A quick note here- I'm going to be out of town for about 2 weeks, so I won't be able to work on the map (no laptop, ugh). I may have internet access to post here once or twice, but I doubt it. I know it's at a really awkward time for starmon's development, but we'll get the alpha to you guys eventually, I promise. ^.^ I'll miss reading all your guys's comments in the meantime! <3
Anyways, you'll need to direct all your future complaints to TheAlmaity, because anything that goes wrong is now entirely his fault :P
edit- Also, after reading the above posts I'd like to add another note: I don't like grinding. So I'm going to do my best to make this as un-grindy as possible, at least for the duration of the story. Turn-based RPGs like this tend to be cursed with grindyness by default, but we're going to try and reduce the grind as much as possible. I like the idea of having "unofficial" PvP fights where EV's are equal. We could also add options to equalize levels or IV's. Good idea :P
We recently made a little change to how spawning works. Previously, you always started the game in the main town no matter what. Now, you spawn at the location of closest unlocked teleporter to your last position. Teleporters are usually found inside a starcenter (the really out-of-the-way teleporters will at least be next to a healing machine, if not in a full starcenter). This way, if you die, it's a much shorter walk back to the spot of your demise. Additionally, you can easily get back to town (or to anywhere else) because you're already at the teleporter. The same thing happens if you leave the game and log back in later, you'll spawn next to a teleporter.
We've also been fixing lots of nasty bugs. In fact, that's what I've been spending most of time doing. :P
Intentionally hiding mechanics that improve your pokemon is not cool :P. Only hardcore players may research this up and be willing to grind for it.
One of our design goals for starmon was to avoid the hidden mechanics of pokemon. That's not to say we want to remove those hidden mechanics, but we want to explain them properly and make them transparent to the player. So happiness will still exist, but we're going to explain it to you and give you an easy way to check it. IVs and EVs still exist, but we're giving you an easy way to view them and we're going to explain them clearly. That way, casual players can do absolutely fine and understand the game systems, while "pro" players can train specifically for the best stats.
Additionally, we don't have a wiki like the actual pokemon games do. Curios players can't just google the best ways to level up starmon. So we want to provide all the information you would ever need in-game. If we ever get around to launching a website, that would be awesome. But we can't rely on that.
Hopefully somewhere down the track you'll edit this to say alot easier :P. I agree that it would be interesting feeling like we 'trained' our pets but after a certain point it gets repetitive and boring, especially for several starmon. Sure, you'll include those items but if I have to grind to get them, if they're stashed behind BP hoarding, then I wouldn't get them.
We'll have to see how it goes. In general, leveling up is a faster process in starmon. We're giving you large experience rewards for finishing quests and also providing you with easily accessible fights if you do want to grind. It's tricky to see how grindy it is now (there's only 2 of us and we're constantly making new starmon for ourselves), but I definitely don't like grinding. If it becomes too grindly late-game, we'll change something.
Pokemon's repel doesn't seem practical. I usually zig-zagged alot to find items or other goodies. Repel gets used up too quick and isn't worth the money when I could spend it on other things (like the expensive vitamins). You guys aren't doing grid-based movement so I'm curious how your repels work, how long they last, and if they get used up only if we only move through grass. I'm just gonna cross my fingers that wild battles can be avoided for free :P.
Well, we can just tweak the price and duration to make it practical ^.^ Repel isn't actually in the game yet (although we'll definitely add it), but I think only draining it while you're actually in grass is a good idea. I'm not sure how avoiding wild battles for free would go over... Again, you can skip a lot of "dangerous areas" by using the teleporters, so you won't have to re-tread old zones. I guess we could add something where you won't be attacked if you greatly outlevel a zone, or something like that. We'll have to see what works.
Peaceful solutions to conflicts is pretty cool and was really fun from mass effect. I'm crossing my fingers some more that we'll get plenty more quests that use this :P.
