Can we re-battle trainers in zones? That would add so much to the re-use of zones and be really fun. I'd like to rematch trainers that get tougher or maybe get new party members.
EDIT: It's also a good alternative before we unlock the arena or wherever your'e stashing the elite-trainers/EV-trainers, etc.
What Maity said is right- all our trainers are generated randomly every time you load. So you won't find the exact same trainer a second time, but the newly-generated trainers will fight you. Since we've made it super easy to avoid old zones (the teleporter system is very cheap and easy to unlock), this shouldn't become a problem for players.
Thinking about it now, we could put in an option to "unlock" the maximum level cap for zone scaling. In other words, enemies in zones you're over-leveled for will scale up to you with more evolved and higher-level starmon. It could be a reward for something- like completing the campaign, reaching a certain trainer level, etc....
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I was wondering about the level scaling. Won't that affect difficulty too much? I liked pokemon where it was kinda quick and easy to finish trainer battles and keep moving (but against reasonable levelled pokemon so it didn't feel too easy and exp was good).
We don't think it will be a problem. But what's great about the system is that if it ends up being too hard or too easy, we can easily adjust it so it's just right. The way the system works now is that it makes sure enemies are about your level, not exactly your level. We just use the average level of your party as the starting point- from there we adjust it based on a few different things, and then throw in a few random numbers to mix things up. The higher level you are, the more varied we'll allow the enemy's levels to be.
Also, keep in mind that we don't jam-pack zones with trainers. Many zones in the original games were literally just a linear path with like 20 trainers in the way, and you had to fight through each and every painful battle to get through. Our zones are more open, with trainers being placed further apart. They also walk around or turn (usually) instead of staring at the wall waiting to kill you the second you walk by. So you can sneak more of them than in the actual games. We don't want monotonous fights, which is why we're encouraging leveling up through quests.
Levels won't affect difficulty much if type advantages are considered.
Trainer "Classes" are determined by the zone you're in- you won't find bug catchers in the desert, for example. So this ends up meaning types are usually reasonably uniform throughout a zone. If you're in a volcano area, you can expect a lot of fire-type starmon. If you're in the desert, you can expect lots of sand-type starmon. So you can prepare appropriately if you want.
That said, Trainers will attempt to counter you if they have types to do it. Say you're using a fire-type and you kill their current starmon. And say the next starmon we gave them was a grass-type. If they also had a water-type available, they'll send that out instead of the grass-type that we originally decided would be next, assuming their AI level is high enough.
Again, we can tweak these randomization numbers as much as we need, if necessary. If it becomes too hard/easy, we can look at your party and modify the opponent's team before the battle starts.
Lower level starmon opponents are also wanted when you want train that new low level starmon you just caught (assuming exp. share hasn't been obtained).
I can't remember if I mentioned it, but we did add exp share after you asked about it last time, since we felt it was a really good way to train. Lower level starmon opponents are always available via the arena if you want to train that way. Keep in mind that we reward your party with experience when you finish quests, so you'll end up leveling a little faster that way.
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Just to add to what Zelda said in reply to lower level opponents: Trainers are scaled with your current party, not with all starmon including those in storage. Dump your high levels into the box and you'll fight lower level trainers (Assuming you're not in a zone where the minimum level is above your average level)
I like this due to the fact that it'll make the world this much more dynamic and with that, larger. It doesn't matter how much you've played and how high level your Starmon are, you'll always have plenty of reasons to go back and train in the mountain zone, desert or forest if you feel like it.
We've got some pretty exciting news coming your guys's way very soon! Me & TheAlmaity have spent the last two days testing, debugging, and then testing some more in preparation to record our next update video.
The good news is that we finally managed to get a video recorded, and it's going to be posted here as soon as it's finished. The bad news is that we had some audio problems. Maity is re-recording the commentary as we speak, but that means it's not going to be ready today. To make up for it, here's one of the original tests that went...well, less than perfectly.
Edit: I stand corrected! Maity came through and stayed up until 5 in the morning waiting for the video to render & upload. Please give him your applause :P The actual video is in the post right below this one, and as Maity said, we'll post more information about it tomorrow. It's sort of the middle of the night right now O.o
Our first failed test (actual video is in the post below this one):
Anyways, the real video should be ready tomorrow. You'll get to see the surprise feature we've been working on for the past few months!
Alpha
Depends what we want to test. Not sure how far Zelda got with the quests, and he has to fix all the bugs in the videos. My issue is that I need a new comp, some piece of hardware seems to be dying in this laptop (Or at least got a lot slower), seems like either the RAM or the HDD - I have trouble with loading times, stuff just takes forever to load. I can play games and so on since they just load once and everything works fine, but the Editor handles this really badly and has to reload everything every single time I open a field, which means if I open or close a field I literally spend 30+ seconds waiting just for the editor to respond again. Every change I want to make takes me over a minute. Yea, I could do it, but i'd probaly go insane and would need a new window since my laptop flying through it will probably result in it breaking. I should be getting a new comp this month though :)
But yeah, fix everything that was broken in the videos, a bit more terraining from Moz and implement the quests we wanted, and we're pretty much ready.
Copyright issues
We *still* haven't contacted the guy who made it >.> But I'll have to look into it. Not sure whether express permission is even needed though (In some cases just giving credit is enough (When no profit is being made off it)), and even if it is, I highly doubt the guy will mind. You make such music because you enjoy it and its source, I highly doubt you wouldn't allow people with similar motives to use it.
Quests
I guess I'll explain it again in text, much easier:
There will be two (or two and a half, sort of) quest lines. The storyline will be roughly the same, you just have to pick a side.
As for Co-op, I think I said this in the video: What the second player did or did not do is completely ignored. When a party is created, the game only uses the first players progress. Player 2 will never be locked out of quests due to having made different choices in his own quest line. If you're thinking how co-op will work in scenario XYZ, just imagine its only one player with two controllable units. Player two practically doesn't exist, whatever he may or may not have done will never interfere with what player one/The Party is doing. You could call him the sidekick. Both players are playing Player 1s storyline.
After the players split up, the game does memorize all the quests player two has completed while in a party, but doesn't mark them as properly completed. Instead it just marks them as completed-in-coop, and when the player actually reaches that quest he gets the option to instantly mark it as complete and skip it. This will prevent players from skipping quests in chains and so on (Like the Mozared quests, he's gonna have multiple ones. Completing quest #2 won't unlock #3 for player 2, he will first have to complete #1, will then get the option to skip #2 which will then unlock #3). Player two practically gets a "Complete Quest Instantly" token, but you need to have the actual quest to use that token.
