pick a stat from the starmon to buff. The idea is to give us some control in the growth of the starmon, no matter how small, must be more direct and quicker than EVs, and happen frequently enough. I had that some joy with TWEWY using consumables to customise my character's stats/growth/specialty.
Don't think you came off rough or rude at all :p
Being able to pick a stat to strengthen is a nice idea, but doesn't really work with how we have set things up at the moment (Your stats aren't actually saved, ever. Your IVs and EVs are. When your stats are needed, we grab the base stats, IVs and EVs and run em through a formula. IVs and EVs are also the thing that uses up the most space in our banks. (Ability, ID, moves, held item, happiness, nature and a "serial number" are the other values iirc (I think Im forgetting one or two), and those are still less than IVs+EVs.) Another number saved per stat would just make more issues with loading (We have to space out the loading due to "execution took too long" errors)
However, I think being able to pick a stat to slap some extra EVs on every now and then would work :) Will discuss this with Zelda once he's back.
OK I feel I need to give my opinion on all this talk of GRINDING, to me pokemon my Favorite RPG along with the .Hack GU PS2 games because the Story alone covers all your level grinding. Do any extra side quests help a NPC Character with something made the game even faster and less grindy by DOING something with some STORY ELEMENTS even if it's not the MAIN STORY got you more levels and money and MADE the MAIN STORY EASIER to get Through.
Then there are GAMES with nothing but GRIND and very SPARSE (only little bits and pieces of STORY) STORY ELEMENTS, the best example to me is FINAL FANTASY 12. The best way to get through the Game STORY is by spending 4-8 Hours in the First Battle area Dalmasca Estersand. You might even need more than that because you should be Level 20+ if you want to progress SMOOTHLY past the MASSIVE WORLD littered with enemies just to GRIND for LEVELING UP and continue to the STORY. Then you will need to stop again quite frequently every 10 levels to GRIND MORE just to KEEP UP to the enemies.
That second paragraph is GRINDING when you gotta spend more of the time fighting the enemies in the same area because there the ONLY ones to give you the most XP to LEVEL UP for facing the next area is to me boring and much more STIMULATING than the old DBZ All Sagas map from StarCraft 1 where you just sit in the Training Area fighting a Free Enemy not being Fought by your Allies, and Button Mash on Upgrade Weapons & Armor. So in Summary Spending 7 Minutes GRINDING for the Story then the STORY only taking 1 Minute Tops dealing with Story Character is boring GRINDING.
In Pokemon if you had to Grind for the Gym Leader or Elite Four in my Experience it's usually a 10 to 30 minute Grind then you back on to the STORY. I think that is why the Elite Four have Never been Level 100 because it would take a lot of GRINDING TIME from Level 70 to Level 100 since there are not many Trainers to encounter with Level 70 and Higher Pokemon since you've been to all areas and most trainers were under Level 50 even.
That made the game go by easier by having most of the Trainers under Level 50 you don't have to GRIND to get past the START of the GAME, but Since they didn't have a Re-Battle for most Generations you couldn't face the Level 5 to 15 Bug Catchers again this time with a more Varied and/or Higher Level of those same Bug and/or some Different ones.
I think your GAME can pull it off BECAUSE I believe You've said you plan to have a Re-Battle with their Pokemon Team Level Scaling to Match yours upto a cap based on their Level when you first faced them and the Level of the AREA they are in. It means that it may be a little more GRINDING since you have to go back to AREAS whose STORY you very likely have completed fully, just to Level Up for the ENDGAME but it can be made to feel less GRINDING because your all so going back to see new teams hopefully on some of the Trainers. If they have some New and some of their Original Pokemon it can feel more like just the INBETWEEN STORY part of the GAME more I think, even more so if there is new Events taking Place in the Areas that might of been hinted at EARLIER or events Never mentioned.
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Blizzard Fan since Starcraft. The Single Player story is AMAZING IMO, I can't wait for the Expansions. In Warcraft 3 I only enjoy the Custom Maps scene (& Blizzards...
Well then our Definition of GRINDING is very Different, since to me it means you HAVE to spend x amount of time GRINDING to Level Up just to be able to beat the area ahead otherwise you're stuck and no more things STORY wise to do only BATTLE what you've already fought.
I don't see how Optional Side Stories that only make the Main Game Easier but are not Required to actually get through the Main Game Equals GRINDING. I'll give an Example say playing ONLY through the Main Story at the 4th Milestone Trainer your Starmon Team Average at around Level 35 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon Team Average at Level 30, but if you had done all the Side Story your Team Average would be at around Level 42 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon Team Average were at Level 30. Either way you can still beat the Gym Leader it's just even Easier and Even more likely if you did the Side Story.
Now Here's an Example of what I think would be GRINDING in Starmon, doing the Main Story ONLY your Starmon Team Average were at Level 30 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon Team Average at around Level 45, but if you had done all the Side Story your Starmon would Average at around Level 40 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon were at Level 45. Either way you still might need to GRIND some Levels to beat the 4th Milestone Trainer it's just less Difficult and may be likely without GRINDING if you did ALL the Side Story.
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Blizzard Fan since Starcraft. The Single Player story is AMAZING IMO, I can't wait for the Expansions. In Warcraft 3 I only enjoy the Custom Maps scene (& Blizzards...
Also I noticed you had a post recently about what to do after you complete the story. You could add arenas for people to battle and complete challenges like I have seen before in games like this.
If the main story was designed so players never get stuck (which doesn't require other ways to get exp/money) then that's the better design because you don't have to work anything up to catch up (which is what I see as grinding).
Oh yes it looks I agree now that I get what you're talking about,
That is how I feel that Starmon should be too, I was getting worried you were talking more about making all Battles (Trainer and Wild Starmon) skippable because you thought the game would be too GRINDY otherwise. The way you stated it in your quote above I agree 100% with.
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Blizzard Fan since Starcraft. The Single Player story is AMAZING IMO, I can't wait for the Expansions. In Warcraft 3 I only enjoy the Custom Maps scene (& Blizzards...
Won't give any promises. Zelda is currently on vacation, a friend of mine who moved out of country came back for a while so I'm practically on vacation as well, Moz is on vacation. Things should pick back up in a week or two. Zelda has one quest to finish for our alpha content to be done, but I think we want to add more before then, and we've got some polishing to do (The storage box looks horrible, I need to work on some art for that. Trainer card is pretty bad atm as we haven't fully decided how it will look yet and what stats it will contain, but I think we might not fix this for the alpha. Then there's general bugs that need fixing and tweaks that need to be made. Also, don't expect many items or that all starmon have abilities, those are two things we haven't worked on at all. You've got capture cores, potions, status heals and 2 TMs, and we've got a few very generic abilities)
Currently, our to-do list goes over 9 A4 pages, but that includes discussions on issues (With a lot of wasted space due to how bullet points work (thinner paragraphs) It sounds like a lot more than it actually is though :p Some of those things have already been fixed but not removed from the list, a good chunk of it is discussions, around 1 page is just the abilities I want Zelda to make (for the starter starmon + Eves), there's a list of moves that need to be implemented trigger wise (Although I think most of em are already in) with comments on those, list of artwork (Which includes crossed out lines), etc.