Right, we want to add lots of those types of situations. The reason that there's only one or two in the game right now is because there's only one or two big quests. But we definitely think these "choice" situations are cool. Obviously the "big" choice in the game is whether or not you'll join cipher (and that results in a totally different set of story missions), but we'd like to include smaller choices with smaller, but still significant, consequences.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
Battles weren't forced onto you, you could pick them
I should also add that, even with the small number of quests we have now, we've already got ways to avoid battles. Obviously you can use repel to skip wild battles, or just walk around random trainers you'll encounter, but there's ways to avoid some storyline-related fights as well. One idea we wanted to communicate during the story was "Fighting isn't always the best option". As such, there's ways to resolve some situations peacefully (or at least without getting into an actual fight). There's only a small number of quests at the moment, but we already have a few situations where this occurs. Your dialog choices in tense situations may also have consequences besides a battle; People may live or die because of your actions, or various events may or may not occur. This isn't anything like mass effect or the witcher, (there's 2 paths through the story, not a bazillion) but small things might change.
I'm not saying implement all these now or I will show up at your home :P but having something at least close would be cool. Especially the picking our own battles, like the option to run before the battle starts. Players should be given a flexible amount of choices and not be 'forced' to do many things imo.
We're not going to let you run from every fight before it starts, but like I said above, we do wan to allow some non-combat options to various fights.
At some stage you're gonna have to show us all the starmon you have and their info so I can decide what goes on that milestone trainer's team that shares my name. Shock-eve sounds cool but is he steel, electric, and super fast? Wow, it's like magneton and jolteon had a baby :P.
Heh, we'll post something eventually. All of our starmon data is written in xml, so theoretically we could easily create a database or something :P
Will the pokedex give Pokemon locations? Like it does in the game.
Yes. If you haven't captured the starmon before (you just saw it), you'll get a more vague location ("Likes cool, dark areas", "Enjoys shallow water", "Likes extreme heat"). So we don't explicitly name the zone but you get a pretty good idea. If you've captured the starmon already, we actually list off the zones where you can find the thing.
Zelda, I was totally unaware that Blizzard allowed you to publish maps with a white-list. Absolutely wonderful if you can.
You can't do it via the bnet service, but you can whip it together with triggers. We already have an admin/ban system set up (just fyi, we don't plan on banning anybody, it's there for emergencies only ^.^), and the same sort of thing would work for a whitelist.
I recall some sentence in their ToS for the editor, that it is not allowed to restrict access to the map and have users pay for full access or something, so a white-list for testing might be somewhat of a grey area.
You recall correctly. But the way I see it, the only way something like that would ever be reported is if the map was popular, and people were being frustrated they couldn't play it. If we publish it with zero advertisement with a whitelist, it's not possible for it to get popular (you guys couldn't possibly play it enough to bump it up in popularity). So the only people who would be aware of it's existence would be the whitelisted people. It's a little tricky- I'll have to go over the ToS word-for-word again, but I don't forsee any issues.
To be safe, according to Kueken, why not just invite us to a privately published map?
If the whitelist doesn't work out, we can fall back on that. The problem would be that you guys would need to be invited by us every time you want to play. So you wouldn't be able to play on your own time. We'll have to see what we can do when we get there....
The engine should support up to 15 people at once, but we're not going to allow that many. The biggest issue is that we need to have enough space to give each player a little battle arena where they can fight. If every player is engaged in a fight simultaneously, we need a spot for them all to be battling. Right now we're thinking we should be able to fit in 6 players- maybe 1 or 2 more if we can fit it. It ultimately depends on which zones we decide to do, and how big/small moz wants to make them- is removing a planned zone worth increasing the player cap by 1? It's a tricky question. We're literally using all the map space here. And then there's the issue of actually being able to run everything for 6 people without lag- it's a lot.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
OMG OMG OMG YES YES YES. I hope I'm awake and on here when you plan to have ALPHA, weather I am or not Can you PM me the MAP after you do the ALPHA so I can Replay SOLO as much as I want until the Full Release.
Well, we still have a little ways to go before we'll start the alpha (moz has to finish our terrain, I need to finish up the last quest, and a few smaller things here and there need to be set up for multiplayer to work). When we do start the alpha, we'll send you guys a PM with the information. We're probably not going to send the map file out, though. We haven't discussed it too much, but what we might do is publish the map publicly, but restrict it so only approved testers can play. That way, you guys would be able to play whenever you want, but random people won't stumble upon the map.
