What I meant is that there will be little to no starmon that will generally have low base stats compared to others. 520-525 seems to have been the highest base stat total the original pokemon could achieve (Except for legendaries and pseudo-legendaries, which would hit 600), but iirc many of them actually had less. Pigeot for example had 469, Altaria 490, Raticate 413.
So if you got a shiny rattatta, you'd have a pretty crap shiny, base stat wise. A shiny swablu/altaria is worth a lot more as their base stats aren't completely bad. Catch a shiny ralts, and you've got a pokemon that ends up with 518 total base stats, over 100 more than that damn rattatta/raticate.
So what I'm saying is that there is no real rattatta in starmon. Almost everything will have base stats total 520, the main difference will be how those are allocated and move sets. I'll probably make base stat totals vary a bit more, like maybe 490-520 or so. But Im going to keep all starmon as equal as possible in raw power, as we don't have the sheer numbers pokemon has to be able to afford to have unviable/crap starmon.
I'm quite tired atm :( The items you suggested all seem interesting, and can probably be implemented with maybe some number tweaking :) We should probably start working on those relatively soon.
Shinies won't differ at all - They'll just be shiny. Making them stronger only gives hackers more incentive to screw everything up.
Yea, if we do holiday events at all (No real plans) and we do special wild starmon, they wouldn't be very common (Probably the standard 5% chance, like other rares)
Shinies in starmon get a halo/glow btw (Like when you mouse over characters/objects in the campaign between missions, except that the halo is colored to match the starmon's color scheme (Which is different than the non-shiny color scheme ofc)), so they should be easier to spot and more "special"
One thing to remember is that you can trade starmon. Maybe you don't want a shiny pidgey, but I'm sure someone else will want one. What do you think you'd get for it? An extra legendary perhaps? Maybe the guy will give you his starter? Or the "eevee"? Or a super rare item / tons of cash?
I definitely want there to be multiple... uh... "Choice" starmon? Stuff like Eevee and the starters - You can't get all of them alone. (And as I said multiple times, breeding is most likely not going to be implemented)
I also want there to be a starmon that attacks you after you reach a certain amount of karma. Well, two starmon to be specific - A good one and a bad one. And you can obviously only get one of them.
Another relevant idea I had (But didn't discuss with Zelda yet) was an item that added a halo/glow to starmon when held, and if that Starmon had a second texture set (i.e. it can be shiny) it'd swap textures as well, making it a fake shiny.
As it'd occupy the held item slot, there'd be a tradeoff for having a fake shiny. Plus we could make it multiple items, only one of them being the actual Shiny transformation, and the rest just being colored halos.
If we do add this, I'd make em incredibly rare - One, maybe two guaranteed ones (Story/Arena completion, perhaps), maybe use the secondary currency I talk about and make it super expensive (So you're pretty much sacrificing the other actually useful items for it), and ofc as something Zelda and I can hand out to people.
Talking about dev hand-outs: Zelda mentioned special events and helping in this thread. If the map gets popular enough, I think I might try and host some small tournaments, where we can give away such things as well.
And about not having time to participate in possible holiday events - Trading! Find that shiny pidgey and trade it for a holiday starmon you missed. (Tbh, holiday starmon shouldn't be as exclusive as stuff like Mei, so I think it'd be best if we allow more than 1 per account, like by having them show up in the wild. I'm sure some players will see an opportunity, capture a ton of em and trade em out to players who had no time.)
Oh, and just think I should say this again: I want to have all starmon be competitively viable if possible. We've got a lot less than the pokemon games, so I want to make them count. Reason I'm mentioning this is because chances that you'll catch a shiny that is simply outclassed by other starmon due to stuff like base stats are gonna be low.
EDIT: Completely forgot I already did some testing with halos >.> Not possible. Not sure if its just the specific few models I tested with or all WoW models, but if you have different colored halos on screen on those models they all bug out and start mixing colors and I wouldn't be surprised if they caused epileptic seizures.
After almost finishing Soul Silver I'm actually surprised EV training isn't as grindy as I thought (without EV training items and knowing the EV hotspots). Still, I'd like you guys to do better for starmon. How about doubling all the EV gains? So if I defeat a zubat equivalent then I get 2 speed EVs.
EDIT: Or lower the 255 cap for stats. I think it's already enough to make players work for about 100EVs per starmon and they certainly are 'training' the starmon to suit their battle role.
Srry for not answering earlier.
