Quote from Trieva: Go@TheAlmaity: Go
I'm not sure what you're saying here. EV boosting items do make it easier to train (from very hard to hard) but it's still hard :P. I found EV training efficient when I used my op pokemon to OHKO stuff and the trainee gets the exp, and hence EVs, from exp share. It made it very streamlined so what I asked for was EV boosting items acting like exp share too (saving us from excessive switching). But since you guys are doing level scaling it may make EV training even harder (cuz no OHKO use) and the HP mechanic that makes higher level starmon tougher might drive me crazy even further :P.
That's actually a pretty good point that I didn't take in consideration. Maybe we should change the EV formula, increase the number of digits maybe (but still keep it proportional, so in the end its still +63 to a stat) and then to counteract the change to the health formula and the scaling that result in longer battles on average we can multiply EV reward with level (and probably by some constant as well just so that we have numbers line up nicely) or even relative level (i.e. If the enemy is stronger than you, you get more EVs)
Quote from Trieva: Go@TheAlmaity: Go
[About "pokemon game without grind = impossible"]
Nothing is impossible, you're just not trying hard enough :P (which is something I tell myself often believe it or not). In seriousness though I don't believe you ;) .
[About it being impossible for us to add content to guide players through all 100 levels]
Why don't you think it's possible? Just simply increase money/exp rewards? Btw if players are just interested in the story it would be very nice allowing them to play those only. 'Forcing' things onto players is not cool :P. I prefer to respect the players and if want them to spend time on something I made I'd want them to have a fun experience (which includes giving them the choice to do whatever the hell they want) and not that I forced them to use everything because I put alot of time and effort in. That was my decision going into game development and the players could care less.
Quote from 1631377 »
Increasing XP rewards only helps once. What if you complete the story/get a good way through it, and then decide you want to change part of your lineup?
And what I said about "we're not just gonna hand you level 100 starmon" also comes into play here - There's just limits to what we can do, and I'm not talking about technical limits, but time and effort. If we allowed the story to get you all the way to level 100, you'd get such an endgame party in a matter of a few hours. And then we incorporate the previous point - The big quests aren't repeatable, therefore the rewards are only gotten once. So after those few hours during which you level super fast due to reward, you are suddenly faced with a massive grind to change one starmon in your lineup, and you don't expect it at all.
I'm not so sure about pokemon being about character progression. I'm pretty sure pokemon started off as a friendship/battle simulator and stuck with that. Not every pokemon you catch makes it to your party so they wouldn't stay long enough to develop the sorts of emotional connections like you would in massive RPGs like Final Fantasy. Plus there's too many pokemon for players to progress with :P. I don't claim to be a pro with story based games but this is just my opinion.
Quote from Trieva: Go yea, but that battle simulator heavily relies on levels (And evolutions, and moves, but those are all gained through levels). If the game to you is not about reaching level 100 and being the best, then you won't really face a grind in the first place because you have no reason to. I'll touch on this below again.
I don't mind working for my starmon but how much I have to do will be the issue. If it's a grind then I'll forget it, otherwise I'll enjoy it. Although, getting level 100s and choosing their movesets would make a good multiplayer mode giving us sandboxy play. I don't care how little but a game is much more enjoyable when I can very quickly (and in a very obvious way) have gained something frequently. Since you guys are in Alpha, and might not mind what I'm going to suggest, then maybe revamp the pokemon system. Instead of sticking to their formulas and problems you can always come up with a way to make every battle feel awesome and be rewarding. One example is letting us increase stats directly through items or something. In TWEWY level ups hardly gave bonus stats. They came from equippable items and consumables (which are used by by the amount of battles).
Just to clarify I'm willing to give this map a try. I'm planning to play through the entire main story. If things become unbearably grindy/slow/sluggish then I'll stop. I don't think the main story should have too many problems there but you seem really set on keeping grinding which I don't agree with. This will most certainly influence my decision to replay the game or do end-game stuff like EV training.
Grinding is never fun from the player's point of view and I don't see how it helps from the development point of view besides being too lazy to have more story content or something :P. A good game should end short and sweet if it needs to be with no junk appended :P.
I think you may have sort of misunderstood my intentions/ideas/whatever, or I just explained them poorly.
"I don't mind working for my starmon but how much I have to do will be the issue."
That's what I meant there's different levels of grinding. There's "Ok, I'll spend 5-10 minutes mindlessly doing battles with anyone I see for this bonus I need for whatever reason" and then there's "Yea, I'll spend two weeks running heroics so that I can spend two months doing that raid". I definitely don't want the latter kind, but I think we'll have to resort to the former: (hopefully-)short intervals where you just have to do your own thing and get a bit higher level. You'll still have some form of guidance as early on in the game you'll realise that generally big stuff is going to happen right after you beat the next milestone trainer, so if at any point the story just seems to be standing still, you'll know what to do. If you're missing a few levels, you'll walk out one of the gates (or use a teleporter), wander around a zone, fight trainers and hopefully find a quick optional quest or two for a nice XP reward, or if you wanna do something more reliable but grindy you can just repeat one or two arena fights over and over again until you're ready to fight the milestone trainer. Whatever case it is, it shouldn't last too long. Not gonna mention a specific time as I suck at estimating such stuff, and I also find that time passes quite quickly when playing pokemon/starmon :p It might take an hour, but not the "Oh my god when is this going to end" type of hour, but the "JESUS CHRIST ITS 3 AM ALREADY!?!?!" kind of hour. Ideally I don't want it to take an hour though, was just giving an example.
Unless you stick to your first 6 starmon (or, well, any 6 you've managed to get above the level of captureable starmon) forever, you're gonna need to a reliable way to train alternative starmon. Easiest way is obviously battles. Well, only way, pretty much. Whatever you do will have to include a battle - Even if it doesnt directly, chances are you'll have to walk from point A to point B and there'll be trainers/grass in between.
Levels in pokemon took a decent amount of time later on, and we're keeping XP numbers the same (Well, due to the lack of 3 part starmon chains, most stage 2 starmon have higher XP than in pokemon (Still slightly less than Stage 3 in either though)), but we're gonna make sure that the story quests and a good amount of side quests catapult you through the levels to create as little downtime between milestone trainers (and therefore story quests) as possible. The issue is that the quests aren't repeatable, you'll only get through em once, you'll only be able to give the reward to a set of 6 starmon at once, and if you swap out any of them for a weaker version, chances are you'll have to grin to bring it up to par, unless we can add something else. EXP.Share helps with making new and/or lower level pokemon catch up. Being able to pick fights of any level in the arena helps a bit as well, as you couldn't really be picky in pokemon and the league were the highest level trainers - and I don't think they ever exceeded level 70, if they reached it at all. (Silver/Gold may be the exception since they have practically 2 games in one. Can't remember the levels there)
Right now we're using the "old" XP formula. I think it was Black/White that used the new one, that factors in level differences, and after this discussion, I think that we should use the new formula, as it will heavily accelerate the training of lower level starmon - Imagine you place EXP.Share on a level 10 Probichu, then go fight the level 50 Milestone trainer with your level 55 party. Knock out one starmon, and probichu will get 5-10 times the XP your level 55 starmon got.
And, as fights of all levels are always available, your above-average level starmon won't really be penalized as you either pick what the average is (arena) or the average is adjusted to your party ("Wild" trainers, as I always call em). (I can't imagine what it is like to reach level 100 in Black/White, as I've never seen a pokemon game introduce such high level trainers. There was Mt.Battle in XD which I think went up to 90.)
WARNING: It's relatively late and I slept less than usual the past few days, so below here I kept going off-topic. Will go back on topic in the paragraph after this one.
WARNING 2: Feel free to skip both following paragraphs. I think I might be a bit irritated today and it might be affecting my writing, I go off topic a lot and might unintentionally sound mean/annoyed/whatever. I could just delete the paragraphs, but I think I'll rather just leave em up with this warning. I honestly think this is a good discussion, and also a very necessary one. Relying on your own opinions is bound to backfire, I've learned that and the value of other peoples opinions/feedback during our development of RuneCraft (Eiviyn is probably the best game designer I know relatively personally, I'll probably ask him to join the alpha test and force myself to listen to him criticizing absolutely everything, because he always has good points.)
With the arena, people will always have the option to just do the straightforward really boring grind if they want to. And don't get me wrong, I hate grinding as well, at least the extreme kind that just takes for fucking ever. So, I And I actually want to point out that all these posts are 100% from my perspective without consulting with Zelda first, actually most posts are if we are talking about concepts/not yet implemented stuff. It's rare that he disagrees, and if he does we find a good solution. (He did a pretty damn good job with our party system, I didn't think about flaws in the first place and he not only found em but thought up multiple really good solutions). Back on topic: I want to have as much stuff in the map as possible to have the world "feel alive", that there is stuff to do regardless of the story, so that instead being forced to do a mindless grind you can just run around and interact with the world inbetween battles, find a quest/event here and there, discover some cool wandering NPC/Starmon, find random items, etc. But again, time, effort:reward/usefulness, space. Those are proving to be our biggest problems. The first two especially. [removed a ton of irrelevant text. More than this paragraph consists of at this moment actually.]
RIGHT. Back on topic! Where was I?
Time, effort, and space. We promised an Alpha in April. Then we got really cool ideas. It's June. Zelda won't be back til August, same goes for Moz. Do you know how far our storyline goes at the moment? Level 25. "Oh yeah, that's a quarter way" No, it's not. XP/levels aren't linear, they aren't even quadratic, they're fucking cubic. Levels 1-25 are fast.
Why am I talking about this? Because we were talking about grinding. We have to invest a lot of time for anything we do here. The core of the game is fight->get levels->try to beat game up to the point where current level isn't enough->repeat. It becomes grindy when the "fight" part is relatively directionless, when the player has nothing real to do other than find a trainer or pick an arena fight. We'll add as many events and quests as we can to keep players occupied to "mask" the grind and make it feel less grindy, but please don't expect or ask us to devote as much time to this as actual game companies do to create massive zones full of quests so that the player never has free time. We're two people and we don't do this as our jobs, we've got a lot of free time, but since this isn't our job we won't work on it constantly and as efficiently as possible. Even Mozared is really damn busy with his new job and rarely has time to add any terrain to the map. And even ignoring the time limit, there's the map space limit. At a certain point stuff will just get really cluttered if we don't handle every optional quest/event absolutely perfectly. We can't make massive zones like in WoW where there is more than enough space for a million quests, we've got a tiny forest and that's it.
Ok, I think I might sound a bit annoyed/annoying and so on in this post... Sorry about that >.>
To summarize all I wanted to say really shortly:
Boring grinding sucks and can go to hell. I want to do my best (And Zelda probably too) to reduce the amount of grinding in this game, and what grinding will be left over we will attempt to make more fun with optional side quests and events. We'll make a lot of them appear randomly or have other random elements to them, so that they don't get too repetitive and you don't actually find all possible quests/events in a single go, so you always have a reason to go back to a zone, see if something new showed up. People who want to grind will easily have the option, but I really want to do my best to just shove enough content into the game to keep people occupied while they level up their primary/secondary set of starmon. And if we can't add quests and events, we can try and add consumables and other NPCs and systems to make stuff easier and smoother (Like what I keep mentioning about fights tailored for EV training)
What we need is two things: Actually get the game developed far enough so that we can actually test and go beyond theoretical discussions on this subject, and ideas on how to identify fix such problems preemptively through the discussion we're having right now by going into far more specific cases. So, first of all, "bigger rewards" isn't really something that should be considered. We'll be using those to dictate the game pace, and we'll try to keep it quick. The bigger issue is that you'll spend most of your time doing the story quests, which aren't repeatable, and therefore not a reliable training method. You'll get one high level party, and that's it. I already talked about this before. So we need to find problems and solutions to them while ignoring the fact that the story exists - It is a quick ride for your first party of starmon to a high level (Story will most likely end a good time before level 100. In addition to time requirements, I think if I have to stretch it out for too long it'll decrease in quality), and it only works once. And this is a game where, if you want to do more than the story, you have to eventually get a large amount of starmon to level 100 so that you can have a more diverse team and try different strategies, so we need a very reliable and repeatable method to have a "pleasant grind" for that.
