Haha, that's a funny character for Mozared yet interesting.
Assuming that we're given EV control like I suggested, can we get starmon base stat info after we catch them?
Old WIP image of the stardex - some of the boxes like "moves" are empty here, but those have all been implemented already (I can't get the game to launch in a reasonable time so I cant get you a more up to date screenshot atm)
To make the battling more strategic I don't think increasing HP based on level will work. Starmon with high HP base stat, like snorlax/chansey, might be op or other starmon using/receiving HP based moves. The real issue is there's no balance in usefulness between high powered damaging moves and others (like status or buffs). Most status drain HP too slowly and their effects only have a chance of happening like paralyse. Why do anything 'smart' when you can just use a high powered 100% accuracy move? :P
I believe there are 2 ways to solve this:
Reduce high damaging move's effectiveness (eg tweak the formulas so regardless of what type of starmon or move power involved, it takes at least 4-6 hits to defeat the enemy).
Increase status move effectiveness. eg Paralyse will have a guarunteed effect of stunning the target for at least 1 turn. If their type resists electric then they can't be stunned for more than 1 turn. If immune, can't be stunned. Before you start saying this is op/imba, you're planning on making your electric starmon varied? As in they won't all have really high speed. Another balance for this could be the more often you paralyse the enemy, the more easily and quicker they can recover. Maybe with burn, have it disable all attack moves for a certain amount of turns. Also give some starmon the passive ability to resist/immune status and I think we're ok ;)
Other solutions I can think of that's prob easier for you guys to implement is some kind of held item:
Bright Gem. Reduces all damage by 50% for the first 4 turns of the battle of when switched in.
Toxic Sludge. Disables enemy attack moves for 2 turns if the first starmon or switched in.
OR make it that plenty of moves have about 60 or lower power. Anything above must do recoil damage. That way, players can use massive power if they want, just too much is unhealthy unless mixed with healing/defense moves :P.
In the early levels in the game, moves like Leer that lowered defense or poisons were quite useful because just spamming tackle took incredibly long to kill anything. Move damage scaled higher than pokemon health, so the other type of moves lost their usefulness - The change to the health formula should keep damage and health scaling closer together. And since most damage-per-turn moves (Things like whirlpool or statuses like poison and burn) deal % health, they are stronger than in the normal pokemon games due to the higher health. The higher health pool means more attacks, which means more chances for the secondary effect of a move to happen.
Making paralyse be a guaranteed stun practically turns it into flinch and/or protect. Keep in mind that it normally halves speed, so it can give your slower starmon an advantage. There's a move that makes use of speed difference (Higher damage the faster the caster is in relation to the enemy), and I think an item that does the same could be cool as well. 50% chance to prevent moves on paralyse is already pretty good. I think paralyse is fine as it is. Same goes for Burn - The damage is worth more due to the higher health, and the halved damage on physical moves might even be OP.
The higher health gives you more time to screw over an opponent who relies on sheer damage. Have a Meylir on your team (Grass + Psychic), have him cast Engrain, Light Screen/Reflect, and then have him spam calm mind and start wrecking with psychic (or giga drain if you want to go full drain-tank) once he's buffed up. Someone who relies on sheer damage moves will only have a couple of turns before a control oriented starmon like that becomes impossible to deal with, and with larger health numbers, a couple of turns probably won't be enough. Is that starmon OP / Uncounterable? No - Bring in a ghost to steal its stat buffs and burn its energy. Bring in someone with Punish and Brick Break. Paralyse and confuse it.
But at the moment this is all theorycrafting. I do think that increased health will help, the questions is just how much, and whether it is too much. And that can only really be answered once people start playing this map and try to abuse OP stuff. Most of our testing at the moment is focused on the early game, as that are the only parts we really worked on. I don't think we should do too much pre-emptive balancing, as we have yet to see how the few changes we already made will affect the game, how many problems they might cause - the more changes we make before testing everything, the more we can end up screwing up everything unintentionally.
But I think brute force should still be a viable strategy. Just look at other turn based games, card games mainly - You've got both rush decks and control decks quite commonly, and they are relatively well balanced - Control tends to come out on top, but a well set up and executed rush deck can easily go out of control.
Shoo! Back to exploring! And dont get eaten by huge spiders, k? btw moz, we're making your character get trapped in a cave with a lot of giant spiders for a quest
Random ideas:
Interesting quest variety. Just like the zelda games, some quests would appear at certain times of day or after completing other quests.
Randomised quests. These will prob be ones you can redo indefinitely (like errands for delivering stuff) that's slightly different each time you do this type of quest. For example for multiple errands, you may have to transport a different item from a different person to a different destination each time. It should hopefully solve the problem of 'running out of quests' so players don't have to grind for exp.