I definitely want to have something that allows you to start preset EV-based battles (i.e. you can pick between a set of trainers that only have specific EVs or combinations of them. And it won't be anything vague or so - It will explicitly tell you that its for EV training). I'm currently trying to think of ways to implement it in a more "fun" way (i.e. having the battles be something special, include special starmon/moves, or... A mechanic we're not gonna reveal until the alpha :p Maybe give a high chance that the enemy starmon is shiny. In addition to making the battles special, I'm also trying to think of how to implement it into the world/story, but that's a bit easier.)
A consumable that increases EV gain for a certain amount of time could work as well (Zelda and I have been talking about ways to make arena progression more "fun", one of the ideas was a special currency gotten only from arena fights - I think using such a currency for the EV booster consumable/held items would be more "balanced" than making them a cash sink, and possibly even promote a sense of competitiveness for arena fights)
We won't change the EV numbers/caps directly, I want to keep as many basic systems the same as possible, so that someone who has played Pokemon, regardless of which level, will know their way around. Only change to EVs I would consider is changing the cap to 252 or 256, seeing as going past 252 is a waste since you can't reach 256 for that last stat point.
Yea, the invalid letters/symbols pissed me off as well. I had try a million different things. It says that stuff like numbers and some symbols are allowed, but they actually aren't -.- So yeah, no numbers, no "-"s...
I changed it for you. "Torhal" was the mod that "banned" it. Seeing as the name doesn't sound familiar, Im guessing he's a curse employee.
EDIT: One reason not to have that as a URL is if someone wishes to give you credit in their map, they cannot link to it (Since the map would be removed from battle.net for using the word penis a lot)
What I meant with randomised rival was that we'd have a list of multiple rivals, and you would be assigned one of them permanently. Your rival won't ever change. There's just a good chance you won't have the same rival as another person. As for party, same thing would apply as with everything else: Player two practically doesn't exist, and nothing is changed due to him, so his rival will never show up, while player 1s will (Both players will fight the rival in a 2v2 (the rival will be sending out 2 starmon) if the second player is close enough when the battle is started. Just like with any other battle)
The opening cinematic will include a part/quick version of the backstory (Just like the pokemon professor "cinematic" at the start of the pokemon games), and I'll make sure the full version of it is accessible somewhere, video may be a good idea or just another optional cinematic ingame.
We are definitely adding a map, I'm just waiting for the terrain to be more or less complete before I start working on one. Also, getting out of the forest is a lot easier - You just head either south or west. If you go west, you'll reach the Lake, which has no obstacles and you can just follow it south to where Route 1 ends. And the reason that going south in the forest is easier than going north is ledges, which is kinda why we got lost - We couldn't use every path available. But as you saw, it didn't really take long for us to find our way, and the map should make it easier once its implemented.
Good point about the what-team-is-a-starmon-on-thingy. I think maybe making it "Enemy [Starmon]" in the chat messages may be better. Zelda will have to look at that.
Yea, we will definitely mention the trainer scaling somewhere. It will probably be a while though before we do as it's not really that important yet, as no one but us is gonna play this (And once we do the alpha... Well, you guys should already know, and we can tell everyone else in chat). But yeah, we wnat to make as much info about the map available in it (The Stardex and Mentor being two of the bigger ways of doing that. We'll also have random NPCs that will occasionally have something useful to say)
Alpha
Depends what we want to test. Not sure how far Zelda got with the quests, and he has to fix all the bugs in the videos. My issue is that I need a new comp, some piece of hardware seems to be dying in this laptop (Or at least got a lot slower), seems like either the RAM or the HDD - I have trouble with loading times, stuff just takes forever to load. I can play games and so on since they just load once and everything works fine, but the Editor handles this really badly and has to reload everything every single time I open a field, which means if I open or close a field I literally spend 30+ seconds waiting just for the editor to respond again. Every change I want to make takes me over a minute. Yea, I could do it, but i'd probaly go insane and would need a new window since my laptop flying through it will probably result in it breaking. I should be getting a new comp this month though :)
But yeah, fix everything that was broken in the videos, a bit more terraining from Moz and implement the quests we wanted, and we're pretty much ready.
Copyright issues
We *still* haven't contacted the guy who made it >.> But I'll have to look into it. Not sure whether express permission is even needed though (In some cases just giving credit is enough (When no profit is being made off it)), and even if it is, I highly doubt the guy will mind. You make such music because you enjoy it and its source, I highly doubt you wouldn't allow people with similar motives to use it.