Hope that was less confusing :)
Legendaries
well, they will definitely be available before the 8th milestone trainer, but that's mostly because that guy will have an average starmon level of 85. We have no concrete plans yet about when we are introducing them, we'd ideally tie it into the story, once we get there. The final legendary (#150, like MewTwo) will be directly tied to the story ending, so that one becomes available as part of the final quest, and we haven't decided yet when that is going to be (Getting to level 100 will take ages, I think we should end the story before then and use unrelated quests to carry players to around level 80-90 afterwards).
Also, I think we already discussed this earlier, but I'd like to bring it up again: The Legendaries will be some seriously badass motherfuckers. Expect lots of collateral when you see them. Literally. Shit's gonna go down, people are going to be burnt and/or torn apart. These guys you really don't want to mess with. The ones you can capture will be weaker versions / not the originals. (My current ideas are offspring, "phoenix rebirth like thingy", and clone) This means the legendaries will be introduced some time before they can be captured, and you'll have to go through a quest chain revolving around them. The exact details about things will be decided as we go along: We've got general ideas, we know where we want to go with the plot and what should happen, but we're going to plan out the details only once we reach them.
Masterball hasn't be planned as well, but I'd probably involve it in the story as well. Not sure how much we told you about the backstory, but I had a good idea when we chose the name Starmon - It's not supposed to mean "Starcraft Monsters" (Pokemon means Pocket Monsters iirc), it's supposed to mean "Monsters from the Stars". Everything you can capture with a "capture core" is actually an alien. A very, very long time ago (Back when cave paintings were still in style), "fire fell from the skies" (Falling stars / Drop pods). Humans, who had barely begun drawing/writing found many strange creatures around the impact sites, escaped from the crashed drop pods (Or, well, emergency ejected). Over time, people started domesticating them, bla bla bla, I'll not go into detail too much about how society developed, if you want the full backstory tell me and I'll post it, I'll just skip to the relevant part: Capture cores.
Capture cores were found in and around the escape pods. High tech orbs that could dematerialize and store starmon, and would also force some small amount of obedience on them (More due to the creatures having adapted to capture cores and their place in society over centuries/millenia than it being something built into the capture core. Obeying the person that captured them is practically an instinct - They understand that they are bonded to that person practically forever, whether they like it or not.) Humans had no problems whatsoever figuring out how they worked, and they were all "master balls" essentially. Fast forward two thousand years or so: Humans have for a long time been trying (and succeeding) to replicate capture cores, but none were ever as perfect as the original ones from the drop pods. There weren't infinite drop pods, and unlike Starmon, capture cores can't reproduce, so there was a finite amount of them. A fairly large amount at first. Then the drop pods crash landed on a rather hard planet. And then they had to survive some 2k+ years, a lot of them being in use for a lot of that time. Most of them at some point just ejected the starmon and refused to work anymore, and no one knew how to fix them. Wars were fought over capture cores (And using Starmon - They are really fucking resilient, screw fighting with weapons when you can just send practically invulnerable beasts at your enemies), so people tried to create their own. As I already said, they succeeded, but they aren't perfect.
The "Master Ball" you will get will be an original capture core. I think we'll make the player actually visit a drop pod to retrieve a core (Or for some other reason and give the capture core some other way, but I definitely want a drop pod visit)
Also, a while ago you guys were throwing out random ideas and some concered pokeballs/Capture cores. I can't remember whose idea it was, and what it was originally, but I think we're going to add a second pseudo-master-ball. It will be a capture core that will not be consumed until it actually succeeds in capturing something, and each failure (in the same battle) will increase its capture rate multiplier, so at a certain point it will plain simply be guaranteed to capture, just like a masterball, but unlike the master ball you can't just instant capture something, and weakening the starmon first will still help as it will make it easier to capture something as you work your way to 100% capture chance.
Rival
The original plan was to tie it into the Karma system. Your rival will be who you chose not to be. So if you go dark side, the rival will be the good guy and vice versa. We haven't implemented him/her yet, and haven't had too many discussions about him/her. What I'd personally like to do, but may be a bit too hard/time consuming, is have multiple preset rivals, so that the rival isn't the same for each player. My rival might end up being Kenny while Zelda's rival will be Kyle. They will have different lines and different lineups, but they would still appear at the same places and so on (So in essence I'd just like to have multiple possible characters and lineups for the rival, which one ends up being the actual rival would be randomised, but those are just changes in-battle and in conversation. Your quests and when/where/how you meet the rival will always be the same regardless of who your rival is)
OK, I'm really impressed. The map looks really close to functional alpha with limited bugs. The randomized rival idea is a bit too confusing for me to handle, what happens if I restart the map, or if I'm playing in a party? One rival doesn't exactly make perfect sense in party play, but neither does two. IDK, but I really do like the idea of your rival being your opposite morally, and I think that starmon lineups could change "random"ly but it has to make sense. His Squirtle/Pikachu needs to be ever present.
Also, the back story you mentioned seems really important for world building. I would love if someone produced a cinematic that showed the starmon falling, people finding the usefulness of capture capsules, a civilization building, and friendships forming. Is there any way to do a slideshow thingy in the Galaxy Editor? Maybe just an intro uploaded to youtube is enough though. That would be useful for promotion. Maybe tac some game play footage onto the end.
In the Video, you mentioned that you got lost on your own map. I know that was in jest, but what if someone else gets lost? I think that a minimap would be really nice, or even a map that you bring up from an inventory. The "premade" sc2 minimap doesn't seem to fit well, so a hand drawn map for each area might be really pretty. (Quest rewards? idk, but little things like that make a person feel cuddly with the game) I know these last two points might require additional team members, but it would add a wicked cool aspect to the map. Defiantly can be saved until late Beta.
I think some notification of what starmon belongs to who in team battles would be useful to little brother who glances at the screen, or even me. Also, and indicator of how many starmon remain not-fainted in each party would be lovely.
Lastly, you mentioned that trainers react to average level of party. I think some way of mentioning this to a player, within the map, would be useful.
I hope that this post turns out to be useful, instead of just a daydream. Anyhow, keep up the great work guys!
What I meant with randomised rival was that we'd have a list of multiple rivals, and you would be assigned one of them permanently. Your rival won't ever change. There's just a good chance you won't have the same rival as another person. As for party, same thing would apply as with everything else: Player two practically doesn't exist, and nothing is changed due to him, so his rival will never show up, while player 1s will (Both players will fight the rival in a 2v2 (the rival will be sending out 2 starmon) if the second player is close enough when the battle is started. Just like with any other battle)
The opening cinematic will include a part/quick version of the backstory (Just like the pokemon professor "cinematic" at the start of the pokemon games), and I'll make sure the full version of it is accessible somewhere, video may be a good idea or just another optional cinematic ingame.
We are definitely adding a map, I'm just waiting for the terrain to be more or less complete before I start working on one. Also, getting out of the forest is a lot easier - You just head either south or west. If you go west, you'll reach the Lake, which has no obstacles and you can just follow it south to where Route 1 ends. And the reason that going south in the forest is easier than going north is ledges, which is kinda why we got lost - We couldn't use every path available. But as you saw, it didn't really take long for us to find our way, and the map should make it easier once its implemented.