I'll just give a short list of what needs to be done, and I'll try and sort by priority:
2v2 bugs
General bugs
Terrain for a few more zones, even if its just placeholder
Artwork for a few more things
Lots of polish and bug fixing all round. While I know we're not supposed to create an absolutely perfect test for an alpha test, I still do want a certain level of quality, and the map currently isn't there.
Also I noticed you had a post recently about what to do after you complete the story. You could add arenas for people to battle and complete challenges like I have seen before in games like this.
The big arena (elite 4 + champion at the end) won't be done by the time the story is (I'm expecting the story to end around level 70. It all really depends on how well I can write it and how far I can stretch it out without making it bad), so that's one thing the player still has to do. We've got some suggestions in our to-do list for things to add, like special challenge battles with various parameters. We might change our saving method a bit to allow multiple player profiles per bank (Or we could just use multiple banks) and add some stuff to support the more hardcore modes people play pokemon on (permadeath, forced to capture first starmon in each zone, nickname everyone, etc.) But that's stuff that will be added later on in development - Shouldn't be too hard, but its not a priority atm. Won't be in for the alpha.
Reading Fishy's post gave me an idea. An easy way to solve grinding is adjustable difficulty levels. Just like other games (eg TWEWY, Fallout 3) can we adjust this on the fly? All it needs to do is scale the enemy starmon stats.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh... We can make the enemies user lower AI levels (Which controls EVs and IVs to a certain extent), and maybe tweak the level scaling formula. I don't really know whether we should add something like this. The easiest way to deal with difficult enemies is by spending 5-10 minutes doing something else to level up your starmon. Fallout is similar to Skyrim and Oblivion, so I think I know how it uses the difficulty slider and... Well, I guess it works for those games? They're not multiplayer first of all, so you don't really get that much out of easy difficulty except an easier time to play solo. In starmon, lowering the difficulty in any way would make it a lot easier and faster to level and would just get abused by people who like to grind :p Lowering XP rewards with lowered difficulty just defeats the entire purpose. I would be fine with a slider that adjusts the scaling of randomized enemy trainers, so you can set them to be 2-3 levels beneath you.
As for the grinding discussion that's been going on:
Players will be left to do their own stuff regularly, and that's mostly because of the way we're handling "open world" - We're not locking you out of zones the same way pokemon did. After the first milestone trainer, you'll be able to go into any zone (We might lock some of the really high level zones though, like the deep desert, which is supposed to be level 40+ and a pretty hard place. Those zones would be unlocked when appropriate.) But in general you'll end up with most of the world exploreable immediately. I want to do this so that you can immediately start putting together a good team of starmon, and not having a very limited selection because you can only find about 5-10 new ones every zone/5-10 levels, and all of them being of similar types as wild starmon fit the theme of the zone.
Because of this, it's relatively hard to create criteria that are required for the next story quest to show up. There's close to nothing every player has to do. Everyone can run off in a different direction. Only place we are guaranteed to find players is the main city and arena - You just can't get around that. So right now we're using milestone trainers as criteria for the story quests, as they are kind of the only way we currently have to gate game progress. Fights inbetween milestone trainers are harder to use because players can just "leave them for later" and decide to do all 10 at once.
Let me explain how the current quest works: You hit level 15, nothing happens. But you remember the first milestone trainer was level 15, so you head to the arena. Maybe you already did all fights, or only some, but that doesn't really matter. If you're not there yet, you fight your way to the milestone trainer, and then you get told he's not here. You find out he's busy searching for something, and you get asked to help him find it. This forces the player to leave the city, which means we can create an event for when he returns into the city, because we are absolutely certain he won't meet the criteria for the quest while in it.
The second big quest takes place in a zone, but once again the player is forced to the city to actually reach the milestone trainer fight. This one isn't locked, but right after it you find out stuffs going on and get sent into the zone - Once again we used the milestone trainer to make sure the player isn't in the zone where all the quest NPCs suddenly spawn.
We can't do that with NPCs and objects in zones because players aren't guaranteed to go there at the right time. If a player did the cave zone at level 15, why would he think of returning there at level 35? We need to use the city in one way or another, and can't use the zones themselves to start story-related quests.
So our plan is to have stuff in the zones that players can do regardless of level (due to scaling). You're gonna get a big chunk of XP through the story quests, a good amount through the arena fights you need to do, but you'll probably be missing some, and that will make you go out into the zones and do quests there. They may be related to Cipher and story, but most probably won't be. You'll have Mozared giving you silly quests only a certified explorer can understand the purpose of, you might meet a farmer whose crops are being plagued by starmon that need taking care of. There'll be a mercenary who needs a partner, a Wanderer searching for something interesting who enjoys an occasional conversation. The guys over at the lab may have some equipment that needs testing, or will want you to do some field work. Or Cipher is gonna be screwing stuff up. Yea, you can in a way consider it grinding, but I think the story quests will be a lot better if I don't have to make too many of them and can fill space with side quests - it's also a lot easier.
We'll force players into the zones via story quests, and we'll force players to do the story quests by locking the arena. But outside of the story quests, players will have the choice between never leaving the city and mindlessly grinding arena fights, or going out and doing (hopefully) fun side quests and get more involved in the game world we're trying to create - to each his own.
All this talk about grinding and game theory is academic and besides the point. No one besides the devs has any knowledge of how the game feels yet. After you play the alpha, you are then qualified to form an opinion on what feels nice or needs fixing. ZeldAity (Zelda/Almaity), I look forward to complimenting the alpha and finding bugbears.
All this talk about grinding and game theory is academic and besides the point. No one besides the devs has any knowledge of how the game feels yet. After you play the alpha, you are then qualified to form an opinion on what feels nice or needs fixing. ZeldAity (Zelda/Almaity), I look forward to complimenting the alpha and finding bugbears.
That's kinda a good point. Also, for the record, we don't know yet either because we didn't get to trying it yet - In addition to having little content in the first place, we also cheat :p
Been a while since we updated anything here (Probably because its been a while since we updated the map...).
Moz seems really damn happy about the pitch/roll thing with doodads and I can already imagine him making houses out of planks and planks out of houses and houses out of planks made out of houses.