Ideally we'll have a lot of repeatable randomized stuff :) Definitely planned, we just have to get there.
More coop epicness. While I'm grateful for what's done for battles (yay! a massive improvement from pokemon imo!) there should be other things too. Maybe we can coop quests or do some kind of team-based events/mini-games. Maybe allow us to trade items/money with fellow players? I guess I'm looking for more ways to allow player interaction and helping eachother out. Maybe if we're give dialog choices from NPCs, some player can leave a good word for other players increasing their karma when they reach this NPC :P.
Trading will definitely be in (I think the current version is only limited to starmon themselves, but items and money should be doable. For the alpha itself, you can at least start a 1v1 with a large sum of money as a bet and then lose if you want to give someone money :p )
More realistic inventory. Remember how pokemon's backpacks were like armories that could hold many and heavy items? :P. I don't know if this idea would help but PC item storage seemed useless in pokemon. To make it more useful, how about stored items in the PC grow in number over time to some limit or grow in effectiveness? The manager of PCs might send my potion to the potion shop for an upgrade for my good karma then return it :P. Or maybe stored items get increased sell value or something.
We have no way to track real-time, and this seems like a very weird system :/ Also promotes "not using items" so that you can get more items that you can then... Continue not to use for more items you'll not use to get more items?
We don't even have item storage atm because there's no real point with the practically unlimited inventory space you have right now. Sometimes "realism" just adds little to the game and just ends up being annoying, and I think this may be one of those times - "Unlimited" inventory space (or at least more than you should realistically need) keeps it simple. The game isn't about inventory management anyway - This isn't diablo where you want to get tons of loot, this is a game with many super situational items that you don't want to use, but keep on you in case you do actually need them at some point.
Clarify the epic adventure. At the beginning of the game, show players the scope. Have our protagonist talk about catching em all, show us the 'town map' and just about anything else that mixes the story with hints at how fun the game will be :P. I'm hoping you guys will give us plenty of interesting things to do AND make the game extremely replayable, solo or coop.
Not entirely sure how we'll handle this. There'll definitely be a neat cutscene with an arena battle, and you'll be introduced to the arena system early on, with the goal of reaching the top (Which requires you to beat the trainer shown in the cutscene)
More involved characters. I'm tired of pokemon's stereotypical/simple jerk rival and gym leaders who think with their dicks/ego :P . Can we have it so the rival seems like a real person or even a friend? Same with team rocket or anyone else. If anyone's played Phoenix Wright you'll prob see how you can make characters definitely evil but seem misunderstood/damaged.
Rival definitely isn't a dick. He'll be a friend, maybe not one you had for long or knew too well, but the first friendly face you see. In the end, it might be you who ends up being the dick rival.
The leader of Cipher has had some losses, losses he wants avenged. Nothing more, nothing less. He has his reasons to do what he does, and after that he plans to keep his promises to the people who helped him with his goals.
The Police Chief will start his quest to protect his people, but things will not go smoothly, and he'll be given more and more reasons, some personal, to stop Cipher.
The Arena Master might not be the hero you expect him to be. You can't be sure if, when the time comes, he will even be there to help save the day...
You'll meet people on the way. Mozared, the explorer who's too lazy to do his own dirty work and decides to share his adventure with you. You'll run into a pair of quite memorable cipher agents multiple times throughout the story. You might find a mysterious figure, a wanderer, a man disinterested in the current ongoings and more interested in the origin of the Starmon themselves. There's that Cipher grunt who you probably don't even realize exists, but trust me, he'll remember you.
There'll be more characters once we actually get properly started with filling out the world. Random trainers will have random lines, which you'll probably get sick of after a while, but there will definitely be some nicely fleshed out characters (There already are for the alpha, you just wont get to see much of their stories yet, as even your own will barely have started)
Truly devastating legendaries. I don't know what your plans for them are exactly but cool it would it be if every now and then, they level a random town/city :P. In events like this we need to scramble for survival/shelter and this changes what wild starmon you find in the damaged town and trainers you bump into. Then have cool things like towns getting rebuilt over-time with cranes and other heavy machinery. Make the world truly alive and dynamic, if possible.
Trust me, when you find a legendary, the best course of action will be to spam the "run" button. We did go over this before. The legendaries will be... Well, Legendary. You won't capture them - You'll instead get a weaker form of them (offspring, clones, phoenix-style-reincarnation, whatever else we might come up with). The massive beasts that will rain fire, frost and lightning down onto you will be out of reach, and you hopefully out of theirs.