One thing I suggested earlier was changing the XP formula to include relative levels - It allows you to quickly pull a new party member to your average level. This also makes the story more effective at training new starmon after you did the quests, as you now have a party that is capable of pulling new members up to their level. I think this will be very effective, but it only solves half of the problem kinda - You still need a source of experience.
I might try to think of unique minigames or such stuff that don't involve traditional battles (or maybe do) that can serve as an alternative XP source should a player get bored of standard battles.
also, to touch on your multiplayer/pvp comment: Yea, I think it's very important that we have an easy to get into PvP system. So, as suggested earlier, we can make that battle type that equalized teams. I said no rewards, but I think that may be the wrong thing to do. So, here's my idea:
0 EVs. This makes the battles different than non-equalized ones, as the proportions between stats change, and encourage players to actually reach max level and try the "real" fights.
Undecided on IVs. Probably 0 as well for the same reason
Moves: Little to no starmon learn a move past level 60, which means you unlock your starmons full move list relatively early. The last/level-50+ moves are in most cases powerful TM moves as well. (Fire Blast, Thunder, Solarbeam, Overdrive, etc.), so setting up your moves shouldn't be an issue.
Levels: I think letting players pick the level of the fight would be best. Would probably add a minimum limit of about 30-50 though to avoid as many possible issues with my next point as possibe.
Auto-evolve: We've got this in place for AIs, when they are generated, the system checks whether the starmon is at or above its evolve level and evolves it if yes. This doesn't work on non-level evolutions though (Happiness, trade, stones). We could add this so that really low level players (<25) can still try relatively fair fights against higher level trainers without suffering from crappy base stats due to unevolved sarmon.
The reason for the minimum level on such fights is so that you can't run into the reverse evolution problem: Doing a level 10 fight, meaning the low level players starmon don't auto evolve and have crappy base stats, while the other player has a fully evolved party.
Would also add auto-learn moves in case a players starmon has an empty slot - It would just grab the last move it could learn for that level. Starmon usually have all 4 move slots filled by level 13-17 though, so this would very rarely be used.
Rewards: No rewards would probably be a bit extreme and annoying. Not sure what rewards to give though - I want proper battles to be better than equalized ones. Money earned will be determined by players (Each player pays the same amount of money for the battle, winner takes all), so what we have left is pretty much Arena Points. I guess we could have equalized battles give an XP reward post-battle based on the average level of the party (So starmon participation doesn't matter either, it'll just be a number give to all party members), and maybe a low amount of arena points. "Real battles" could award more arena points, or maybe yet another currency used for more special items (OP PvE items maybe?), and maybe a good amount of recorded stats (Could easily implement an Elo system I think)
Ok, I'm tired and wanna go to sleep. Feel free to leave feedback :)
EV boosting items is still clunky because you have to switch in and out the trainee, especially if they're low level. Maybe let them gain exp as well?
3 EVs max sounds good so does that mean everyone at the hotspot will offer that? It seems pointless training with 2 or less EVs at a time
Consumable pokerus might be ok if not too hard to get
Which is why its not being added :p
Most training that doesn't use Exp.Share works this way (And it actually makes Exp.Share more efficient as it'll take 75% of the XP if it was in battle), and also isn't a good argument to not include held item EV boosters, but an argument to add more than just held items.
All final stage starmon will offer 3 EVs. Putting unevolved starmon into the list of possible ones would just be a dumb idea to begin with. (This also means there will be a minimum level, probably around 30)
Definitely won't be hard to get. Maybe a bit pricey, but you'll probably have enough money to buy a new one by the time it expires. The price should discourage it being used randomly though and make people only use it when they actually want to focus on EVs.
Ok, I acknowledge you guys are making things easier than pokemon, which is good, but I don't see why you won't take things further to remove as much grindiness as possible. If you're really aiming the project at adults then help us out who don't have several hours every day to play like kids do :P. Quick and 'productive' games have a charm you know ;)
We have to grind to max out levels? Doesn't sound fun to me.
I don't think it's really possible to make a pokemon style game without grindyness. The entire point of it is to capture some creatures and train them until you are the best. Training pretty much equals grinding.
The games "guide" the players through the guide, give him another objective, through the storyline and the massive zones the player needs to get through to reach the next city. But at some point the player just gets stuck due to being too weak and has to take a break to just get a few levels.
Games in which character progression is a big factor generally require some grinding. The first playthrough of D3 can be considered as story focused I guess, but after that its all grinding to get better numbers. Mass Effect doesn't have too important character progression and focuses a lot more on the story - Character progression isn't the core feature there, being too low levelled/having too few upgrades doesn't make the game impossible or insanely hard, so there aren't even any good options for grinding (by "good options" I mean something straightforward and repeatable that gives XP and/or money). Skyrim is somewhere in between, you can just explore and do quests for the sake of exploring and doing quests, and due to how Skyrim scales you generally won't find anything that's impossible to do due to being too weak, but if you want to have a strong character you're gonna be spending a good amount of time grinding skills, collecting crafting materials and gold, doing very specific quests for their rewards (Azura's star for example) etc.
The pokemon games, including Starmon, are about character progression, much like MMOs. The story is a way to get player through the grind/forget about the grind/keep them from realizing it's just one big grind.
Remember what the popular opinions about every single feature of D3 that reduced the grind were? (Being able to switch spells whenever you want, not having something permanent like a talent tree, less time overall needed to reach max level, auction house, etc.) Not that I agree with those arguments/complaints, just giving an example of what happens when you take grind out of a popular grind based game.
Now, with all that said, there are different levels of grinding. I don't want to remove all the grindibg, but I do want to cut down on the time it takes to get through the game and to level more (alternative) team members to 100. But I don't think that it's even close to possible for us to remove the need to battle outside of quests or so (In other words, allow you to play only the story and side quests to level, like mass effect 3), and we're not going to aim for that. Making quests takes time and space, and we'd prefer using as little as possible of the former and simply don't have much of the latter. We'll make sure that it doesn't take horrendously long, but we're not gonna remove all "grinding". We're not just gonna hand you level 100 starmon with perfectly set up IVs and EVs, you're gonna have to work for them. We're gonna add in quests for all stages of the game and also repeatable quests that don't care what your completion/level is so that at no point the only option left is to grind (Unlike pokemon, which rarely had anything/much after you completed the story. Silver/Gold had the most post-end content, but even then, after you beat Kanto and Red, you've got about 20 levels to go), we'll try to accelerate things and make them as interesting as possible. We'll do our best to reduce the grindy elements of the game, but we won't straight up remove them.
Good to know everything will be made aware. This is sort of a confusing area, even for me, so hopefully I can explain myself properly XD. While I'm sure alot of you guys don't mind EV training, I don't think every player will get into it. Like I said earlier, maybe we just don't have time (depending on how grindy it is), or maybe it kills the simple fun that was pokemon. Anyone who knows this mechanic will likely want to use it cuz why not make your starmon the very best? If that's the case it should prob be treated like a normal thing and not just exclusive for 'pro' trainers (hence made easier to get/use). For those who don't choose to EV train will be disadvantaged against those who do in pvp. It won't always be an issue of laziness and that's not always a bad thing. Like I implied earlier, I find games more interesting when it moves fast. EV training can be a veery sloow process for several starmon if not done right. It's up to you guys but I prob won't play much if late game is like that. This is why I suggested a multiplayer mode that makes things even between players with and without EV training.
I guess we can add a PvP mode where all starmon get set to a specific level (Chosen by the players) and have all EVs, maybe even IVs, set to 0. Zelda already set up a system that automatically evolves random trainer starmon if they are able to (So that we don't have trainers with level 70 metapods), maybe we can throw that one in as well. Probably won't have such matches affect a players PvP stats and won't reward the secondary currency (I think we'll call it Arena Points.)
@TheAlmaity: Go
Intentionally hiding mechanics that improve your pokemon is not cool :P. Only hardcore players may research this up and be willing to grind for it.
I said they were hidden in pokemon. They're not really hidden here since the genetics lab reveals all the numbers and allows you to modify them, and the NPCs will explain things to the player should he ask.
As for how fast you can EV train, iirc with all the possible boosters in pokemon it actually went pretty fast. You can get 100 with vitamins. 3 is the highest possible you can get from defeating a starmon. Double it with a held item. Pokemon had the PokeRus virus thingy that doubled EVs again iirc, but we're not gonna add that - I think a consumable would be better. So, that's 12 per starmon. You're gonna need to defeat 13 starmon to max out your EVs in a single stat. Now, unlike the pokemon games, we're gonna add a system that can hand you battles against such starmon on a silver platter. Pick a stat and be thrown into a fight against a trainer with only starmon that award that stats EVs. So, about 120k money + whatever the consumable costs + the held item + KO 13 starmon and you've EV trained one stat. Tbh, 120k shouldn't be hard to get by the time EV training really becomes noticeable. And you can just fight 8 additional starmon instead if you don't have the money.
Money/BP grinding will probably coincide with trying to get your starmon to reach level 100, as you need to fight a lot in those later levels, and the arena is the easiest place to repeatedly get high level opponents.
Yea, it sounds pretty grindy, but pokemon was pretty damn grindy later on as well. We're already doing things to make it easier, like XP rewards on quests, karma rewards, easily accessible fights for all levels and we'll probably add some consumables as well.
As for Repel: I was thinking of having it time based, but making it tick only while in grass is really easy to do (Probably easier than time based in our current system :p )
I'm fine with alternate types that are good with electric attacks. Maybe like a gengar equivalent with his awesome special attack and speed (that can learn thunderbolt). Hopefully sc2 models aren't too sucky so you make more. I saw Zolden show a mech zergling in his nth model thread which looked cool.
Haven't seen the mech zergling, will have to take a look. (Already using zergling and a zergling retexture, I guess this could be one of those optional evolutions that change stats instead of increasing :) )
Once we start setting up TMs and what moves starmon can learn through TMs (I should put that on my to-do list...) I'll get you a list with pictures of the starmon, their base stats and so on. Tbh, I don't think it'd be a bad thing to give milestone trainers one completely off-type starmon as long as it sorta fit in with the rest of the team (So if you're gonna go for a ton of high speed starmon, I can add another high speed starmon that isn't electric and doesn't know electric moves. Also, we can cheat and give it an electric move like Volt Switch anyway :P )
I'm avoiding sc2 models even if I can use them for good steel/mech starmon as I want this map to feel more "special". It'll just give a better impression if people come into this map and see unfamiliar models. Doesn't mean I'll avoid Sc2 models altogether, if I find really good ones I'll use em.
While that's true, it gives people with this knowledge an unfair advantage in competitive or pvp play :P. I'm ok with keeping as long as it's not too grindy EV training then maxing out starmon levels. I don't want to spend several hours fully training each starmon like pokemon :P. Also, TMs should have infinite uses. It's really punishing to not let players experiment with different move sets and pokemon made me 'save' TMs for particular types or not use them at all. Eggs helped a bit since you could carry over those moves but you guys aren't implementing that.
I don't really see why giving people with knowledge an advantage is a bad thing. Why reward people for being lazy? Why not reward them for doing some research and spending some time optimizing their starmon?
