Well, we're planning on the karma system which gives you different bonuses based on your choices (good/bad), and there will be a split storyline (For simplicities sake it will be almost identical, you just get to play it from opposite sides, so the actual quests will usually require you to do different things while the story stays the same). The last quest in the alpha will make you pick sides. We'll try and do as much as possible with the choices and karma system, but everything takes valuable time, so we'll see how well it goes.
I think we discussed a lot earlier in this thread the possibility of restarting the game (maybe even with a seperate save slot now that bank sizes shouldn't be an issue anymore.) with different options/challenges, perma-death being an example we talked about I think. When we get to making that we'll probably discuss it here and see if you guys have any great ideas for rules/challenges :) Some should be fairly easy to implement, like perma-death (Just needs a set of actions after the 0HP/Faint-check that checks whether perma-death is on and if yes delete the starmon from the bank), and some other "simple" rules like maybe "no items" would be really easy (That one is just simply disabling the buttons to all inventory tabs other than capture cores)
I don't want to change the starters though. I'd rather add an additional difficulty dialog before/after picking them - The starter itself shouldn't really indicate difficulty, and its also hard to tell the player what's going on without a massive wall of text. And in the end, as we have relatively few starmon, I want all of them to be viable and valuable, or at least as many as possible.
Also, iirc I tried to make sure that the first trainers in the arena, including the first milestone, shouldn't have a type advantage over the starters (Fire Starter is gonna be OP though cuz there's a lot of bugs. They don't have bug moves at that point, so grass starter is fine), I'd have to check again though, I think I modified the possible starmon trainers can get since I did all that. Young Kid trainers might have a chance to get one of the starters, so that could be a potential problem for yours :p But you should have a second or even third starmon before you can start expecting to win in the arena.
I've finally got a little bit of free time, so I can respond :D
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Coop support (for at least 2 players)
That's in already. Or at least, it was until the patch broke it. I'm working on finding the problem. (Edit: It's fixed! My hunch was right, it was a patch-related bug). You can hop into a party with any other player and all fights you guys get into will automatically be converted into a 2v2 co-op fight. More than 2 people at once isn't gunna happen though- the engine just isn't set up for that :)
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Enhanced replayability, so we have things to do after beating the elite four or catching them all. Maybe include random events.
A random event system is already added, but there's only one or two. We'd definitely like high replay value. NewGame+ (or something similar) would be really awesome, and we'll definitely look into that when the time comes. Because of the way our content is generated rather than pre-set, it shouldn't be too hard to just bump up the difficulty curve if we wanted.
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Hidden goodies. Like items, quests, or events that reward players who love exploring.
Items are currently placed randomly around the map each time you load the game. There's also several hidden areas and zones for you to find (several are there already, actually, though we'll add more over time) But you really have to look hard :)
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Remove late game grinding. I'd rather not spend several hours/days/weeks getting to level 100 from a low level or EV training if it will drag and it's very uninteresting to do. Especially if that effort is kinda wasted when I feel like trying a different team or starmon. Reward players who experiment but don't make gaming a chore.
One of the reasons we have the quest system is to help alleviate this problem. Completing the story (and side quests, for that matter) gives you experience points, so grinding should be much less of a problem. We'll have to look at that later though, since currently there isn't any end-game at all ^.^
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Writing this post got me thinking, will there be a 2v2 equivalent of the elite four to make coop just as epic?
Like I said above, every single battle in the game will automatically become a 2v2 if you're with a friend. You can get through the entire story without ever battling on your own, if you wanted. We've also discussed maybe adding some type of co-op arena challenge, where you and a friend try to survive as many fights as you can (with each one getting harder) to earn rewards. There's no end-game content right now though, so we'll have to tackle that issue when we get there.
We may have discussed this before but I'm not willing to re-read so many posts :P . I'd like to suggest we have many conveniences. For starters, how about replacing HMs with items? I don't like using up a pokemon's move and I usually made it a throwaway party member which wasted space. Ideally it would be nice to train up my dream-team/competitive-team from the get-go.
We did talk about this :P Originally only Surf and Fly were planned as useable HMs, and after technical difficulties Surf was demoted to "just another move". With the teleporter system, Fly is merely a convenience, not something thats necessary.
This got me wondering, can we have an option to prevent any starmon from picking up certain EVs and be able to change that later if we wanted it? Maybe to make things simpler and possibly better, remove EV training and stats altogether.
We did discuss Ev training as well :)
There'll be a special place where you can pick fights based on EVs (So you fight trainers whose starmon award only specific EVs), and there will be an easy way to remove unwanted EVs from your starmon (and reroll IVs). We're not gonna remove em as it adds customization to starmon, which there is little to none of if we don't add new mechanics instead, and we want to stick to stuff people already know. We are however doing everything we can think of to make it easier and less "hidden" - As I said, you can remove them (which also means you can view em), you have an easy way to grind them, and we'll add ways to boost the speed at which you get them. Preventing pickup of certain EVs is probably doable, will think about that
I've taken advantage of Christmas break to get a bunch of work done on the map. It's been mostly bugfixing. I fixed a ton of small problems with quests, I fixed a bug that was wrecking save files, and I fixed a bunch of small visual glitches. I also added an early version of the map screen.
The point is, it's far more stable now than it was a week ago :P
I hope I'm not coming off harsh but I'm critical because I care ;) . To finish off this post on a lighter note, I have an idea. How about our trainer can level up with our starmon. Based on our levels or abilities, we can apply passive buffs to our active starmon to enhance them. There's a variety of buffs to choose from and the choosing can be done before each battle or switch in. This should add the interesting idea of "we're in this together". Why should starmon do all the hard work like their our slaves or tools of war? :P.
I think we've discussed this idea before. It's not something we're looking to add for the alpha, but I think it's a cool idea nevertheless. We're going to add some type of "trainer level" that's based on a bunch of different things, so we'd be able to tie your trainer level into some sort of passive buff system. Maybe the higher level you are, the more passive buffs you can equip at once. We'll have to see.
My idea was intended to allow us to train our desired team asap. Going through the effort of removing unwanted EVs and then retraining is still a slight inconvenience. As soon as I catch a starmon I'd like to prevent pick up of EVs for any or more of the stats, but allow picking up of others. Please don't make us wait until end-game (by defeating the Elite Four or unlocking the DNA machine) before we can train our better teams. I can't see any good reason for that. What if I want a pidgeot (assuming pidgey can be caught in the first set of grass) in my competitive team? You should let us tweak EV absorb/block that early. Realistically, why would any creature just magically get proficient at everything simply by making other creatures faint? :P
I think allowing people to disable the gain of certain Ev's could work. It'd slow down your overall gain of strength, but it'd help you focus on what you want. And it'd be pretty understandable to people. That said, we might not add it right away for alpha just because it's not too relevant for low-level combat.
