@BladeOfAiur: Go
That'll actually work well in an area we've been thinking about adding :)
@JacktheArcher: Go
I love the billboard pack, that's something I've never seen before :D
@OceanFlex: Go
I haven't thought about repeatable quests too much yet (other than random events), but it's a neat idea... I'll have to think about that.
I wanted to make a brief(not really) note on AI. If you saw the updated OP, you might have noticed a point about the AI improvements being a work in progress. Basically, the "AI" we've had so far is totally random, just picking and using a random move each turn. Obviously that's not quite ideal. We wanted to have a "range" of AI difficulties, since not every trainer would be as smart as others. So I'm going to be creating several levels of AI thought, and each level adds an additional layer of intelligence to the move selection. Here's an example using just the AI's that are already finished:
Braindead AI uses no logic and is completely random
Easy AI is still random, but it won't use moves that are totally useless (poison cloud on something that's already poisoned, tackle on a ghost, etc....)
Medium AI won't use moves that are totally useless, but then chooses it's move based on the type-effectiveness and STAB. Will also use up to 1 potion if it has one. We also let it change up it's starmon order to counter yours.
More advanced AI's will try to use status lowering/raising moves, inflict status ailments, or use other intelligent behaviors. The idea is that this gives us an additional tool to tweak difficulty. So instead of giving champion trainers or bosses overpowered starmon to make them difficult, we can just make them smarter.
Also....Good News, Everyone!
Pretty exiting stuff, if I do say so myself. It's time to MOVE on to better things (get it?), like Starmon and Items. Everybody give Maity a virtual hug for painstakingly working on those over the last 8 months. :)
@Mozared: Go
You don't seem like the type of person to edit posts, but I think it's good to edit the OP to avoid an Archive Hell scenario (not linking to that wiki) because that scares people off. I also edit my posts to avoid double posting and for punctuation errors. (I tend to hit POST before I think real hard for real long and proof read.)
I actually edit my posts way more often than I should- I'm a little bit OCD like that. But on this thread, I haven't made too many edits because our posts have sort of become a "developers blog" :P So if we edit old posts to add information, people miss it, since most of our "recurring posters" return to the thread once they've seen that something new was posted. You're right though that the OP is kind of outdated. We'll probably update it once we finally created the developer diary video.
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New abilities for u(Zelda please tell me whether you are still accepting these I'm trying REALLY hard to not be annoying ","
Here's the deal with abilities- We're going to be making them after we develop the starmon. We feel it's better to make starmon and then create cool and well-suited abilities for them, instead of creating abilities first and trying to fit them in to a starmon. Obviously not everything you suggest will go into the game (we can only make so many) but they serve as good inspiration. Simple SideQuest ideas are probably the most useful thing right now. :)
I put in some minor stuff earlier this week- First of all, I made some changes to banks. I had starmon data packed in as tightly as it would fit, but now that we need to store more information, we were running into issues. Basically there's an internal limit to how long any bank key can be, and if we go over that, your data is totally messed up. Luckily though the bank size limit was upped substantially after we started the project, so it's easy to fix and works properly now.
Second of all, we implemented shiny starmon. These are extremely rare starmon who are just like regular starmon, but they glow and have an alternate color pallet. They're not stronger, tougher, or anything like that, they're just...special :P The probability of any randomly generated starmon being shiny is currently 0.09%. We've also taken some measures to make hacking starmon to be shiny trickier than it would be usually (although as always, dedicated hackers will always find a way). So in other words, if you happen to find one of these, you're a very, very lucky person. And if you happen to find one and kill it accidentally.... You're gunna be a very, veryunhappy person ;) We'll get you guys some screenshots soon(ish).
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@Taintedwisp: Go
Could just be that Zelda had the same idea but ran into difficulties though, I guess.
Basically this. The way I did it was the only way we could find that was possible, since there's no way to reference pre-made doodads in triggers, really. That said, Maity may have found a workaround that will allow you to actually set down the doodads via the terrain editor... Either way it's going to be a little tricky. But if if wasn't tricky, it wouldn't be fun ^.^
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Note to self: those arenas need a payload of work.
Yeah, that's our pretty much un-doodaded debugging arena :P For those who don't know, Terraining those is especially difficult because they aren't "really" terrained. The arenas are all totally empty upon loading, and the doodads, textures, and walls (if any) are all created on-the-fly. This is so that we can make the theme of the arena match the zone you're fighting in.