The advantage won't be too massive either. Your stats can differ by a maximum of 95 (Bigger difference for health as it uses a different formula, also not counting natures), but that's assuming the other guy has has zero IVs and EVs, and that just won't happen. If you don't know much about EV training/Don't give a crap, it just means they won't be focused on specific stats, not that you won't have EVs at all, and getting perfect IVs is pretty damn hard, even with rerolls. So in the end you'll end up with lets say 50 more points in a stat, which is at most going to be around 20-25% higher than your opponent, depending on the starmon. It's still a decent advantage, but I'm sure that can easily be overcome by using the right moves and type advantage to your favor.
Of course, EV training will be made a bit easier. Like in the normal games, we'll include ways to increase EV gains, like using held items and maybe even some consumables that give a timed bonus. And I already said I was going to have a place where you can pick fights based on EV rewards (So you can pick "Special Attack" and you'll fight a trainer that has only starmon with Special Attack as EV rewards), that way trainer randomization won't slow the process down and you won't even need to know what starmon gives what EVs.
The genetics Lab Zelda is working on allows you to view IVs and EVs, which was something that wasn't possible in pokemon (You could only get rough estimations from certain NPCs), and you can reroll your IVs and reduce your EVs (Which was possible by feeding pokemon certain berries). Zelda already implemented the vitamins that give you +10 to any EV (capped at 100)
As for TMs, I definitely don't want them limited to a single use for your entire playthrough. Not sure whether we should make them completely reusable, or to have them be single-use, but you can buy each TM at a special shop after you unlock it (Finding it, player level/progress or whatever) so they're not really that limited.
Talking about TMs, not sure whether we mentioned this before, so I'll just say it now (again, maybe):
Fly and Surf won't be HMs, they'll be TMs. No real point in making a distinction if you have an unlimited amount of them anyway (Either via unlimited uses or being able to buy em), and we can't be bothered to implement the "Can't overwrite this move" mechanic for HMs (It's annoying anyway)
Second of all, we've decided to not add Surf out of combat. I've run into issues setting up the animations for it (For some reason I can't have the damn trainer jump on the damn turtle. He always ends up just falling down the abyss and then suddenly appearing on it, which is not supposed to happen...), having a way to detect the edges of water might become performance intensive (might not, not sure, haven't tested) and might prove to be problematic when it comes to terraining, plus we might not have as much space as we'd hoped for the ocean zone.
We'll be replacing the ocean zone with some tropical islands, and we'll use shallow water the same way as tall grass there and in the beach zone as well. Will share more details as we plan them out :)
Not entirely sure what you mean by "I downloaded custom units". Did you download a mod file, a map file, or are you talking about 3D models? (.m3 files) Because generally, you can't download units. You set them up in the editor. You can do that in a mod file, which can then be used by any map by adding it to its dependencies (Place it in your installation->Mods folder, then in the editor open whatever map you want them in, File->Dependencies, click "Add Other" and switch to the local tab or whatever the not-battle.net one is called and select your mod)
Eve sounds pretty great, and I like the evolutions. I think you should do the stones idea. They can be found in the wild or bought at a very high price.
A few questions/suggestions.
1. Will the pokedex give Pokemon locations? Like it does in the game.
Yes, it already does. I believe Zelda was planning to implement rarity as well (Common, uncommon, rare)
2. When trading there should be an option for immediate trade back so assholes don't walk away with your Pokemon, and you can either evolve your Pokemon or get Pokedex info safely.
Maybe. Will see. Reason I don't like it is because it practically just turns into "Find other player, click button to evolve starmon" and it sorta removes the "difficulty" from trade evolutions. On the other hand, the "difficulty" in trade evolutions comes mostly from people being dicks... I guess we probably will add it, but no promises on this one.
Not saying there won't be non-combat stuff in the story, just that as combat is the main point of the game I think we should avoid large gaps and/or have the non-combat stuff be optional content. If you grab a couple of Repels to stop wild starmon from attacking you, you could say that we already have a few non-combat quests (If you manage to avoid the random trainers as well :p )
Anything that is 100% non-combat (So no wilds or random trainers either) would pretty much have to take place in only the city or be some sort of minigame or something else that keeps the player stationary.
I think the beach may be a good place for some minigames though.
We won't remove any of the pokemon features like EV or happiness - They're already fully implemented anyway, wouldn't make it any easier for us and would just remove depth from the game for people who really want to have the best of the best starmon. It's not like the features complicate things for the player - Most of those values are hidden in the pokemon games anyway. People play through the games without knowing that those mechanics even exist, and it doesn't hurt them.
I'll see if I can find some vids of that game later to see what you mean :)
I think all the starmon currently implemented were actually shown off in this thread in posts like my last one. Unfortunately, not too many electrics :( Shock-eve won't have amazing speed though. Probably good speed, but not crazy good. Considering it'll be able to paralyze people, it doesn't even need that much speed.
Current Electrics are Probichu->Zenchu (Sentry model), Galvamine->Galvadrone (Spidermine and PDD model, practically magnemite and magneton) and Shockeve. Got a "bird" line as well, but I either have to find other models or scrap it. It's using observer->phoenix->hero phoenix from SC2, and... Well, SC2 models suck for starmon :p
Hey, it's me again, I know it's been really long since my last post, sorry about that, bla bla bla, more sarcasm, bla bla bla
Anyway, I did some work on the map today (very little, to be honest. Mostly testing and finding bugs for Zelda.)
Here's what I have done:
Ignore the back line in this image for now, and focus on the four starmon in the front.
On the left we have a little black fox called Eve. It's a cute little Dark-Type starmon that is incredibly rare. So rare that it's almost impossible to find in the wild. If you wanna get one, you'll have to find another way to get it. Some NPC might give one to you if you're lucky ;)
To it's right we've got Freeve, the Ice-Dark evolution of Eve. It's heart is as cold as its attacks, it aims to weaken its foe before killing it. The only way to get Eve to evolve into this creature is by exposing it to something very cold.
Next up we've got this horrible looking creature Helleve. Who needs muscles and organs when instead you can just watch the world burn? This Dark-Fire starmon will specialize in searing the flesh off of his enemies bones. Turning Eve into such a hellish creature requires immense heat.
Next up is Shockeve. It's the only Eve-olution that loses the Dark Type, and instead it gets Steel to complement its Electric type. While it won't match the sheer firepower of its fire counterpart (hehe he... puns) or even that of its frosty relative, you could argue that being unstoppable is far more dangerous.
The others in this picture serve as size references mostly. The four in the back are the four trade evolutions: Mortessus (Ghost Ice), Thangur (Fight), Shelob(Rock Ice) and Roknarr(Rock Fire)
Alright, now that I'm done with the descriptions, lets discuss. First of all I would've preferred "cute" models like with Eevee, but those aren't easy to come by :(
Not much has been planned about this thing. Three evolutions, perhaps more if I can find more (Actually have an idea for one more, but I want to make it at least five total then). Fire will be sheer damage, Ice will be control and Electric will be the tank/bruiser (Being a steel type already makes it very hard to kill, so I don't need to make its base defenses too high and can give it good offensive stats instead)
Haven't decided how to get Eve or evolve them yet. Either the stones, like in the original games, or location based like the Gen IV eevees. We've got a snow covered mountain zone, a volcano zone (planned) and the power plant. If we decide to not use stones, I'd do the same for other starmon as well (Probichu will evolve the same way as Eve->Shockeve then, for example)
For acquiring Eve, I think the professor giving it to you might be a good idea - You're a decent trainer that already helps him by using the Stardex, what better way is there to get info on a genetically unstable starmon than giving it to such a trainer?
Not sure about their abilities yet, but I want to make them something unique. Here are the first three ideas that popped into my head: Ice: Being faster than the opponent amplifies damage dealt. (Encourages usage of slows) Fire: +5 or 10% additional burn chance on all damaging moves (even if the moves themselves can't cause burn), (+10% damage to burnt enemies as well maybe?) Electric: Ok, this one is more complex. Using or being hit by electric moves gives 1 shock charge. When you have 4, you get a Shock Shield that prevents the damage from the next damaging attack. If that attack was a contact move (Melee, practically), the attacker takes damage and has a chance to be paralyzed. If it wasn't, you immediately get another shock charge.
This passive would make it tankier and make it a good starmon vs melee starmon (If you have Static Field up, getting hit by a melee/contact attack deals damage to the attacker, so you get a charge)
Very interesting and thought out backstory, Chaos :)
First of all: The Coalition is led by the Quantum Legion, who are very pacifistic. They would not have anyone assassinated and would veto and suggestions of it. The Magratheans and Tirions aren't military factions so they leave cases like Castellan to the other factions. While the Aranov Consectorate used to be quite the stereotypic dictatorship before, Domovoi Aranov despises his father and does his best to not be like him. While I wouldn't say an assassination is past him, he wouldn't easily consider one.
That leaves two factions, The Pirates and the Auruleans. Doom Bonecrusher simply wouldn't care, and the Auruleans and Aranov Consectorate despise him enough that they wouldn't even consider hiring him (In case of Aranov, it'd be high ranking personnel left over from Aranov's fathers time paying and ordering the assassination by themselves, without authorization, and once found out they'd probably be sent to jail). The Auruleans themselves however are some mean sons of bitches and also happen to be the ones manufacturing stealth equipment and training ghost and spectre operatives for the entire Coalition. It wouldn't be the first thing they've done behind the Coalitions back either.
In short: Change that part of your backstory to specifically mention the Auruleans. The other Coalition factions wouldn't order a hit on someone.
Of course, after Castellan runs and steals stuff from the Auruleans, he'd officially become a fugitive and wanted criminal, so that stuff is ok.
And the last bit is a bit problematic: There weren't many big battles in the last few years. The three races are only fighting amongst themselves (Coalition vs Outsider, Imperium vs Exiled, almost every brood vs almost every brood), Castellan would only really have had work opportunities in Outsider space.
Character details: Dispersion Shield:
How exactly are you thinking this should work? If you take 22 damage, does it get reduced to 11, or does only the surplus 2 damage get halved, so it ends up 21?
The former is rather weird, as dealing less damage actually ends up dealing more damage. The latter is useless with its current numbers, as almost nothing deals 20 damage in a single hit to begin with, and you'll still end up taking quite a lot of damage even from that.
I think this ability would probably be best with the latter way, but it reducing everything after 5. Fully upgraded marines will do 7 damage (Down from 9), Zerglings 6.5 (down from 8), Stalkers and marauders 9 (from 13), Immortals 14 (from 26), Sieged Tanks 23 (from 41? not sure). More effective than standard Hardened Shields against low damage units while still very good against high damage units.
The other "hero" units get the same version of this ability, no need to make it weaker.
Quote:
Master Crafted Weapon
Passive
-Dawn Blade: While the Dawn Blade is active, Castellan deals 5 bonus damage against biological units.
-Rail Rifle: While the Rail Rifle is active, Castellan deals 5 bonus damage against armored units.
This would literally just cost you 1 point if you added it as DPS instead of an ability.
Quote:
Dawn Blade/Rail Rifle
Toggle
Cost: None Cool down: 4
Weapons switch weapons between Dawn Blade and Rail Rifle.
This doesn't need to be an ability. Hero units can have multiple weapons as long as none of them have stats that exceed what you bought (Also, you can't make the melee weapon stronger because it isn't using the points invested in the range stat, just in case you were wondering)
Removing those two as abilities, your honor guards weapon switch ability and paying 1 point for the bonus damage reduces your heroes cost by 34 points combined, without actually losing anything.