With the "no spaceships" stuff, I meant more of... Well, you know, some neat tech, like holograms and shit, but there's little focus on the new tech and it doesn't really feel too far off from what we have now. Just because someone has a laser/energy gun in an otherwise modern setting doesn't really make the entire thing feel sci-fi to me :/ Spaceships aren't necessary, but any setting that does have them already feels very futuristic and advanced. The books I was thinking of really don't feel like sci-fi: there's some neat advanced tech, but... well, those books even have a lot of fantasy mixed in, that kinda kills the sci fi feeling as well. It's kinda the reason why I didn't want to list Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead - Even though there's a tiny bit of spaceship and some AI involved, it focuses really heavily on social stuff and the technology and things like that are secondary. It's definitely sci-fi, it did cross that imaginary line where I consider it as such, despite the settings being quite similar to what we have today (except for the fact that its on another world and there's more than one intelligent species, but if those count then middle earth and elves/dwarves/orcs make LotR sci-fi), it's just a bit more about social stuff/morals/ethics/not-entire-sure-what-the-right-word-here-is than... Well, futuristic shit.
Books:
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (more for the humor than the sci-fi)
Ender's Game
Surprisingly, that's all I have.
Actually, I've got two starcraft books (had to DL the third one as an ebook, DT saga) and a book called "The Lost Art" which I liked.
(I've got some books with advanced tech, but no spaceships or far future shit, so I wouldn't consider those any more of a sci fi than some TV serie where they randomly have holograms for no reason)
Series:
Stargate (Didn't watch too much of SG1 - Was a little kid back then, watched with my parents every now and then. Watched all of Atlantis and Universe, both of which I quite liked)
Battlestar Galactica (Watched only first couple of seasons, not actually sure how far I got)
Doctor Who (Kinda obvious... Although its often not that sci fi and the actual future bits aren't as great as other series lately imo)
There's Eureka and Continuum for series set in our time with sci fi bits attached, I like those, but I want fucking spaceships :(
I'm sure I'm forgetting some great serie :(
Games:
Mass Effect
Starcraft
Star Wars Battlefront 2 (Was it called that?)
Sanctum 2
Space Pirates and Zombies
Starbound
Sins of a solar empire was decent
I'm sure I'm forgetting something here as well.
Not gonna go into movies. Only ones I can think of atm are the two Star Trek ones. I watched and liked a lot more movies than those two, I just can't remember shit :)
We may have discussed this before but I'm not willing to re-read so many posts :P . I'd like to suggest we have many conveniences. For starters, how about replacing HMs with items? I don't like using up a pokemon's move and I usually made it a throwaway party member which wasted space. Ideally it would be nice to train up my dream-team/competitive-team from the get-go.
We did talk about this :P Originally only Surf and Fly were planned as useable HMs, and after technical difficulties Surf was demoted to "just another move". With the teleporter system, Fly is merely a convenience, not something thats necessary.
This got me wondering, can we have an option to prevent any starmon from picking up certain EVs and be able to change that later if we wanted it? Maybe to make things simpler and possibly better, remove EV training and stats altogether.
We did discuss Ev training as well :)
There'll be a special place where you can pick fights based on EVs (So you fight trainers whose starmon award only specific EVs), and there will be an easy way to remove unwanted EVs from your starmon (and reroll IVs). We're not gonna remove em as it adds customization to starmon, which there is little to none of if we don't add new mechanics instead, and we want to stick to stuff people already know. We are however doing everything we can think of to make it easier and less "hidden" - As I said, you can remove them (which also means you can view em), you have an easy way to grind them, and we'll add ways to boost the speed at which you get them. Preventing pickup of certain EVs is probably doable, will think about that
Well, we're planning on the karma system which gives you different bonuses based on your choices (good/bad), and there will be a split storyline (For simplicities sake it will be almost identical, you just get to play it from opposite sides, so the actual quests will usually require you to do different things while the story stays the same). The last quest in the alpha will make you pick sides. We'll try and do as much as possible with the choices and karma system, but everything takes valuable time, so we'll see how well it goes.
I think we discussed a lot earlier in this thread the possibility of restarting the game (maybe even with a seperate save slot now that bank sizes shouldn't be an issue anymore.) with different options/challenges, perma-death being an example we talked about I think. When we get to making that we'll probably discuss it here and see if you guys have any great ideas for rules/challenges :) Some should be fairly easy to implement, like perma-death (Just needs a set of actions after the 0HP/Faint-check that checks whether perma-death is on and if yes delete the starmon from the bank), and some other "simple" rules like maybe "no items" would be really easy (That one is just simply disabling the buttons to all inventory tabs other than capture cores)
I don't want to change the starters though. I'd rather add an additional difficulty dialog before/after picking them - The starter itself shouldn't really indicate difficulty, and its also hard to tell the player what's going on without a massive wall of text. And in the end, as we have relatively few starmon, I want all of them to be viable and valuable, or at least as many as possible.