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Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
Random ideas:
Interesting quest variety. Just like the zelda games, some quests would appear at certain times of day or after completing other quests.
Randomised quests. These will prob be ones you can redo indefinitely (like errands for delivering stuff) that's slightly different each time you do this type of quest. For example for multiple errands, you may have to transport a different item from a different person to a different destination each time. It should hopefully solve the problem of 'running out of quests' so players don't have to grind for exp.
Ideally we'll have a lot of repeatable randomized stuff :) Definitely planned, we just have to get there.
More coop epicness. While I'm grateful for what's done for battles (yay! a massive improvement from pokemon imo!) there should be other things too. Maybe we can coop quests or do some kind of team-based events/mini-games. Maybe allow us to trade items/money with fellow players? I guess I'm looking for more ways to allow player interaction and helping eachother out. Maybe if we're give dialog choices from NPCs, some player can leave a good word for other players increasing their karma when they reach this NPC :P.
Trading will definitely be in (I think the current version is only limited to starmon themselves, but items and money should be doable. For the alpha itself, you can at least start a 1v1 with a large sum of money as a bet and then lose if you want to give someone money :p )
More realistic inventory. Remember how pokemon's backpacks were like armories that could hold many and heavy items? :P. I don't know if this idea would help but PC item storage seemed useless in pokemon. To make it more useful, how about stored items in the PC grow in number over time to some limit or grow in effectiveness? The manager of PCs might send my potion to the potion shop for an upgrade for my good karma then return it :P. Or maybe stored items get increased sell value or something.
We have no way to track real-time, and this seems like a very weird system :/ Also promotes "not using items" so that you can get more items that you can then... Continue not to use for more items you'll not use to get more items?
We don't even have item storage atm because there's no real point with the practically unlimited inventory space you have right now. Sometimes "realism" just adds little to the game and just ends up being annoying, and I think this may be one of those times - "Unlimited" inventory space (or at least more than you should realistically need) keeps it simple. The game isn't about inventory management anyway - This isn't diablo where you want to get tons of loot, this is a game with many super situational items that you don't want to use, but keep on you in case you do actually need them at some point.
Clarify the epic adventure. At the beginning of the game, show players the scope. Have our protagonist talk about catching em all, show us the 'town map' and just about anything else that mixes the story with hints at how fun the game will be :P. I'm hoping you guys will give us plenty of interesting things to do AND make the game extremely replayable, solo or coop.
Not entirely sure how we'll handle this. There'll definitely be a neat cutscene with an arena battle, and you'll be introduced to the arena system early on, with the goal of reaching the top (Which requires you to beat the trainer shown in the cutscene)
More involved characters. I'm tired of pokemon's stereotypical/simple jerk rival and gym leaders who think with their dicks/ego :P . Can we have it so the rival seems like a real person or even a friend? Same with team rocket or anyone else. If anyone's played Phoenix Wright you'll prob see how you can make characters definitely evil but seem misunderstood/damaged.
Rival definitely isn't a dick. He'll be a friend, maybe not one you had for long or knew too well, but the first friendly face you see. In the end, it might be you who ends up being the dick rival.
The leader of Cipher has had some losses, losses he wants avenged. Nothing more, nothing less. He has his reasons to do what he does, and after that he plans to keep his promises to the people who helped him with his goals.
The Police Chief will start his quest to protect his people, but things will not go smoothly, and he'll be given more and more reasons, some personal, to stop Cipher.
The Arena Master might not be the hero you expect him to be. You can't be sure if, when the time comes, he will even be there to help save the day...
You'll meet people on the way. Mozared, the explorer who's too lazy to do his own dirty work and decides to share his adventure with you. You'll run into a pair of quite memorable cipher agents multiple times throughout the story. You might find a mysterious figure, a wanderer, a man disinterested in the current ongoings and more interested in the origin of the Starmon themselves. There's that Cipher grunt who you probably don't even realize exists, but trust me, he'll remember you.
There'll be more characters once we actually get properly started with filling out the world. Random trainers will have random lines, which you'll probably get sick of after a while, but there will definitely be some nicely fleshed out characters (There already are for the alpha, you just wont get to see much of their stories yet, as even your own will barely have started)
Truly devastating legendaries. I don't know what your plans for them are exactly but cool it would it be if every now and then, they level a random town/city :P. In events like this we need to scramble for survival/shelter and this changes what wild starmon you find in the damaged town and trainers you bump into. Then have cool things like towns getting rebuilt over-time with cranes and other heavy machinery. Make the world truly alive and dynamic, if possible.
Trust me, when you find a legendary, the best course of action will be to spam the "run" button. We did go over this before. The legendaries will be... Well, Legendary. You won't capture them - You'll instead get a weaker form of them (offspring, clones, phoenix-style-reincarnation, whatever else we might come up with). The massive beasts that will rain fire, frost and lightning down onto you will be out of reach, and you hopefully out of theirs.
Shoo! Back to exploring! And dont get eaten by huge spiders, k? btw moz, we're making your character get trapped in a cave with a lot of giant spiders for a quest
Haha, that's a funny character for Mozared yet interesting.
Assuming that we're given EV control like I suggested, can we get starmon base stat info after we catch them?
Old WIP image of the stardex - some of the boxes like "moves" are empty here, but those have all been implemented already (I can't get the game to launch in a reasonable time so I cant get you a more up to date screenshot atm)
To make the battling more strategic I don't think increasing HP based on level will work. Starmon with high HP base stat, like snorlax/chansey, might be op or other starmon using/receiving HP based moves. The real issue is there's no balance in usefulness between high powered damaging moves and others (like status or buffs). Most status drain HP too slowly and their effects only have a chance of happening like paralyse. Why do anything 'smart' when you can just use a high powered 100% accuracy move? :P
I believe there are 2 ways to solve this:
Reduce high damaging move's effectiveness (eg tweak the formulas so regardless of what type of starmon or move power involved, it takes at least 4-6 hits to defeat the enemy).
Increase status move effectiveness. eg Paralyse will have a guarunteed effect of stunning the target for at least 1 turn. If their type resists electric then they can't be stunned for more than 1 turn. If immune, can't be stunned. Before you start saying this is op/imba, you're planning on making your electric starmon varied? As in they won't all have really high speed. Another balance for this could be the more often you paralyse the enemy, the more easily and quicker they can recover. Maybe with burn, have it disable all attack moves for a certain amount of turns. Also give some starmon the passive ability to resist/immune status and I think we're ok ;)
Other solutions I can think of that's prob easier for you guys to implement is some kind of held item:
Bright Gem. Reduces all damage by 50% for the first 4 turns of the battle of when switched in.