About your second character, the lore is completely up to Wind, but I like what you wrote :) Telemose could create a very interesting story, probably more so than Castellan (Not saying Castellan is bad, I just think Telemose has a better set up for a really cool story), and could probably lead to some very interesting interactions with the Black Hand (New terran faction introduced in the last few posts)
As for the abilities:
Not sure whether bonus damage vs Heroic should be allowed. There aren't many heroic units in the first place, all of them are hero characters obviously, so having a tool that makes killing important characters easier is something that I don't think may be a too good idea I think. Also, don't think you really need cooldowns on your abilities. First passive is fine by me, the second passive is a bit trickier, I guess it might be fine, might not. It's ultimately Wind's decision anyway :p
Would that make No-Evolution starmon OP in the early game, because their total base stats are above those of "baby" or "not-yet-evolved" starmon?
Yes, and also the equialents of Caterpie->Metapod->Butterfree - They reached stage 3 incredibly quickly and are very powerful early game pokemon, but their base stats aren't comparable to other stage 3 pokemon that are evolved into 20-40 levels after them, so their OPness is short lived. It'll be the same in Starmon, although these starmon will have a less bad lategame (They'll still be the weakest evolved starmon in the game, the difference just won't be as large as in pokemon. On the other hand, there will be little to no other below-average starmon, so they'll kinda be the only ones with crappy base stats)
If total base stats change (+, -, or move) would there be an option to "push the B button" and abort the evolution, or have the guy hold an everstone?
If so, when I reach lvl 100, can I force an evolution, or is the guy stuck in he first form?
I actually mentioned this at the end of my previous post. Level and Happiness evolutions (which are the only evolutions that aren't entirely under the players control) can't be stopped. Pokemon made unevolved pokemon learn moves faster, and in some cases learn moves that their evolutions didn't. I'm not really a fan of that, partially because I just don't like that mechanic in the first place and partially because setting up move lists for starmon is already annoying enough if I don't have to write up the entire list three seperate times and don't have to change what levels the moves are learned at. (Currently the move lists for starmon only include moves they can learn before levelling up. Evolved starmon include the move list of the previous one + new moves until their next evolution or levels 55-65 in case of fully evolved starmon. Writing the previous move list into an evolution is already a quite annoying and time consuming process and pretty much the thing that takes the most time when adding in a new set of starmon.)
When you start writing triggers for the white listing program, I want to make sure that you guys inform the people who were curious about the game why they are not allowed to play. Something along the lines of the loading screen, and an in-game message saying something like "This game is still being developed. We would be quite embarrassed if someone we didn't know played this and found a bug. Contact us at [email protected] with questions. If you are interested in the development of our game, visit our thread on sc2mapster.com!" Maybe include a shortened version of the url in there too, because www.sc2mapster.com/forums/resources/project-workplace/41336 is terribly long, especially if you include the -starmon-a-pokemon-style-map part.
I'd prefer avoiding the White List altogether. As I mentioned earlier, there was an option that allowed you to play downloaded/cached maps "offline", but I'm not sure whether it still exists. I don't remember any patch notes saying it was removed, I'll just have to find it now that the Arcade and HotS restructured the menus. So once we do the alpha test, you guys will be able to play it on your own. If you want to play multiplayer we can probably just determine a time and Zelda or I (depending on who publishes the map) will come online and set up a lobby.
But if we do have to resort to a white list, we'll make sure to make it clear on the loading screen, and possibly even include a little demo gameplay for people not on the list. And yea, we already used URL shorteners for RuneCraft.
I've also wondered if there will be an item which will upgrade a starmon's energy limit. even just a one time +10 energy that costs 50,000 Starcoins.
Probably. Some Starmon might even have their passive ability increase their limit. And it's more likely to be +20-30 I think. +10 is barely 1-2 extra moves, getting an item that makes moves hit harder instead would be a far more efficient way to increase how long you are able to fight at a time.
A "Create Unit" effect is obviously used to create units.
A "Create Persistent" effect is able to use effects at an offset (So you can make it use a Create Unit effect far away from where the Persistent was initially cast)
An "Issue Order" effect is able to issue the Attack order. Set up the target fields correctly (Unit receiving the order should be "Target", unit targetted by the order should be "Caster") and have the Create Unit effect use this effect as its "Spawn Effect" (I think its called that, might be something else, should be very obvious though)
Using those three effects with a specific unit as a caster should allow you to create units a good distance away and immediately make them attack the "caster" (The caster by default won't use any animations or have anything else in the game indicates he's the caster). This will however make them completely ignore other units. You can make the attack order target Caster Point instead of Caster Unit, which will make them attack the first unit they see on their way to the point the caster was at the time of "casting". If you want them to attack the first best unit on their way to the caster but also track the casters location, it's gonna get a tiny bit more complicated (You're probably gonna have to mark the caster with a behavior and have the dudes have a behavior that periodically searches for enemies with that specific behavior and gives an attack order)
I didn't mean to scare you but I wasn't thinking about 3v3+ or different story versions. For a split second I was wondering if you guys will include gameplay or ways to complete quests without battles. Something more rpg like in mass effect where you run errands or solve disputes between characters. I suppose there's no room for minigames?
Combat is pretty much what the entire game revolves around, it's what makes it what it is. I'm not saying we shouldn't make any non-combat part, but it needs to added smartly. In Mass Effect 1 you come to the citadel and I'm sure you remember just how much time you spent on there, going from character to character and doing stuff... There were a few short combat moments involved, but overall that stuff just took way too long for an action game. Oh, it was great for building up the story, teaching the player whats going on, but I got really annoyed that I couldn't just play the damn game because I was stuck in this incredibly long "running errands" period.
What I'm trying to say is that if we add non-combat stuff to Starmon, which I'm sure we will, we'll have to make sure it doesn't just break the flow of the game and the players just get locked into a long boring walk they possibly won't enjoy: I know a lot of people love lore and story in games, but I'm sure there's just as many, if not more, that don't really care much, and getting stuck in such a long "pause" would put them off.
Non-combat optional/Side quests would be a good way to add such content: As it's optional, you'll not get stuck doing something that bores you.
As for minigames: The only reason I can think of not to add any is time. So, if we have time, we might just add some if we get good ideas for them and how to implement into the game (Not only technically, but also story/gameplay-wise)
About evolutions, my 'choice' meant choosing whether to evolve a starmon or not based on their stronger base stats. I thought you were making the total EVs the same for all starmon so those like pidgey aren't useless. If you evolved and gained more EVs total then it might be op. That's why I suggested it be redistributed.
I hope I'm clearer now.
Not sure what you mean. EVs are gained by KO-ing pokemon/starmon and capped at 255 per stat / 512 total. Evolved starmon generally grant more EVs when KO's, which I think is only fair considering they're tougher. Pidgey being useless doesn't have anything to do with EVs, but base stats and the fact that he's unevolved (Which actually goes back to the point of base stats. Evolutions almost always just straight up have higher base stats)
I'm still fairly certain you're asking for something like the Scyther->Scizor evolution, where evolution is not mandatory and doesn't actually grant a stronger starmon, just redistributes the stats in a different way. I.E. evolve into a different set of stats instead of a stronger set of stats.
(also, for the record, we have no way to prevent happiness/level up evolutions at the moment, they will just happen with no way to stop them. This makes it a lot easier to set up move sets for me)
Hey! Nice seeing some more interest in the RP :) But I highly recommend reading my first post, especially the "Premise" part. (There's buttons on the right that reveal the text, just in case you didn't notice) It goes over the very basics, but most importantly it mentions that this doesn't take place in the canon SC2 universe
What this means is you need to skim over the existing factions listed in the second post, and possibly some of the general backstory, because this does not involve anything from SC and SC2 - There are different planets, different factions, different characters. The SC universe is fairly vague in a lot of areas in its lore, which makes using the original setting a bit harder as you'd have to sift through wikis just to make sure you don't contradict anything, and creates other issues for the GMs. The advantages of using a new, (even more-)fictional setting are first of all more freedom as there's no chance of us contradicting official lore, and possibly more importantly: we define the lore. If something is vague, you PM the relevant GM and he can tell you the details. If you want to have a big role in some faction, you have more freedom doing so.
Anyway, as for your battlecruiser, it currently costs 80 points. You start with 300, which means if you want to divide them equally among an army, ship and hero character, that leaves you with another 20 points to use on it.
The Flagship is technically seen the only mandatory thing you need to have, but not having an army or at least hero characters that can properly enter a battle somewhat limits your role in the RP (Not saying it's exactly bad, you'll just have to be more imaginative and will have to find other ways to make an impact in the story)
If you have issues with the entire point system and the armies, feel free to message me and I'll help wherever I can. I know it's quite scary/confusing for a start, but trust me, the rest of the RP won't be like that at all. It's like buying a new house with new furniture, and going to Ikea with €2000 to spend on furniture. Yea, you'll have to buy a lot of stuff and spend a lot of money at one point, won't be too sure what to do with it, but once you're done with all that you have your furnished house and can do stuff with it, and if you need something else you forgot earlier or just couldn't afford, you save up for it and buy it later.
Whitelist: Not sure, but before the Arcade you could play "vs AI" or something like that from the singleplayer menu, and it'd take about 5 minutes to load the list of maps, which would include all cached maps (i.e. everything you ever played on that computer, including Arcade maps), I used that to play Magicide before Eiviyn published it. Since the Arcade moved a lot of stuff around, I'm not sure whether that exists anymore :/
Also, one thing to point out: Chances are you don't get to keep your saves from the alpha. You might for a good amount of versions, but we might have to reset your progress to test something we added in earlier/fixes to quests, or simply because we changed something fundamental in the saving method. For example, you Stardex will most definitely be wiped - I haven't added in all Starmon yet, and Mei (The dark doll girl) for example will always be at the end of the list with the other legendaries, but if you guys see her, right now it would mark ID 81 as revealed, and if I added more Starmon and moved Mei to the back of the list again, you guys would have whatever starmon is now #81 is revealed again, without ever seeing it.
Looking at how fast we're working, that's a looooooooooooong time til we're done :p Also, had an idea how you could add eyes to the model you already sent me - Just make some indents, don't fill them. Maybe even indent a smile, or change its texture in a way that it roughly forms a smile. It'll be enough for people to see a friendly face, like when you look at some cars you can roughly make out a face with the headlights being the eyes, and some other machines/devices sometimes have faces as well.
Well, it depends on multiplayer features imo. If we can make parties bigger than 2 and do interesting team worky stuff then it's worth bribging in more players. I'm not sure if you guys are focusing more on a single playe or multiplayer map. Cmon, am I the only one who's dreamed of a coop pokemon? :P
Parties will stay 2 player. double battles already caused enough problems and delays, and tripple battles would probably require more cameras so that you can actually see everything, and possibly even force us to make the arenas larger.
You'll be able to play through everything together with another person, but storywise it'll be exactly the same as if you went alone. Quests are already enough work without us having to create mildly different versions for co-op.
For some reason I can't edit my last post of my ipad.
Anyways I was wondering if we get interesting effects to base stats from evolutions. Instead of upgrading all of them, some should be reduced to give us interesting decisions to make. For example stalkerchu has mor special attack and defense base than probichu but speed is lowered :P.
Don't think that's very practical for evolution lines consisting of only the base starmon and a single evolution. If it were something like Base -> Stage 1 via levelling -> Stage 2 via Trade, then Stage 2 could have significant stat changes. But the basic stage needs to have below average stats to match other low level starmon, which means the evolution will naturally be overall stronger. Yea, I can take away from a certain stat and put it into another if it makes sense thematically, but that isn't really what you're asking for - It's not really a choice, since the non-evolved form will be a lot weaker overall.
What you want is something like Scyther->Scizor. Due to Scyther having had 500 base stat total in Gen I (Which is pretty high), they just couldn't make his evolution more powerful when they added it in Gen II, so instead they cut his speed stat by 40 and shoved it into attack and defense.