Good point about the what-team-is-a-starmon-on-thingy. I think maybe making it "Enemy [Starmon]" in the chat messages may be better. Zelda will have to look at that.
Yea, we will definitely mention the trainer scaling somewhere. It will probably be a while though before we do as it's not really that important yet, as no one but us is gonna play this (And once we do the alpha... Well, you guys should already know, and we can tell everyone else in chat). But yeah, we wnat to make as much info about the map available in it (The Stardex and Mentor being two of the bigger ways of doing that. We'll also have random NPCs that will occasionally have something useful to say)
Ah, so it's like diablo. I'm wondering how realistic coop will be. Can we watch battles that our friends are involved in? Will 2 players get to fight the same trainer meaning the one being fought performed a genetic duplication of themselves? :P. It's better if once an AI NPC has been locked in battle it cannot battle with trainers talking to it on the overworld.
While it's not ready yet, we plan to make any battles going on in the town arena watchable. It's a big special arena where PvP battles and other high-level bosses are fought. The idea is that any player can spectate you if you're in there.
2 players won't fight duplicate trainers. If you and me are in a party, and we wander upon a boss, he'll just send out 2 starmon at once. Me and you would both send out one starmon. It's not unfair because once me & you lose 6 starmon between the two of us (you could lose 2 and I lose 4, for example) the battle ends. So it's not like we have twice the firepower as the opponent.
NPC's are phased, like many of the other elements of the game. If an NPC gets into a battle with your party buddy, you'll both fight him together. If you're not in the same party, you won't even notice that NPC is battling- it will look as if he's just walking around still. Only the player actually involved in the battle will see the NPC run up to him, and then start the battle.
I'd like to hear the full backstory. That was very interesting and believable. I just thought of this but will starmon include in the plot (at some point) a suggestion that starmon will rebel? It might be interesting having scenarios of a humans vs starmon war or humans + loyal starmon vs rebellious starmon. Those creatures might be biding their time to attack cuz they're sick of us :P.
We plan on working the backstory into the game. Like maity said above, most of the plot isn't written yet (we just have some general plans/ideas, the only stuff written for now is the story that will be ready for alpha). We plan on including a visit to a drop-pod impact site at some point, so you'll definitely become aware of the backstory throughout the plot.
I think the town map like from pokemon is enough. If we had an sc2 minimap won't that make caves too easy to navigate? I also like how view is restricted to what's around the player which is realistic. Maybe have an explorer NPC at the entrance of each zone give directions saying things like "If you ever get lost, go west or south, otherwise hope for the best :P". Maybe have the option to talk to and ask the following starmon to lead us out?
Yeah, we're not super sure what we'll do for the map, but we'll have at least what the pokemon games had (a basic map that shows you which direction to go for each area). Navigation should be pretty easy once that's in, but we'll also include signs. Some of the signs were moved when Moz was terraining, but we had a sign outside zone enterances that gave directions. You can also ask the mentor back in town for advice on where to find any particular thing.
One last question for now. Can EV training be made alot easier? Like letting the vitamins go beyond 100 or make it easier to get those items like power brace. I'd rather not grind at a million rattata in the wild for speed EVs.
We have the genetics lab as a feature that will be unlocked over time. We haven't set up the system entirely yet, so I'll see if we can find a way to speed up the process. At the very least we'll allow you to remove EV's and re-train them, although I realize that's not what you're looking for :)
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After almost finishing Soul Silver I'm actually surprised EV training isn't as grindy as I thought (without EV training items and knowing the EV hotspots). Still, I'd like you guys to do better for starmon. How about doubling all the EV gains? So if I defeat a zubat equivalent then I get 2 speed EVs.
EDIT: Or lower the 255 cap for stats. I think it's already enough to make players work for about 100EVs per starmon and they certainly are 'training' the starmon to suit their battle role.
Srry for not answering earlier.
I definitely want to have something that allows you to start preset EV-based battles (i.e. you can pick between a set of trainers that only have specific EVs or combinations of them. And it won't be anything vague or so - It will explicitly tell you that its for EV training). I'm currently trying to think of ways to implement it in a more "fun" way (i.e. having the battles be something special, include special starmon/moves, or... A mechanic we're not gonna reveal until the alpha :p Maybe give a high chance that the enemy starmon is shiny. In addition to making the battles special, I'm also trying to think of how to implement it into the world/story, but that's a bit easier.)
A consumable that increases EV gain for a certain amount of time could work as well (Zelda and I have been talking about ways to make arena progression more "fun", one of the ideas was a special currency gotten only from arena fights - I think using such a currency for the EV booster consumable/held items would be more "balanced" than making them a cash sink, and possibly even promote a sense of competitiveness for arena fights)
We won't change the EV numbers/caps directly, I want to keep as many basic systems the same as possible, so that someone who has played Pokemon, regardless of which level, will know their way around. Only change to EVs I would consider is changing the cap to 252 or 256, seeing as going past 252 is a waste since you can't reach 256 for that last stat point.
Information is secretly being kept from us like the coop thing
At this point, I can't think of anything we're keeping secret except what Maity referred to in his last post, and that's only a secret because it's very important to the storyline. So other than the storyline details, feel free to ask about whatever you want now ^.^.
I know it was frustrating when we didn't talk about the 2v2/co-op systems at all, but to be honest, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get them working. I didn't want to promise we'd add something and then have to say "yeah, sorry, can't do it". So we decided not to announce it until it was actually in game and working.
@TheAlmaity: Go
About shinies, I know they're supposed to be rare and special but can it be like master balls? Every trainer should have a definite way to make 1 starmon shiny of their choice (maybe by a prototype scientific device that explodes after the first use :P) imo. It's still special but we get to have it sooner.
The chance of any starmon being shiny in the actual pokemon games is about 0.01%. We realize that we won't have nearly the same playerbase as the actual pokemon games though, so we've tweaked the probability of shiny starmon to be roughly 0.09%. That's nine times as likely as the actual games. Shiny starmon are only special because of their rarity, so if we gave everybody a guaranteed one, you'd end up seeing them a lot more often and they'd loose that special "Oh my gosh, that's a shiny, I'm screen-shotting this to cherish forever" feeling. With a chance of about 1/1000, most people won't find a shiny unless they're playing a lot, but some people definitely will. For every player that catches all 100-ish starmon, about 1 of them will get a shiny (which is extremely likely compared to the real games). We can tweak the numbers in the future if needed- we'll have to see how things feel with an actual playerbase. It's very difficult to tell how rare or common items or starmon should be when there's just a few of us.