He also, quite a while ago, told me he doesn't like making interiors/cities and prefers natural stuff, so I started working on the city, as we really need it for the Alpha. Here come screenshots!
Welcome to Arena City!
When you first start the map, you will spawn beneath that bottom lamp post. Not shown on the screenshot, right below there, is the entrance to what is for now called the "pre-desert" zone (We'll probably have it done for the alpha. A dry somewhat rocky place that will lead to the open desert)
In the bottom left of the image you can see part of the shop - It's opposite the Starcenter. Before it used cliffs as walls and was in the center of the city. In addition to occupying an important location, the cliffs just made it too damn huge as well. So I moved it down there, made it a bit smaller and used SoulFilchers metal walls.
And here's the city square, right on top of what was in the previous image! This screenshot was taken before I added streetlights between the benches along the trees (Its those double streetlights that are in the first screenie as well) The middle of the pond/pool/whatever is currently occupied by a placeholder archon statue, but Mozared has plans to make an awesome fountain.
Here's me standing there with my trusty Washb at night:
What else have we been doing?
Zelda was for the most part working on system changes that make it easier for me to fill in our User Types (Databases practically. Trainers, items, zone definitions (Starmon spawns, # of trainers, etc.) and the arena are 100% User Types with triggers using those values, so its important that we can fill those in quickly and easily without making mistakes)
He was also working on the intro-quest, I'm not sure whether he finished it, don't think he did so he'll probably do so today. The intro quest sends you to the professor, as in all games, to get your first starmon, and you also get to meet your rival :) We already have the tutorial quest implemented that comes afterwards.
I've filled up the arena going up to level 25. The last fight is the "Electric Milestone: Trieve". I've given him, for now, a Zenchu (Probichu evolution, stats are similar to Raichu, just a bit higher to get to that 520 base stat total), Galvadrone (Magneton), Eve, Luxon (Fly+Electric, to be scrapped/model changed, its currently an SC2 phoenix -.-) and a Shockeve. All his starmon have Volt Switch as one of their moves.
I've started work on the intro cutscene, got about 11 seconds at the moment and will be adding a few more different scenes. It's gonna go give you a short summary of the backstory. After that you'll have a sort of "call" with the professor which will go over the players backstory, and the professor will tell the player to make his way to Arena City as he'll give him a Starmon in exchange for help with his research (Stardex)
Also, as we've talked about grinding a lot lately: Chances are the alpha will be quite grindy. We've got a few quests in place that might be able to cover levels 5-15, but we've got nothing to bridge the gap between the two story quests (15 and 25) at the moment. I'll probably let us all cheat through that period if we get bored, or we can maybe even enable XP for PvP fights or something like that.
Nom Nom Nom, that's some tasty news! Should tide me over until dinner time, but then I'll start craving more. :)
Bit of feedback: in the third image I can see the UI sidebar. I think the left/right boarder to the buttons could lose some weight and give the extra real estate to the button width. (PokeBuilder is too close to the edge of it's button) Also, if you could make the whole array taller, and put a few more pixels of space between the buttons, that would make it even more polished. (also, center the text?)
Keep up the good work guys! I want to play before the winter holidays.
The sidebar is the admin only debug options :p You guys will never actually see that outside of the screenshots here.
But the feedback is appreciated. Didn't know what you meant with "center the text?" as it is centered, but then I noticed that it wasn't really centered vertically (Well, it is, but the top border of the button is larger than the bottom border, so it looks uncentered), so I guess I'll have to do some modifications on this.
Not sure if I can make the left and right borders thinner, as they are barely a few pixels thick already, and I'm not really that good at tiled images like these (If you look carefully at the borders you can see them change on the right side (Get a bit whiter) and overall the colors becomes lighter in the center segment of the sidebar)
Thanks :)
And yea, we should have the alpha ready pretty soon. Not sure when we'll really make it a public map, I think we should be careful with that - If we don't have enough content people can quickly get bored and the map will die before it is fully done.
It all makes sense now. My feedback only served to feed your obsessiveness. I am glad that the sidebar is something I never see, because the pokebuilder sounds OP as MewTwo.
Also, is there a post or page limit in threads? I could see 999 being a limit, or 64 pages, etc.
@TheAlmaity: Go
Also, is there a post or page limit in threads? I could see 999 being a limit, or 64 pages, etc.
Not as far as I know. If there is, it's probably something ridiculously large related to how the number is stored. I'm fairly certain there were bigger threads on mapster than this one, but I can't remember what they were.
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Curse PremiumSorry for not answering anything, I've been away from home (and away from the internet) for a while :P
I should also add that, even with the small number of quests we have now, we've already got ways to avoid battles. Obviously you can use repel to skip wild battles, or just walk around random trainers you'll encounter, but there's ways to avoid some storyline-related fights as well. One idea we wanted to communicate during the story was "Fighting isn't always the best option". As such, there's ways to resolve some situations peacefully (or at least without getting into an actual fight). There's only a small number of quests at the moment, but we already have a few situations where this occurs. Your dialog choices in tense situations may also have consequences besides a battle; People may live or die because of your actions, or various events may or may not occur. This isn't anything like mass effect or the witcher, (there's 2 paths through the story, not a bazillion) but small things might change.
We're not going to let you run from every fight before it starts, but like I said above, we do wan to allow some non-combat options to various fights.
Heh, we'll post something eventually. All of our starmon data is written in xml, so theoretically we could easily create a database or something :P
Yes. If you haven't captured the starmon before (you just saw it), you'll get a more vague location ("Likes cool, dark areas", "Enjoys shallow water", "Likes extreme heat"). So we don't explicitly name the zone but you get a pretty good idea. If you've captured the starmon already, we actually list off the zones where you can find the thing.
I said they were hidden in pokemon. They're not really hidden here since the genetics lab reveals all the numbers and allows you to modify them, and the NPCs will explain things to the player should he ask.
As for how fast you can EV train, iirc with all the possible boosters in pokemon it actually went pretty fast. You can get 100 with vitamins. 3 is the highest possible you can get from defeating a starmon. Double it with a held item. Pokemon had the PokeRus virus thingy that doubled EVs again iirc, but we're not gonna add that - I think a consumable would be better. So, that's 12 per starmon. You're gonna need to defeat 13 starmon to max out your EVs in a single stat. Now, unlike the pokemon games, we're gonna add a system that can hand you battles against such starmon on a silver platter. Pick a stat and be thrown into a fight against a trainer with only starmon that award that stats EVs. So, about 120k money + whatever the consumable costs + the held item + KO 13 starmon and you've EV trained one stat. Tbh, 120k shouldn't be hard to get by the time EV training really becomes noticeable. And you can just fight 8 additional starmon instead if you don't have the money.