Also, iirc I tried to make sure that the first trainers in the arena, including the first milestone, shouldn't have a type advantage over the starters (Fire Starter is gonna be OP though cuz there's a lot of bugs. They don't have bug moves at that point, so grass starter is fine), I'd have to check again though, I think I modified the possible starmon trainers can get since I did all that. Young Kid trainers might have a chance to get one of the starters, so that could be a potential problem for yours :p But you should have a second or even third starmon before you can start expecting to win in the arena.
Cool. If I'm reading what Maity is saying correctly, you guys are almost ready for alpha testing. 6 player support isn't a big deal if we can test at least 2 players together imo. I'm not too concerned about 2v2 battles (for now) although I'd like to suggest a new idea. Instead of going with typical RPGs where a party battle simply meant adding more units in (with issues of balance and competitive play) how about Zelda builds a simpler system?
I'm thinking a tag team where players agree when they get to switch in their starmon but it's still 1v1. Then we could add interesting effects with a coop partner around like passive bonuses to the active combatants based on the the trainer or the starmon's ability that will be switched in next. I don't know how this'll work exactly but the idea is to try something new, potentially better, and easier to make/maintain. Maybe the passive coop partner can only use heal/support moves?
This wouldn't actually be "simpler" I think :p Plain and simple tag team may be possible (Swapping control with another player) but probably a short nightmare for Zelda, but adding more stuff to it is probably harder than setting up 2v2s (Which was mostly just modifying existing stuff to take into account the additional slots, targetting stuff and things regarding party sizes and switching). 2v2s are pretty much in already, the patch just broke them, and honestly I think that's the most straightforward way for coop to work - If you do tag-team, one player doesn't get to play much instead of getting to just do what he'd normally do together with a friend, it changes the game fundamentally.
As for 2v2s not being necessary for alpha - They are :p We want to test multiplayer, 2v2s and the story quests do include some 2v2 battles I believe (I can think of at least one, but I'm sure there's more)
Do you guys feel you need alpha testing? I'm patient with starmon and I assume you could test the map between you 3. If you release the alpha version on bnet I'm willing to try it every now and then and report my findings here.
We can't really test things between ourselves. The reason we can work together well as a team is because our times rarely collide :p Moz and I can probably play together a lot, but the only reason I get to talk to Zelda on skype is because my sleep schedule is fucked up :) (If you do some math, you'll notice this is being posted at about 3:30 AM CET) If we need to though we can probably set up a time for the three of us to test together, but there's a more important reason we want to test with other people: We don't get any "first impressions" from this, we don't know whether some things are too hard to understand, follow or find, because we made all this. We know how the game works, where we're supposed to go, etc. We've played this over and over again while testing. I made stuff the way I liked it, without much of a second opinion.
When we were making RuneCraft I made sure to get Eiviyn in on a game wrote down everything he criticized - It helped a lot. Getting another persons opinion on something really helps in finding flaws you didn't notice before.
When you think about it, we want an alpha for similar reasons why we have this thread - Talk about the map, share ideas and get feedback. And we also need to make sure it actually works with multiple players, what bugs can occur with multiple people, etc.
I've been lazy as fuck as well, no need to be sorry :p
I can't remember what our to-do list was >.>
For me: Some UI images, if I can be bothered making them, they're not necessary - I highly doubt you guys will be using the storage box much, and its completely functional already anyway, the buttons are just stand sc2 buttons. Looks quite ugly though, I do want to change that.
Make sure all starmon are ready, have a working move set and are available in the wild / somehow else. (Probably done)
Set up enough trainer types and arena fights (probably done)
"add more stuff" - Relatively unnecessary, for the alpha at least. I do need to get off my ass and add more stuff, there's a lot I need to do, but a lot of things I'd do now simply wouldn't be available in the alpha (We don't have an entire working map and story, so if I add more starmon there's a good chance they won't be available til who knows when. Adding more trainer types without starmon is a bit hard), which is one of the reasons I'm lacking motivation. So much of my stuff isn't necessary :(
I'd need to playtest for a couple of hours to figure out what I'm missing and work on that...