Toxic Sludge. Disables enemy attack moves for 2 turns if the first starmon or switched in.
OR make it that plenty of moves have about 60 or lower power. Anything above must do recoil damage. That way, players can use massive power if they want, just too much is unhealthy unless mixed with healing/defense moves :P.
In the early levels in the game, moves like Leer that lowered defense or poisons were quite useful because just spamming tackle took incredibly long to kill anything. Move damage scaled higher than pokemon health, so the other type of moves lost their usefulness - The change to the health formula should keep damage and health scaling closer together. And since most damage-per-turn moves (Things like whirlpool or statuses like poison and burn) deal % health, they are stronger than in the normal pokemon games due to the higher health. The higher health pool means more attacks, which means more chances for the secondary effect of a move to happen.
Making paralyse be a guaranteed stun practically turns it into flinch and/or protect. Keep in mind that it normally halves speed, so it can give your slower starmon an advantage. There's a move that makes use of speed difference (Higher damage the faster the caster is in relation to the enemy), and I think an item that does the same could be cool as well. 50% chance to prevent moves on paralyse is already pretty good. I think paralyse is fine as it is. Same goes for Burn - The damage is worth more due to the higher health, and the halved damage on physical moves might even be OP.
The higher health gives you more time to screw over an opponent who relies on sheer damage. Have a Meylir on your team (Grass + Psychic), have him cast Engrain, Light Screen/Reflect, and then have him spam calm mind and start wrecking with psychic (or giga drain if you want to go full drain-tank) once he's buffed up. Someone who relies on sheer damage moves will only have a couple of turns before a control oriented starmon like that becomes impossible to deal with, and with larger health numbers, a couple of turns probably won't be enough. Is that starmon OP / Uncounterable? No - Bring in a ghost to steal its stat buffs and burn its energy. Bring in someone with Punish and Brick Break. Paralyse and confuse it.
But at the moment this is all theorycrafting. I do think that increased health will help, the questions is just how much, and whether it is too much. And that can only really be answered once people start playing this map and try to abuse OP stuff. Most of our testing at the moment is focused on the early game, as that are the only parts we really worked on. I don't think we should do too much pre-emptive balancing, as we have yet to see how the few changes we already made will affect the game, how many problems they might cause - the more changes we make before testing everything, the more we can end up screwing up everything unintentionally.
But I think brute force should still be a viable strategy. Just look at other turn based games, card games mainly - You've got both rush decks and control decks quite commonly, and they are relatively well balanced - Control tends to come out on top, but a well set up and executed rush deck can easily go out of control.
As for specific numbers: Don't have any at the moment, but it's pretty much double the health, so twice as many hits. (This also makes health EVs twice as effective as in the pokemon games)
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It's almost like a broken card game where the cards you chose to be in your deck are a huge determining factor of winning :P . Once everything's chosen one player may have lost already :P .
That's not really a broken card game. In card games, you need to be prepared for everything. If you enter a tournament, you've got your deck and you can't change it up in between games to counter your opponents (At least not in the ones I've seen / been to). You need to know the meta and prepare accordingly. Same goes for pokemon/starmon - Hoping the opponent doesn't have something you can't deal with isn't a great idea.
As for guaranteed stuns... Either they will be just as good as Protect (Buy you a turn and cost you a turn while doing so), or they'll stun for two turns, which means you can just chain stun people if you're faster (and if you're slower it'll just be a weird version of protect that protects the next turn instead of the current one, or if it doesnt count the turn its cast on if cast last it can chain stun again). As the latter case is way too easy to abuse, it would have to be more unreliable, which pretty much turns it into sleep.
I definitely want to balance this, but its too early and I have no real data to analyse to see if its actually broken - I made a simple change that changes a lot (double health) without changing the actual mechanics of the game, and have to see how that works out first. This discussion is definitely telling me what things to keep an eye on though :)
You better have starmon that fits all kinds of styles :P . I might be in the mood for an electric tank, a fire tank, or an ice sweeper. There should be at least one of each battle role for each type of starmon.
That'd be a lot of starmon :p I try to make the starmon fit the 3D models we have for them, and those are in a somewhat short supply :(
I do think we have one or two electric tanks (we have two steel+electric types). One of them has this ability: Shock Shield: Using or being hit by electric moves gives 1 shock charge. When you have 4, you get a Shock Shield that prevents the damage from the next damaging attack. If that attack was a contact move (Melee, practically), the attacker takes damage and has a chance to be paralyzed. If it wasn't, you immediately get another shock charge. [Note: You'll get charges from all electric damage, so if you put up Static Field, which damages enemies on contact, you can get 2 charges per turn, and if Shock Shield is blocks a contact move it does damage as well, so thats another free charge]
Fire tank... Not sure, I think we have one. Big rock+fire guy.
We have a grass+psychic tank (Mentioned him in the previous post). Also have a grass+fighting starmon, and an ice+fighting. Also have ghost+ice and rock+ice, the ghost one has quite a lot of sp.atk (happens to be the one in the image of my previous post). There aren't too many ice moves though :(
But yeah, I will try to mix things up as much as I can with what I have :)
I have to say, looking at various screenshots you have made available, this looks truly amazing! I could never imagine being able to make some of these things. I look forward to trying this whenever it is released.
We've already implemented all types and 170 moves and 80ish starmon distributed over those types. "Simplifying" it to 3 would be a lot more work, whether it was changing everything now or from the start - If we did it at the start, we'd have less of a basis in pokemon and make more and more things ourselves. If I had to make up every single one of the 170 moves, things would've gone a lot more slowly. Yeah, I would've needed less probably, but it still would've taken more time. Plus, we want to keep as many similarities with pokemon as possible - People who know how to play pokemon should know how to play this game.
Can't remember when you get exp.share atm, but it's fairly early (most likely before any of your starmon reach level 20)
Removing code is work. You have to make sure you didn't do anything inside the now missing code that was important, decide what's unimportant enough to be removed, and more. Simplifying to only a few types would require a rebalanced version of everything he's already implemented, as well as a lot of thinking. And you miss out on some of the feels that he's going for. (Probe-Pikachu wouldn't be an electric mouse-bot, etc.)
While having less starmon doesn't change how the game's played, it changes how long it's interesting. If you only have 15 starmon, there isn't many options of what to catch to make a team you can call your own. Reaching a new area would mean only two or three new starmon to find, instead of a dozen. Personally, as long as models aren't a problem, I'd be happy with up to 250 different little friends to find.