Also, wondering what you think of using the HotS models when they come out fur moar starmon.
We want Starmon to be available for WoL players as well as HotS players. Back in the days of Wc3, using WC3 Frozen Throne models in the vanilla Wc3 game would cause problems. So it depends on if blizzard's okay with using those models in WoL maps. If they are, we may use some. But for now we're not using any.
Also, I've got some good news for today's progress. We were experiencing excessive lag spikes with the starmon storage box that were making it unusable. In order to load in the stored starmon, we were having to locate, decrypt, decompress, and read 80 separate "data chunks". So I decided that I needed to change the dialog to cut down load times. I've made the storage box more like the box in real pokemon games- so instead of one huge box with all your starmon inside, you have several smaller "boxes" to use. This re-design will also include a facelift, but the artwork isn't done yet. You'll get to take a peek once that's done.
But here's the numbers as they currently worked out: You have 5 storage boxes, each with space for 16 starmon inside. That means you can have 80 starmon stored in total, plus the 6 in your inventory. This numbers may change if load times become way too large, but with any luck they'll stay this way.
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Sorry trieva I thought you asked... (-,-)
Ahhhhhh....(awkward) ill apologize by giving you a north-east side of America right now style side quest, starmon, and custom move and ability.
No worries, man :) We appreciate all of you guys helping out and showing support. At the very least we're going to make sure you're all listed under "Special Thanks" for the credits. And of course there's the closed alpha- we'll make sure you guys are the first outside the team to try it out. I'm sure we can find a place to reference to you guys in-game as well. There's not very many NPC's at the moment, but we'll talk to you guys about it later once there's more content.
I decided I have to contribute with something to this map at some point. Most probably artwork, maybe a model. Which Starmon type needs new models the most? Remember I would make one by using the ones in SC2, or parts of models at least.
I'm not totally sure, we haven't done tons of concept work on the starmon. That's more of Maity's territory....and his internet's down again >.> I know that we were struggling to find 5 different evolution models for Evee, but the ones we have now are from WoW so sc2 parts wouldn't fit so well. The "mew-like" legendary already has the basic concept art done(which we'll release here once it's polished up more), and Zolden is handling that one. We actually use most of our custom models for moves because it's so important to keep them unique and fancy. Once Maity's back I'll ask him. Thanks for the offer :D
I know :D I've actually had ideas for something like (and don't worry, we're not doing this, it's just a fun idea for a "real" Nintendo game) a pokemon game with a permadeath mechanic with heavy rougelike randomization. Your pokemon die, they're gone for good. And it's gritty, gory, and very serious/dramatic.
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Legendarys need to go to a psychiatrist. Not cool to kill peeps. PLEASE don't rate this above teen I am only twelve and I really want my folks to allow me to play this: /
Oh, we're not making this mature content with a ton of violence and language or anything. We just mean that we're probably going to stray away from the "yay, happy, sunshine, nobody ever dies, everything always works out, 10 year old easily takes down large criminal organization, horray" attitude of many pokemon games. So it's not going to be "M-rated" material or anything (that likely wouldn't be allowed in sc2 anyways). It just won't be overtly goofy all the time, it's going to have (hopefully) some serious moments.
So when we say "not quite as child friendly" we mean that we'd like the story to be a little more serious, and not that we want tons of violence, excessive language, or anything like that. Starcraft 2 is rated Teen, after all :)
As my age suggests, um I'm an editor noob. I know this isn't an advice thread but can anyone tell me a advice thread that's really noob-friendly and new? Thx in advance!!!
Hah, you've come to the right place :P As you've probably become aware by now, the editor is made of three core modules- The trigger editor (my job), the data editor (TheAlmaity's Job), and the terrain editor (Mozared's job). Each of those tools is important, and you'll need to use all 3 to create a totally custom map like starmon. If you just want to make a melee map, or something simple that uses the sc2 default units, you won't need to use all of them.