Money/BP grinding will probably coincide with trying to get your starmon to reach level 100, as you need to fight a lot in those later levels, and the arena is the easiest place to repeatedly get high level opponents.
Yea, it sounds pretty grindy, but pokemon was pretty damn grindy later on as well. We're already doing things to make it easier, like XP rewards on quests, karma rewards, easily accessible fights for all levels and we'll probably add some consumables as well.
As for Repel: I was thinking of having it time based, but making it tick only while in grass is really easy to do (Probably easier than time based in our current system :p )
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Curse PremiumWe recently made a little change to how spawning works. Previously, you always started the game in the main town no matter what. Now, you spawn at the location of closest unlocked teleporter to your last position. Teleporters are usually found inside a starcenter (the really out-of-the-way teleporters will at least be next to a healing machine, if not in a full starcenter). This way, if you die, it's a much shorter walk back to the spot of your demise. Additionally, you can easily get back to town (or to anywhere else) because you're already at the teleporter. The same thing happens if you leave the game and log back in later, you'll spawn next to a teleporter.
We've also been fixing lots of nasty bugs. In fact, that's what I've been spending most of time doing. :P
One of our design goals for starmon was to avoid the hidden mechanics of pokemon. That's not to say we want to remove those hidden mechanics, but we want to explain them properly and make them transparent to the player. So happiness will still exist, but we're going to explain it to you and give you an easy way to check it. IVs and EVs still exist, but we're giving you an easy way to view them and we're going to explain them clearly. That way, casual players can do absolutely fine and understand the game systems, while "pro" players can train specifically for the best stats.
Additionally, we don't have a wiki like the actual pokemon games do. Curios players can't just google the best ways to level up starmon. So we want to provide all the information you would ever need in-game. If we ever get around to launching a website, that would be awesome. But we can't rely on that.
We'll have to see how it goes. In general, leveling up is a faster process in starmon. We're giving you large experience rewards for finishing quests and also providing you with easily accessible fights if you do want to grind. It's tricky to see how grindy it is now (there's only 2 of us and we're constantly making new starmon for ourselves), but I definitely don't like grinding. If it becomes too grindly late-game, we'll change something.
Well, we can just tweak the price and duration to make it practical ^.^ Repel isn't actually in the game yet (although we'll definitely add it), but I think only draining it while you're actually in grass is a good idea. I'm not sure how avoiding wild battles for free would go over... Again, you can skip a lot of "dangerous areas" by using the teleporters, so you won't have to re-tread old zones. I guess we could add something where you won't be attacked if you greatly outlevel a zone, or something like that. We'll have to see what works.
Right, we want to add lots of those types of situations. The reason that there's only one or two in the game right now is because there's only one or two big quests. But we definitely think these "choice" situations are cool. Obviously the "big" choice in the game is whether or not you'll join cipher (and that results in a totally different set of story missions), but we'd like to include smaller choices with smaller, but still significant, consequences.
I don't think it's really possible to make a pokemon style game without grindyness. The entire point of it is to capture some creatures and train them until you are the best. Training pretty much equals grinding.
The games "guide" the players through the guide, give him another objective, through the storyline and the massive zones the player needs to get through to reach the next city. But at some point the player just gets stuck due to being too weak and has to take a break to just get a few levels.
Games in which character progression is a big factor generally require some grinding. The first playthrough of D3 can be considered as story focused I guess, but after that its all grinding to get better numbers. Mass Effect doesn't have too important character progression and focuses a lot more on the story - Character progression isn't the core feature there, being too low levelled/having too few upgrades doesn't make the game impossible or insanely hard, so there aren't even any good options for grinding (by "good options" I mean something straightforward and repeatable that gives XP and/or money). Skyrim is somewhere in between, you can just explore and do quests for the sake of exploring and doing quests, and due to how Skyrim scales you generally won't find anything that's impossible to do due to being too weak, but if you want to have a strong character you're gonna be spending a good amount of time grinding skills, collecting crafting materials and gold, doing very specific quests for their rewards (Azura's star for example) etc.
The pokemon games, including Starmon, are about character progression, much like MMOs. The story is a way to get player through the grind/forget about the grind/keep them from realizing it's just one big grind.
Remember what the popular opinions about every single feature of D3 that reduced the grind were? (Being able to switch spells whenever you want, not having something permanent like a talent tree, less time overall needed to reach max level, auction house, etc.) Not that I agree with those arguments/complaints, just giving an example of what happens when you take grind out of a popular grind based game.
Now, with all that said, there are different levels of grinding. I don't want to remove all the grindibg, but I do want to cut down on the time it takes to get through the game and to level more (alternative) team members to 100. But I don't think that it's even close to possible for us to remove the need to battle outside of quests or so (In other words, allow you to play only the story and side quests to level, like mass effect 3), and we're not going to aim for that. Making quests takes time and space, and we'd prefer using as little as possible of the former and simply don't have much of the latter. We'll make sure that it doesn't take horrendously long, but we're not gonna remove all "grinding". We're not just gonna hand you level 100 starmon with perfectly set up IVs and EVs, you're gonna have to work for them. We're gonna add in quests for all stages of the game and also repeatable quests that don't care what your completion/level is so that at no point the only option left is to grind (Unlike pokemon, which rarely had anything/much after you completed the story. Silver/Gold had the most post-end content, but even then, after you beat Kanto and Red, you've got about 20 levels to go), we'll try to accelerate things and make them as interesting as possible. We'll do our best to reduce the grindy elements of the game, but we won't straight up remove them.
I guess we can add a PvP mode where all starmon get set to a specific level (Chosen by the players) and have all EVs, maybe even IVs, set to 0. Zelda already set up a system that automatically evolves random trainer starmon if they are able to (So that we don't have trainers with level 70 metapods), maybe we can throw that one in as well. Probably won't have such matches affect a players PvP stats and won't reward the secondary currency (I think we'll call it Arena Points.)