As for Zelda:
- Add 6 player support (That number of players is technically seen already supported, he just needs to make sure there's enough battle arenas for them all and that they're all linked up to the right cameras and then one of us changes the map settings to allow that many players in the lobby)
- Fixing bugs (Probably the biggest thing)
- Finalizing 2v2s (Making them work again in the first place, and then fixing some weird cases/bugs, like starting a 2v2 with only a single available starmon, knocking out two starmon in one go, etc. Also includes looking into whether an AI on the players side is possible with the current system (AIs were set up with us assuming they'll always be on the other side, a lot of stuff is skipped for the "player" side of the battle and the variables are set up differently for AIs)
- I think the last story quest we have in the alpha needs its alternate version/ending
- Modifying the story encounters to reveal the surprise I've been hinting at for quite a while (Actually, this might be up to me)
That should be it I think. There might be some missing UI stuff, I think trading is currently not possible because there is simply no way for a player to activate the trade triggers. (Trading works though, if you can start one)
Not sure about held items at the moment, but those aren't necessary for the alpha (in fact, don't expect many items or starmon abilities (the passive stuff) in the alpha - we have very few of them, and they're not really that necessary yet)
Hey, sorry about not answering yesterday, I read the posts and then.. No idea, did something else quickly and forgot. Happens more than you'd think.
Ideas are always welcome, we'll need em at some point so we can just go back here and look at em again when its time. Right now we're not doing much though :(
We won't abandon it, Zelda is just insanely busy with school/college stuff, and imo education > mapping. He said he'll have more time come December, so hopefully then we can start making progress again. It's so close to playable...
He also said something about the patch breaking 2v2s :( Let's hope he can fix that.
And holy crap Zelda's been productive in the past year!
Would also like to add that we've made a lot of use of "User Types" to use them instead of some records/variables (All the "Poke"dex, move/attack stats/info/etc, trainer types (Party compositions, chances, rewards, dialogues, etc.) and such things are all put into User Types, its a lot easier to manage, add new stuff and edit) which may account for a decent part of our Game Data size.
Currently procrastinating on doing any work on Starmon (I think a link should be in my sig? I guess I'll see after I posted).
Working on it together with Zelda, and Mozared is doing the terrain for us while multiple other people (SoulFilcher and Zolden in particular) occasionally help with assets. Zelda is incredibly busy at the moment and hasn't been able to open the editor in ages, and I'm just plain lazy.
It's a map based on the Pokemon games, with a few small changes of our own (Energy/mana pool instead of per-move PP, more unique passive abilities, a story not designed for 5 year olds, choice + karma system, higher max health lategame, legendaries that you don't want to get in a fight with, etc.) We're technically seen close to being able to test it with people, but as I mentioned above, its been a while since we worked on it >.>
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Old WIP image of the stardex - some of the boxes like "moves" are empty here, but those have all been implemented already (I can't get the game to launch in a reasonable time so I cant get you a more up to date screenshot atm)
In the early levels in the game, moves like Leer that lowered defense or poisons were quite useful because just spamming tackle took incredibly long to kill anything. Move damage scaled higher than pokemon health, so the other type of moves lost their usefulness - The change to the health formula should keep damage and health scaling closer together. And since most damage-per-turn moves (Things like whirlpool or statuses like poison and burn) deal % health, they are stronger than in the normal pokemon games due to the higher health. The higher health pool means more attacks, which means more chances for the secondary effect of a move to happen.
Making paralyse be a guaranteed stun practically turns it into flinch and/or protect. Keep in mind that it normally halves speed, so it can give your slower starmon an advantage. There's a move that makes use of speed difference (Higher damage the faster the caster is in relation to the enemy), and I think an item that does the same could be cool as well. 50% chance to prevent moves on paralyse is already pretty good. I think paralyse is fine as it is. Same goes for Burn - The damage is worth more due to the higher health, and the halved damage on physical moves might even be OP.
The higher health gives you more time to screw over an opponent who relies on sheer damage. Have a Meylir on your team (Grass + Psychic), have him cast Engrain, Light Screen/Reflect, and then have him spam calm mind and start wrecking with psychic (or giga drain if you want to go full drain-tank) once he's buffed up. Someone who relies on sheer damage moves will only have a couple of turns before a control oriented starmon like that becomes impossible to deal with, and with larger health numbers, a couple of turns probably won't be enough. Is that starmon OP / Uncounterable? No - Bring in a ghost to steal its stat buffs and burn its energy. Bring in someone with Punish and Brick Break. Paralyse and confuse it.
But at the moment this is all theorycrafting. I do think that increased health will help, the questions is just how much, and whether it is too much. And that can only really be answered once people start playing this map and try to abuse OP stuff. Most of our testing at the moment is focused on the early game, as that are the only parts we really worked on. I don't think we should do too much pre-emptive balancing, as we have yet to see how the few changes we already made will affect the game, how many problems they might cause - the more changes we make before testing everything, the more we can end up screwing up everything unintentionally.