We also plan on giving out some type of special rewards for "events". For example, Mei (the creepy doll starmon you saw in the video) is not obtainable in-game. In order to get one, you'll have to actually receive it from somebody on the dev team. We can also include shiny or particularly rare starmon for rewards. We're not totally sure on how exactly this will work, but we'll probably be giving out gift starmon on holidays or as rewards for any type of tournament that could happen.
<sub>...And of course we may slip a few starmon in the direction of our loyal forum goers and alpha testers..</sub>
Shinies in starmon get a halo/glow btw (Like when you mouse over characters/objects in the campaign between missions, except that the halo is colored to match the starmon's color scheme (Which is different than the non-shiny color scheme ofc)), so they should be easier to spot and more "special"
One thing to remember is that you can trade starmon. Maybe you don't want a shiny pidgey, but I'm sure someone else will want one. What do you think you'd get for it? An extra legendary perhaps? Maybe the guy will give you his starter? Or the "eevee"? Or a super rare item / tons of cash?
I definitely want there to be multiple... uh... "Choice" starmon? Stuff like Eevee and the starters - You can't get all of them alone. (And as I said multiple times, breeding is most likely not going to be implemented)
I also want there to be a starmon that attacks you after you reach a certain amount of karma. Well, two starmon to be specific - A good one and a bad one. And you can obviously only get one of them.
Another relevant idea I had (But didn't discuss with Zelda yet) was an item that added a halo/glow to starmon when held, and if that Starmon had a second texture set (i.e. it can be shiny) it'd swap textures as well, making it a fake shiny.
As it'd occupy the held item slot, there'd be a tradeoff for having a fake shiny. Plus we could make it multiple items, only one of them being the actual Shiny transformation, and the rest just being colored halos.
If we do add this, I'd make em incredibly rare - One, maybe two guaranteed ones (Story/Arena completion, perhaps), maybe use the secondary currency I talk about and make it super expensive (So you're pretty much sacrificing the other actually useful items for it), and ofc as something Zelda and I can hand out to people.
Talking about dev hand-outs: Zelda mentioned special events and helping in this thread. If the map gets popular enough, I think I might try and host some small tournaments, where we can give away such things as well.
And about not having time to participate in possible holiday events - Trading! Find that shiny pidgey and trade it for a holiday starmon you missed. (Tbh, holiday starmon shouldn't be as exclusive as stuff like Mei, so I think it'd be best if we allow more than 1 per account, like by having them show up in the wild. I'm sure some players will see an opportunity, capture a ton of em and trade em out to players who had no time.)
Oh, and just think I should say this again: I want to have all starmon be competitively viable if possible. We've got a lot less than the pokemon games, so I want to make them count. Reason I'm mentioning this is because chances that you'll catch a shiny that is simply outclassed by other starmon due to stuff like base stats are gonna be low.
EDIT: Completely forgot I already did some testing with halos >.> Not possible. Not sure if its just the specific few models I tested with or all WoW models, but if you have different colored halos on screen on those models they all bug out and start mixing colors and I wouldn't be surprised if they caused epileptic seizures.
Shinies won't differ at all - They'll just be shiny. Making them stronger only gives hackers more incentive to screw everything up.
Yea, if we do holiday events at all (No real plans) and we do special wild starmon, they wouldn't be very common (Probably the standard 5% chance, like other rares)
What I meant is that there will be little to no starmon that will generally have low base stats compared to others. 520-525 seems to have been the highest base stat total the original pokemon could achieve (Except for legendaries and pseudo-legendaries, which would hit 600), but iirc many of them actually had less. Pigeot for example had 469, Altaria 490, Raticate 413.
So if you got a shiny rattatta, you'd have a pretty crap shiny, base stat wise. A shiny swablu/altaria is worth a lot more as their base stats aren't completely bad. Catch a shiny ralts, and you've got a pokemon that ends up with 518 total base stats, over 100 more than that damn rattatta/raticate.
So what I'm saying is that there is no real rattatta in starmon. Almost everything will have base stats total 520, the main difference will be how those are allocated and move sets. I'll probably make base stat totals vary a bit more, like maybe 490-520 or so. But Im going to keep all starmon as equal as possible in raw power, as we don't have the sheer numbers pokemon has to be able to afford to have unviable/crap starmon.
I'm quite tired atm :( The items you suggested all seem interesting, and can probably be implemented with maybe some number tweaking :) We should probably start working on those relatively soon.
There will be two starmon that attack the player if he reaches a certain amount of karma (One for good, one for bad). Each player can only get one of them. That is essentially it - Become super evil/good and you'll encounter a unique starmon.
It's basically the Pokemon on the box, you only catch one of them, only this time your game play determines which one, not what color the box is. maity, do you have any plans to restrict trading OP Starmon to a newbie account? Pokemon made it so that any pokemon above X level would disobey you, based on gym badges. Money and Items are also a possible concern. If my friend beat the game, sending me a large chunk of change could ruin the experience; or just make it different. (The limit may change for a hardcore mode?)
No solid plans yet, but there will definitely be some kind of limit. For levels, maybe the level of the next milestone trainer+5 (So that you don't accidentally outlevel him before fighting him and suddenly your best starmon becomes useless). Or we could disallow trading such high level starmon, but if you train a starmon past that level cap it won't become useless (Could tie it to the happiness value. If it's happy, it will still fight for you)
Cash and item trading shouldn't be limited I think - They can't directly win you the game. They can help, but the biggest factors are your starmon. Having a million potions or revives don't matter if you get one or two shot. Also, as with the pokemon games, what items are available in the store will be limited by your progression/level. I just don't think money/Items give a gamebreaking advantage if acquired earlier than normally possible.
If people think that having such an advantage would ruin their experience... Well, they can simply not trade such things :) This isn't LoL where any one of your friends can gift you teemo in cold blood without you being able to do anything about it.
As for hardcore: We'll see when we get there. Easiest solution to me is I think an option that would disallow trades with any non-hardcore players, and maybe more options like no money and no item trading.
I'm hoping you guys want item ideas so I'll start with some and tell me if you want more (and I'll try to think them up) :
I don't remember if I've mentioned it, but we did implement an item-holding system a while back, so items like what you described will work. I'll definitely steal those ideas whenever we start to add items. Thanks :)
Right now, my current focus is anything that has to be ready for the alpha to launch. Moz is going to be terraining the last zone that we need for the alpha's storyline (there's lots of zones that we still have to make, of course, but we only need one more for the alpha). After that's done, we need to create the next storyline quest and a few sidequests for the zones we have now.
That means that the alpha will have 4 or 5 zones when we start it (depending on moz's schedule for terraining as well as our ability to make content for those zones). The "bug-catcher park" area, the forest, the road leading up to the mountains, the zone for the quest, and the town will be available when we start for sure. As a bonus, here's a sneak-peak at what the next zone will be (this one likely will not be ready for alpha, but it will be added later). Pretty nice terrain if you ask me.