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Curse PremiumA quick note here- I'm going to be out of town for about 2 weeks, so I won't be able to work on the map (no laptop, ugh). I may have internet access to post here once or twice, but I doubt it. I know it's at a really awkward time for starmon's development, but we'll get the alpha to you guys eventually, I promise. ^.^ I'll miss reading all your guys's comments in the meantime! <3
Anyways, you'll need to direct all your future complaints to TheAlmaity, because anything that goes wrong is now entirely his fault :P
edit- Also, after reading the above posts I'd like to add another note: I don't like grinding. So I'm going to do my best to make this as un-grindy as possible, at least for the duration of the story. Turn-based RPGs like this tend to be cursed with grindyness by default, but we're going to try and reduce the grind as much as possible. I like the idea of having "unofficial" PvP fights where EV's are equal. We could also add options to equalize levels or IV's. Good idea :P
I think you may have sort of misunderstood my intentions/ideas/whatever, or I just explained them poorly. "I don't mind working for my starmon but how much I have to do will be the issue." That's what I meant there's different levels of grinding. There's "Ok, I'll spend 5-10 minutes mindlessly doing battles with anyone I see for this bonus I need for whatever reason" and then there's "Yea, I'll spend two weeks running heroics so that I can spend two months doing that raid". I definitely don't want the latter kind, but I think we'll have to resort to the former: (hopefully-)short intervals where you just have to do your own thing and get a bit higher level. You'll still have some form of guidance as early on in the game you'll realise that generally big stuff is going to happen right after you beat the next milestone trainer, so if at any point the story just seems to be standing still, you'll know what to do. If you're missing a few levels, you'll walk out one of the gates (or use a teleporter), wander around a zone, fight trainers and hopefully find a quick optional quest or two for a nice XP reward, or if you wanna do something more reliable but grindy you can just repeat one or two arena fights over and over again until you're ready to fight the milestone trainer. Whatever case it is, it shouldn't last too long. Not gonna mention a specific time as I suck at estimating such stuff, and I also find that time passes quite quickly when playing pokemon/starmon :p It might take an hour, but not the "Oh my god when is this going to end" type of hour, but the "JESUS CHRIST ITS 3 AM ALREADY!?!?!" kind of hour. Ideally I don't want it to take an hour though, was just giving an example. Unless you stick to your first 6 starmon (or, well, any 6 you've managed to get above the level of captureable starmon) forever, you're gonna need to a reliable way to train alternative starmon. Easiest way is obviously battles. Well, only way, pretty much. Whatever you do will have to include a battle - Even if it doesnt directly, chances are you'll have to walk from point A to point B and there'll be trainers/grass in between.
Levels in pokemon took a decent amount of time later on, and we're keeping XP numbers the same (Well, due to the lack of 3 part starmon chains, most stage 2 starmon have higher XP than in pokemon (Still slightly less than Stage 3 in either though)), but we're gonna make sure that the story quests and a good amount of side quests catapult you through the levels to create as little downtime between milestone trainers (and therefore story quests) as possible. The issue is that the quests aren't repeatable, you'll only get through em once, you'll only be able to give the reward to a set of 6 starmon at once, and if you swap out any of them for a weaker version, chances are you'll have to grin to bring it up to par, unless we can add something else. EXP.Share helps with making new and/or lower level pokemon catch up. Being able to pick fights of any level in the arena helps a bit as well, as you couldn't really be picky in pokemon and the league were the highest level trainers - and I don't think they ever exceeded level 70, if they reached it at all. (Silver/Gold may be the exception since they have practically 2 games in one. Can't remember the levels there) Right now we're using the "old" XP formula. I think it was Black/White that used the new one, that factors in level differences, and after this discussion, I think that we should use the new formula, as it will heavily accelerate the training of lower level starmon - Imagine you place EXP.Share on a level 10 Probichu, then go fight the level 50 Milestone trainer with your level 55 party. Knock out one starmon, and probichu will get 5-10 times the XP your level 55 starmon got.
And, as fights of all levels are always available, your above-average level starmon won't really be penalized as you either pick what the average is (arena) or the average is adjusted to your party ("Wild" trainers, as I always call em). (I can't imagine what it is like to reach level 100 in Black/White, as I've never seen a pokemon game introduce such high level trainers. There was Mt.Battle in XD which I think went up to 90.) WARNING: It's relatively late and I slept less than usual the past few days, so below here I kept going off-topic. Will go back on topic in the paragraph after this one.
WARNING 2: Feel free to skip both following paragraphs. I think I might be a bit irritated today and it might be affecting my writing, I go off topic a lot and might unintentionally sound mean/annoyed/whatever. I could just delete the paragraphs, but I think I'll rather just leave em up with this warning. I honestly think this is a good discussion, and also a very necessary one. Relying on your own opinions is bound to backfire, I've learned that and the value of other peoples opinions/feedback during our development of RuneCraft (Eiviyn is probably the best game designer I know relatively personally, I'll probably ask him to join the alpha test and force myself to listen to him criticizing absolutely everything, because he always has good points.) With the arena, people will always have the option to just do the straightforward really boring grind if they want to. And don't get me wrong, I hate grinding as well, at least the extreme kind that just takes for fucking ever. So, I
And I actually want to point out that all these posts are 100% from my perspective without consulting with Zelda first, actually most posts are if we are talking about concepts/not yet implemented stuff. It's rare that he disagrees, and if he does we find a good solution. (He did a pretty damn good job with our party system, I didn't think about flaws in the first place and he not only found em but thought up multiple really good solutions). Back on topic: I want to have as much stuff in the map as possible to have the world "feel alive", that there is stuff to do regardless of the story, so that instead being forced to do a mindless grind you can just run around and interact with the world inbetween battles, find a quest/event here and there, discover some cool wandering NPC/Starmon, find random items, etc. But again, time, effort:reward/usefulness, space. Those are proving to be our biggest problems. The first two especially. [removed a ton of irrelevant text. More than this paragraph consists of at this moment actually.]RIGHT. Back on topic! Where was I?Time, effort, and space. We promised an Alpha in April. Then we got really cool ideas. It's June. Zelda won't be back til August, same goes for Moz. Do you know how far our storyline goes at the moment? Level 25. "Oh yeah, that's a quarter way"
No, it's not. XP/levels aren't linear, they aren't even quadratic, they're fucking cubic. Levels 1-25 are fast.Ok, I think I might sound a bit annoyed/annoying and so on in this post... Sorry about that >.> To summarize all I wanted to say really shortly:Why am I talking about this? Because we were talking about grinding. We have to invest a lot of time for anything we do here. The core of the game is fight->get levels->try to beat game up to the point where current level isn't enough->repeat. It becomes grindy when the "fight" part is relatively directionless, when the player has nothing real to do other than find a trainer or pick an arena fight. We'll add as many events and quests as we can to keep players occupied to "mask" the grind and make it feel less grindy, but please don't expect or ask us to devote as much time to this as actual game companies do to create massive zones full of quests so that the player never has free time. We're two people and we don't do this as our jobs, we've got a lot of free time, but since this isn't our job we won't work on it constantly and as efficiently as possible. Even Mozared is really damn busy with his new job and rarely has time to add any terrain to the map. And even ignoring the time limit, there's the map space limit. At a certain point stuff will just get really cluttered if we don't handle every optional quest/event absolutely perfectly. We can't make massive zones like in WoW where there is more than enough space for a million quests, we've got a tiny forest and that's it.