The Screenshots look great for the Battle UI, Question though do you think there can be an Option for different ways of how Lv is shown Example's of The Choices I'd like: Lv 20 (Current), Lv. 50, Lvl 75, Lvl. 37 (My Fav). I'd prefer the 2nd or 4th Option myself.
Now that I think about it, I do like "Lvl." better than just "Lv". Honestly, it was text I set up at the very beginning of development without thinking too much about it. It's easy enough to change- thanks for pointing that out :P
Alright, we're now one step closer to alpha! I just finished up the good-guy version of the last storyline quest for the alpha. That means the only story quest we have left is the bad-guy version of that same quest. Because this is the quest where the storyline actually splits, what happens either way is pretty similar, so we can reuse a lot of code. I won't be posting any screenshots of that (don't want to spoil things yet!) but I do have some screenshots of UI improvements we've made...
Maity threw together a cleaner looking UI for battle status frames. As a bonus, we have a few different versions of the UI for special starmon. Legendary starmon have a red panel, shiny starmon have a nice golden one, and normal starmon stick with the standard blue theme we've shown before. This should hopefully make shiny and legendary starmon feel that much more special.
Here's the new version of the "normal" frame:
Here's the legendary frame (this screenshot was from the enemy side of the screen, if you're using a legendary it'll be the same direction as the other ones):
I certainly hope you do :) We're trying to make it really good, but we don't want to spoil it here. That way, when you guys get to play the first few quests during the alpha, we can get your opinions on the story as a whole. If the tone, pacing, or style of writing needs to change, it's better to change it now rather than later ^.^
We also put in a "Group Event" type of thing today. If anybody's played Guild Wars 2, it's sort of like that. There's a chance for an odoron horde (odorons are these flying poison starmon) to invade a zone at night. If this happens, they'll cover the area with their toxic gas. This gas will carry over into battles in that zone, poisoning any starmon you send out during battle (but not the odorons, of course, they're immune ^.^). If players work together to kill enough of the odorons, they may eventually leave the zone, allowing the gas to dissipate....
Here's a screenshot of a plagued zone- this is same grassy zone we've shown off before (Route 1)... As you can see, there's gas all over the place and the sunlight doesn't shine through very well- and there's odorons all over the place. It's usually a lot nicer looking ^.^
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
Another dislike from pokemon is it reduced their happiness from simply trading away then trading back. This is prob unnecessary (and easy to make complicated) but have you guys considered happiness affecting more things? It could be interesting having a more happy starmon doing more damage in battle or using less energy for moves. Or if starmon were aligned by karma too, frustration could make an evil starmon more battle productive. What if starmon hapiness affected quests and other things too?
At the moment, happiness doesn't really do anything. That said, we made sure to add a slot in the banking system to save it, so it will be easy to make it have some effect in the future if we decide to. In other words, starmon currently have a happiness number, but it has no effect on gameplay. If/When we add happiness we'll definitely look into that, I honestly don't know enough about how it worked in the pokemon games to really comment.
Today I put in a bunch of improvements to the game which should speed up our development/testing process a bit. It was taking us longer than it should to add new trainers into the game, so I redid the way we input new trainer types into the game. Similarly, it was taking us longer than we'd like to test the quests, so I threw in a bunch of quest debugging features that let us to zip around rapidly to whichever bits of the story we need. You guys won't notice any difference, except an earlier alpha date from the time we save, I suppose :P
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
What else do we have... Well, I tested all of Zelda's quests today, found a minimum of one bug in each of them, but they were all really good :) He actually did a pretty damn good job at using sounds and music, I'm pretty impressed :)
Heh...I spent all day fixing those bugs. I should probably get better at not making them in the first place :P
We've gotten the story finished up to the good/evil split, so we've got 2 more quests to go (well, technically it's the same one quest but from opposite sides, so there's going to be some reused code). I'll see if we can get another video soon(ish). I've been having more computer problems, so I'm not entirely sure how things will go.
Oh man, I was never able to catch one when I was a kid. Those game designers were evil! Luckily for you guys, there isn't a way to check the date inside the editor. Otherwise I'd definitely get my revenge- Probichu would show up at midnight every third Wednesday, but only it's raining and snowing at the same time.