So basically, we need to make one more zone, one more storyline quest, and a few more sidequests. As far as we can tell, everything seems to be working. All of the bugs from the video have been fixed, and everything else looks pretty stable :)
I don't know the specifics of hardcore mode (which sounds like a way to make single player insanely challenging) but I think there are easier ways. From games like FTL or some others, several difficulty levels could be chosen before starting the adventure. Each one does something simple like scaling money rewards, exp, etc.
We don't know the specifics of hardcore mode either :P It's just something we've talked about, and you guys have mentioned a few times. The idea would be that the player could play with a different rule set. I believe somebody mentioned a version where you must nickname every starmon and whenever a starmon faints, you must release it. The idea would be that you can choose to use those rules when you start, and then we'll actually enforce them. Some players are sadistic enough to do that to themselves- I'm definitely not O.o
I also trust Zelda to make super intelligent AI which strongly contributes to difficulty.
Oh no, now I have to meet expectations! The current AI's aren't exactly rocket scientists, but we'll work on smarter AI at a later point. For the alpha, you'll face the mighty power of our easy & medium AI's. It's not a super big deal because you wouldn't really encounter a super smart trainer at that point in the game anyways- we'll probably reserve smarter AI's for boss fights or later game enemies.
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Curse PremiumWhat Maity said is right- all our trainers are generated randomly every time you load. So you won't find the exact same trainer a second time, but the newly-generated trainers will fight you. Since we've made it super easy to avoid old zones (the teleporter system is very cheap and easy to unlock), this shouldn't become a problem for players.
Thinking about it now, we could put in an option to "unlock" the maximum level cap for zone scaling. In other words, enemies in zones you're over-leveled for will scale up to you with more evolved and higher-level starmon. It could be a reward for something- like completing the campaign, reaching a certain trainer level, etc....
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Curse PremiumWe don't think it will be a problem. But what's great about the system is that if it ends up being too hard or too easy, we can easily adjust it so it's just right. The way the system works now is that it makes sure enemies are about your level, not exactly your level. We just use the average level of your party as the starting point- from there we adjust it based on a few different things, and then throw in a few random numbers to mix things up. The higher level you are, the more varied we'll allow the enemy's levels to be.
Also, keep in mind that we don't jam-pack zones with trainers. Many zones in the original games were literally just a linear path with like 20 trainers in the way, and you had to fight through each and every painful battle to get through. Our zones are more open, with trainers being placed further apart. They also walk around or turn (usually) instead of staring at the wall waiting to kill you the second you walk by. So you can sneak more of them than in the actual games. We don't want monotonous fights, which is why we're encouraging leveling up through quests.
Trainer "Classes" are determined by the zone you're in- you won't find bug catchers in the desert, for example. So this ends up meaning types are usually reasonably uniform throughout a zone. If you're in a volcano area, you can expect a lot of fire-type starmon. If you're in the desert, you can expect lots of sand-type starmon. So you can prepare appropriately if you want.
That said, Trainers will attempt to counter you if they have types to do it. Say you're using a fire-type and you kill their current starmon. And say the next starmon we gave them was a grass-type. If they also had a water-type available, they'll send that out instead of the grass-type that we originally decided would be next, assuming their AI level is high enough.
Again, we can tweak these randomization numbers as much as we need, if necessary. If it becomes too hard/easy, we can look at your party and modify the opponent's team before the battle starts.
I can't remember if I mentioned it, but we did add exp share after you asked about it last time, since we felt it was a really good way to train. Lower level starmon opponents are always available via the arena if you want to train that way. Keep in mind that we reward your party with experience when you finish quests, so you'll end up leveling a little faster that way.
Just to add to what Zelda said in reply to lower level opponents: Trainers are scaled with your current party, not with all starmon including those in storage. Dump your high levels into the box and you'll fight lower level trainers (Assuming you're not in a zone where the minimum level is above your average level)
@TheAlmaity: Go
I like this due to the fact that it'll make the world this much more dynamic and with that, larger. It doesn't matter how much you've played and how high level your Starmon are, you'll always have plenty of reasons to go back and train in the mountain zone, desert or forest if you feel like it.
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Curse PremiumWe've got some pretty exciting news coming your guys's way very soon! Me & TheAlmaity have spent the last two days testing, debugging, and then testing some more in preparation to record our next update video.
The good news is that we finally managed to get a video recorded, and it's going to be posted here as soon as it's finished. The bad news is that we had some audio problems. Maity is re-recording the commentary as we speak, but that means it's not going to be ready today. To make up for it, here's one of the original tests that went...well, less than perfectly.
Edit: I stand corrected! Maity came through and stayed up until 5 in the morning waiting for the video to render & upload. Please give him your applause :P The actual video is in the post right below this one, and as Maity said, we'll post more information about it tomorrow. It's sort of the middle of the night right now O.o
Our first failed test (actual video is in the post below this one):
Anyways, the real video should be ready tomorrow. You'll get to see the surprise feature we've been working on for the past few months!
There's a good reason we didn't answer this question ;)
He's lying.
4:15 AM. Time to sleep. Will answer questions tomorrow! (And again: I seriously don't mind walls of text. I like them. Seriously.)
Depends what we want to test. Not sure how far Zelda got with the quests, and he has to fix all the bugs in the videos. My issue is that I need a new comp, some piece of hardware seems to be dying in this laptop (Or at least got a lot slower), seems like either the RAM or the HDD - I have trouble with loading times, stuff just takes forever to load. I can play games and so on since they just load once and everything works fine, but the Editor handles this really badly and has to reload everything every single time I open a field, which means if I open or close a field I literally spend 30+ seconds waiting just for the editor to respond again. Every change I want to make takes me over a minute. Yea, I could do it, but i'd probaly go insane and would need a new window since my laptop flying through it will probably result in it breaking. I should be getting a new comp this month though :)
But yeah, fix everything that was broken in the videos, a bit more terraining from Moz and implement the quests we wanted, and we're pretty much ready.
We *still* haven't contacted the guy who made it >.> But I'll have to look into it. Not sure whether express permission is even needed though (In some cases just giving credit is enough (When no profit is being made off it)), and even if it is, I highly doubt the guy will mind. You make such music because you enjoy it and its source, I highly doubt you wouldn't allow people with similar motives to use it.
I guess I'll explain it again in text, much easier:
There will be two (or two and a half, sort of) quest lines. The storyline will be roughly the same, you just have to pick a side.
As for Co-op, I think I said this in the video: What the second player did or did not do is completely ignored. When a party is created, the game only uses the first players progress. Player 2 will never be locked out of quests due to having made different choices in his own quest line. If you're thinking how co-op will work in scenario XYZ, just imagine its only one player with two controllable units. Player two practically doesn't exist, whatever he may or may not have done will never interfere with what player one/The Party is doing. You could call him the sidekick. Both players are playing Player 1s storyline.