Boring grinding sucks and can go to hell. I want to do my best (And Zelda probably too) to reduce the amount of grinding in this game, and what grinding will be left over we will attempt to make more fun with optional side quests and events. We'll make a lot of them appear randomly or have other random elements to them, so that they don't get too repetitive and you don't actually find all possible quests/events in a single go, so you always have a reason to go back to a zone, see if something new showed up. People who want to grind will easily have the option, but I really want to do my best to just shove enough content into the game to keep people occupied while they level up their primary/secondary set of starmon. And if we can't add quests and events, we can try and add consumables and other NPCs and systems to make stuff easier and smoother (Like what I keep mentioning about fights tailored for EV training) What we need is two things: Actually get the game developed far enough so that we can actually test and go beyond theoretical discussions on this subject, and ideas on how to identify fix such problems preemptively through the discussion we're having right now by going into far more specific cases. So, first of all, "bigger rewards" isn't really something that should be considered. We'll be using those to dictate the game pace, and we'll try to keep it quick. The bigger issue is that you'll spend most of your time doing the story quests, which aren't repeatable, and therefore not a reliable training method. You'll get one high level party, and that's it. I already talked about this before. So we need to find problems and solutions to them while ignoring the fact that the story exists - It is a quick ride for your first party of starmon to a high level (Story will most likely end a good time before level 100. In addition to time requirements, I think if I have to stretch it out for too long it'll decrease in quality), and it only works once. And this is a game where, if you want to do more than the story, you have to eventually get a large amount of starmon to level 100 so that you can have a more diverse team and try different strategies, so we need a very reliable and repeatable method to have a "pleasant grind" for that. One thing I suggested earlier was changing the XP formula to include relative levels - It allows you to quickly pull a new party member to your average level. This also makes the story more effective at training new starmon after you did the quests, as you now have a party that is capable of pulling new members up to their level. I think this will be very effective, but it only solves half of the problem kinda - You still need a source of experience. I might try to think of unique minigames or such stuff that don't involve traditional battles (or maybe do) that can serve as an alternative XP source should a player get bored of standard battles. also, to touch on your multiplayer/pvp comment: Yea, I think it's very important that we have an easy to get into PvP system. So, as suggested earlier, we can make that battle type that equalized teams. I said no rewards, but I think that may be the wrong thing to do. So, here's my idea:
- 0 EVs. This makes the battles different than non-equalized ones, as the proportions between stats change, and encourage players to actually reach max level and try the "real" fights.
- Undecided on IVs. Probably 0 as well for the same reason
- Moves: Little to no starmon learn a move past level 60, which means you unlock your starmons full move list relatively early. The last/level-50+ moves are in most cases powerful TM moves as well. (Fire Blast, Thunder, Solarbeam, Overdrive, etc.), so setting up your moves shouldn't be an issue.
- Levels: I think letting players pick the level of the fight would be best. Would probably add a minimum limit of about 30-50 though to avoid as many possible issues with my next point as possibe.
- Auto-evolve: We've got this in place for AIs, when they are generated, the system checks whether the starmon is at or above its evolve level and evolves it if yes. This doesn't work on non-level evolutions though (Happiness, trade, stones). We could add this so that really low level players (<25) can still try relatively fair fights against higher level trainers without suffering from crappy base stats due to unevolved sarmon.
- The reason for the minimum level on such fights is so that you can't run into the reverse evolution problem: Doing a level 10 fight, meaning the low level players starmon don't auto evolve and have crappy base stats, while the other player has a fully evolved party.
- Would also add auto-learn moves in case a players starmon has an empty slot - It would just grab the last move it could learn for that level. Starmon usually have all 4 move slots filled by level 13-17 though, so this would very rarely be used.
- Rewards: No rewards would probably be a bit extreme and annoying. Not sure what rewards to give though - I want proper battles to be better than equalized ones. Money earned will be determined by players (Each player pays the same amount of money for the battle, winner takes all), so what we have left is pretty much Arena Points. I guess we could have equalized battles give an XP reward post-battle based on the average level of the party (So starmon participation doesn't matter either, it'll just be a number give to all party members), and maybe a low amount of arena points. "Real battles" could award more arena points, or maybe yet another currency used for more special items (OP PvE items maybe?), and maybe a good amount of recorded stats (Could easily implement an Elo system I think)
Ok, I'm tired and wanna go to sleep. Feel free to leave feedback :)Can't be bothered with cutting up your post with the quote BBCode atm, so I'll just reply in color inside the quote.
OK I feel I need to give my opinion on all this talk of GRINDING, to me pokemon my Favorite RPG along with the .Hack GU PS2 games because the Story alone covers all your level grinding. Do any extra side quests help a NPC Character with something made the game even faster and less grindy by DOING something with some STORY ELEMENTS even if it's not the MAIN STORY got you more levels and money and MADE the MAIN STORY EASIER to get Through.
Then there are GAMES with nothing but GRIND and very SPARSE (only little bits and pieces of STORY) STORY ELEMENTS, the best example to me is FINAL FANTASY 12. The best way to get through the Game STORY is by spending 4-8 Hours in the First Battle area Dalmasca Estersand. You might even need more than that because you should be Level 20+ if you want to progress SMOOTHLY past the MASSIVE WORLD littered with enemies just to GRIND for LEVELING UP and continue to the STORY. Then you will need to stop again quite frequently every 10 levels to GRIND MORE just to KEEP UP to the enemies.
That second paragraph is GRINDING when you gotta spend more of the time fighting the enemies in the same area because there the ONLY ones to give you the most XP to LEVEL UP for facing the next area is to me boring and much more STIMULATING than the old DBZ All Sagas map from StarCraft 1 where you just sit in the Training Area fighting a Free Enemy not being Fought by your Allies, and Button Mash on Upgrade Weapons & Armor. So in Summary Spending 7 Minutes GRINDING for the Story then the STORY only taking 1 Minute Tops dealing with Story Character is boring GRINDING.
In Pokemon if you had to Grind for the Gym Leader or Elite Four in my Experience it's usually a 10 to 30 minute Grind then you back on to the STORY. I think that is why the Elite Four have Never been Level 100 because it would take a lot of GRINDING TIME from Level 70 to Level 100 since there are not many Trainers to encounter with Level 70 and Higher Pokemon since you've been to all areas and most trainers were under Level 50 even. That made the game go by easier by having most of the Trainers under Level 50 you don't have to GRIND to get past the START of the GAME, but Since they didn't have a Re-Battle for most Generations you couldn't face the Level 5 to 15 Bug Catchers again this time with a more Varied and/or Higher Level of those same Bug and/or some Different ones.