Quests
I guess I'll explain it again in text, much easier:
There will be two (or two and a half, sort of) quest lines. The storyline will be roughly the same, you just have to pick a side.
As for Co-op, I think I said this in the video: What the second player did or did not do is completely ignored. When a party is created, the game only uses the first players progress. Player 2 will never be locked out of quests due to having made different choices in his own quest line. If you're thinking how co-op will work in scenario XYZ, just imagine its only one player with two controllable units. Player two practically doesn't exist, whatever he may or may not have done will never interfere with what player one/The Party is doing. You could call him the sidekick. Both players are playing Player 1s storyline.
After the players split up, the game does memorize all the quests player two has completed while in a party, but doesn't mark them as properly completed. Instead it just marks them as completed-in-coop, and when the player actually reaches that quest he gets the option to instantly mark it as complete and skip it. This will prevent players from skipping quests in chains and so on (Like the Mozared quests, he's gonna have multiple ones. Completing quest #2 won't unlock #3 for player 2, he will first have to complete #1, will then get the option to skip #2 which will then unlock #3). Player two practically gets a "Complete Quest Instantly" token, but you need to have the actual quest to use that token.
Hope that was less confusing :)
Legendaries
well, they will definitely be available before the 8th milestone trainer, but that's mostly because that guy will have an average starmon level of 85. We have no concrete plans yet about when we are introducing them, we'd ideally tie it into the story, once we get there. The final legendary (#150, like MewTwo) will be directly tied to the story ending, so that one becomes available as part of the final quest, and we haven't decided yet when that is going to be (Getting to level 100 will take ages, I think we should end the story before then and use unrelated quests to carry players to around level 80-90 afterwards).
Also, I think we already discussed this earlier, but I'd like to bring it up again: The Legendaries will be some seriously badass motherfuckers. Expect lots of collateral when you see them. Literally. Shit's gonna go down, people are going to be burnt and/or torn apart. These guys you really don't want to mess with. The ones you can capture will be weaker versions / not the originals. (My current ideas are offspring, "phoenix rebirth like thingy", and clone) This means the legendaries will be introduced some time before they can be captured, and you'll have to go through a quest chain revolving around them. The exact details about things will be decided as we go along: We've got general ideas, we know where we want to go with the plot and what should happen, but we're going to plan out the details only once we reach them.
Masterball hasn't be planned as well, but I'd probably involve it in the story as well. Not sure how much we told you about the backstory, but I had a good idea when we chose the name Starmon - It's not supposed to mean "Starcraft Monsters" (Pokemon means Pocket Monsters iirc), it's supposed to mean "Monsters from the Stars". Everything you can capture with a "capture core" is actually an alien. A very, very long time ago (Back when cave paintings were still in style), "fire fell from the skies" (Falling stars / Drop pods). Humans, who had barely begun drawing/writing found many strange creatures around the impact sites, escaped from the crashed drop pods (Or, well, emergency ejected). Over time, people started domesticating them, bla bla bla, I'll not go into detail too much about how society developed, if you want the full backstory tell me and I'll post it, I'll just skip to the relevant part: Capture cores.
Capture cores were found in and around the escape pods. High tech orbs that could dematerialize and store starmon, and would also force some small amount of obedience on them (More due to the creatures having adapted to capture cores and their place in society over centuries/millenia than it being something built into the capture core. Obeying the person that captured them is practically an instinct - They understand that they are bonded to that person practically forever, whether they like it or not.) Humans had no problems whatsoever figuring out how they worked, and they were all "master balls" essentially. Fast forward two thousand years or so: Humans have for a long time been trying (and succeeding) to replicate capture cores, but none were ever as perfect as the original ones from the drop pods. There weren't infinite drop pods, and unlike Starmon, capture cores can't reproduce, so there was a finite amount of them. A fairly large amount at first. Then the drop pods crash landed on a rather hard planet. And then they had to survive some 2k+ years, a lot of them being in use for a lot of that time. Most of them at some point just ejected the starmon and refused to work anymore, and no one knew how to fix them. Wars were fought over capture cores (And using Starmon - They are really fucking resilient, screw fighting with weapons when you can just send practically invulnerable beasts at your enemies), so people tried to create their own. As I already said, they succeeded, but they aren't perfect.