The most obvious and best example on how to implement this is Eevee - You've got quite the choice to make. I'll be adding an Eevee in, probably very soon. I couldn't find a third model that fit, so I'll likely use the Predator from the SC2 campaign.
I'll see if I can find something which I can turn into a Scyther/Scizor type evolution, but I wouldn't get my hopes up :/ Evolution chains are already hard enough to find in the WoW model files, but finding similar yet different enough models where one doesn't look weaker than the other will be harder.
When you have any window of the editor open, in the top bar where there's "File" and "Edit" and so on, go to "Window" and click on Lighting.
I believe it will by default pick the lighting used by your map, but I'm not 100% sure on this, so double check (I think default lighting is defined in the same place as your Terrain textures, fog color and so on, forgot the tabs name)
I also can't remember exactly which tab it was in the lighting editor, but it should be very obvious which one edits lighting regions (Since you'll be able to pick between 4 of them). You can then paint these regions onto the map in the terrain editor.
Another possible thing to do is create/edit another lighting set of its own, place a regular region in the terrain editor and then have a trigger switch the players lighting when he enters/leaves that region. (This changes the lighting for the entire map at once, so having a locked camera is probably best, which obviously won't really work in big RTS maps where the player has to look at multiple places, in which case you should definitely use lighting regions)
This method also breaks "Day of time" lighting (In the lighting window you can have it change lighting depending on the day of time and have it transition between things like day and night, have shadows move as time passes, etc. Changing lighting by trigger removes that functionality)
After every trainer battle we have the option to refuse money rewards or steal. Even if we lose a battle we can steal money and end up with a net gain :P
Completing quests given by 'good' people increases the good meter. Similar with bad.
That's a good idea. But the stealing-when-losing part wouldn't make sense lorewise - You've got nothing to threaten the guy with, while he is quite literally able to kill you.
Almost evey decision we make needs to affect karma to make it interesting. Sometimes I might want a mildly good character, one that's all the way evil, or maybe redeem myself and be a saint ;) . Don't do the mass effect thing where going all good or all bad was the best since it unlocked special dialogue options. There should be advantages for being more inthe middle.
We want to use this system as much as possible. We might neglect the middle ground at the start because it might just be way too much work in addition to the already two seperate storylines we have, but we want it to be viable in the long run.
Maybe how often starmon are healed affects karma. Less healing might be considered starmon abuse.
Eh... Not sure I like this idea. Too easy to abuse for good karma, makes "evil" players play more risky (and punishes them for playing safe by screwing with their karma) and punishes ill prepared players that don't want bad karma.
Starmon are aligned with karma too and if they match with the character then they get bonuses in battle or something.
Not sure whether that can be implemented easily and visibly. And in the end, they'd always end up with the players karma anyway, so it's practically just another "happiness" value.
Karma affects bigger story elements. If you're evil then team cipher becomes stronger and moves around more actively. Maybe have the mass effect 3 ending type thing where we build up for a war (affected by karma).
Eeeeh... Karma won't affect this directly. It's kinda more the other way around... You'll be doing quests which obviously affect one or both sides, and those change your karma appropriately.
Here are some story ideas:
Our initial adventure motivation is NOT to be an elite op trainer and participate in the big dick waving fest that's happening :P. We need something interesting and realistic, kinda like an expansion of pokemon beginnings where an errand is run for the professor.
We haven't decided yet who the player is and so on, and I'm thinking of keeping it relatively vague, possibly adding a customizeable background (Like in GW2)
Maybe some portion of the game should be playable without starmon so when we gain them, we can really see how much help they are. How about we need to meet up with a family member in town and do some quests (before getting our first starmon)?
Really don't like this idea. It'd pretty much just delay the entire game, force the player to do things that are completely unrelated mechanically. Imagine you join a custom map that advertises itself as a pokemon clone, and you don't get any pokemon. You'll just go wtf and ragequit after 5 minutes.
Team cipher has complete control over at least one zone (and they're the only trainer types you find there). This should help demonstrate their power and effectiveness as a group.
If we have space, maybe. We're definitely adding a sort of hideout, but right now the plan is to not have it actually connected to any zone and just port players over when necessary.
Make clear to the player that there is a FFA war going on. It's starmon vs civilians vs team cipher vs legendaries. Maybe as part of karma we can decide which faction/team to join.
It's mostly Arena City dudes vs Cipher. Legendaries will be more similar to natural disasters than an actual faction in an FFA, and the starmon themselves won't end up uniting and become a faction. That shit's going down between the two factions we have though will be very clear.
We have a relative who's a milestone trainer or elite four. Give us some backstory on what it's like to live as a pro trainer through conversations or something.
Answered the backstory thing above. This is an interesting idea.
Some NPCs we meet become good friends, some become enemies. Unlike pokemon where it was sunshine and rainbows and everyone treated you like you're an angel :P.
There's a limit to what we can do. Technically, it's possible, but we also had an alpha test planned for late April, didn't we? There's just some pretty cool ideas that will have to be ignored for the sake of time, and I think this will be one of them :(
This one's a bit hard to explain but the main story quests should feel like an adventure and make me look forward to doing the next thing. It shouldn't be just 'become the most powerful trainer' which takes ages to get. I'd like hints from NPCs that I should be travelling to the next zone, using alternate routes, doing favours for people, etc. Something that feels like I'm always doing something to make progress with the adventure and anything could happen. There might be a road block or characters might get inthe way :P.
The main story quest won't be "beat the arena". The player might want to become the best, but it won't be the focus of the story. Shit's gonna go down and the player's gonna get dragged into it. The player can pursue his goal of advancing in the arena while plans are being made and prepared, while he isn't needed by his allies. Then, after the main story ends, the player will have a good chunk of the arena left to go.
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I think you may have sort of misunderstood my intentions/ideas/whatever, or I just explained them poorly. "I don't mind working for my starmon but how much I have to do will be the issue." That's what I meant there's different levels of grinding. There's "Ok, I'll spend 5-10 minutes mindlessly doing battles with anyone I see for this bonus I need for whatever reason" and then there's "Yea, I'll spend two weeks running heroics so that I can spend two months doing that raid". I definitely don't want the latter kind, but I think we'll have to resort to the former: (hopefully-)short intervals where you just have to do your own thing and get a bit higher level. You'll still have some form of guidance as early on in the game you'll realise that generally big stuff is going to happen right after you beat the next milestone trainer, so if at any point the story just seems to be standing still, you'll know what to do. If you're missing a few levels, you'll walk out one of the gates (or use a teleporter), wander around a zone, fight trainers and hopefully find a quick optional quest or two for a nice XP reward, or if you wanna do something more reliable but grindy you can just repeat one or two arena fights over and over again until you're ready to fight the milestone trainer. Whatever case it is, it shouldn't last too long. Not gonna mention a specific time as I suck at estimating such stuff, and I also find that time passes quite quickly when playing pokemon/starmon :p It might take an hour, but not the "Oh my god when is this going to end" type of hour, but the "JESUS CHRIST ITS 3 AM ALREADY!?!?!" kind of hour. Ideally I don't want it to take an hour though, was just giving an example. Unless you stick to your first 6 starmon (or, well, any 6 you've managed to get above the level of captureable starmon) forever, you're gonna need to a reliable way to train alternative starmon. Easiest way is obviously battles. Well, only way, pretty much. Whatever you do will have to include a battle - Even if it doesnt directly, chances are you'll have to walk from point A to point B and there'll be trainers/grass in between.
Levels in pokemon took a decent amount of time later on, and we're keeping XP numbers the same (Well, due to the lack of 3 part starmon chains, most stage 2 starmon have higher XP than in pokemon (Still slightly less than Stage 3 in either though)), but we're gonna make sure that the story quests and a good amount of side quests catapult you through the levels to create as little downtime between milestone trainers (and therefore story quests) as possible. The issue is that the quests aren't repeatable, you'll only get through em once, you'll only be able to give the reward to a set of 6 starmon at once, and if you swap out any of them for a weaker version, chances are you'll have to grin to bring it up to par, unless we can add something else. EXP.Share helps with making new and/or lower level pokemon catch up. Being able to pick fights of any level in the arena helps a bit as well, as you couldn't really be picky in pokemon and the league were the highest level trainers - and I don't think they ever exceeded level 70, if they reached it at all. (Silver/Gold may be the exception since they have practically 2 games in one. Can't remember the levels there) Right now we're using the "old" XP formula. I think it was Black/White that used the new one, that factors in level differences, and after this discussion, I think that we should use the new formula, as it will heavily accelerate the training of lower level starmon - Imagine you place EXP.Share on a level 10 Probichu, then go fight the level 50 Milestone trainer with your level 55 party. Knock out one starmon, and probichu will get 5-10 times the XP your level 55 starmon got.
And, as fights of all levels are always available, your above-average level starmon won't really be penalized as you either pick what the average is (arena) or the average is adjusted to your party ("Wild" trainers, as I always call em). (I can't imagine what it is like to reach level 100 in Black/White, as I've never seen a pokemon game introduce such high level trainers. There was Mt.Battle in XD which I think went up to 90.) WARNING: It's relatively late and I slept less than usual the past few days, so below here I kept going off-topic. Will go back on topic in the paragraph after this one.
WARNING 2: Feel free to skip both following paragraphs. I think I might be a bit irritated today and it might be affecting my writing, I go off topic a lot and might unintentionally sound mean/annoyed/whatever. I could just delete the paragraphs, but I think I'll rather just leave em up with this warning. I honestly think this is a good discussion, and also a very necessary one. Relying on your own opinions is bound to backfire, I've learned that and the value of other peoples opinions/feedback during our development of RuneCraft (Eiviyn is probably the best game designer I know relatively personally, I'll probably ask him to join the alpha test and force myself to listen to him criticizing absolutely everything, because he always has good points.) With the arena, people will always have the option to just do the straightforward really boring grind if they want to. And don't get me wrong, I hate grinding as well, at least the extreme kind that just takes for fucking ever. So, I
And I actually want to point out that all these posts are 100% from my perspective without consulting with Zelda first, actually most posts are if we are talking about concepts/not yet implemented stuff. It's rare that he disagrees, and if he does we find a good solution. (He did a pretty damn good job with our party system, I didn't think about flaws in the first place and he not only found em but thought up multiple really good solutions). Back on topic: I want to have as much stuff in the map as possible to have the world "feel alive", that there is stuff to do regardless of the story, so that instead being forced to do a mindless grind you can just run around and interact with the world inbetween battles, find a quest/event here and there, discover some cool wandering NPC/Starmon, find random items, etc. But again, time, effort:reward/usefulness, space. Those are proving to be our biggest problems. The first two especially. [removed a ton of irrelevant text. More than this paragraph consists of at this moment actually.]RIGHT. Back on topic! Where was I?Time, effort, and space. We promised an Alpha in April. Then we got really cool ideas. It's June. Zelda won't be back til August, same goes for Moz. Do you know how far our storyline goes at the moment? Level 25. "Oh yeah, that's a quarter way"
No, it's not. XP/levels aren't linear, they aren't even quadratic, they're fucking cubic. Levels 1-25 are fast.Ok, I think I might sound a bit annoyed/annoying and so on in this post... Sorry about that >.> To summarize all I wanted to say really shortly:Why am I talking about this? Because we were talking about grinding. We have to invest a lot of time for anything we do here. The core of the game is fight->get levels->try to beat game up to the point where current level isn't enough->repeat. It becomes grindy when the "fight" part is relatively directionless, when the player has nothing real to do other than find a trainer or pick an arena fight. We'll add as many events and quests as we can to keep players occupied to "mask" the grind and make it feel less grindy, but please don't expect or ask us to devote as much time to this as actual game companies do to create massive zones full of quests so that the player never has free time. We're two people and we don't do this as our jobs, we've got a lot of free time, but since this isn't our job we won't work on it constantly and as efficiently as possible. Even Mozared is really damn busy with his new job and rarely has time to add any terrain to the map. And even ignoring the time limit, there's the map space limit. At a certain point stuff will just get really cluttered if we don't handle every optional quest/event absolutely perfectly. We can't make massive zones like in WoW where there is more than enough space for a million quests, we've got a tiny forest and that's it.