I think your GAME can pull it off BECAUSE I believe You've said you plan to have a Re-Battle with their Pokemon Team Level Scaling to Match yours upto a cap based on their Level when you first faced them and the Level of the AREA they are in. It means that it may be a little more GRINDING since you have to go back to AREAS whose STORY you very likely have completed fully, just to Level Up for the ENDGAME but it can be made to feel less GRINDING because your all so going back to see new teams hopefully on some of the Trainers. If they have some New and some of their Original Pokemon it can feel more like just the INBETWEEN STORY part of the GAME more I think, even more so if there is new Events taking Place in the Areas that might of been hinted at EARLIER or events Never mentioned.
@Trieva: Go
Well then our Definition of GRINDING is very Different, since to me it means you HAVE to spend x amount of time GRINDING to Level Up just to be able to beat the area ahead otherwise you're stuck and no more things STORY wise to do only BATTLE what you've already fought.
I don't see how Optional Side Stories that only make the Main Game Easier but are not Required to actually get through the Main Game Equals GRINDING. I'll give an Example say playing ONLY through the Main Story at the 4th Milestone Trainer your Starmon Team Average at around Level 35 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon Team Average at Level 30, but if you had done all the Side Story your Team Average would be at around Level 42 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon Team Average were at Level 30. Either way you can still beat the Gym Leader it's just even Easier and Even more likely if you did the Side Story.
Now Here's an Example of what I think would be GRINDING in Starmon, doing the Main Story ONLY your Starmon Team Average were at Level 30 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon Team Average at around Level 45, but if you had done all the Side Story your Starmon would Average at around Level 40 and the 4th Milestone Trainer's Starmon were at Level 45. Either way you still might need to GRIND some Levels to beat the 4th Milestone Trainer it's just less Difficult and may be likely without GRINDING if you did ALL the Side Story.
Any idea on when this will be able to be played?
Also I noticed you had a post recently about what to do after you complete the story. You could add arenas for people to battle and complete challenges like I have seen before in games like this.
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@Trieva: Go
Oh yes it looks I agree now that I get what you're talking about, That is how I feel that Starmon should be too, I was getting worried you were talking more about making all Battles (Trainer and Wild Starmon) skippable because you thought the game would be too GRINDY otherwise. The way you stated it in your quote above I agree 100% with.
Won't give any promises. Zelda is currently on vacation, a friend of mine who moved out of country came back for a while so I'm practically on vacation as well, Moz is on vacation. Things should pick back up in a week or two. Zelda has one quest to finish for our alpha content to be done, but I think we want to add more before then, and we've got some polishing to do (The storage box looks horrible, I need to work on some art for that. Trainer card is pretty bad atm as we haven't fully decided how it will look yet and what stats it will contain, but I think we might not fix this for the alpha. Then there's general bugs that need fixing and tweaks that need to be made. Also, don't expect many items or that all starmon have abilities, those are two things we haven't worked on at all. You've got capture cores, potions, status heals and 2 TMs, and we've got a few very generic abilities)
Currently, our to-do list goes over 9 A4 pages, but that includes discussions on issues (With a lot of wasted space due to how bullet points work (thinner paragraphs) It sounds like a lot more than it actually is though :p Some of those things have already been fixed but not removed from the list, a good chunk of it is discussions, around 1 page is just the abilities I want Zelda to make (for the starter starmon + Eves), there's a list of moves that need to be implemented trigger wise (Although I think most of em are already in) with comments on those, list of artwork (Which includes crossed out lines), etc.
I'll just give a short list of what needs to be done, and I'll try and sort by priority:
and that's all the important stuff.
The big arena (elite 4 + champion at the end) won't be done by the time the story is (I'm expecting the story to end around level 70. It all really depends on how well I can write it and how far I can stretch it out without making it bad), so that's one thing the player still has to do. We've got some suggestions in our to-do list for things to add, like special challenge battles with various parameters. We might change our saving method a bit to allow multiple player profiles per bank (Or we could just use multiple banks) and add some stuff to support the more hardcore modes people play pokemon on (permadeath, forced to capture first starmon in each zone, nickname everyone, etc.) But that's stuff that will be added later on in development - Shouldn't be too hard, but its not a priority atm. Won't be in for the alpha.
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh... We can make the enemies user lower AI levels (Which controls EVs and IVs to a certain extent), and maybe tweak the level scaling formula. I don't really know whether we should add something like this. The easiest way to deal with difficult enemies is by spending 5-10 minutes doing something else to level up your starmon. Fallout is similar to Skyrim and Oblivion, so I think I know how it uses the difficulty slider and... Well, I guess it works for those games? They're not multiplayer first of all, so you don't really get that much out of easy difficulty except an easier time to play solo. In starmon, lowering the difficulty in any way would make it a lot easier and faster to level and would just get abused by people who like to grind :p Lowering XP rewards with lowered difficulty just defeats the entire purpose. I would be fine with a slider that adjusts the scaling of randomized enemy trainers, so you can set them to be 2-3 levels beneath you.
As for the grinding discussion that's been going on:
Players will be left to do their own stuff regularly, and that's mostly because of the way we're handling "open world" - We're not locking you out of zones the same way pokemon did. After the first milestone trainer, you'll be able to go into any zone (We might lock some of the really high level zones though, like the deep desert, which is supposed to be level 40+ and a pretty hard place. Those zones would be unlocked when appropriate.) But in general you'll end up with most of the world exploreable immediately. I want to do this so that you can immediately start putting together a good team of starmon, and not having a very limited selection because you can only find about 5-10 new ones every zone/5-10 levels, and all of them being of similar types as wild starmon fit the theme of the zone.
Because of this, it's relatively hard to create criteria that are required for the next story quest to show up. There's close to nothing every player has to do. Everyone can run off in a different direction. Only place we are guaranteed to find players is the main city and arena - You just can't get around that. So right now we're using milestone trainers as criteria for the story quests, as they are kind of the only way we currently have to gate game progress. Fights inbetween milestone trainers are harder to use because players can just "leave them for later" and decide to do all 10 at once.
Let me explain how the current quest works: You hit level 15, nothing happens. But you remember the first milestone trainer was level 15, so you head to the arena. Maybe you already did all fights, or only some, but that doesn't really matter. If you're not there yet, you fight your way to the milestone trainer, and then you get told he's not here. You find out he's busy searching for something, and you get asked to help him find it. This forces the player to leave the city, which means we can create an event for when he returns into the city, because we are absolutely certain he won't meet the criteria for the quest while in it.