I like the idea of the conversation box commenting on the gamey nature of RPGs. I would offer feedback when I have a feel for the map's humor.
We're working on making the side quests fun and interesting. The main story is definitely going to be much more serious overall- it's not all written yet (we have the starting and ending bits, not so much of the middle), but there's definitely some sad/emotional parts with more serious moments. That's not to say it's all serious; the police chief you'll be helping out in the alpha is so paranoid that he refuses to go anywhere without his power armor and his chaingun (he calls it Betsey).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
What if you use the arena space (like I suggested above)?
Keep in mind that the arena doesn't use any physical space. You talk to the Arena manager, he shows you the roster of competitors, you pick the one you want, and a fight starts. We do have an actual arena for players to fight in, but that's going to be used for spectate-able PvP fights as well as some dramatic storyline fights. The idea is that any PvP fight going on inside the arena can be watched by anybody who is interested. This "Grand Arena" is pretty big compared to the other areas that we have, and it's going to be terrained to look very fancy. If somebody is already using the arena, we'll give you the option to fight somewhere else instead (so there's no queues to get into a fight).
Regarding the map space- It is going to be a very tight squeeze to get everything we want into the game in addition to the battle areas. So we're not going to have random buildings/homes where you can go inside just to chat with the occupants. Pretty much all of the map space is going to be used for something important. The Arena town will be your main go-to area for most of the game. We're going to be putting pretty much everything you'll need in the town as well- it contains a starcenter (complete with a starmon storage box & a healing machine), the actual arena itself, a lot of quest NPCs, a teleporter console, the mentor, a general goods store, and (maybe) the IV/EV modification lab.
We've been making some good progress recently. ^.^ Moz has been working on the next zone (We'll show screenshots as soon as it's done), and I've been working on the final storyline quest for the alpha. I also made a bunch of improvements to our battle setup system, which is going to let us do more fancy stuff for story-related fights. The standard 1v1 battle can get a little dull if it's not mixed up every now and then, so we'll try and do something special for the important fights.
Finally, we added the player costume system. It's not entirely finished up, but basically players will be able to change their appearance to a variety of different models. You'll start with a few unlocked costumes, and you'll unlock more over the course of the game by completing side-quests or finding specific items/locations/events. You'll be able to change your costume back at town for free (there's no in-game cost). It should be a nice way for players to customize their appearance and also brag about their achievements.
A few minor updates- We've been working mainly on adding content so you guys will have something to do once the alpha starts. Right now, we're up to 9 finished quests. 2 of those are tutorial quests, 1 is a main story quest, and 6 are sidequests. We're working on getting the 2nd main-story quest done (that's going to be where the alpha story ends).
In addition to some of the more standard quests, we're starting to add a couple of random events and repeatable quests. The first random event has been added to the game, and it's called the "Odoron Plague". There's a small(ish) chance that Odorons (our poison cloud starmon) will flood into areas near the city, covering it with gas. While they're flying around the area, any battles fought within that zone will have a special poison-cloud weather effect, which poisons any active starmon.
Another change that we've made has to do with arena progression. Previously, you had to fight through every arena trainer in order to progress. Now, you can challenge any trainer within 2 ranks of your own rank. So basically, say you defeat the level 6 trainer. You can then fight the level 7 or the level 8 trainer. If you then beat the level 8 trainer, you can fight the level 9 or 10 trainer next. So basically, this allows you to skip up to half of the fights in the arena if you want. The only restriction is that you can't skip fights against the arena champions (otherwise that would be pretty outrageous). It also gives you a little bit more flexibility in which fights you choose to take on.
Whenever you beat a fight in the arena for the first time, you receive a bonus pile of credits as well as some Arena points (our PvP Currency). You can repeat any fight you want, but you'll receive less Arena Points (2 instead of the usual 5) and you won't get the bonus credits. You'll still get the standard credits reward as well as the experience you gained from battle, but this makes completing all the fights a worthwhile bonus, not a required timesink.