After the players split up, the game does memorize all the quests player two has completed while in a party, but doesn't mark them as properly completed. Instead it just marks them as completed-in-coop, and when the player actually reaches that quest he gets the option to instantly mark it as complete and skip it. This will prevent players from skipping quests in chains and so on (Like the Mozared quests, he's gonna have multiple ones. Completing quest #2 won't unlock #3 for player 2, he will first have to complete #1, will then get the option to skip #2 which will then unlock #3). Player two practically gets a "Complete Quest Instantly" token, but you need to have the actual quest to use that token.
Hope that was less confusing :)
well, they will definitely be available before the 8th milestone trainer, but that's mostly because that guy will have an average starmon level of 85. We have no concrete plans yet about when we are introducing them, we'd ideally tie it into the story, once we get there. The final legendary (#150, like MewTwo) will be directly tied to the story ending, so that one becomes available as part of the final quest, and we haven't decided yet when that is going to be (Getting to level 100 will take ages, I think we should end the story before then and use unrelated quests to carry players to around level 80-90 afterwards).
Also, I think we already discussed this earlier, but I'd like to bring it up again: The Legendaries will be some seriously badass motherfuckers. Expect lots of collateral when you see them. Literally. Shit's gonna go down, people are going to be burnt and/or torn apart. These guys you really don't want to mess with. The ones you can capture will be weaker versions / not the originals. (My current ideas are offspring, "phoenix rebirth like thingy", and clone) This means the legendaries will be introduced some time before they can be captured, and you'll have to go through a quest chain revolving around them. The exact details about things will be decided as we go along: We've got general ideas, we know where we want to go with the plot and what should happen, but we're going to plan out the details only once we reach them.
Masterball hasn't be planned as well, but I'd probably involve it in the story as well. Not sure how much we told you about the backstory, but I had a good idea when we chose the name Starmon - It's not supposed to mean "Starcraft Monsters" (Pokemon means Pocket Monsters iirc), it's supposed to mean "Monsters from the Stars". Everything you can capture with a "capture core" is actually an alien. A very, very long time ago (Back when cave paintings were still in style), "fire fell from the skies" (Falling stars / Drop pods). Humans, who had barely begun drawing/writing found many strange creatures around the impact sites, escaped from the crashed drop pods (Or, well, emergency ejected). Over time, people started domesticating them, bla bla bla, I'll not go into detail too much about how society developed, if you want the full backstory tell me and I'll post it, I'll just skip to the relevant part: Capture cores.
Capture cores were found in and around the escape pods. High tech orbs that could dematerialize and store starmon, and would also force some small amount of obedience on them (More due to the creatures having adapted to capture cores and their place in society over centuries/millenia than it being something built into the capture core. Obeying the person that captured them is practically an instinct - They understand that they are bonded to that person practically forever, whether they like it or not.) Humans had no problems whatsoever figuring out how they worked, and they were all "master balls" essentially. Fast forward two thousand years or so: Humans have for a long time been trying (and succeeding) to replicate capture cores, but none were ever as perfect as the original ones from the drop pods. There weren't infinite drop pods, and unlike Starmon, capture cores can't reproduce, so there was a finite amount of them. A fairly large amount at first. Then the drop pods crash landed on a rather hard planet. And then they had to survive some 2k+ years, a lot of them being in use for a lot of that time. Most of them at some point just ejected the starmon and refused to work anymore, and no one knew how to fix them. Wars were fought over capture cores (And using Starmon - They are really fucking resilient, screw fighting with weapons when you can just send practically invulnerable beasts at your enemies), so people tried to create their own. As I already said, they succeeded, but they aren't perfect.
The "Master Ball" you will get will be an original capture core. I think we'll make the player actually visit a drop pod to retrieve a core (Or for some other reason and give the capture core some other way, but I definitely want a drop pod visit)
Also, a while ago you guys were throwing out random ideas and some concered pokeballs/Capture cores. I can't remember whose idea it was, and what it was originally, but I think we're going to add a second pseudo-master-ball. It will be a capture core that will not be consumed until it actually succeeds in capturing something, and each failure (in the same battle) will increase its capture rate multiplier, so at a certain point it will plain simply be guaranteed to capture, just like a masterball, but unlike the master ball you can't just instant capture something, and weakening the starmon first will still help as it will make it easier to capture something as you work your way to 100% capture chance.
The original plan was to tie it into the Karma system. Your rival will be who you chose not to be. So if you go dark side, the rival will be the good guy and vice versa. We haven't implemented him/her yet, and haven't had too many discussions about him/her. What I'd personally like to do, but may be a bit too hard/time consuming, is have multiple preset rivals, so that the rival isn't the same for each player. My rival might end up being Kenny while Zelda's rival will be Kyle. They will have different lines and different lineups, but they would still appear at the same places and so on (So in essence I'd just like to have multiple possible characters and lineups for the rival, which one ends up being the actual rival would be randomised, but those are just changes in-battle and in conversation. Your quests and when/where/how you meet the rival will always be the same regardless of who your rival is)
Ok, I hope I answered everything :)
OK, I'm really impressed. The map looks really close to functional alpha with limited bugs. The randomized rival idea is a bit too confusing for me to handle, what happens if I restart the map, or if I'm playing in a party? One rival doesn't exactly make perfect sense in party play, but neither does two. IDK, but I really do like the idea of your rival being your opposite morally, and I think that starmon lineups could change "random"ly but it has to make sense. His Squirtle/Pikachu needs to be ever present.
Also, the back story you mentioned seems really important for world building. I would love if someone produced a cinematic that showed the starmon falling, people finding the usefulness of capture capsules, a civilization building, and friendships forming. Is there any way to do a slideshow thingy in the Galaxy Editor? Maybe just an intro uploaded to youtube is enough though. That would be useful for promotion. Maybe tac some game play footage onto the end.
In the Video, you mentioned that you got lost on your own map. I know that was in jest, but what if someone else gets lost? I think that a minimap would be really nice, or even a map that you bring up from an inventory. The "premade" sc2 minimap doesn't seem to fit well, so a hand drawn map for each area might be really pretty. (Quest rewards? idk, but little things like that make a person feel cuddly with the game) I know these last two points might require additional team members, but it would add a wicked cool aspect to the map. Defiantly can be saved until late Beta.
I think some notification of what starmon belongs to who in team battles would be useful to little brother who glances at the screen, or even me. Also, and indicator of how many starmon remain not-fainted in each party would be lovely.
Lastly, you mentioned that trainers react to average level of party. I think some way of mentioning this to a player, within the map, would be useful.
I hope that this post turns out to be useful, instead of just a daydream. Anyhow, keep up the great work guys!