But I think brute force should still be a viable strategy. Just look at other turn based games, card games mainly - You've got both rush decks and control decks quite commonly, and they are relatively well balanced - Control tends to come out on top, but a well set up and executed rush deck can easily go out of control.
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@Mozared: Go
Shoo! Back to exploring! And dont get eaten by huge spiders, k? btw moz, we're making your character get trapped in a cave with a lot of giant spiders for a quest
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Ideally we'll have a lot of repeatable randomized stuff :) Definitely planned, we just have to get there.
Trading will definitely be in (I think the current version is only limited to starmon themselves, but items and money should be doable. For the alpha itself, you can at least start a 1v1 with a large sum of money as a bet and then lose if you want to give someone money :p )
We have no way to track real-time, and this seems like a very weird system :/ Also promotes "not using items" so that you can get more items that you can then... Continue not to use for more items you'll not use to get more items?
We don't even have item storage atm because there's no real point with the practically unlimited inventory space you have right now. Sometimes "realism" just adds little to the game and just ends up being annoying, and I think this may be one of those times - "Unlimited" inventory space (or at least more than you should realistically need) keeps it simple. The game isn't about inventory management anyway - This isn't diablo where you want to get tons of loot, this is a game with many super situational items that you don't want to use, but keep on you in case you do actually need them at some point.
Not entirely sure how we'll handle this. There'll definitely be a neat cutscene with an arena battle, and you'll be introduced to the arena system early on, with the goal of reaching the top (Which requires you to beat the trainer shown in the cutscene)
Rival definitely isn't a dick. He'll be a friend, maybe not one you had for long or knew too well, but the first friendly face you see. In the end, it might be you who ends up being the dick rival.
The leader of Cipher has had some losses, losses he wants avenged. Nothing more, nothing less. He has his reasons to do what he does, and after that he plans to keep his promises to the people who helped him with his goals.
The Police Chief will start his quest to protect his people, but things will not go smoothly, and he'll be given more and more reasons, some personal, to stop Cipher.
The Arena Master might not be the hero you expect him to be. You can't be sure if, when the time comes, he will even be there to help save the day...
You'll meet people on the way. Mozared, the explorer who's too lazy to do his own dirty work and decides to share his adventure with you. You'll run into a pair of quite memorable cipher agents multiple times throughout the story. You might find a mysterious figure, a wanderer, a man disinterested in the current ongoings and more interested in the origin of the Starmon themselves. There's that Cipher grunt who you probably don't even realize exists, but trust me, he'll remember you.
There'll be more characters once we actually get properly started with filling out the world. Random trainers will have random lines, which you'll probably get sick of after a while, but there will definitely be some nicely fleshed out characters (There already are for the alpha, you just wont get to see much of their stories yet, as even your own will barely have started)
Trust me, when you find a legendary, the best course of action will be to spam the "run" button. We did go over this before. The legendaries will be... Well, Legendary. You won't capture them - You'll instead get a weaker form of them (offspring, clones, phoenix-style-reincarnation, whatever else we might come up with). The massive beasts that will rain fire, frost and lightning down onto you will be out of reach, and you hopefully out of theirs.
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@SoulFilcher: Go
With the "no spaceships" stuff, I meant more of... Well, you know, some neat tech, like holograms and shit, but there's little focus on the new tech and it doesn't really feel too far off from what we have now. Just because someone has a laser/energy gun in an otherwise modern setting doesn't really make the entire thing feel sci-fi to me :/ Spaceships aren't necessary, but any setting that does have them already feels very futuristic and advanced. The books I was thinking of really don't feel like sci-fi: there's some neat advanced tech, but... well, those books even have a lot of fantasy mixed in, that kinda kills the sci fi feeling as well. It's kinda the reason why I didn't want to list Xenocide and Speaker for the Dead - Even though there's a tiny bit of spaceship and some AI involved, it focuses really heavily on social stuff and the technology and things like that are secondary. It's definitely sci-fi, it did cross that imaginary line where I consider it as such, despite the settings being quite similar to what we have today (except for the fact that its on another world and there's more than one intelligent species, but if those count then middle earth and elves/dwarves/orcs make LotR sci-fi), it's just a bit more about social stuff/morals/ethics/not-entire-sure-what-the-right-word-here-is than... Well, futuristic shit.
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Books:
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (more for the humor than the sci-fi)
Ender's Game
Surprisingly, that's all I have.
Actually, I've got two starcraft books (had to DL the third one as an ebook, DT saga) and a book called "The Lost Art" which I liked.