I wanted to ask the devs, now that Heart arcade games are all free to play, are you interested in using any HotS resources?
A very well said post libertymonk that I agree with I prefer more choices to a few for a Starmon game. I hope they release soon it seems so Great that there HORDING the PRECIOUS all to themselves Smeagol thinks.
My Projects:
Sorted Multiplayer Leader Board
Card Shuffle Dialog Demo
Air Wars Mass
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...
A very well said post libertymonk that I agree with I prefer more choices to a few for a Starmon game. I hope they release soon it seems so Great that there HORDING the PRECIOUS all to themselves Smeagol thinks.
Yeah, yeah ;)
Over the last few days I've been doing a huge amount of bugfixing. I tend to hop around different parts of the game with our debugging commands to test specific pieces of content, but I haven't done as much "start to finish" testing. And that's what I've been doing, over and over, to get the bugs ;) Most of the remaining bugs are smaller visual hiccups instead of anything game-breaking.
The good news is that, as far as I can tell, the last big bug with the battle system has been squashed. I'm sure there's lots of smaller, hidden bugs in there somewhere (especially once we start playing it with multiple people, ugh), but the system is looking pretty stable now.
I also made a quick addition in the form of the codex- it's sort of like you have in Mass Effect, if you've ever played that. As you encounter new characters and locations, they're added to the codex for easy reference. It's still pretty early but it'll get filled with more content as we go along. It even has a shnazzy little "new" marker next to unread articles. :D Here's a screenshot of what type of entry you might find. On a side note, if you guys have a better name for our "Arena City", let us know. It's a terrible name >.>
We've got enough room to support 3 simultaneous players now, and I'll probably get that number up to 4 today or tomorrow. The biggest hurdles for us to overcome now are probably going to be adding content, balancing that content, and polishing everything up.
And here's a picture of me literally squashing (well, more like punching) a bug. :)
Recently, I have been really interested to see how this game is going, as I am really looking forward to it. So I noticed that there were some problems related to balancing. I found this link which is a formula for balancing units. I'm not sure if it will help you, but I figured I might as well show it to you in case it actually is helpful.
I have a change of heart. If you guys want to have wall-of-text discussions, you're on ;)
Do you guys want ideas on how we could work around the limited models and the balance issues it creates?
In my honest opinion, you guys are only in the alpha stage. It's better to make major changes to the game or even start over now so you can solve some major problems. It's better realising and acting on it now than later when the map is bigger, more complicated, and much harder to modify.
I'm gonna try and keep it short: Variety in models is only an issue if I want to force certain things to exist - I believe at the moment the models we have provide enough variety in types and roles. Also, a lot of starmon will be dual types, so having a certain type like Grass focus heavily on defense doesn't mean you won't find an offensive one since the second type can be more offensive (Like for example a massive tree that punches stuff to death). Some types just simply work a lot better for certain roles. Electric and Fire have a lot of high powered stuff and fast starmon. But I already mentioned Shockeve as an Electric+Steel tank and I've got a somewhat beefy rock+fire line in here as well. I might not be able to create every role for every type, but I do think right now every type has starmon for multiple roles (Except dragon cuz iirc I didn't add any dragons yet, the Legendaries will probably take care of that though)
About your points about many pokemon being useless due to base stats/move sets: I want to avoid this as much as possible. This is the biggest thing I'm worried about. I'm not too fussed about not having an excessively large variety of different starmon, but I am kinda worried that certain of these starmon simply won't be good enough to compete. I've already normalized base stats to a total of 520 for every final-stage starmon except for the level 10 bugs (cuz thatd be OP as fuck early on...), which will hopefully help. But, once we're done with everything and the map is released, this is something I want to pay a lot of attention to. I wish we had server side banks and a way for mapmakers to access those to gather statistics, because that would help me a lot once i need to figure out if anything is underpowered.
Removing code is work. You have to make sure you didn't do anything inside the now missing code that was important, decide what's unimportant enough to be removed, and more. Simplifying to only a few types would require a rebalanced version of everything he's already implemented, as well as a lot of thinking. And you miss out on some of the feels that he's going for. (Probe-Pikachu wouldn't be an electric mouse-bot, etc.)
While having less starmon doesn't change how the game's played, it changes how long it's interesting. If you only have 15 starmon, there isn't many options of what to catch to make a team you can call your own. Reaching a new area would mean only two or three new starmon to find, instead of a dozen. Personally, as long as models aren't a problem, I'd be happy with up to 250 different little friends to find.
I wanted to ask the devs, now that Heart arcade games are all free to play, are you interested in using any HotS resources?
In addition to this, one of the main goals of making a pokemon map for us was that many people would already be familiar with the core concept and mechanics. Simplifying the game would actually add more to learn because things are different, and having to learn anything in an sc2 custom map usually means it won't be played much.
As for HotS assets... Holy shit I didn't even realize that. ZELDA! ADD HOTS DEPENDENCIES NAO!
Hope I answered everything >.> Sorry if I missed something, pretty tired today and there were quite a lot of posts to go through...
I know I don't really have a say in this matter, but I like participating. While people do have very open minds and are willing to learn how to play, I have found within my own maps, that you really have to spoon feed your players the information, or many will just say, "What do I do? This makes no sense!", and then leave.
My point is, it really doesn't matter how simple or advanced the map is, what matters is how you present it. So as long as it is easy to understand and people can easily learn, you will be fine.
I know I don't really have a say in this matter, but I like participating. While people do have very open minds and are willing to learn how to play, I have found within my own maps, that you really have to spoon feed your players the information, or many will just say, "What do I do? This makes no sense!", and then leave.
I made a map where you defended a base with heroes, and there were 8 lanes. You could toggle units spawning in lanes by attacking beacons (Green meant no units, red meant they spawned). On the loading screen, it said "Attack beacons/green circles to start spawning units", ingame messages stated that you had to attack the beacons to start the game, and I put up text tags above the beacons saying "Enemies are (not) spawning, attack to start/stop spawning enemies"
People did not know what to do.
Similar thing happened with runecraft, where we had to force a slow tutorial on people with lots of red text and blinking buttons just for people to understand "This is a worker, you want to build this, then select it, then select what units you want to spawn, and now look at the top right of the screen for the tech tree button". People actually still had trouble with it, not too many, but there were some.
Yes, we could've tried something new and innovative. But we already did, we made Runecraft, which I think is a pretty cool tug of war map that works differently than most due to the fact you don't have to build units (Games where I went spells instead of units I usually had more success with) and due to the way the runes/buildings there work. And it suffered because of that. People on map night loved the map, but those are the kind of people that would actually spend five minutes to learn how to play it, which isn't the majority of players on battle.net unfortunately. Online gaming is catering to casuals for a good reason.