This is a triggering basics tutorial I made a long time ago. This is mozared's tutorial on the basics of the terrain editor. I don't have a link off the top of my head that is a good all-around data tutorial, but I'll update this if I can think of one :)
Wondering what the ETA of this is between trieva's and my ideas, mozared and tainted's texturing, and maity and zelda's skillz, THIS LOOKS AWESOME!!! GIVE ME MOAR SREENIES AND VIDS I WANNA SEE IT ALL!!!... Wait... That would spoil the fun of playing it...=(
I know you don't want to hear this, but the full release is still a long ways off. That said, we're really pushing to get the game into a playable state for alpha as quickly as we can. Our original "target" goal for something playable was going to be right about now, but obviously that didn't happen. It's really tricky for us to give a date- obviously we're not being payed to do this, so we all have "real-life" work that needs to get taken care of first. My schedule and workload is kind of erratic, so sometimes I'll get a huge chunk of stuff done on the weekend, and other times I only have time to make some minor edits. I guess the best we can do for now is throw out Blizzard's standard "It's done when it's done" motto. One motto that I also like is "A bad game released early will be bad forever, but a game delayed for improvements will be good forever". But like I said, we're working hard to get the alpha done SoonTM.
I know I said I'd be trying to get screenshots out more regularly, but I haven't done anything too "screenshotable" recently. I've spent the last few days working on some internal improvements to level calculation, bank load times, and some debugging tools for myself and Maity. See? It's not very exciting ;) Once mozared gets the first big batch of terrain done, I'm sure he'll let you see some of it :P As for a video... It's sort of what I said before. It's something that both of us really want to do, but haven't had time for. But there will be a video at some point, likely before the alpha's ready to go.
Thanks, u 2. Maity and Zelda, I just wanted u to know that viewing this thread was why I got an account. Thx for an amazing project, and I'll try my best to add more suggestions without being that really annoying chihuahua yapping up a storm at your feet. Thx, lookin good. Lookin real good so far.
I'm really happy to hear you like the project that much :) We appreciate all of your guys's support and ideas, it's a nice encouragement to keep going.
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Move ideas(i sure hope that ur still taking move requests ant that my move posts aren't just annoying now)
I'm definitely interested in abilities since I'm going to have to make them at all some point. Maity's nearing the end of the moves, so I'm not entirely sure how many he's going to be adding. Either way I like the ideas you listed :)
As for the side quest stuff- I love 'em :D Obviously not every side-quest is going to be on the same epic scale as the ones you've described here, but we do want to have at least some that are "big" quests.
I don't like the idea of a refugee camp in the slums of the main city. Sounds too much like some war torn area, or a failing economy. Not something I think fits while playing a Starmon kind of game.
Yeah, our main city is not the backwater town you'll be familiar with from Pokemon. The "Arena Town" (our temporary name for it) is the main hub for the absolute best trainers on the planet. This is the place where the "Elite 4" type of people live. While the town terrain is mostly empty at the moment, the plan is to have a big and wealthy city- billboards all over, fountains, etc... surrounding the colossal Arena in which these elite-fights take place. So it's not a slum :P That said, the idea of some nasty poison starmon living in a sewer somewhere is still a totally viable idea.
Anyways, today I put in a few minor things. I fixed a game-breaking bug that was preventing battles from starting, and added a nice debugging tool for myself and TheAlmaity. Since balance is going to become more of an issue as we begin to add more content, we want the process of balancing to be as quick and accurate as possible, so it's easy for us to find and correct imbalances.
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Woah, that was a lot :D Most of those a neat ideas, I've added them to the idea page :P
I might as well point something out regarding the rival. I'll keep this intentionally vague for now (We won't be spoiling the story for you guys, any potential spoilers will be in spoiler tags), but we're going to be stepping up the rival's role in the story. So he's probably not going to be in many side quests. That's all I'll say. But we can still use the same quest idea but just with another character. :)
Paralyse and sleep are my favourite status effects. Burn isn't bad but poison seems useless because it's so slow compared to high powered starmon attacks. The only exception is if you're vsing a starmon with insane defense/special-defense EVs but that's rare or can be dealth with another way. I would also like ways to increase or decrease evasion of any starmon.
Regarding status effects. We noticed the same issue fairly early during game development (poison, and burn to some extent, not being too useful because you can just use a way more powerful attack that will kill the opponent way faster). One thing we noticed was that during high-level pokemon games, pokemon almost always die within a single hit or two. For starmon, we wanted things to feel a little bit less one-shotty. We made a small change to the HP forumla, which is as follows: You receive a 1% bonus to your HP per level. So at level 100, you will have twice as much Hp as you would in pokemon, while at level 1 you won't notice any difference.