(I've got some books with advanced tech, but no spaceships or far future shit, so I wouldn't consider those any more of a sci fi than some TV serie where they randomly have holograms for no reason)
Series:
Stargate (Didn't watch too much of SG1 - Was a little kid back then, watched with my parents every now and then. Watched all of Atlantis and Universe, both of which I quite liked)
Battlestar Galactica (Watched only first couple of seasons, not actually sure how far I got)
Doctor Who (Kinda obvious... Although its often not that sci fi and the actual future bits aren't as great as other series lately imo)
There's Eureka and Continuum for series set in our time with sci fi bits attached, I like those, but I want fucking spaceships :(
I'm sure I'm forgetting some great serie :(
Games:
Mass Effect
Starcraft
Star Wars Battlefront 2 (Was it called that?)
Sanctum 2
Space Pirates and Zombies
Starbound
Sins of a solar empire was decent
I'm sure I'm forgetting something here as well.
Not gonna go into movies. Only ones I can think of atm are the two Star Trek ones. I watched and liked a lot more movies than those two, I just can't remember shit :)
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Oh, I think Im a day late.... But still, merry christmas everyone!
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Right, guys, I have no idea why I didn't do this before, but I unstickied the old, outdated map night thread and stickied this one. Have fun :)
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We did talk about this :P Originally only Surf and Fly were planned as useable HMs, and after technical difficulties Surf was demoted to "just another move". With the teleporter system, Fly is merely a convenience, not something thats necessary.
We did discuss Ev training as well :)
There'll be a special place where you can pick fights based on EVs (So you fight trainers whose starmon award only specific EVs), and there will be an easy way to remove unwanted EVs from your starmon (and reroll IVs). We're not gonna remove em as it adds customization to starmon, which there is little to none of if we don't add new mechanics instead, and we want to stick to stuff people already know. We are however doing everything we can think of to make it easier and less "hidden" - As I said, you can remove them (which also means you can view em), you have an easy way to grind them, and we'll add ways to boost the speed at which you get them. Preventing pickup of certain EVs is probably doable, will think about that
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Well, we're planning on the karma system which gives you different bonuses based on your choices (good/bad), and there will be a split storyline (For simplicities sake it will be almost identical, you just get to play it from opposite sides, so the actual quests will usually require you to do different things while the story stays the same). The last quest in the alpha will make you pick sides. We'll try and do as much as possible with the choices and karma system, but everything takes valuable time, so we'll see how well it goes.
I think we discussed a lot earlier in this thread the possibility of restarting the game (maybe even with a seperate save slot now that bank sizes shouldn't be an issue anymore.) with different options/challenges, perma-death being an example we talked about I think. When we get to making that we'll probably discuss it here and see if you guys have any great ideas for rules/challenges :) Some should be fairly easy to implement, like perma-death (Just needs a set of actions after the 0HP/Faint-check that checks whether perma-death is on and if yes delete the starmon from the bank), and some other "simple" rules like maybe "no items" would be really easy (That one is just simply disabling the buttons to all inventory tabs other than capture cores)
I don't want to change the starters though. I'd rather add an additional difficulty dialog before/after picking them - The starter itself shouldn't really indicate difficulty, and its also hard to tell the player what's going on without a massive wall of text. And in the end, as we have relatively few starmon, I want all of them to be viable and valuable, or at least as many as possible.
Also, iirc I tried to make sure that the first trainers in the arena, including the first milestone, shouldn't have a type advantage over the starters (Fire Starter is gonna be OP though cuz there's a lot of bugs. They don't have bug moves at that point, so grass starter is fine), I'd have to check again though, I think I modified the possible starmon trainers can get since I did all that. Young Kid trainers might have a chance to get one of the starters, so that could be a potential problem for yours :p But you should have a second or even third starmon before you can start expecting to win in the arena.
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This wouldn't actually be "simpler" I think :p Plain and simple tag team may be possible (Swapping control with another player) but probably a short nightmare for Zelda, but adding more stuff to it is probably harder than setting up 2v2s (Which was mostly just modifying existing stuff to take into account the additional slots, targetting stuff and things regarding party sizes and switching). 2v2s are pretty much in already, the patch just broke them, and honestly I think that's the most straightforward way for coop to work - If you do tag-team, one player doesn't get to play much instead of getting to just do what he'd normally do together with a friend, it changes the game fundamentally.
As for 2v2s not being necessary for alpha - They are :p We want to test multiplayer, 2v2s and the story quests do include some 2v2 battles I believe (I can think of at least one, but I'm sure there's more)
We can't really test things between ourselves. The reason we can work together well as a team is because our times rarely collide :p Moz and I can probably play together a lot, but the only reason I get to talk to Zelda on skype is because my sleep schedule is fucked up :) (If you do some math, you'll notice this is being posted at about 3:30 AM CET) If we need to though we can probably set up a time for the three of us to test together, but there's a more important reason we want to test with other people: We don't get any "first impressions" from this, we don't know whether some things are too hard to understand, follow or find, because we made all this. We know how the game works, where we're supposed to go, etc. We've played this over and over again while testing. I made stuff the way I liked it, without much of a second opinion.