[Warning: incoming gigantic rant, sorry about that, got carried away :( I like writing...]
We wanted to make a pokemon map. Not a map where you capture creatures and train them and fight with them, we specifically wanted a pokemon game, with pokemon mechanics, that anyone who can play pokemon can easily pick up, and that if I say "It's pretty much pokemon for SC2", people know what I mean. We wanted to have something to base our map on to reduce the amount of work we have. We've had experience with making our own thing, and it was definitely fun and cool, but starmon was easy and fast. Instead of trying to design the game, we took what existed and made it as cool as we possibly could. I didn't have to spend hours brainstorming ideas for attacks, what they do and just designing an entire combat system, I took a combat system that already existed with its moves, and then made it look cool. Most of my efforts in this map up to now have been "make this look cool". Instead of designing complex mechanics, I made grass move when you walk through it and doors that open when players or NPCs walk near them. I spent hours creating complex combinations of invisible models to get animations that did not exist in SC2. I really enjoyed the work I did, in another way than in RuneCraft. In RuneCraft I experimented for hours and just tried to "make it work", which was cool, I ended up going through many different things before we finally settled on a system that worked perfectly for the player, for the data editor and the trigger editor. I played around a lot with how things work in RuneCraft, I tried to create data-systems that could have easily been done through triggers. I created a system where a building would automatically target the entire closest lane for an AoE spell, and it included 0 triggers - I was kinda proud of that. By the time the map was released, I figured out a way to replace all the unit spawning triggers with data and could've implemented that within a few hours - if there had been a point to it, triggers worked just fine and were already implemented.
I'm going on a long rant here... Point is, Zelda and I did a map before this, and this time we did something different. And as backwards as it may seem, its our second map actually that's a copy of something that already exists instead of the first, and we wanted it to be that way for various reasons, and in the end it allowed us to learn many new things - I got a lot more familiar with actors and how to create fancy visual effects, while Zelda got experience working with massive trigger systems, he basically created a proper game engine.
I'm sorry you don't like the direction we're heading with this map :( But even if we wanted to try something different, more along the lines of what you want from us, we wouldn't have the time. This took ages, and we'd practically have to start from scratch if we wanted something not-pokemon-like, and we just don't have the time for that anymore, and I honestly don't have the motivation. I'll probably just finish starmon, and then I'm done with SC2 map editting for a while. It's a really nice hobby, but I've found other hobbies to replace it. I'll probably come back some day though, it's just too damn cool making your own stuff to give this up forever!
If you want to straight up copy pokemon, I don't see that as an interesting reason to play Starmon when I could get pokemon myself and play it much sooner.
The thing with this though is that pokemon doesn't exist for PC, at least not officially. There are emulators and things like PokeMMO, and those are technically seen illegal (PokeMMO and the emulators themselves are legal, but you need to have the GBA ROMs/Games, and you can't obtain them legally afaik)
You don't have to advertise your game as a pokemon one. If it's just another arcade map players will have to learn how to play anyways.
About this point, we actually want to advertise it as a pokemon map. As I said above, somewhere in that big rant: We wanted to say "Its pokemon" and have people know what we're talking about. That's how we started doing this map. We had a long discussion where we were brainstorming for ideas before we started our second map together, and the idea that one was "Something people already know, something we don't have to explain. We just say it's [this] and people get what we mean", and it was pokemon. There's many things we could've done and considered them, but we are doing this with a purpose - Every little bit about it was discussed and we decided this was how we do it. Some things are even different from the pokemon games, we are making our own improvements, we're not just blindly copying the game.
But yeah, I think I've pretty much just been saying the same thing over and over and over again and its probably getting boring by now. Sorry again :( I'll head to bed.
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Well, we're planning on the karma system which gives you different bonuses based on your choices (good/bad), and there will be a split storyline (For simplicities sake it will be almost identical, you just get to play it from opposite sides, so the actual quests will usually require you to do different things while the story stays the same). The last quest in the alpha will make you pick sides. We'll try and do as much as possible with the choices and karma system, but everything takes valuable time, so we'll see how well it goes.
I think we discussed a lot earlier in this thread the possibility of restarting the game (maybe even with a seperate save slot now that bank sizes shouldn't be an issue anymore.) with different options/challenges, perma-death being an example we talked about I think. When we get to making that we'll probably discuss it here and see if you guys have any great ideas for rules/challenges :) Some should be fairly easy to implement, like perma-death (Just needs a set of actions after the 0HP/Faint-check that checks whether perma-death is on and if yes delete the starmon from the bank), and some other "simple" rules like maybe "no items" would be really easy (That one is just simply disabling the buttons to all inventory tabs other than capture cores)
I don't want to change the starters though. I'd rather add an additional difficulty dialog before/after picking them - The starter itself shouldn't really indicate difficulty, and its also hard to tell the player what's going on without a massive wall of text. And in the end, as we have relatively few starmon, I want all of them to be viable and valuable, or at least as many as possible.
Also, iirc I tried to make sure that the first trainers in the arena, including the first milestone, shouldn't have a type advantage over the starters (Fire Starter is gonna be OP though cuz there's a lot of bugs. They don't have bug moves at that point, so grass starter is fine), I'd have to check again though, I think I modified the possible starmon trainers can get since I did all that. Young Kid trainers might have a chance to get one of the starters, so that could be a potential problem for yours :p But you should have a second or even third starmon before you can start expecting to win in the arena.
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Curse PremiumI've finally got a little bit of free time, so I can respond :D
That's in already. Or at least, it was until the patch broke it. I'm working on finding the problem. (Edit: It's fixed! My hunch was right, it was a patch-related bug). You can hop into a party with any other player and all fights you guys get into will automatically be converted into a 2v2 co-op fight. More than 2 people at once isn't gunna happen though- the engine just isn't set up for that :)
A random event system is already added, but there's only one or two. We'd definitely like high replay value. NewGame+ (or something similar) would be really awesome, and we'll definitely look into that when the time comes. Because of the way our content is generated rather than pre-set, it shouldn't be too hard to just bump up the difficulty curve if we wanted.