Some of you may have been listening to all the E3 news. There was lots of great stuff announced, but we also got some nice details on Pokemon X & Y. One big game-changer for the balance is the brand-new Fairy type. When we made the starmon battle engine, we set it up so we could add more types if we ever needed to, and the opportunity has now presented itself. So we figured we would ask you guys here- If it were up to you, would you add the Fairy type into Starmon? Right now we're tentatively leaning towards a "Yes", partially because we feel it would be a good type for the "Good karma" starmon (with dark being the "Bad Karma" type), but we're going to wait for official information on the type strengths/weaknesses.
But please, share your opinions on the Fairy type! Let us know if you like or dislike the idea, and why.
I'd like to extend on DaFunk's idea. The dev team should be made memorable characters. That was really interesting from DaFunk saying that you guys will likely make the first successful pokemon project.
Heh, we'll see. We're all going to referenced in the game somehow or another. As you've already seen, moz is an explorer with his own sidequest chain. We have a couple ideas for where we'll put myself and TheAlmaity, but nothing solid yet. :)
Are you guys still taking requests for side stories and/or special events?
And are you making one of those cemetery- like places? Yaknow, pokemon tower, celestial tower, old ceatau, lost tower, etc. EDIT: Also, please tell me what, if anything, you are accepting requests for these days.
If you want to throw ideas for sidequests at us, I'll chuck them in our idea box. But I think we've got what we need idea-wise for the alpha, we just need to actually get the quests into the game.
And yes, we will have a ghost-type zone. It's going to be a sort of "haunted woods" type area. It's not going to be ready for the alpha but once it's been terrained we'll put up some screenshots. It's a pretty cool idea for a zone, I can't wait to see how it turns out :)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
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.
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>
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 :)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Feel free to Send me a PM if you have any questions/concerns!
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
A quick note here- I'm going to be out of town for about 2 weeks, so I won't be able to work on the map (no laptop, ugh). I may have internet access to post here once or twice, but I doubt it. I know it's at a really awkward time for starmon's development, but we'll get the alpha to you guys eventually, I promise. ^.^ I'll miss reading all your guys's comments in the meantime! <3
Anyways, you'll need to direct all your future complaints to TheAlmaity, because anything that goes wrong is now entirely his fault :P
edit- Also, after reading the above posts I'd like to add another note: I don't like grinding. So I'm going to do my best to make this as un-grindy as possible, at least for the duration of the story. Turn-based RPGs like this tend to be cursed with grindyness by default, but we're going to try and reduce the grind as much as possible. I like the idea of having "unofficial" PvP fights where EV's are equal. We could also add options to equalize levels or IV's. Good idea :P
We recently made a little change to how spawning works. Previously, you always started the game in the main town no matter what. Now, you spawn at the location of closest unlocked teleporter to your last position. Teleporters are usually found inside a starcenter (the really out-of-the-way teleporters will at least be next to a healing machine, if not in a full starcenter). This way, if you die, it's a much shorter walk back to the spot of your demise. Additionally, you can easily get back to town (or to anywhere else) because you're already at the teleporter. The same thing happens if you leave the game and log back in later, you'll spawn next to a teleporter.
We've also been fixing lots of nasty bugs. In fact, that's what I've been spending most of time doing. :P
One of our design goals for starmon was to avoid the hidden mechanics of pokemon. That's not to say we want to remove those hidden mechanics, but we want to explain them properly and make them transparent to the player. So happiness will still exist, but we're going to explain it to you and give you an easy way to check it. IVs and EVs still exist, but we're giving you an easy way to view them and we're going to explain them clearly. That way, casual players can do absolutely fine and understand the game systems, while "pro" players can train specifically for the best stats.
Additionally, we don't have a wiki like the actual pokemon games do. Curios players can't just google the best ways to level up starmon. So we want to provide all the information you would ever need in-game. If we ever get around to launching a website, that would be awesome. But we can't rely on that.
We'll have to see how it goes. In general, leveling up is a faster process in starmon. We're giving you large experience rewards for finishing quests and also providing you with easily accessible fights if you do want to grind. It's tricky to see how grindy it is now (there's only 2 of us and we're constantly making new starmon for ourselves), but I definitely don't like grinding. If it becomes too grindly late-game, we'll change something.