This should have (hopefully) a few positive effects- First, battles are not so one-shotty, and you'll need to mix up your strategies a bit more instead of just using power-moves to crush the enemy. And second, poison and burn become way more useful, because starmon actually live long enough to make the turn-based damage worth it. For example, Poison takes 1/8th of your HP per turn. If a starmon only lives 2-3 turns, it's a way better idea to just use a powerful move and kill it immediately. But if a starmon lives 4-6 turns, now your status ailments actually deal some damage. We've also gone with the 1st-Gen damage on poison (1/8th hp damage), instead of the newer poison damage (1/16th hp damage). Obviously if this hp bonus becomes a problem (or needs to be tweaked/remove) we'll re-balance it. Balance hasn't been too much of a concern for us until recently, but we're going to be starting on it soon(ish) once we get more starmon in. I'm actually working on some tools to help us balance the game, so rest assured we're going to be making things fair :)
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Do you have the HP Status recovery moves like Sleep, Recover, Giga Drain, Leech Seed, Roost, ect. I love Roost on my Pidgeot, Recover on Mewtwo, and Giga Drain on my grass Pokemon.
We've got leech seed, roost, and mega/giga drain, as well as a few other recovery moves like Synthesis.
If you want to check on a particular move, our up-to-date moves list is available here.
I like the idea of the Legendary's themselves not being catch-able and instead you get there egg's or a hatched baby version of them, but I hope when you raise them from a Level 1 Egg or Baby to Level 100 there as strong as there Parent at 100.
Don't worry, The 'baby' version of the legendary you're able to capture will be basically the same as the legendary pokemon from the real games- not absurdly overpowered, but definitely good. The "legendary" starmon will have stats that are otherwise impossible to get (levels over 100, for example). According to our "lore" (if you can call it that), the legendary starmon are almost god-like, capable of leveling cities in a moment. They're not able to be contained within a capture core- you don't want to mess with them, and you certainly can't kill them with your 10-year-old trainer skillz.
Today I implemented the system for non-arena quests. Basically we're going to have 10 "core" quests that are imperative to the storyline, and most of them are going to be relatively large. But because those quests require you to be at certain levels in order to start them, we want to give the player plenty of other things to do instead of just grinding. And those other quests come in two flavors: Random events, and side-quests. Doing these smaller missions will earn you experience for your party upon completion and many will also give you specific items (for example, we may make exp share a quest reward). We want to encourage players to cycle various starmon through their party instead of just having to use the same 6 all the way through, so players can take advantage of side quests to help power-level new starmon.
That said, we want to have tons of side-quests, and if there's one thing I'm terrible at, it's coming up with story ideas. We're working on writing the main story ourselves (and we wouldn't want to spoil it), but if you guys have any ideas for side-quests, feel free to suggest them here.
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@zeldarules28: Go
Wow nicknames values up to 129,000,000 is that being saved as a String, because otherwise I'm not sure how you got that to work.
It's being stored in our bank files as a string (it's encrypted, so that's nothing special). But in-game I've got it assigned to a standard integer variable. We have a multi-dimensional array to store the stats of your 6 "party" starmon, and three of those values per starmon store nickname numbers. So unless the issue only pops up in multiplayer or something strange like that, I don't think there's will be any problems issues. Like I said, if issues appear, I'll just lower the nickname length and that will resolve the issue (it would be very easy to change). But as far as I've been able to tell for now, things work fine, which would lead me to believe that the limit is imposed on the GUI only, and is not an internal restriction.
@BladeOfAiur: Go That'll actually work well in an area we've been thinking about adding :)
@JacktheArcher: Go I love the billboard pack, that's something I've never seen before :D
@OceanFlex: Go I haven't thought about repeatable quests too much yet (other than random events), but it's a neat idea... I'll have to think about that.