Items are currently placed randomly around the map each time you load the game. There's also several hidden areas and zones for you to find (several are there already, actually, though we'll add more over time) But you really have to look hard :)
One of the reasons we have the quest system is to help alleviate this problem. Completing the story (and side quests, for that matter) gives you experience points, so grinding should be much less of a problem. We'll have to look at that later though, since currently there isn't any end-game at all ^.^
Like I said above, every single battle in the game will automatically become a 2v2 if you're with a friend. You can get through the entire story without ever battling on your own, if you wanted. We've also discussed maybe adding some type of co-op arena challenge, where you and a friend try to survive as many fights as you can (with each one getting harder) to earn rewards. There's no end-game content right now though, so we'll have to tackle that issue when we get there.
We did talk about this :P Originally only Surf and Fly were planned as useable HMs, and after technical difficulties Surf was demoted to "just another move". With the teleporter system, Fly is merely a convenience, not something thats necessary.
We did discuss Ev training as well :)
There'll be a special place where you can pick fights based on EVs (So you fight trainers whose starmon award only specific EVs), and there will be an easy way to remove unwanted EVs from your starmon (and reroll IVs). We're not gonna remove em as it adds customization to starmon, which there is little to none of if we don't add new mechanics instead, and we want to stick to stuff people already know. We are however doing everything we can think of to make it easier and less "hidden" - As I said, you can remove them (which also means you can view em), you have an easy way to grind them, and we'll add ways to boost the speed at which you get them. Preventing pickup of certain EVs is probably doable, will think about that
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Curse PremiumI've taken advantage of Christmas break to get a bunch of work done on the map. It's been mostly bugfixing. I fixed a ton of small problems with quests, I fixed a bug that was wrecking save files, and I fixed a bunch of small visual glitches. I also added an early version of the map screen.
The point is, it's far more stable now than it was a week ago :P
I think we've discussed this idea before. It's not something we're looking to add for the alpha, but I think it's a cool idea nevertheless. We're going to add some type of "trainer level" that's based on a bunch of different things, so we'd be able to tie your trainer level into some sort of passive buff system. Maybe the higher level you are, the more passive buffs you can equip at once. We'll have to see.
I think allowing people to disable the gain of certain Ev's could work. It'd slow down your overall gain of strength, but it'd help you focus on what you want. And it'd be pretty understandable to people. That said, we might not add it right away for alpha just because it's not too relevant for low-level combat.
Ideally we'll have a lot of repeatable randomized stuff :) Definitely planned, we just have to get there.
Trading will definitely be in (I think the current version is only limited to starmon themselves, but items and money should be doable. For the alpha itself, you can at least start a 1v1 with a large sum of money as a bet and then lose if you want to give someone money :p )
We have no way to track real-time, and this seems like a very weird system :/ Also promotes "not using items" so that you can get more items that you can then... Continue not to use for more items you'll not use to get more items?
We don't even have item storage atm because there's no real point with the practically unlimited inventory space you have right now. Sometimes "realism" just adds little to the game and just ends up being annoying, and I think this may be one of those times - "Unlimited" inventory space (or at least more than you should realistically need) keeps it simple. The game isn't about inventory management anyway - This isn't diablo where you want to get tons of loot, this is a game with many super situational items that you don't want to use, but keep on you in case you do actually need them at some point.
Not entirely sure how we'll handle this. There'll definitely be a neat cutscene with an arena battle, and you'll be introduced to the arena system early on, with the goal of reaching the top (Which requires you to beat the trainer shown in the cutscene)
Rival definitely isn't a dick. He'll be a friend, maybe not one you had for long or knew too well, but the first friendly face you see. In the end, it might be you who ends up being the dick rival.
The leader of Cipher has had some losses, losses he wants avenged. Nothing more, nothing less. He has his reasons to do what he does, and after that he plans to keep his promises to the people who helped him with his goals.
The Police Chief will start his quest to protect his people, but things will not go smoothly, and he'll be given more and more reasons, some personal, to stop Cipher.
The Arena Master might not be the hero you expect him to be. You can't be sure if, when the time comes, he will even be there to help save the day...
You'll meet people on the way. Mozared, the explorer who's too lazy to do his own dirty work and decides to share his adventure with you. You'll run into a pair of quite memorable cipher agents multiple times throughout the story. You might find a mysterious figure, a wanderer, a man disinterested in the current ongoings and more interested in the origin of the Starmon themselves. There's that Cipher grunt who you probably don't even realize exists, but trust me, he'll remember you.
There'll be more characters once we actually get properly started with filling out the world. Random trainers will have random lines, which you'll probably get sick of after a while, but there will definitely be some nicely fleshed out characters (There already are for the alpha, you just wont get to see much of their stories yet, as even your own will barely have started)
Trust me, when you find a legendary, the best course of action will be to spam the "run" button. We did go over this before. The legendaries will be... Well, Legendary. You won't capture them - You'll instead get a weaker form of them (offspring, clones, phoenix-style-reincarnation, whatever else we might come up with). The massive beasts that will rain fire, frost and lightning down onto you will be out of reach, and you hopefully out of theirs.
Hey! I'm right here! T_T
@Mozared: Go
Shoo! Back to exploring! And dont get eaten by huge spiders, k? btw moz, we're making your character get trapped in a cave with a lot of giant spiders for a quest
@TheAlmaity: Go
As long as there's rocks, I'll be happy.
Old WIP image of the stardex - some of the boxes like "moves" are empty here, but those have all been implemented already (I can't get the game to launch in a reasonable time so I cant get you a more up to date screenshot atm)
In the early levels in the game, moves like Leer that lowered defense or poisons were quite useful because just spamming tackle took incredibly long to kill anything. Move damage scaled higher than pokemon health, so the other type of moves lost their usefulness - The change to the health formula should keep damage and health scaling closer together. And since most damage-per-turn moves (Things like whirlpool or statuses like poison and burn) deal % health, they are stronger than in the normal pokemon games due to the higher health. The higher health pool means more attacks, which means more chances for the secondary effect of a move to happen.
Making paralyse be a guaranteed stun practically turns it into flinch and/or protect. Keep in mind that it normally halves speed, so it can give your slower starmon an advantage. There's a move that makes use of speed difference (Higher damage the faster the caster is in relation to the enemy), and I think an item that does the same could be cool as well. 50% chance to prevent moves on paralyse is already pretty good. I think paralyse is fine as it is. Same goes for Burn - The damage is worth more due to the higher health, and the halved damage on physical moves might even be OP.
The higher health gives you more time to screw over an opponent who relies on sheer damage. Have a Meylir on your team (Grass + Psychic), have him cast Engrain, Light Screen/Reflect, and then have him spam calm mind and start wrecking with psychic (or giga drain if you want to go full drain-tank) once he's buffed up. Someone who relies on sheer damage moves will only have a couple of turns before a control oriented starmon like that becomes impossible to deal with, and with larger health numbers, a couple of turns probably won't be enough. Is that starmon OP / Uncounterable? No - Bring in a ghost to steal its stat buffs and burn its energy. Bring in someone with Punish and Brick Break. Paralyse and confuse it.