Well, we can just tweak the price and duration to make it practical ^.^ Repel isn't actually in the game yet (although we'll definitely add it), but I think only draining it while you're actually in grass is a good idea. I'm not sure how avoiding wild battles for free would go over... Again, you can skip a lot of "dangerous areas" by using the teleporters, so you won't have to re-tread old zones. I guess we could add something where you won't be attacked if you greatly outlevel a zone, or something like that. We'll have to see what works.
Right, we want to add lots of those types of situations. The reason that there's only one or two in the game right now is because there's only one or two big quests. But we definitely think these "choice" situations are cool. Obviously the "big" choice in the game is whether or not you'll join cipher (and that results in a totally different set of story missions), but we'd like to include smaller choices with smaller, but still significant, consequences.
Sorry for not answering anything, I've been away from home (and away from the internet) for a while :P
I should also add that, even with the small number of quests we have now, we've already got ways to avoid battles. Obviously you can use repel to skip wild battles, or just walk around random trainers you'll encounter, but there's ways to avoid some storyline-related fights as well. One idea we wanted to communicate during the story was "Fighting isn't always the best option". As such, there's ways to resolve some situations peacefully (or at least without getting into an actual fight). There's only a small number of quests at the moment, but we already have a few situations where this occurs. Your dialog choices in tense situations may also have consequences besides a battle; People may live or die because of your actions, or various events may or may not occur. This isn't anything like mass effect or the witcher, (there's 2 paths through the story, not a bazillion) but small things might change.
We're not going to let you run from every fight before it starts, but like I said above, we do wan to allow some non-combat options to various fights.
Heh, we'll post something eventually. All of our starmon data is written in xml, so theoretically we could easily create a database or something :P
Yes. If you haven't captured the starmon before (you just saw it), you'll get a more vague location ("Likes cool, dark areas", "Enjoys shallow water", "Likes extreme heat"). So we don't explicitly name the zone but you get a pretty good idea. If you've captured the starmon already, we actually list off the zones where you can find the thing.
You can't do it via the bnet service, but you can whip it together with triggers. We already have an admin/ban system set up (just fyi, we don't plan on banning anybody, it's there for emergencies only ^.^), and the same sort of thing would work for a whitelist.
You recall correctly. But the way I see it, the only way something like that would ever be reported is if the map was popular, and people were being frustrated they couldn't play it. If we publish it with zero advertisement with a whitelist, it's not possible for it to get popular (you guys couldn't possibly play it enough to bump it up in popularity). So the only people who would be aware of it's existence would be the whitelisted people. It's a little tricky- I'll have to go over the ToS word-for-word again, but I don't forsee any issues.
If the whitelist doesn't work out, we can fall back on that. The problem would be that you guys would need to be invited by us every time you want to play. So you wouldn't be able to play on your own time. We'll have to see what we can do when we get there....
The engine should support up to 15 people at once, but we're not going to allow that many. The biggest issue is that we need to have enough space to give each player a little battle arena where they can fight. If every player is engaged in a fight simultaneously, we need a spot for them all to be battling. Right now we're thinking we should be able to fit in 6 players- maybe 1 or 2 more if we can fit it. It ultimately depends on which zones we decide to do, and how big/small moz wants to make them- is removing a planned zone worth increasing the player cap by 1? It's a tricky question. We're literally using all the map space here. And then there's the issue of actually being able to run everything for 6 people without lag- it's a lot.
Well, we still have a little ways to go before we'll start the alpha (moz has to finish our terrain, I need to finish up the last quest, and a few smaller things here and there need to be set up for multiplayer to work). When we do start the alpha, we'll send you guys a PM with the information. We're probably not going to send the map file out, though. We haven't discussed it too much, but what we might do is publish the map publicly, but restrict it so only approved testers can play. That way, you guys would be able to play whenever you want, but random people won't stumble upon the map.
Now that I think about it, I do like "Lvl." better than just "Lv". Honestly, it was text I set up at the very beginning of development without thinking too much about it. It's easy enough to change- thanks for pointing that out :P
Alright, we're now one step closer to alpha! I just finished up the good-guy version of the last storyline quest for the alpha. That means the only story quest we have left is the bad-guy version of that same quest. Because this is the quest where the storyline actually splits, what happens either way is pretty similar, so we can reuse a lot of code. I won't be posting any screenshots of that (don't want to spoil things yet!) but I do have some screenshots of UI improvements we've made...