I wanted to make a brief(not really) note on AI. If you saw the updated OP, you might have noticed a point about the AI improvements being a work in progress. Basically, the "AI" we've had so far is totally random, just picking and using a random move each turn. Obviously that's not quite ideal. We wanted to have a "range" of AI difficulties, since not every trainer would be as smart as others. So I'm going to be creating several levels of AI thought, and each level adds an additional layer of intelligence to the move selection. Here's an example using just the AI's that are already finished:
More advanced AI's will try to use status lowering/raising moves, inflict status ailments, or use other intelligent behaviors. The idea is that this gives us an additional tool to tweak difficulty. So instead of giving champion trainers or bosses overpowered starmon to make them difficult, we can just make them smarter.
Also....Good News, Everyone!
Pretty exiting stuff, if I do say so myself. It's time to MOVE on to better things (get it?), like Starmon and Items. Everybody give Maity a virtual hug for painstakingly working on those over the last 8 months. :)
I actually edit my posts way more often than I should- I'm a little bit OCD like that. But on this thread, I haven't made too many edits because our posts have sort of become a "developers blog" :P So if we edit old posts to add information, people miss it, since most of our "recurring posters" return to the thread once they've seen that something new was posted. You're right though that the OP is kind of outdated. We'll probably update it once we finally created the developer diary video.
Here's the deal with abilities- We're going to be making them after we develop the starmon. We feel it's better to make starmon and then create cool and well-suited abilities for them, instead of creating abilities first and trying to fit them in to a starmon. Obviously not everything you suggest will go into the game (we can only make so many) but they serve as good inspiration. Simple SideQuest ideas are probably the most useful thing right now. :)
I put in some minor stuff earlier this week- First of all, I made some changes to banks. I had starmon data packed in as tightly as it would fit, but now that we need to store more information, we were running into issues. Basically there's an internal limit to how long any bank key can be, and if we go over that, your data is totally messed up. Luckily though the bank size limit was upped substantially after we started the project, so it's easy to fix and works properly now.
Second of all, we implemented shiny starmon. These are extremely rare starmon who are just like regular starmon, but they glow and have an alternate color pallet. They're not stronger, tougher, or anything like that, they're just...special :P The probability of any randomly generated starmon being shiny is currently 0.09%. We've also taken some measures to make hacking starmon to be shiny trickier than it would be usually (although as always, dedicated hackers will always find a way). So in other words, if you happen to find one of these, you're a very, very lucky person. And if you happen to find one and kill it accidentally.... You're gunna be a very, very unhappy person ;) We'll get you guys some screenshots soon(ish).
Basically this. The way I did it was the only way we could find that was possible, since there's no way to reference pre-made doodads in triggers, really. That said, Maity may have found a workaround that will allow you to actually set down the doodads via the terrain editor... Either way it's going to be a little tricky. But if if wasn't tricky, it wouldn't be fun ^.^
That's just a little bug where we set the wrong model was set for the battle :P
Yeah, that's our pretty much un-doodaded debugging arena :P For those who don't know, Terraining those is especially difficult because they aren't "really" terrained. The arenas are all totally empty upon loading, and the doodads, textures, and walls (if any) are all created on-the-fly. This is so that we can make the theme of the arena match the zone you're fighting in.
Oh. Well if that's been confirmed then no, we won't be using those models. We're aiming for a release on both WoL and HotS.
We want Starmon to be available for WoL players as well as HotS players. Back in the days of Wc3, using WC3 Frozen Throne models in the vanilla Wc3 game would cause problems. So it depends on if blizzard's okay with using those models in WoL maps. If they are, we may use some. But for now we're not using any.
Also, I've got some good news for today's progress. We were experiencing excessive lag spikes with the starmon storage box that were making it unusable. In order to load in the stored starmon, we were having to locate, decrypt, decompress, and read 80 separate "data chunks". So I decided that I needed to change the dialog to cut down load times. I've made the storage box more like the box in real pokemon games- so instead of one huge box with all your starmon inside, you have several smaller "boxes" to use. This re-design will also include a facelift, but the artwork isn't done yet. You'll get to take a peek once that's done.
But here's the numbers as they currently worked out: You have 5 storage boxes, each with space for 16 starmon inside. That means you can have 80 starmon stored in total, plus the 6 in your inventory. This numbers may change if load times become way too large, but with any luck they'll stay this way.
No worries, man :) We appreciate all of you guys helping out and showing support. At the very least we're going to make sure you're all listed under "Special Thanks" for the credits. And of course there's the closed alpha- we'll make sure you guys are the first outside the team to try it out. I'm sure we can find a place to reference to you guys in-game as well. There's not very many NPC's at the moment, but we'll talk to you guys about it later once there's more content.