But at the moment this is all theorycrafting. I do think that increased health will help, the questions is just how much, and whether it is too much. And that can only really be answered once people start playing this map and try to abuse OP stuff. Most of our testing at the moment is focused on the early game, as that are the only parts we really worked on. I don't think we should do too much pre-emptive balancing, as we have yet to see how the few changes we already made will affect the game, how many problems they might cause - the more changes we make before testing everything, the more we can end up screwing up everything unintentionally.
But I think brute force should still be a viable strategy. Just look at other turn based games, card games mainly - You've got both rush decks and control decks quite commonly, and they are relatively well balanced - Control tends to come out on top, but a well set up and executed rush deck can easily go out of control.
As for specific numbers: Don't have any at the moment, but it's pretty much double the health, so twice as many hits. (This also makes health EVs twice as effective as in the pokemon games)
That's not really a broken card game. In card games, you need to be prepared for everything. If you enter a tournament, you've got your deck and you can't change it up in between games to counter your opponents (At least not in the ones I've seen / been to). You need to know the meta and prepare accordingly. Same goes for pokemon/starmon - Hoping the opponent doesn't have something you can't deal with isn't a great idea.
As for guaranteed stuns... Either they will be just as good as Protect (Buy you a turn and cost you a turn while doing so), or they'll stun for two turns, which means you can just chain stun people if you're faster (and if you're slower it'll just be a weird version of protect that protects the next turn instead of the current one, or if it doesnt count the turn its cast on if cast last it can chain stun again). As the latter case is way too easy to abuse, it would have to be more unreliable, which pretty much turns it into sleep.
I definitely want to balance this, but its too early and I have no real data to analyse to see if its actually broken - I made a simple change that changes a lot (double health) without changing the actual mechanics of the game, and have to see how that works out first. This discussion is definitely telling me what things to keep an eye on though :)
That'd be a lot of starmon :p I try to make the starmon fit the 3D models we have for them, and those are in a somewhat short supply :(
I do think we have one or two electric tanks (we have two steel+electric types). One of them has this ability:
Shock Shield: Using or being hit by electric moves gives 1 shock charge. When you have 4, you get a Shock Shield that prevents the damage from the next damaging attack. If that attack was a contact move (Melee, practically), the attacker takes damage and has a chance to be paralyzed. If it wasn't, you immediately get another shock charge. [Note: You'll get charges from all electric damage, so if you put up Static Field, which damages enemies on contact, you can get 2 charges per turn, and if Shock Shield is blocks a contact move it does damage as well, so thats another free charge]
Fire tank... Not sure, I think we have one. Big rock+fire guy.
We have a grass+psychic tank (Mentioned him in the previous post). Also have a grass+fighting starmon, and an ice+fighting. Also have ghost+ice and rock+ice, the ghost one has quite a lot of sp.atk (happens to be the one in the image of my previous post). There aren't too many ice moves though :(
But yeah, I will try to mix things up as much as I can with what I have :)
I have to say, looking at various screenshots you have made available, this looks truly amazing! I could never imagine being able to make some of these things. I look forward to trying this whenever it is released.
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@Trieva: Go
We've already implemented all types and 170 moves and 80ish starmon distributed over those types. "Simplifying" it to 3 would be a lot more work, whether it was changing everything now or from the start - If we did it at the start, we'd have less of a basis in pokemon and make more and more things ourselves. If I had to make up every single one of the 170 moves, things would've gone a lot more slowly. Yeah, I would've needed less probably, but it still would've taken more time. Plus, we want to keep as many similarities with pokemon as possible - People who know how to play pokemon should know how to play this game.
Can't remember when you get exp.share atm, but it's fairly early (most likely before any of your starmon reach level 20)
@Trieva: Go
Removing code is work. You have to make sure you didn't do anything inside the now missing code that was important, decide what's unimportant enough to be removed, and more. Simplifying to only a few types would require a rebalanced version of everything he's already implemented, as well as a lot of thinking. And you miss out on some of the feels that he's going for. (Probe-Pikachu wouldn't be an electric mouse-bot, etc.)
While having less starmon doesn't change how the game's played, it changes how long it's interesting. If you only have 15 starmon, there isn't many options of what to catch to make a team you can call your own. Reaching a new area would mean only two or three new starmon to find, instead of a dozen. Personally, as long as models aren't a problem, I'd be happy with up to 250 different little friends to find.
I wanted to ask the devs, now that Heart arcade games are all free to play, are you interested in using any HotS resources?
@OceanFlex: Go
A very well said post libertymonk that I agree with I prefer more choices to a few for a Starmon game. I hope they release soon it seems so Great that there HORDING the PRECIOUS all to themselves Smeagol thinks.
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Curse PremiumYeah, yeah ;)
Over the last few days I've been doing a huge amount of bugfixing. I tend to hop around different parts of the game with our debugging commands to test specific pieces of content, but I haven't done as much "start to finish" testing. And that's what I've been doing, over and over, to get the bugs ;) Most of the remaining bugs are smaller visual hiccups instead of anything game-breaking.
The good news is that, as far as I can tell, the last big bug with the battle system has been squashed. I'm sure there's lots of smaller, hidden bugs in there somewhere (especially once we start playing it with multiple people, ugh), but the system is looking pretty stable now.
I also made a quick addition in the form of the codex- it's sort of like you have in Mass Effect, if you've ever played that. As you encounter new characters and locations, they're added to the codex for easy reference. It's still pretty early but it'll get filled with more content as we go along. It even has a shnazzy little "new" marker next to unread articles. :D Here's a screenshot of what type of entry you might find. On a side note, if you guys have a better name for our "Arena City", let us know. It's a terrible name >.>
We've got enough room to support 3 simultaneous players now, and I'll probably get that number up to 4 today or tomorrow. The biggest hurdles for us to overcome now are probably going to be adding content, balancing that content, and polishing everything up.
And here's a picture of me literally squashing (well, more like punching) a bug. :)
Recently, I have been really interested to see how this game is going, as I am really looking forward to it. So I noticed that there were some problems related to balancing. I found this link which is a formula for balancing units. I'm not sure if it will help you, but I figured I might as well show it to you in case it actually is helpful.
Good luck!
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Shit, I seemed to have missed a lot of posts here >.> Sorry!