Boring grinding sucks and can go to hell. I want to do my best (And Zelda probably too) to reduce the amount of grinding in this game, and what grinding will be left over we will attempt to make more fun with optional side quests and events. We'll make a lot of them appear randomly or have other random elements to them, so that they don't get too repetitive and you don't actually find all possible quests/events in a single go, so you always have a reason to go back to a zone, see if something new showed up. People who want to grind will easily have the option, but I really want to do my best to just shove enough content into the game to keep people occupied while they level up their primary/secondary set of starmon. And if we can't add quests and events, we can try and add consumables and other NPCs and systems to make stuff easier and smoother (Like what I keep mentioning about fights tailored for EV training) What we need is two things: Actually get the game developed far enough so that we can actually test and go beyond theoretical discussions on this subject, and ideas on how to identify fix such problems preemptively through the discussion we're having right now by going into far more specific cases. So, first of all, "bigger rewards" isn't really something that should be considered. We'll be using those to dictate the game pace, and we'll try to keep it quick. The bigger issue is that you'll spend most of your time doing the story quests, which aren't repeatable, and therefore not a reliable training method. You'll get one high level party, and that's it. I already talked about this before. So we need to find problems and solutions to them while ignoring the fact that the story exists - It is a quick ride for your first party of starmon to a high level (Story will most likely end a good time before level 100. In addition to time requirements, I think if I have to stretch it out for too long it'll decrease in quality), and it only works once. And this is a game where, if you want to do more than the story, you have to eventually get a large amount of starmon to level 100 so that you can have a more diverse team and try different strategies, so we need a very reliable and repeatable method to have a "pleasant grind" for that. One thing I suggested earlier was changing the XP formula to include relative levels - It allows you to quickly pull a new party member to your average level. This also makes the story more effective at training new starmon after you did the quests, as you now have a party that is capable of pulling new members up to their level. I think this will be very effective, but it only solves half of the problem kinda - You still need a source of experience. I might try to think of unique minigames or such stuff that don't involve traditional battles (or maybe do) that can serve as an alternative XP source should a player get bored of standard battles. also, to touch on your multiplayer/pvp comment: Yea, I think it's very important that we have an easy to get into PvP system. So, as suggested earlier, we can make that battle type that equalized teams. I said no rewards, but I think that may be the wrong thing to do. So, here's my idea:
- 0 EVs. This makes the battles different than non-equalized ones, as the proportions between stats change, and encourage players to actually reach max level and try the "real" fights.
- Undecided on IVs. Probably 0 as well for the same reason
- Moves: Little to no starmon learn a move past level 60, which means you unlock your starmons full move list relatively early. The last/level-50+ moves are in most cases powerful TM moves as well. (Fire Blast, Thunder, Solarbeam, Overdrive, etc.), so setting up your moves shouldn't be an issue.
- Levels: I think letting players pick the level of the fight would be best. Would probably add a minimum limit of about 30-50 though to avoid as many possible issues with my next point as possibe.
- Auto-evolve: We've got this in place for AIs, when they are generated, the system checks whether the starmon is at or above its evolve level and evolves it if yes. This doesn't work on non-level evolutions though (Happiness, trade, stones). We could add this so that really low level players (<25) can still try relatively fair fights against higher level trainers without suffering from crappy base stats due to unevolved sarmon.
- The reason for the minimum level on such fights is so that you can't run into the reverse evolution problem: Doing a level 10 fight, meaning the low level players starmon don't auto evolve and have crappy base stats, while the other player has a fully evolved party.
- Would also add auto-learn moves in case a players starmon has an empty slot - It would just grab the last move it could learn for that level. Starmon usually have all 4 move slots filled by level 13-17 though, so this would very rarely be used.
- Rewards: No rewards would probably be a bit extreme and annoying. Not sure what rewards to give though - I want proper battles to be better than equalized ones. Money earned will be determined by players (Each player pays the same amount of money for the battle, winner takes all), so what we have left is pretty much Arena Points. I guess we could have equalized battles give an XP reward post-battle based on the average level of the party (So starmon participation doesn't matter either, it'll just be a number give to all party members), and maybe a low amount of arena points. "Real battles" could award more arena points, or maybe yet another currency used for more special items (OP PvE items maybe?), and maybe a good amount of recorded stats (Could easily implement an Elo system I think)
Ok, I'm tired and wanna go to sleep. Feel free to leave feedback :)0
I don't think it's really possible to make a pokemon style game without grindyness. The entire point of it is to capture some creatures and train them until you are the best. Training pretty much equals grinding.
The games "guide" the players through the guide, give him another objective, through the storyline and the massive zones the player needs to get through to reach the next city. But at some point the player just gets stuck due to being too weak and has to take a break to just get a few levels.
Games in which character progression is a big factor generally require some grinding. The first playthrough of D3 can be considered as story focused I guess, but after that its all grinding to get better numbers. Mass Effect doesn't have too important character progression and focuses a lot more on the story - Character progression isn't the core feature there, being too low levelled/having too few upgrades doesn't make the game impossible or insanely hard, so there aren't even any good options for grinding (by "good options" I mean something straightforward and repeatable that gives XP and/or money). Skyrim is somewhere in between, you can just explore and do quests for the sake of exploring and doing quests, and due to how Skyrim scales you generally won't find anything that's impossible to do due to being too weak, but if you want to have a strong character you're gonna be spending a good amount of time grinding skills, collecting crafting materials and gold, doing very specific quests for their rewards (Azura's star for example) etc.
The pokemon games, including Starmon, are about character progression, much like MMOs. The story is a way to get player through the grind/forget about the grind/keep them from realizing it's just one big grind.
Remember what the popular opinions about every single feature of D3 that reduced the grind were? (Being able to switch spells whenever you want, not having something permanent like a talent tree, less time overall needed to reach max level, auction house, etc.) Not that I agree with those arguments/complaints, just giving an example of what happens when you take grind out of a popular grind based game.
Now, with all that said, there are different levels of grinding. I don't want to remove all the grindibg, but I do want to cut down on the time it takes to get through the game and to level more (alternative) team members to 100. But I don't think that it's even close to possible for us to remove the need to battle outside of quests or so (In other words, allow you to play only the story and side quests to level, like mass effect 3), and we're not going to aim for that. Making quests takes time and space, and we'd prefer using as little as possible of the former and simply don't have much of the latter. We'll make sure that it doesn't take horrendously long, but we're not gonna remove all "grinding". We're not just gonna hand you level 100 starmon with perfectly set up IVs and EVs, you're gonna have to work for them. We're gonna add in quests for all stages of the game and also repeatable quests that don't care what your completion/level is so that at no point the only option left is to grind (Unlike pokemon, which rarely had anything/much after you completed the story. Silver/Gold had the most post-end content, but even then, after you beat Kanto and Red, you've got about 20 levels to go), we'll try to accelerate things and make them as interesting as possible. We'll do our best to reduce the grindy elements of the game, but we won't straight up remove them.
I guess we can add a PvP mode where all starmon get set to a specific level (Chosen by the players) and have all EVs, maybe even IVs, set to 0. Zelda already set up a system that automatically evolves random trainer starmon if they are able to (So that we don't have trainers with level 70 metapods), maybe we can throw that one in as well. Probably won't have such matches affect a players PvP stats and won't reward the secondary currency (I think we'll call it Arena Points.)
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I said they were hidden in pokemon. They're not really hidden here since the genetics lab reveals all the numbers and allows you to modify them, and the NPCs will explain things to the player should he ask.
As for how fast you can EV train, iirc with all the possible boosters in pokemon it actually went pretty fast. You can get 100 with vitamins. 3 is the highest possible you can get from defeating a starmon. Double it with a held item. Pokemon had the PokeRus virus thingy that doubled EVs again iirc, but we're not gonna add that - I think a consumable would be better. So, that's 12 per starmon. You're gonna need to defeat 13 starmon to max out your EVs in a single stat. Now, unlike the pokemon games, we're gonna add a system that can hand you battles against such starmon on a silver platter. Pick a stat and be thrown into a fight against a trainer with only starmon that award that stats EVs. So, about 120k money + whatever the consumable costs + the held item + KO 13 starmon and you've EV trained one stat. Tbh, 120k shouldn't be hard to get by the time EV training really becomes noticeable. And you can just fight 8 additional starmon instead if you don't have the money.
Money/BP grinding will probably coincide with trying to get your starmon to reach level 100, as you need to fight a lot in those later levels, and the arena is the easiest place to repeatedly get high level opponents.
Yea, it sounds pretty grindy, but pokemon was pretty damn grindy later on as well. We're already doing things to make it easier, like XP rewards on quests, karma rewards, easily accessible fights for all levels and we'll probably add some consumables as well.
As for Repel: I was thinking of having it time based, but making it tick only while in grass is really easy to do (Probably easier than time based in our current system :p )
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Haven't seen the mech zergling, will have to take a look. (Already using zergling and a zergling retexture, I guess this could be one of those optional evolutions that change stats instead of increasing :) )
Once we start setting up TMs and what moves starmon can learn through TMs (I should put that on my to-do list...) I'll get you a list with pictures of the starmon, their base stats and so on. Tbh, I don't think it'd be a bad thing to give milestone trainers one completely off-type starmon as long as it sorta fit in with the rest of the team (So if you're gonna go for a ton of high speed starmon, I can add another high speed starmon that isn't electric and doesn't know electric moves. Also, we can cheat and give it an electric move like Volt Switch anyway :P )
I'm avoiding sc2 models even if I can use them for good steel/mech starmon as I want this map to feel more "special". It'll just give a better impression if people come into this map and see unfamiliar models. Doesn't mean I'll avoid Sc2 models altogether, if I find really good ones I'll use em.
I don't really see why giving people with knowledge an advantage is a bad thing. Why reward people for being lazy? Why not reward them for doing some research and spending some time optimizing their starmon?
The advantage won't be too massive either. Your stats can differ by a maximum of 95 (Bigger difference for health as it uses a different formula, also not counting natures), but that's assuming the other guy has has zero IVs and EVs, and that just won't happen. If you don't know much about EV training/Don't give a crap, it just means they won't be focused on specific stats, not that you won't have EVs at all, and getting perfect IVs is pretty damn hard, even with rerolls. So in the end you'll end up with lets say 50 more points in a stat, which is at most going to be around 20-25% higher than your opponent, depending on the starmon. It's still a decent advantage, but I'm sure that can easily be overcome by using the right moves and type advantage to your favor.
Of course, EV training will be made a bit easier. Like in the normal games, we'll include ways to increase EV gains, like using held items and maybe even some consumables that give a timed bonus. And I already said I was going to have a place where you can pick fights based on EV rewards (So you can pick "Special Attack" and you'll fight a trainer that has only starmon with Special Attack as EV rewards), that way trainer randomization won't slow the process down and you won't even need to know what starmon gives what EVs.
The genetics Lab Zelda is working on allows you to view IVs and EVs, which was something that wasn't possible in pokemon (You could only get rough estimations from certain NPCs), and you can reroll your IVs and reduce your EVs (Which was possible by feeding pokemon certain berries). Zelda already implemented the vitamins that give you +10 to any EV (capped at 100)
As for TMs, I definitely don't want them limited to a single use for your entire playthrough. Not sure whether we should make them completely reusable, or to have them be single-use, but you can buy each TM at a special shop after you unlock it (Finding it, player level/progress or whatever) so they're not really that limited.