I'm not totally sure, we haven't done tons of concept work on the starmon. That's more of Maity's territory....and his internet's down again >.> I know that we were struggling to find 5 different evolution models for Evee, but the ones we have now are from WoW so sc2 parts wouldn't fit so well. The "mew-like" legendary already has the basic concept art done(which we'll release here once it's polished up more), and Zolden is handling that one. We actually use most of our custom models for moves because it's so important to keep them unique and fancy. Once Maity's back I'll ask him. Thanks for the offer :D
I know :D I've actually had ideas for something like (and don't worry, we're not doing this, it's just a fun idea for a "real" Nintendo game) a pokemon game with a permadeath mechanic with heavy rougelike randomization. Your pokemon die, they're gone for good. And it's gritty, gory, and very serious/dramatic.
Oh, we're not making this mature content with a ton of violence and language or anything. We just mean that we're probably going to stray away from the "yay, happy, sunshine, nobody ever dies, everything always works out, 10 year old easily takes down large criminal organization, horray" attitude of many pokemon games. So it's not going to be "M-rated" material or anything (that likely wouldn't be allowed in sc2 anyways). It just won't be overtly goofy all the time, it's going to have (hopefully) some serious moments.
So when we say "not quite as child friendly" we mean that we'd like the story to be a little more serious, and not that we want tons of violence, excessive language, or anything like that. Starcraft 2 is rated Teen, after all :)
Hah, you've come to the right place :P As you've probably become aware by now, the editor is made of three core modules- The trigger editor (my job), the data editor (TheAlmaity's Job), and the terrain editor (Mozared's job). Each of those tools is important, and you'll need to use all 3 to create a totally custom map like starmon. If you just want to make a melee map, or something simple that uses the sc2 default units, you won't need to use all of them.
This is a triggering basics tutorial I made a long time ago. This is mozared's tutorial on the basics of the terrain editor. I don't have a link off the top of my head that is a good all-around data tutorial, but I'll update this if I can think of one :)
I should be thanking you guys who are contributing. I really appreciate the ideas :P
I know you don't want to hear this, but the full release is still a long ways off. That said, we're really pushing to get the game into a playable state for alpha as quickly as we can. Our original "target" goal for something playable was going to be right about now, but obviously that didn't happen. It's really tricky for us to give a date- obviously we're not being payed to do this, so we all have "real-life" work that needs to get taken care of first. My schedule and workload is kind of erratic, so sometimes I'll get a huge chunk of stuff done on the weekend, and other times I only have time to make some minor edits. I guess the best we can do for now is throw out Blizzard's standard "It's done when it's done" motto. One motto that I also like is "A bad game released early will be bad forever, but a game delayed for improvements will be good forever". But like I said, we're working hard to get the alpha done SoonTM.
I know I said I'd be trying to get screenshots out more regularly, but I haven't done anything too "screenshotable" recently. I've spent the last few days working on some internal improvements to level calculation, bank load times, and some debugging tools for myself and Maity. See? It's not very exciting ;) Once mozared gets the first big batch of terrain done, I'm sure he'll let you see some of it :P As for a video... It's sort of what I said before. It's something that both of us really want to do, but haven't had time for. But there will be a video at some point, likely before the alpha's ready to go.
That's what happens if you type the minus sign twice. It's a formatting thing.
Thisis slashed text. :)I'm really happy to hear you like the project that much :) We appreciate all of your guys's support and ideas, it's a nice encouragement to keep going.
I'm definitely interested in abilities since I'm going to have to make them at all some point. Maity's nearing the end of the moves, so I'm not entirely sure how many he's going to be adding. Either way I like the ideas you listed :)
As for the side quest stuff- I love 'em :D Obviously not every side-quest is going to be on the same epic scale as the ones you've described here, but we do want to have at least some that are "big" quests.
Yeah, our main city is not the backwater town you'll be familiar with from Pokemon. The "Arena Town" (our temporary name for it) is the main hub for the absolute best trainers on the planet. This is the place where the "Elite 4" type of people live. While the town terrain is mostly empty at the moment, the plan is to have a big and wealthy city- billboards all over, fountains, etc... surrounding the colossal Arena in which these elite-fights take place. So it's not a slum :P That said, the idea of some nasty poison starmon living in a sewer somewhere is still a totally viable idea.