I'm gonna try and keep it short: Variety in models is only an issue if I want to force certain things to exist - I believe at the moment the models we have provide enough variety in types and roles. Also, a lot of starmon will be dual types, so having a certain type like Grass focus heavily on defense doesn't mean you won't find an offensive one since the second type can be more offensive (Like for example a massive tree that punches stuff to death). Some types just simply work a lot better for certain roles. Electric and Fire have a lot of high powered stuff and fast starmon. But I already mentioned Shockeve as an Electric+Steel tank and I've got a somewhat beefy rock+fire line in here as well. I might not be able to create every role for every type, but I do think right now every type has starmon for multiple roles (Except dragon cuz iirc I didn't add any dragons yet, the Legendaries will probably take care of that though)
About your points about many pokemon being useless due to base stats/move sets: I want to avoid this as much as possible. This is the biggest thing I'm worried about. I'm not too fussed about not having an excessively large variety of different starmon, but I am kinda worried that certain of these starmon simply won't be good enough to compete. I've already normalized base stats to a total of 520 for every final-stage starmon except for the level 10 bugs (cuz thatd be OP as fuck early on...), which will hopefully help. But, once we're done with everything and the map is released, this is something I want to pay a lot of attention to. I wish we had server side banks and a way for mapmakers to access those to gather statistics, because that would help me a lot once i need to figure out if anything is underpowered.
In addition to this, one of the main goals of making a pokemon map for us was that many people would already be familiar with the core concept and mechanics. Simplifying the game would actually add more to learn because things are different, and having to learn anything in an sc2 custom map usually means it won't be played much.
As for HotS assets... Holy shit I didn't even realize that. ZELDA! ADD HOTS DEPENDENCIES NAO!
Hope I answered everything >.> Sorry if I missed something, pretty tired today and there were quite a lot of posts to go through...
@Trieva: Go
I know I don't really have a say in this matter, but I like participating. While people do have very open minds and are willing to learn how to play, I have found within my own maps, that you really have to spoon feed your players the information, or many will just say, "What do I do? This makes no sense!", and then leave.
My point is, it really doesn't matter how simple or advanced the map is, what matters is how you present it. So as long as it is easy to understand and people can easily learn, you will be fine.
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I made a map where you defended a base with heroes, and there were 8 lanes. You could toggle units spawning in lanes by attacking beacons (Green meant no units, red meant they spawned). On the loading screen, it said "Attack beacons/green circles to start spawning units", ingame messages stated that you had to attack the beacons to start the game, and I put up text tags above the beacons saying "Enemies are (not) spawning, attack to start/stop spawning enemies"
People did not know what to do.
Similar thing happened with runecraft, where we had to force a slow tutorial on people with lots of red text and blinking buttons just for people to understand "This is a worker, you want to build this, then select it, then select what units you want to spawn, and now look at the top right of the screen for the tech tree button". People actually still had trouble with it, not too many, but there were some.
Yes, we could've tried something new and innovative. But we already did, we made Runecraft, which I think is a pretty cool tug of war map that works differently than most due to the fact you don't have to build units (Games where I went spells instead of units I usually had more success with) and due to the way the runes/buildings there work. And it suffered because of that. People on map night loved the map, but those are the kind of people that would actually spend five minutes to learn how to play it, which isn't the majority of players on battle.net unfortunately. Online gaming is catering to casuals for a good reason.
[Warning: incoming gigantic rant, sorry about that, got carried away :( I like writing...]
We wanted to make a pokemon map. Not a map where you capture creatures and train them and fight with them, we specifically wanted a pokemon game, with pokemon mechanics, that anyone who can play pokemon can easily pick up, and that if I say "It's pretty much pokemon for SC2", people know what I mean. We wanted to have something to base our map on to reduce the amount of work we have. We've had experience with making our own thing, and it was definitely fun and cool, but starmon was easy and fast. Instead of trying to design the game, we took what existed and made it as cool as we possibly could. I didn't have to spend hours brainstorming ideas for attacks, what they do and just designing an entire combat system, I took a combat system that already existed with its moves, and then made it look cool. Most of my efforts in this map up to now have been "make this look cool". Instead of designing complex mechanics, I made grass move when you walk through it and doors that open when players or NPCs walk near them. I spent hours creating complex combinations of invisible models to get animations that did not exist in SC2. I really enjoyed the work I did, in another way than in RuneCraft. In RuneCraft I experimented for hours and just tried to "make it work", which was cool, I ended up going through many different things before we finally settled on a system that worked perfectly for the player, for the data editor and the trigger editor. I played around a lot with how things work in RuneCraft, I tried to create data-systems that could have easily been done through triggers. I created a system where a building would automatically target the entire closest lane for an AoE spell, and it included 0 triggers - I was kinda proud of that. By the time the map was released, I figured out a way to replace all the unit spawning triggers with data and could've implemented that within a few hours - if there had been a point to it, triggers worked just fine and were already implemented.
I'm going on a long rant here... Point is, Zelda and I did a map before this, and this time we did something different. And as backwards as it may seem, its our second map actually that's a copy of something that already exists instead of the first, and we wanted it to be that way for various reasons, and in the end it allowed us to learn many new things - I got a lot more familiar with actors and how to create fancy visual effects, while Zelda got experience working with massive trigger systems, he basically created a proper game engine.
I'm sorry you don't like the direction we're heading with this map :( But even if we wanted to try something different, more along the lines of what you want from us, we wouldn't have the time. This took ages, and we'd practically have to start from scratch if we wanted something not-pokemon-like, and we just don't have the time for that anymore, and I honestly don't have the motivation. I'll probably just finish starmon, and then I'm done with SC2 map editting for a while. It's a really nice hobby, but I've found other hobbies to replace it. I'll probably come back some day though, it's just too damn cool making your own stuff to give this up forever!
The thing with this though is that pokemon doesn't exist for PC, at least not officially. There are emulators and things like PokeMMO, and those are technically seen illegal (PokeMMO and the emulators themselves are legal, but you need to have the GBA ROMs/Games, and you can't obtain them legally afaik)
About this point, we actually want to advertise it as a pokemon map. As I said above, somewhere in that big rant: We wanted to say "Its pokemon" and have people know what we're talking about. That's how we started doing this map. We had a long discussion where we were brainstorming for ideas before we started our second map together, and the idea that one was "Something people already know, something we don't have to explain. We just say it's [this] and people get what we mean", and it was pokemon. There's many things we could've done and considered them, but we are doing this with a purpose - Every little bit about it was discussed and we decided this was how we do it. Some things are even different from the pokemon games, we are making our own improvements, we're not just blindly copying the game.
But yeah, I think I've pretty much just been saying the same thing over and over and over again and its probably getting boring by now. Sorry again :( I'll head to bed.