Talking about TMs, not sure whether we mentioned this before, so I'll just say it now (again, maybe):
Fly and Surf won't be HMs, they'll be TMs. No real point in making a distinction if you have an unlimited amount of them anyway (Either via unlimited uses or being able to buy em), and we can't be bothered to implement the "Can't overwrite this move" mechanic for HMs (It's annoying anyway)
Second of all, we've decided to not add Surf out of combat. I've run into issues setting up the animations for it (For some reason I can't have the damn trainer jump on the damn turtle. He always ends up just falling down the abyss and then suddenly appearing on it, which is not supposed to happen...), having a way to detect the edges of water might become performance intensive (might not, not sure, haven't tested) and might prove to be problematic when it comes to terraining, plus we might not have as much space as we'd hoped for the ocean zone.
We'll be replacing the ocean zone with some tropical islands, and we'll use shallow water the same way as tall grass there and in the beach zone as well. Will share more details as we plan them out :)
EDIT: Will look at your models, SoulFilcher.
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Not entirely sure what you mean by "I downloaded custom units". Did you download a mod file, a map file, or are you talking about 3D models? (.m3 files) Because generally, you can't download units. You set them up in the editor. You can do that in a mod file, which can then be used by any map by adding it to its dependencies (Place it in your installation->Mods folder, then in the editor open whatever map you want them in, File->Dependencies, click "Add Other" and switch to the local tab or whatever the not-battle.net one is called and select your mod)
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Yes, it already does. I believe Zelda was planning to implement rarity as well (Common, uncommon, rare)
Maybe. Will see. Reason I don't like it is because it practically just turns into "Find other player, click button to evolve starmon" and it sorta removes the "difficulty" from trade evolutions. On the other hand, the "difficulty" in trade evolutions comes mostly from people being dicks... I guess we probably will add it, but no promises on this one.
@Trieva: Go
Not saying there won't be non-combat stuff in the story, just that as combat is the main point of the game I think we should avoid large gaps and/or have the non-combat stuff be optional content. If you grab a couple of Repels to stop wild starmon from attacking you, you could say that we already have a few non-combat quests (If you manage to avoid the random trainers as well :p )
Anything that is 100% non-combat (So no wilds or random trainers either) would pretty much have to take place in only the city or be some sort of minigame or something else that keeps the player stationary.
I think the beach may be a good place for some minigames though.
We won't remove any of the pokemon features like EV or happiness - They're already fully implemented anyway, wouldn't make it any easier for us and would just remove depth from the game for people who really want to have the best of the best starmon. It's not like the features complicate things for the player - Most of those values are hidden in the pokemon games anyway. People play through the games without knowing that those mechanics even exist, and it doesn't hurt them.
I'll see if I can find some vids of that game later to see what you mean :)
I think all the starmon currently implemented were actually shown off in this thread in posts like my last one. Unfortunately, not too many electrics :( Shock-eve won't have amazing speed though. Probably good speed, but not crazy good. Considering it'll be able to paralyze people, it doesn't even need that much speed.
Current Electrics are Probichu->Zenchu (Sentry model), Galvamine->Galvadrone (Spidermine and PDD model, practically magnemite and magneton) and Shockeve. Got a "bird" line as well, but I either have to find other models or scrap it. It's using observer->phoenix->hero phoenix from SC2, and... Well, SC2 models suck for starmon :p
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Hey, it's me again, I know it's been really long since my last post, sorry about that, bla bla bla, more sarcasm, bla bla bla
Anyway, I did some work on the map today (very little, to be honest. Mostly testing and finding bugs for Zelda.)
Here's what I have done:
Ignore the back line in this image for now, and focus on the four starmon in the front.
On the left we have a little black fox called Eve. It's a cute little Dark-Type starmon that is incredibly rare. So rare that it's almost impossible to find in the wild. If you wanna get one, you'll have to find another way to get it. Some NPC might give one to you if you're lucky ;)
To it's right we've got Freeve, the Ice-Dark evolution of Eve. It's heart is as cold as its attacks, it aims to weaken its foe before killing it. The only way to get Eve to evolve into this creature is by exposing it to something very cold.
Next up we've got this horrible looking creature Helleve. Who needs muscles and organs when instead you can just watch the world burn? This Dark-Fire starmon will specialize in searing the flesh off of his enemies bones. Turning Eve into such a hellish creature requires immense heat.
Next up is Shockeve. It's the only Eve-olution that loses the Dark Type, and instead it gets Steel to complement its Electric type. While it won't match the sheer firepower of its fire counterpart (hehe he... puns) or even that of its frosty relative, you could argue that being unstoppable is far more dangerous.
The others in this picture serve as size references mostly. The four in the back are the four trade evolutions: Mortessus (Ghost Ice), Thangur (Fight), Shelob(Rock Ice) and Roknarr(Rock Fire)
Alright, now that I'm done with the descriptions, lets discuss. First of all I would've preferred "cute" models like with Eevee, but those aren't easy to come by :(
Not much has been planned about this thing. Three evolutions, perhaps more if I can find more (Actually have an idea for one more, but I want to make it at least five total then). Fire will be sheer damage, Ice will be control and Electric will be the tank/bruiser (Being a steel type already makes it very hard to kill, so I don't need to make its base defenses too high and can give it good offensive stats instead)
Haven't decided how to get Eve or evolve them yet. Either the stones, like in the original games, or location based like the Gen IV eevees. We've got a snow covered mountain zone, a volcano zone (planned) and the power plant. If we decide to not use stones, I'd do the same for other starmon as well (Probichu will evolve the same way as Eve->Shockeve then, for example)
For acquiring Eve, I think the professor giving it to you might be a good idea - You're a decent trainer that already helps him by using the Stardex, what better way is there to get info on a genetically unstable starmon than giving it to such a trainer?
Not sure about their abilities yet, but I want to make them something unique. Here are the first three ideas that popped into my head:
Ice: Being faster than the opponent amplifies damage dealt. (Encourages usage of slows)
Fire: +5 or 10% additional burn chance on all damaging moves (even if the moves themselves can't cause burn), (+10% damage to burnt enemies as well maybe?)
Electric: Ok, this one is more complex. Using or being hit by electric moves gives 1 shock charge. When you have 4, you get a Shock Shield that prevents the damage from the next damaging attack. If that attack was a contact move (Melee, practically), the attacker takes damage and has a chance to be paralyzed. If it wasn't, you immediately get another shock charge.
This passive would make it tankier and make it a good starmon vs melee starmon (If you have Static Field up, getting hit by a melee/contact attack deals damage to the attacker, so you get a charge)
So, any comments or ideas?
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Very interesting and thought out backstory, Chaos :)
First of all: The Coalition is led by the Quantum Legion, who are very pacifistic. They would not have anyone assassinated and would veto and suggestions of it. The Magratheans and Tirions aren't military factions so they leave cases like Castellan to the other factions. While the Aranov Consectorate used to be quite the stereotypic dictatorship before, Domovoi Aranov despises his father and does his best to not be like him. While I wouldn't say an assassination is past him, he wouldn't easily consider one.
That leaves two factions, The Pirates and the Auruleans. Doom Bonecrusher simply wouldn't care, and the Auruleans and Aranov Consectorate despise him enough that they wouldn't even consider hiring him (In case of Aranov, it'd be high ranking personnel left over from Aranov's fathers time paying and ordering the assassination by themselves, without authorization, and once found out they'd probably be sent to jail). The Auruleans themselves however are some mean sons of bitches and also happen to be the ones manufacturing stealth equipment and training ghost and spectre operatives for the entire Coalition. It wouldn't be the first thing they've done behind the Coalitions back either.
In short: Change that part of your backstory to specifically mention the Auruleans. The other Coalition factions wouldn't order a hit on someone.
Of course, after Castellan runs and steals stuff from the Auruleans, he'd officially become a fugitive and wanted criminal, so that stuff is ok.
And the last bit is a bit problematic: There weren't many big battles in the last few years. The three races are only fighting amongst themselves (Coalition vs Outsider, Imperium vs Exiled, almost every brood vs almost every brood), Castellan would only really have had work opportunities in Outsider space.
Character details:
Dispersion Shield:
How exactly are you thinking this should work? If you take 22 damage, does it get reduced to 11, or does only the surplus 2 damage get halved, so it ends up 21?
The former is rather weird, as dealing less damage actually ends up dealing more damage. The latter is useless with its current numbers, as almost nothing deals 20 damage in a single hit to begin with, and you'll still end up taking quite a lot of damage even from that.
I think this ability would probably be best with the latter way, but it reducing everything after 5. Fully upgraded marines will do 7 damage (Down from 9), Zerglings 6.5 (down from 8), Stalkers and marauders 9 (from 13), Immortals 14 (from 26), Sieged Tanks 23 (from 41? not sure). More effective than standard Hardened Shields against low damage units while still very good against high damage units.
The other "hero" units get the same version of this ability, no need to make it weaker.
This would literally just cost you 1 point if you added it as DPS instead of an ability.
This doesn't need to be an ability. Hero units can have multiple weapons as long as none of them have stats that exceed what you bought (Also, you can't make the melee weapon stronger because it isn't using the points invested in the range stat, just in case you were wondering)
Removing those two as abilities, your honor guards weapon switch ability and paying 1 point for the bonus damage reduces your heroes cost by 34 points combined, without actually losing anything.
About your second character, the lore is completely up to Wind, but I like what you wrote :) Telemose could create a very interesting story, probably more so than Castellan (Not saying Castellan is bad, I just think Telemose has a better set up for a really cool story), and could probably lead to some very interesting interactions with the Black Hand (New terran faction introduced in the last few posts)
As for the abilities:
Not sure whether bonus damage vs Heroic should be allowed. There aren't many heroic units in the first place, all of them are hero characters obviously, so having a tool that makes killing important characters easier is something that I don't think may be a too good idea I think. Also, don't think you really need cooldowns on your abilities. First passive is fine by me, the second passive is a bit trickier, I guess it might be fine, might not. It's ultimately Wind's decision anyway :p
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Yes, that's how it worked in all the pokemon games as well, save for a few specific cases, like Scyther->Scizor I keep mentioning.
Yes, and also the equialents of Caterpie->Metapod->Butterfree - They reached stage 3 incredibly quickly and are very powerful early game pokemon, but their base stats aren't comparable to other stage 3 pokemon that are evolved into 20-40 levels after them, so their OPness is short lived. It'll be the same in Starmon, although these starmon will have a less bad lategame (They'll still be the weakest evolved starmon in the game, the difference just won't be as large as in pokemon. On the other hand, there will be little to no other below-average starmon, so they'll kinda be the only ones with crappy base stats)
I actually mentioned this at the end of my previous post. Level and Happiness evolutions (which are the only evolutions that aren't entirely under the players control) can't be stopped. Pokemon made unevolved pokemon learn moves faster, and in some cases learn moves that their evolutions didn't. I'm not really a fan of that, partially because I just don't like that mechanic in the first place and partially because setting up move lists for starmon is already annoying enough if I don't have to write up the entire list three seperate times and don't have to change what levels the moves are learned at. (Currently the move lists for starmon only include moves they can learn before levelling up. Evolved starmon include the move list of the previous one + new moves until their next evolution or levels 55-65 in case of fully evolved starmon. Writing the previous move list into an evolution is already a quite annoying and time consuming process and pretty much the thing that takes the most time when adding in a new set of starmon.)