What I meant with randomised rival was that we'd have a list of multiple rivals, and you would be assigned one of them permanently. Your rival won't ever change. There's just a good chance you won't have the same rival as another person. As for party, same thing would apply as with everything else: Player two practically doesn't exist, and nothing is changed due to him, so his rival will never show up, while player 1s will (Both players will fight the rival in a 2v2 (the rival will be sending out 2 starmon) if the second player is close enough when the battle is started. Just like with any other battle)
The opening cinematic will include a part/quick version of the backstory (Just like the pokemon professor "cinematic" at the start of the pokemon games), and I'll make sure the full version of it is accessible somewhere, video may be a good idea or just another optional cinematic ingame.
We are definitely adding a map, I'm just waiting for the terrain to be more or less complete before I start working on one. Also, getting out of the forest is a lot easier - You just head either south or west. If you go west, you'll reach the Lake, which has no obstacles and you can just follow it south to where Route 1 ends. And the reason that going south in the forest is easier than going north is ledges, which is kinda why we got lost - We couldn't use every path available. But as you saw, it didn't really take long for us to find our way, and the map should make it easier once its implemented.
Good point about the what-team-is-a-starmon-on-thingy. I think maybe making it "Enemy [Starmon]" in the chat messages may be better. Zelda will have to look at that.
Yea, we will definitely mention the trainer scaling somewhere. It will probably be a while though before we do as it's not really that important yet, as no one but us is gonna play this (And once we do the alpha... Well, you guys should already know, and we can tell everyone else in chat). But yeah, we wnat to make as much info about the map available in it (The Stardex and Mentor being two of the bigger ways of doing that. We'll also have random NPCs that will occasionally have something useful to say)
@TheAlmaity: Go
Ok, thanks. I feel like I understand better now.
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Curse PremiumWhile it's not ready yet, we plan to make any battles going on in the town arena watchable. It's a big special arena where PvP battles and other high-level bosses are fought. The idea is that any player can spectate you if you're in there.
2 players won't fight duplicate trainers. If you and me are in a party, and we wander upon a boss, he'll just send out 2 starmon at once. Me and you would both send out one starmon. It's not unfair because once me & you lose 6 starmon between the two of us (you could lose 2 and I lose 4, for example) the battle ends. So it's not like we have twice the firepower as the opponent.
NPC's are phased, like many of the other elements of the game. If an NPC gets into a battle with your party buddy, you'll both fight him together. If you're not in the same party, you won't even notice that NPC is battling- it will look as if he's just walking around still. Only the player actually involved in the battle will see the NPC run up to him, and then start the battle.
Most likely :D We want to make a good use of the super awesome cutscene tool that's been added.
We plan on working the backstory into the game. Like maity said above, most of the plot isn't written yet (we just have some general plans/ideas, the only stuff written for now is the story that will be ready for alpha). We plan on including a visit to a drop-pod impact site at some point, so you'll definitely become aware of the backstory throughout the plot.
Yeah, we're not super sure what we'll do for the map, but we'll have at least what the pokemon games had (a basic map that shows you which direction to go for each area). Navigation should be pretty easy once that's in, but we'll also include signs. Some of the signs were moved when Moz was terraining, but we had a sign outside zone enterances that gave directions. You can also ask the mentor back in town for advice on where to find any particular thing.
We have the genetics lab as a feature that will be unlocked over time. We haven't set up the system entirely yet, so I'll see if we can find a way to speed up the process. At the very least we'll allow you to remove EV's and re-train them, although I realize that's not what you're looking for :)
Srry for not answering earlier.
I definitely want to have something that allows you to start preset EV-based battles (i.e. you can pick between a set of trainers that only have specific EVs or combinations of them. And it won't be anything vague or so - It will explicitly tell you that its for EV training). I'm currently trying to think of ways to implement it in a more "fun" way (i.e. having the battles be something special, include special starmon/moves, or... A mechanic we're not gonna reveal until the alpha :p Maybe give a high chance that the enemy starmon is shiny. In addition to making the battles special, I'm also trying to think of how to implement it into the world/story, but that's a bit easier.)
A consumable that increases EV gain for a certain amount of time could work as well (Zelda and I have been talking about ways to make arena progression more "fun", one of the ideas was a special currency gotten only from arena fights - I think using such a currency for the EV booster consumable/held items would be more "balanced" than making them a cash sink, and possibly even promote a sense of competitiveness for arena fights)
We won't change the EV numbers/caps directly, I want to keep as many basic systems the same as possible, so that someone who has played Pokemon, regardless of which level, will know their way around. Only change to EVs I would consider is changing the cap to 252 or 256, seeing as going past 252 is a waste since you can't reach 256 for that last stat point.
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Curse PremiumAt this point, I can't think of anything we're keeping secret except what Maity referred to in his last post, and that's only a secret because it's very important to the storyline. So other than the storyline details, feel free to ask about whatever you want now ^.^.
I know it was frustrating when we didn't talk about the 2v2/co-op systems at all, but to be honest, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get them working. I didn't want to promise we'd add something and then have to say "yeah, sorry, can't do it". So we decided not to announce it until it was actually in game and working.
The chance of any starmon being shiny in the actual pokemon games is about 0.01%. We realize that we won't have nearly the same playerbase as the actual pokemon games though, so we've tweaked the probability of shiny starmon to be roughly 0.09%. That's nine times as likely as the actual games. Shiny starmon are only special because of their rarity, so if we gave everybody a guaranteed one, you'd end up seeing them a lot more often and they'd loose that special "Oh my gosh, that's a shiny, I'm screen-shotting this to cherish forever" feeling. With a chance of about 1/1000, most people won't find a shiny unless they're playing a lot, but some people definitely will. For every player that catches all 100-ish starmon, about 1 of them will get a shiny (which is extremely likely compared to the real games). We can tweak the numbers in the future if needed- we'll have to see how things feel with an actual playerbase. It's very difficult to tell how rare or common items or starmon should be when there's just a few of us.
We also plan on giving out some type of special rewards for "events". For example, Mei (the creepy doll starmon you saw in the video) is not obtainable in-game. In order to get one, you'll have to actually receive it from somebody on the dev team. We can also include shiny or particularly rare starmon for rewards. We're not totally sure on how exactly this will work, but we'll probably be giving out gift starmon on holidays or as rewards for any type of tournament that could happen.
<sub>...And of course we may slip a few starmon in the direction of our loyal forum goers and alpha testers..</sub>
Shinies in starmon get a halo/glow btw (Like when you mouse over characters/objects in the campaign between missions, except that the halo is colored to match the starmon's color scheme (Which is different than the non-shiny color scheme ofc)), so they should be easier to spot and more "special"
One thing to remember is that you can trade starmon. Maybe you don't want a shiny pidgey, but I'm sure someone else will want one. What do you think you'd get for it? An extra legendary perhaps? Maybe the guy will give you his starter? Or the "eevee"? Or a super rare item / tons of cash?