Maity threw together a cleaner looking UI for battle status frames. As a bonus, we have a few different versions of the UI for special starmon. Legendary starmon have a red panel, shiny starmon have a nice golden one, and normal starmon stick with the standard blue theme we've shown before. This should hopefully make shiny and legendary starmon feel that much more special.
Here's the new version of the "normal" frame:
Here's the legendary frame (this screenshot was from the enemy side of the screen, if you're using a legendary it'll be the same direction as the other ones):
And here's the shiny frame:
Darn, you got me >.>
I certainly hope you do :) We're trying to make it really good, but we don't want to spoil it here. That way, when you guys get to play the first few quests during the alpha, we can get your opinions on the story as a whole. If the tone, pacing, or style of writing needs to change, it's better to change it now rather than later ^.^
We also put in a "Group Event" type of thing today. If anybody's played Guild Wars 2, it's sort of like that. There's a chance for an odoron horde (odorons are these flying poison starmon) to invade a zone at night. If this happens, they'll cover the area with their toxic gas. This gas will carry over into battles in that zone, poisoning any starmon you send out during battle (but not the odorons, of course, they're immune ^.^). If players work together to kill enough of the odorons, they may eventually leave the zone, allowing the gas to dissipate....
Here's a screenshot of a plagued zone- this is same grassy zone we've shown off before (Route 1)... As you can see, there's gas all over the place and the sunlight doesn't shine through very well- and there's odorons all over the place. It's usually a lot nicer looking ^.^
At the moment, happiness doesn't really do anything. That said, we made sure to add a slot in the banking system to save it, so it will be easy to make it have some effect in the future if we decide to. In other words, starmon currently have a happiness number, but it has no effect on gameplay. If/When we add happiness we'll definitely look into that, I honestly don't know enough about how it worked in the pokemon games to really comment.
Today I put in a bunch of improvements to the game which should speed up our development/testing process a bit. It was taking us longer than it should to add new trainers into the game, so I redid the way we input new trainer types into the game. Similarly, it was taking us longer than we'd like to test the quests, so I threw in a bunch of quest debugging features that let us to zip around rapidly to whichever bits of the story we need. You guys won't notice any difference, except an earlier alpha date from the time we save, I suppose :P
OH, he called you out, moz!
Heh...I spent all day fixing those bugs. I should probably get better at not making them in the first place :P
We've gotten the story finished up to the good/evil split, so we've got 2 more quests to go (well, technically it's the same one quest but from opposite sides, so there's going to be some reused code). I'll see if we can get another video soon(ish). I've been having more computer problems, so I'm not entirely sure how things will go.
Oh man, I was never able to catch one when I was a kid. Those game designers were evil! Luckily for you guys, there isn't a way to check the date inside the editor. Otherwise I'd definitely get my revenge- Probichu would show up at midnight every third Wednesday, but only it's raining and snowing at the same time.
We're working on making the side quests fun and interesting. The main story is definitely going to be much more serious overall- it's not all written yet (we have the starting and ending bits, not so much of the middle), but there's definitely some sad/emotional parts with more serious moments. That's not to say it's all serious; the police chief you'll be helping out in the alpha is so paranoid that he refuses to go anywhere without his power armor and his chaingun (he calls it Betsey).
Keep in mind that the arena doesn't use any physical space. You talk to the Arena manager, he shows you the roster of competitors, you pick the one you want, and a fight starts. We do have an actual arena for players to fight in, but that's going to be used for spectate-able PvP fights as well as some dramatic storyline fights. The idea is that any PvP fight going on inside the arena can be watched by anybody who is interested. This "Grand Arena" is pretty big compared to the other areas that we have, and it's going to be terrained to look very fancy. If somebody is already using the arena, we'll give you the option to fight somewhere else instead (so there's no queues to get into a fight).