I'd prefer avoiding the White List altogether. As I mentioned earlier, there was an option that allowed you to play downloaded/cached maps "offline", but I'm not sure whether it still exists. I don't remember any patch notes saying it was removed, I'll just have to find it now that the Arcade and HotS restructured the menus. So once we do the alpha test, you guys will be able to play it on your own. If you want to play multiplayer we can probably just determine a time and Zelda or I (depending on who publishes the map) will come online and set up a lobby.
But if we do have to resort to a white list, we'll make sure to make it clear on the loading screen, and possibly even include a little demo gameplay for people not on the list. And yea, we already used URL shorteners for RuneCraft.
Probably. Some Starmon might even have their passive ability increase their limit. And it's more likely to be +20-30 I think. +10 is barely 1-2 extra moves, getting an item that makes moves hit harder instead would be a far more efficient way to increase how long you are able to fight at a time.
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A "Create Unit" effect is obviously used to create units.
A "Create Persistent" effect is able to use effects at an offset (So you can make it use a Create Unit effect far away from where the Persistent was initially cast)
An "Issue Order" effect is able to issue the Attack order. Set up the target fields correctly (Unit receiving the order should be "Target", unit targetted by the order should be "Caster") and have the Create Unit effect use this effect as its "Spawn Effect" (I think its called that, might be something else, should be very obvious though)
Using those three effects with a specific unit as a caster should allow you to create units a good distance away and immediately make them attack the "caster" (The caster by default won't use any animations or have anything else in the game indicates he's the caster). This will however make them completely ignore other units. You can make the attack order target Caster Point instead of Caster Unit, which will make them attack the first unit they see on their way to the point the caster was at the time of "casting". If you want them to attack the first best unit on their way to the caster but also track the casters location, it's gonna get a tiny bit more complicated (You're probably gonna have to mark the caster with a behavior and have the dudes have a behavior that periodically searches for enemies with that specific behavior and gives an attack order)
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Combat is pretty much what the entire game revolves around, it's what makes it what it is. I'm not saying we shouldn't make any non-combat part, but it needs to added smartly. In Mass Effect 1 you come to the citadel and I'm sure you remember just how much time you spent on there, going from character to character and doing stuff... There were a few short combat moments involved, but overall that stuff just took way too long for an action game. Oh, it was great for building up the story, teaching the player whats going on, but I got really annoyed that I couldn't just play the damn game because I was stuck in this incredibly long "running errands" period.
What I'm trying to say is that if we add non-combat stuff to Starmon, which I'm sure we will, we'll have to make sure it doesn't just break the flow of the game and the players just get locked into a long boring walk they possibly won't enjoy: I know a lot of people love lore and story in games, but I'm sure there's just as many, if not more, that don't really care much, and getting stuck in such a long "pause" would put them off.
Non-combat optional/Side quests would be a good way to add such content: As it's optional, you'll not get stuck doing something that bores you.
As for minigames: The only reason I can think of not to add any is time. So, if we have time, we might just add some if we get good ideas for them and how to implement into the game (Not only technically, but also story/gameplay-wise)
Not sure what you mean. EVs are gained by KO-ing pokemon/starmon and capped at 255 per stat / 512 total. Evolved starmon generally grant more EVs when KO's, which I think is only fair considering they're tougher. Pidgey being useless doesn't have anything to do with EVs, but base stats and the fact that he's unevolved (Which actually goes back to the point of base stats. Evolutions almost always just straight up have higher base stats)
I'm still fairly certain you're asking for something like the Scyther->Scizor evolution, where evolution is not mandatory and doesn't actually grant a stronger starmon, just redistributes the stats in a different way. I.E. evolve into a different set of stats instead of a stronger set of stats.
(also, for the record, we have no way to prevent happiness/level up evolutions at the moment, they will just happen with no way to stop them. This makes it a lot easier to set up move sets for me)
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@FenixKissKerrigan: Go
Hey! Nice seeing some more interest in the RP :) But I highly recommend reading my first post, especially the "Premise" part. (There's buttons on the right that reveal the text, just in case you didn't notice) It goes over the very basics, but most importantly it mentions that this doesn't take place in the canon SC2 universe
What this means is you need to skim over the existing factions listed in the second post, and possibly some of the general backstory, because this does not involve anything from SC and SC2 - There are different planets, different factions, different characters. The SC universe is fairly vague in a lot of areas in its lore, which makes using the original setting a bit harder as you'd have to sift through wikis just to make sure you don't contradict anything, and creates other issues for the GMs. The advantages of using a new, (even more-)fictional setting are first of all more freedom as there's no chance of us contradicting official lore, and possibly more importantly: we define the lore. If something is vague, you PM the relevant GM and he can tell you the details. If you want to have a big role in some faction, you have more freedom doing so.
Anyway, as for your battlecruiser, it currently costs 80 points. You start with 300, which means if you want to divide them equally among an army, ship and hero character, that leaves you with another 20 points to use on it.
The Flagship is technically seen the only mandatory thing you need to have, but not having an army or at least hero characters that can properly enter a battle somewhat limits your role in the RP (Not saying it's exactly bad, you'll just have to be more imaginative and will have to find other ways to make an impact in the story)
If you have issues with the entire point system and the armies, feel free to message me and I'll help wherever I can. I know it's quite scary/confusing for a start, but trust me, the rest of the RP won't be like that at all. It's like buying a new house with new furniture, and going to Ikea with €2000 to spend on furniture. Yea, you'll have to buy a lot of stuff and spend a lot of money at one point, won't be too sure what to do with it, but once you're done with all that you have your furnished house and can do stuff with it, and if you need something else you forgot earlier or just couldn't afford, you save up for it and buy it later.
@ChaosInfinityLord: Go
That's quite the wall of text. I was kinda busy today, I'll go over it tomorrow :) Nice to have you back.
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Whitelist: Not sure, but before the Arcade you could play "vs AI" or something like that from the singleplayer menu, and it'd take about 5 minutes to load the list of maps, which would include all cached maps (i.e. everything you ever played on that computer, including Arcade maps), I used that to play Magicide before Eiviyn published it. Since the Arcade moved a lot of stuff around, I'm not sure whether that exists anymore :/
Also, one thing to point out: Chances are you don't get to keep your saves from the alpha. You might for a good amount of versions, but we might have to reset your progress to test something we added in earlier/fixes to quests, or simply because we changed something fundamental in the saving method. For example, you Stardex will most definitely be wiped - I haven't added in all Starmon yet, and Mei (The dark doll girl) for example will always be at the end of the list with the other legendaries, but if you guys see her, right now it would mark ID 81 as revealed, and if I added more Starmon and moved Mei to the back of the list again, you guys would have whatever starmon is now #81 is revealed again, without ever seeing it.
@SoulFilcher: Go
Looking at how fast we're working, that's a looooooooooooong time til we're done :p Also, had an idea how you could add eyes to the model you already sent me - Just make some indents, don't fill them. Maybe even indent a smile, or change its texture in a way that it roughly forms a smile. It'll be enough for people to see a friendly face, like when you look at some cars you can roughly make out a face with the headlights being the eyes, and some other machines/devices sometimes have faces as well.
Parties will stay 2 player. double battles already caused enough problems and delays, and tripple battles would probably require more cameras so that you can actually see everything, and possibly even force us to make the arenas larger.
You'll be able to play through everything together with another person, but storywise it'll be exactly the same as if you went alone. Quests are already enough work without us having to create mildly different versions for co-op.
Don't think that's very practical for evolution lines consisting of only the base starmon and a single evolution. If it were something like Base -> Stage 1 via levelling -> Stage 2 via Trade, then Stage 2 could have significant stat changes. But the basic stage needs to have below average stats to match other low level starmon, which means the evolution will naturally be overall stronger. Yea, I can take away from a certain stat and put it into another if it makes sense thematically, but that isn't really what you're asking for - It's not really a choice, since the non-evolved form will be a lot weaker overall.
What you want is something like Scyther->Scizor. Due to Scyther having had 500 base stat total in Gen I (Which is pretty high), they just couldn't make his evolution more powerful when they added it in Gen II, so instead they cut his speed stat by 40 and shoved it into attack and defense.
The most obvious and best example on how to implement this is Eevee - You've got quite the choice to make. I'll be adding an Eevee in, probably very soon. I couldn't find a third model that fit, so I'll likely use the Predator from the SC2 campaign.
I'll see if I can find something which I can turn into a Scyther/Scizor type evolution, but I wouldn't get my hopes up :/ Evolution chains are already hard enough to find in the WoW model files, but finding similar yet different enough models where one doesn't look weaker than the other will be harder.
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@FunBotan: Go
When you have any window of the editor open, in the top bar where there's "File" and "Edit" and so on, go to "Window" and click on Lighting.
I believe it will by default pick the lighting used by your map, but I'm not 100% sure on this, so double check (I think default lighting is defined in the same place as your Terrain textures, fog color and so on, forgot the tabs name)
I also can't remember exactly which tab it was in the lighting editor, but it should be very obvious which one edits lighting regions (Since you'll be able to pick between 4 of them). You can then paint these regions onto the map in the terrain editor.
Another possible thing to do is create/edit another lighting set of its own, place a regular region in the terrain editor and then have a trigger switch the players lighting when he enters/leaves that region. (This changes the lighting for the entire map at once, so having a locked camera is probably best, which obviously won't really work in big RTS maps where the player has to look at multiple places, in which case you should definitely use lighting regions)
This method also breaks "Day of time" lighting (In the lighting window you can have it change lighting depending on the day of time and have it transition between things like day and night, have shadows move as time passes, etc. Changing lighting by trigger removes that functionality)
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That's a good idea. But the stealing-when-losing part wouldn't make sense lorewise - You've got nothing to threaten the guy with, while he is quite literally able to kill you.
We want to use this system as much as possible. We might neglect the middle ground at the start because it might just be way too much work in addition to the already two seperate storylines we have, but we want it to be viable in the long run.
Eh... Not sure I like this idea. Too easy to abuse for good karma, makes "evil" players play more risky (and punishes them for playing safe by screwing with their karma) and punishes ill prepared players that don't want bad karma.
Not sure whether that can be implemented easily and visibly. And in the end, they'd always end up with the players karma anyway, so it's practically just another "happiness" value.
Eeeeh... Karma won't affect this directly. It's kinda more the other way around... You'll be doing quests which obviously affect one or both sides, and those change your karma appropriately.
Was definitely planning on it. Maybe even the third, but probably not. Just not sure how and when we'll give it to the player.
We haven't decided yet who the player is and so on, and I'm thinking of keeping it relatively vague, possibly adding a customizeable background (Like in GW2)
Really don't like this idea. It'd pretty much just delay the entire game, force the player to do things that are completely unrelated mechanically. Imagine you join a custom map that advertises itself as a pokemon clone, and you don't get any pokemon. You'll just go wtf and ragequit after 5 minutes.
If we have space, maybe. We're definitely adding a sort of hideout, but right now the plan is to not have it actually connected to any zone and just port players over when necessary.
It's mostly Arena City dudes vs Cipher. Legendaries will be more similar to natural disasters than an actual faction in an FFA, and the starmon themselves won't end up uniting and become a faction. That shit's going down between the two factions we have though will be very clear.
Answered the backstory thing above. This is an interesting idea.
There's a limit to what we can do. Technically, it's possible, but we also had an alpha test planned for late April, didn't we? There's just some pretty cool ideas that will have to be ignored for the sake of time, and I think this will be one of them :(
The main story quest won't be "beat the arena". The player might want to become the best, but it won't be the focus of the story. Shit's gonna go down and the player's gonna get dragged into it. The player can pursue his goal of advancing in the arena while plans are being made and prepared, while he isn't needed by his allies. Then, after the main story ends, the player will have a good chunk of the arena left to go.