Anyways, today I put in a few minor things. I fixed a game-breaking bug that was preventing battles from starting, and added a nice debugging tool for myself and TheAlmaity. Since balance is going to become more of an issue as we begin to add more content, we want the process of balancing to be as quick and accurate as possible, so it's easy for us to find and correct imbalances.
@Trieva: Go
Woah, that was a lot :D Most of those a neat ideas, I've added them to the idea page :P
I might as well point something out regarding the rival. I'll keep this intentionally vague for now (We won't be spoiling the story for you guys, any potential spoilers will be in spoiler tags), but we're going to be stepping up the rival's role in the story. So he's probably not going to be in many side quests. That's all I'll say. But we can still use the same quest idea but just with another character. :)
Regarding status effects. We noticed the same issue fairly early during game development (poison, and burn to some extent, not being too useful because you can just use a way more powerful attack that will kill the opponent way faster). One thing we noticed was that during high-level pokemon games, pokemon almost always die within a single hit or two. For starmon, we wanted things to feel a little bit less one-shotty. We made a small change to the HP forumla, which is as follows: You receive a 1% bonus to your HP per level. So at level 100, you will have twice as much Hp as you would in pokemon, while at level 1 you won't notice any difference.
This should have (hopefully) a few positive effects- First, battles are not so one-shotty, and you'll need to mix up your strategies a bit more instead of just using power-moves to crush the enemy. And second, poison and burn become way more useful, because starmon actually live long enough to make the turn-based damage worth it. For example, Poison takes 1/8th of your HP per turn. If a starmon only lives 2-3 turns, it's a way better idea to just use a powerful move and kill it immediately. But if a starmon lives 4-6 turns, now your status ailments actually deal some damage. We've also gone with the 1st-Gen damage on poison (1/8th hp damage), instead of the newer poison damage (1/16th hp damage). Obviously if this hp bonus becomes a problem (or needs to be tweaked/remove) we'll re-balance it. Balance hasn't been too much of a concern for us until recently, but we're going to be starting on it soon(ish) once we get more starmon in. I'm actually working on some tools to help us balance the game, so rest assured we're going to be making things fair :)
We've got leech seed, roost, and mega/giga drain, as well as a few other recovery moves like Synthesis.
If you want to check on a particular move, our up-to-date moves list is available here.
Don't worry, The 'baby' version of the legendary you're able to capture will be basically the same as the legendary pokemon from the real games- not absurdly overpowered, but definitely good. The "legendary" starmon will have stats that are otherwise impossible to get (levels over 100, for example). According to our "lore" (if you can call it that), the legendary starmon are almost god-like, capable of leveling cities in a moment. They're not able to be contained within a capture core- you don't want to mess with them, and you certainly can't kill them with your 10-year-old trainer skillz.
Today I implemented the system for non-arena quests. Basically we're going to have 10 "core" quests that are imperative to the storyline, and most of them are going to be relatively large. But because those quests require you to be at certain levels in order to start them, we want to give the player plenty of other things to do instead of just grinding. And those other quests come in two flavors: Random events, and side-quests. Doing these smaller missions will earn you experience for your party upon completion and many will also give you specific items (for example, we may make exp share a quest reward). We want to encourage players to cycle various starmon through their party instead of just having to use the same 6 all the way through, so players can take advantage of side quests to help power-level new starmon.
That said, we want to have tons of side-quests, and if there's one thing I'm terrible at, it's coming up with story ideas. We're working on writing the main story ourselves (and we wouldn't want to spoil it), but if you guys have any ideas for side-quests, feel free to suggest them here.
It's being stored in our bank files as a string (it's encrypted, so that's nothing special). But in-game I've got it assigned to a standard integer variable. We have a multi-dimensional array to store the stats of your 6 "party" starmon, and three of those values per starmon store nickname numbers. So unless the issue only pops up in multiplayer or something strange like that, I don't think there's will be any problems issues. Like I said, if issues appear, I'll just lower the nickname length and that will resolve the issue (it would be very easy to change). But as far as I've been able to tell for now, things work fine, which would lead me to believe that the limit is imposed on the GUI only, and is not an internal restriction.
Indeed they are! Nice work, wisp :D