When we were making RuneCraft I made sure to get Eiviyn in on a game wrote down everything he criticized - It helped a lot. Getting another persons opinion on something really helps in finding flaws you didn't notice before.
When you think about it, we want an alpha for similar reasons why we have this thread - Talk about the map, share ideas and get feedback. And we also need to make sure it actually works with multiple players, what bugs can occur with multiple people, etc.
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@SoulFilcher: Go
I've been lazy as fuck as well, no need to be sorry :p
I can't remember what our to-do list was >.>
For me: Some UI images, if I can be bothered making them, they're not necessary - I highly doubt you guys will be using the storage box much, and its completely functional already anyway, the buttons are just stand sc2 buttons. Looks quite ugly though, I do want to change that.
Make sure all starmon are ready, have a working move set and are available in the wild / somehow else. (Probably done)
Set up enough trainer types and arena fights (probably done)
"add more stuff" - Relatively unnecessary, for the alpha at least. I do need to get off my ass and add more stuff, there's a lot I need to do, but a lot of things I'd do now simply wouldn't be available in the alpha (We don't have an entire working map and story, so if I add more starmon there's a good chance they won't be available til who knows when. Adding more trainer types without starmon is a bit hard), which is one of the reasons I'm lacking motivation. So much of my stuff isn't necessary :(
I'd need to playtest for a couple of hours to figure out what I'm missing and work on that...
As for Zelda:
- Add 6 player support (That number of players is technically seen already supported, he just needs to make sure there's enough battle arenas for them all and that they're all linked up to the right cameras and then one of us changes the map settings to allow that many players in the lobby)
- Fixing bugs (Probably the biggest thing)
- Finalizing 2v2s (Making them work again in the first place, and then fixing some weird cases/bugs, like starting a 2v2 with only a single available starmon, knocking out two starmon in one go, etc. Also includes looking into whether an AI on the players side is possible with the current system (AIs were set up with us assuming they'll always be on the other side, a lot of stuff is skipped for the "player" side of the battle and the variables are set up differently for AIs)
- I think the last story quest we have in the alpha needs its alternate version/ending
- Modifying the story encounters to reveal the surprise I've been hinting at for quite a while (Actually, this might be up to me)
That should be it I think. There might be some missing UI stuff, I think trading is currently not possible because there is simply no way for a player to activate the trade triggers. (Trading works though, if you can start one)
Not sure about held items at the moment, but those aren't necessary for the alpha (in fact, don't expect many items or starmon abilities (the passive stuff) in the alpha - we have very few of them, and they're not really that necessary yet)
EDIT: SOmeone posted while i was writing...
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Hey, sorry about not answering yesterday, I read the posts and then.. No idea, did something else quickly and forgot. Happens more than you'd think.
Ideas are always welcome, we'll need em at some point so we can just go back here and look at em again when its time. Right now we're not doing much though :(
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We won't abandon it, Zelda is just insanely busy with school/college stuff, and imo education > mapping. He said he'll have more time come December, so hopefully then we can start making progress again. It's so close to playable...
He also said something about the patch breaking 2v2s :( Let's hope he can fix that.
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@Creation25: Go @Hookah604: Go
Figured I'd post Starmons overview manager:
And holy crap Zelda's been productive in the past year!
Would also like to add that we've made a lot of use of "User Types" to use them instead of some records/variables (All the "Poke"dex, move/attack stats/info/etc, trainer types (Party compositions, chances, rewards, dialogues, etc.) and such things are all put into User Types, its a lot easier to manage, add new stuff and edit) which may account for a decent part of our Game Data size.
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Currently procrastinating on doing any work on Starmon (I think a link should be in my sig? I guess I'll see after I posted).
Working on it together with Zelda, and Mozared is doing the terrain for us while multiple other people (SoulFilcher and Zolden in particular) occasionally help with assets. Zelda is incredibly busy at the moment and hasn't been able to open the editor in ages, and I'm just plain lazy.
It's a map based on the Pokemon games, with a few small changes of our own (Energy/mana pool instead of per-move PP, more unique passive abilities, a story not designed for 5 year olds, choice + karma system, higher max health lategame, legendaries that you don't want to get in a fight with, etc.) We're technically seen close to being able to test it with people, but as I mentioned above, its been a while since we worked on it >.>