The second big quest takes place in a zone, but once again the player is forced to the city to actually reach the milestone trainer fight. This one isn't locked, but right after it you find out stuffs going on and get sent into the zone - Once again we used the milestone trainer to make sure the player isn't in the zone where all the quest NPCs suddenly spawn.
We can't do that with NPCs and objects in zones because players aren't guaranteed to go there at the right time. If a player did the cave zone at level 15, why would he think of returning there at level 35? We need to use the city in one way or another, and can't use the zones themselves to start story-related quests.
So our plan is to have stuff in the zones that players can do regardless of level (due to scaling). You're gonna get a big chunk of XP through the story quests, a good amount through the arena fights you need to do, but you'll probably be missing some, and that will make you go out into the zones and do quests there. They may be related to Cipher and story, but most probably won't be. You'll have Mozared giving you silly quests only a certified explorer can understand the purpose of, you might meet a farmer whose crops are being plagued by starmon that need taking care of. There'll be a mercenary who needs a partner, a Wanderer searching for something interesting who enjoys an occasional conversation. The guys over at the lab may have some equipment that needs testing, or will want you to do some field work. Or Cipher is gonna be screwing stuff up. Yea, you can in a way consider it grinding, but I think the story quests will be a lot better if I don't have to make too many of them and can fill space with side quests - it's also a lot easier.
We'll force players into the zones via story quests, and we'll force players to do the story quests by locking the arena. But outside of the story quests, players will have the choice between never leaving the city and mindlessly grinding arena fights, or going out and doing (hopefully) fun side quests and get more involved in the game world we're trying to create - to each his own.
All this talk about grinding and game theory is academic and besides the point. No one besides the devs has any knowledge of how the game feels yet. After you play the alpha, you are then qualified to form an opinion on what feels nice or needs fixing. ZeldAity (Zelda/Almaity), I look forward to complimenting the alpha and finding bugbears.
That's kinda a good point. Also, for the record, we don't know yet either because we didn't get to trying it yet - In addition to having little content in the first place, we also cheat :p
So you waited until I was gone until you did this:
I'm hurt :(
Been a while since we updated anything here (Probably because its been a while since we updated the map...).
Moz seems really damn happy about the pitch/roll thing with doodads and I can already imagine him making houses out of planks and planks out of houses and houses out of planks made out of houses.
He also, quite a while ago, told me he doesn't like making interiors/cities and prefers natural stuff, so I started working on the city, as we really need it for the Alpha. Here come screenshots!
Welcome to Arena City!
When you first start the map, you will spawn beneath that bottom lamp post. Not shown on the screenshot, right below there, is the entrance to what is for now called the "pre-desert" zone (We'll probably have it done for the alpha. A dry somewhat rocky place that will lead to the open desert)
In the bottom left of the image you can see part of the shop - It's opposite the Starcenter. Before it used cliffs as walls and was in the center of the city. In addition to occupying an important location, the cliffs just made it too damn huge as well. So I moved it down there, made it a bit smaller and used SoulFilchers metal walls.
And here's the city square, right on top of what was in the previous image! This screenshot was taken before I added streetlights between the benches along the trees (Its those double streetlights that are in the first screenie as well) The middle of the pond/pool/whatever is currently occupied by a placeholder archon statue, but Mozared has plans to make an awesome fountain.
Here's me standing there with my trusty Washb at night:
What else have we been doing?
Zelda was for the most part working on system changes that make it easier for me to fill in our User Types (Databases practically. Trainers, items, zone definitions (Starmon spawns, # of trainers, etc.) and the arena are 100% User Types with triggers using those values, so its important that we can fill those in quickly and easily without making mistakes)
He was also working on the intro-quest, I'm not sure whether he finished it, don't think he did so he'll probably do so today. The intro quest sends you to the professor, as in all games, to get your first starmon, and you also get to meet your rival :) We already have the tutorial quest implemented that comes afterwards.
I've filled up the arena going up to level 25. The last fight is the "Electric Milestone: Trieve". I've given him, for now, a Zenchu (Probichu evolution, stats are similar to Raichu, just a bit higher to get to that 520 base stat total), Galvadrone (Magneton), Eve, Luxon (Fly+Electric, to be scrapped/model changed, its currently an SC2 phoenix -.-) and a Shockeve. All his starmon have Volt Switch as one of their moves.
I've started work on the intro cutscene, got about 11 seconds at the moment and will be adding a few more different scenes. It's gonna go give you a short summary of the backstory. After that you'll have a sort of "call" with the professor which will go over the players backstory, and the professor will tell the player to make his way to Arena City as he'll give him a Starmon in exchange for help with his research (Stardex)
Also, as we've talked about grinding a lot lately: Chances are the alpha will be quite grindy. We've got a few quests in place that might be able to cover levels 5-15, but we've got nothing to bridge the gap between the two story quests (15 and 25) at the moment. I'll probably let us all cheat through that period if we get bored, or we can maybe even enable XP for PvP fights or something like that.
Nom Nom Nom, that's some tasty news! Should tide me over until dinner time, but then I'll start craving more. :)
Bit of feedback: in the third image I can see the UI sidebar. I think the left/right boarder to the buttons could lose some weight and give the extra real estate to the button width. (PokeBuilder is too close to the edge of it's button) Also, if you could make the whole array taller, and put a few more pixels of space between the buttons, that would make it even more polished. (also, center the text?)
Keep up the good work guys! I want to play before the winter holidays.
@OceanFlex: Go
The sidebar is the admin only debug options :p You guys will never actually see that outside of the screenshots here.
But the feedback is appreciated. Didn't know what you meant with "center the text?" as it is centered, but then I noticed that it wasn't really centered vertically (Well, it is, but the top border of the button is larger than the bottom border, so it looks uncentered), so I guess I'll have to do some modifications on this.
Not sure if I can make the left and right borders thinner, as they are barely a few pixels thick already, and I'm not really that good at tiled images like these (If you look carefully at the borders you can see them change on the right side (Get a bit whiter) and overall the colors becomes lighter in the center segment of the sidebar)
Thanks :)
And yea, we should have the alpha ready pretty soon. Not sure when we'll really make it a public map, I think we should be careful with that - If we don't have enough content people can quickly get bored and the map will die before it is fully done.
@TheAlmaity: Go
It all makes sense now. My feedback only served to feed your obsessiveness. I am glad that the sidebar is something I never see, because the pokebuilder sounds OP as MewTwo.
Also, is there a post or page limit in threads? I could see 999 being a limit, or 64 pages, etc.
Not as far as I know. If there is, it's probably something ridiculously large related to how the number is stored. I'm fairly certain there were bigger threads on mapster than this one, but I can't remember what they were.