I definitely want there to be multiple... uh... "Choice" starmon? Stuff like Eevee and the starters - You can't get all of them alone. (And as I said multiple times, breeding is most likely not going to be implemented)
I also want there to be a starmon that attacks you after you reach a certain amount of karma. Well, two starmon to be specific - A good one and a bad one. And you can obviously only get one of them.
Another relevant idea I had (But didn't discuss with Zelda yet) was an item that added a halo/glow to starmon when held, and if that Starmon had a second texture set (i.e. it can be shiny) it'd swap textures as well, making it a fake shiny.
As it'd occupy the held item slot, there'd be a tradeoff for having a fake shiny. Plus we could make it multiple items, only one of them being the actual Shiny transformation, and the rest just being colored halos.
If we do add this, I'd make em incredibly rare - One, maybe two guaranteed ones (Story/Arena completion, perhaps), maybe use the secondary currency I talk about and make it super expensive (So you're pretty much sacrificing the other actually useful items for it), and ofc as something Zelda and I can hand out to people.
Talking about dev hand-outs: Zelda mentioned special events and helping in this thread. If the map gets popular enough, I think I might try and host some small tournaments, where we can give away such things as well.
And about not having time to participate in possible holiday events - Trading! Find that shiny pidgey and trade it for a holiday starmon you missed. (Tbh, holiday starmon shouldn't be as exclusive as stuff like Mei, so I think it'd be best if we allow more than 1 per account, like by having them show up in the wild. I'm sure some players will see an opportunity, capture a ton of em and trade em out to players who had no time.)
Oh, and just think I should say this again: I want to have all starmon be competitively viable if possible. We've got a lot less than the pokemon games, so I want to make them count. Reason I'm mentioning this is because chances that you'll catch a shiny that is simply outclassed by other starmon due to stuff like base stats are gonna be low.
EDIT: Completely forgot I already did some testing with halos >.> Not possible. Not sure if its just the specific few models I tested with or all WoW models, but if you have different colored halos on screen on those models they all bug out and start mixing colors and I wouldn't be surprised if they caused epileptic seizures.
Shinies won't differ at all - They'll just be shiny. Making them stronger only gives hackers more incentive to screw everything up.
Yea, if we do holiday events at all (No real plans) and we do special wild starmon, they wouldn't be very common (Probably the standard 5% chance, like other rares)
What I meant is that there will be little to no starmon that will generally have low base stats compared to others. 520-525 seems to have been the highest base stat total the original pokemon could achieve (Except for legendaries and pseudo-legendaries, which would hit 600), but iirc many of them actually had less. Pigeot for example had 469, Altaria 490, Raticate 413.
So if you got a shiny rattatta, you'd have a pretty crap shiny, base stat wise. A shiny swablu/altaria is worth a lot more as their base stats aren't completely bad. Catch a shiny ralts, and you've got a pokemon that ends up with 518 total base stats, over 100 more than that damn rattatta/raticate.
So what I'm saying is that there is no real rattatta in starmon. Almost everything will have base stats total 520, the main difference will be how those are allocated and move sets. I'll probably make base stat totals vary a bit more, like maybe 490-520 or so. But Im going to keep all starmon as equal as possible in raw power, as we don't have the sheer numbers pokemon has to be able to afford to have unviable/crap starmon.
I'm quite tired atm :( The items you suggested all seem interesting, and can probably be implemented with maybe some number tweaking :) We should probably start working on those relatively soon.
If I said it that way I phrased it wrong.
There will be two starmon that attack the player if he reaches a certain amount of karma (One for good, one for bad). Each player can only get one of them. That is essentially it - Become super evil/good and you'll encounter a unique starmon.
It's basically the Pokemon on the box, you only catch one of them, only this time your game play determines which one, not what color the box is. maity, do you have any plans to restrict trading OP Starmon to a newbie account? Pokemon made it so that any pokemon above X level would disobey you, based on gym badges. Money and Items are also a possible concern. If my friend beat the game, sending me a large chunk of change could ruin the experience; or just make it different. (The limit may change for a hardcore mode?)
@OceanFlex: Go
No solid plans yet, but there will definitely be some kind of limit. For levels, maybe the level of the next milestone trainer+5 (So that you don't accidentally outlevel him before fighting him and suddenly your best starmon becomes useless). Or we could disallow trading such high level starmon, but if you train a starmon past that level cap it won't become useless (Could tie it to the happiness value. If it's happy, it will still fight for you)
Cash and item trading shouldn't be limited I think - They can't directly win you the game. They can help, but the biggest factors are your starmon. Having a million potions or revives don't matter if you get one or two shot. Also, as with the pokemon games, what items are available in the store will be limited by your progression/level. I just don't think money/Items give a gamebreaking advantage if acquired earlier than normally possible.
If people think that having such an advantage would ruin their experience... Well, they can simply not trade such things :) This isn't LoL where any one of your friends can gift you teemo in cold blood without you being able to do anything about it.
As for hardcore: We'll see when we get there. Easiest solution to me is I think an option that would disallow trades with any non-hardcore players, and maybe more options like no money and no item trading.
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Curse PremiumI don't remember if I've mentioned it, but we did implement an item-holding system a while back, so items like what you described will work. I'll definitely steal those ideas whenever we start to add items. Thanks :)
Right now, my current focus is anything that has to be ready for the alpha to launch. Moz is going to be terraining the last zone that we need for the alpha's storyline (there's lots of zones that we still have to make, of course, but we only need one more for the alpha). After that's done, we need to create the next storyline quest and a few sidequests for the zones we have now.
That means that the alpha will have 4 or 5 zones when we start it (depending on moz's schedule for terraining as well as our ability to make content for those zones). The "bug-catcher park" area, the forest, the road leading up to the mountains, the zone for the quest, and the town will be available when we start for sure. As a bonus, here's a sneak-peak at what the next zone will be (this one likely will not be ready for alpha, but it will be added later). Pretty nice terrain if you ask me.
So basically, we need to make one more zone, one more storyline quest, and a few more sidequests. As far as we can tell, everything seems to be working. All of the bugs from the video have been fixed, and everything else looks pretty stable :)
We don't know the specifics of hardcore mode either :P It's just something we've talked about, and you guys have mentioned a few times. The idea would be that the player could play with a different rule set. I believe somebody mentioned a version where you must nickname every starmon and whenever a starmon faints, you must release it. The idea would be that you can choose to use those rules when you start, and then we'll actually enforce them. Some players are sadistic enough to do that to themselves- I'm definitely not O.o
Oh no, now I have to meet expectations! The current AI's aren't exactly rocket scientists, but we'll work on smarter AI at a later point. For the alpha, you'll face the mighty power of our easy & medium AI's. It's not a super big deal because you wouldn't really encounter a super smart trainer at that point in the game anyways- we'll probably reserve smarter AI's for boss fights or later game enemies.