Regarding the map space- It is going to be a very tight squeeze to get everything we want into the game in addition to the battle areas. So we're not going to have random buildings/homes where you can go inside just to chat with the occupants. Pretty much all of the map space is going to be used for something important. The Arena town will be your main go-to area for most of the game. We're going to be putting pretty much everything you'll need in the town as well- it contains a starcenter (complete with a starmon storage box & a healing machine), the actual arena itself, a lot of quest NPCs, a teleporter console, the mentor, a general goods store, and (maybe) the IV/EV modification lab.
We've been making some good progress recently. ^.^ Moz has been working on the next zone (We'll show screenshots as soon as it's done), and I've been working on the final storyline quest for the alpha. I also made a bunch of improvements to our battle setup system, which is going to let us do more fancy stuff for story-related fights. The standard 1v1 battle can get a little dull if it's not mixed up every now and then, so we'll try and do something special for the important fights.
Finally, we added the player costume system. It's not entirely finished up, but basically players will be able to change their appearance to a variety of different models. You'll start with a few unlocked costumes, and you'll unlock more over the course of the game by completing side-quests or finding specific items/locations/events. You'll be able to change your costume back at town for free (there's no in-game cost). It should be a nice way for players to customize their appearance and also brag about their achievements.
A few minor updates- We've been working mainly on adding content so you guys will have something to do once the alpha starts. Right now, we're up to 9 finished quests. 2 of those are tutorial quests, 1 is a main story quest, and 6 are sidequests. We're working on getting the 2nd main-story quest done (that's going to be where the alpha story ends).
In addition to some of the more standard quests, we're starting to add a couple of random events and repeatable quests. The first random event has been added to the game, and it's called the "Odoron Plague". There's a small(ish) chance that Odorons (our poison cloud starmon) will flood into areas near the city, covering it with gas. While they're flying around the area, any battles fought within that zone will have a special poison-cloud weather effect, which poisons any active starmon.
Another change that we've made has to do with arena progression. Previously, you had to fight through every arena trainer in order to progress. Now, you can challenge any trainer within 2 ranks of your own rank. So basically, say you defeat the level 6 trainer. You can then fight the level 7 or the level 8 trainer. If you then beat the level 8 trainer, you can fight the level 9 or 10 trainer next. So basically, this allows you to skip up to half of the fights in the arena if you want. The only restriction is that you can't skip fights against the arena champions (otherwise that would be pretty outrageous). It also gives you a little bit more flexibility in which fights you choose to take on.
Whenever you beat a fight in the arena for the first time, you receive a bonus pile of credits as well as some Arena points (our PvP Currency). You can repeat any fight you want, but you'll receive less Arena Points (2 instead of the usual 5) and you won't get the bonus credits. You'll still get the standard credits reward as well as the experience you gained from battle, but this makes completing all the fights a worthwhile bonus, not a required timesink.
Some of you may have been listening to all the E3 news. There was lots of great stuff announced, but we also got some nice details on Pokemon X & Y. One big game-changer for the balance is the brand-new Fairy type. When we made the starmon battle engine, we set it up so we could add more types if we ever needed to, and the opportunity has now presented itself. So we figured we would ask you guys here- If it were up to you, would you add the Fairy type into Starmon? Right now we're tentatively leaning towards a "Yes", partially because we feel it would be a good type for the "Good karma" starmon (with dark being the "Bad Karma" type), but we're going to wait for official information on the type strengths/weaknesses.
But please, share your opinions on the Fairy type! Let us know if you like or dislike the idea, and why.
@caparosmith: Go
Yea, Cipher will be promoting talented Grunts to squad leaders. The player will likely rise through the ranks of Cipher if they choose to join.
Heh, we'll see. We're all going to referenced in the game somehow or another. As you've already seen, moz is an explorer with his own sidequest chain. We have a couple ideas for where we'll put myself and TheAlmaity, but nothing solid yet. :)
Oh noes! I don't want anybody to die!
If you want to throw ideas for sidequests at us, I'll chuck them in our idea box. But I think we've got what we need idea-wise for the alpha, we just need to actually get the quests into the game.
And yes, we will have a ghost-type zone. It's going to be a sort of "haunted woods" type area. It's not going to be ready for the alpha but once it's been terrained we'll put up some screenshots. It's a pretty cool idea for a zone, I can't wait to see how it turns out :)
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 :)
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.
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.
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>
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.
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 :)