The "Master Ball" you will get will be an original capture core. I think we'll make the player actually visit a drop pod to retrieve a core (Or for some other reason and give the capture core some other way, but I definitely want a drop pod visit)
Also, a while ago you guys were throwing out random ideas and some concered pokeballs/Capture cores. I can't remember whose idea it was, and what it was originally, but I think we're going to add a second pseudo-master-ball. It will be a capture core that will not be consumed until it actually succeeds in capturing something, and each failure (in the same battle) will increase its capture rate multiplier, so at a certain point it will plain simply be guaranteed to capture, just like a masterball, but unlike the master ball you can't just instant capture something, and weakening the starmon first will still help as it will make it easier to capture something as you work your way to 100% capture chance.
Rival
The original plan was to tie it into the Karma system. Your rival will be who you chose not to be. So if you go dark side, the rival will be the good guy and vice versa. We haven't implemented him/her yet, and haven't had too many discussions about him/her. What I'd personally like to do, but may be a bit too hard/time consuming, is have multiple preset rivals, so that the rival isn't the same for each player. My rival might end up being Kenny while Zelda's rival will be Kyle. They will have different lines and different lineups, but they would still appear at the same places and so on (So in essence I'd just like to have multiple possible characters and lineups for the rival, which one ends up being the actual rival would be randomised, but those are just changes in-battle and in conversation. Your quests and when/where/how you meet the rival will always be the same regardless of who your rival is)
Just to add to what Zelda said in reply to lower level opponents: Trainers are scaled with your current party, not with all starmon including those in storage. Dump your high levels into the box and you'll fight lower level trainers (Assuming you're not in a zone where the minimum level is above your average level)
The arena is unlocked almost instantly (After the very short tutorial quest)
As trainers are completely randomized, we can't really save which ones you defeated in the first place as the next time you'll load up the map there'll be completely different trainers. So to get a "rematch" you'll simply have to start the map over again (Although we can probably reset trainers ever 2-3 ingame days or add some other rematch mechanic for playing a single session)
Map size constraints more or less force smaller zones, so they shouldn't take too long to cross. We're trying to make them feel larger/longer by using things like ledges to block direct paths. How much of the map there will be left to "Explore" is something I'm not sure about - We'll most likely have to use every nook and cranny Moz leaves us for (side-)quests. Still, if the forest he made is anything to go by, there'll be plenty of space to explore, the zones will not feel any smaller than in the pokemon games, and they won't take too long to get through (Plus there's the teleporter system)
Another thing: Zelda seems to be making some great progress on the big thing we want to show off in the video. I think we'll just make it a single video (We'll just use Zolden's model during it to show it off ;) )
Not sure whether he mentioned it in the thread, but he's found a way he can record on good settings with stable high FPS. Once he gets all the systems to work, we set up the quests we need for what we want to show off and I make all the remaining 2D art we need, we should be able to finally deliver the video =D
I've watched one of my favourite youtubers play a variant of that mode ;) I'm sure we can add something like that at some point, shouldn't be too hard. Maybe even with customiseable options (So that you can pick only "permadeath" if you don't like force nickname and only capture first per zone and so on).
One issue is banks and bank size. Blizzard allegedly increased the max size to 1 MB, in which case it isn't an issue, but I have yet to see someone test that limit and confirm it. How we save stuff might have to be altered, not sure whether that would be a big issue though since I think we're using only one section for everything atm (Which means we can pretty much just make the section a variable and use different ones for different profiles, easy)
If we can't make multi-profile work, we'll have to overwrite the players usual save file with this if they decide to play it.
Maybe make the death animation a separate actor created on the impact effect with the site operation "SOp Attach Target Point Stationary"? (If you need more details on this, I'm sure someone else will provide them, and if not I'll check back here tomorrow - About to head off)
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What I meant is that there will be little to no starmon that will generally have low base stats compared to others. 520-525 seems to have been the highest base stat total the original pokemon could achieve (Except for legendaries and pseudo-legendaries, which would hit 600), but iirc many of them actually had less. Pigeot for example had 469, Altaria 490, Raticate 413.
So if you got a shiny rattatta, you'd have a pretty crap shiny, base stat wise. A shiny swablu/altaria is worth a lot more as their base stats aren't completely bad. Catch a shiny ralts, and you've got a pokemon that ends up with 518 total base stats, over 100 more than that damn rattatta/raticate.
So what I'm saying is that there is no real rattatta in starmon. Almost everything will have base stats total 520, the main difference will be how those are allocated and move sets. I'll probably make base stat totals vary a bit more, like maybe 490-520 or so. But Im going to keep all starmon as equal as possible in raw power, as we don't have the sheer numbers pokemon has to be able to afford to have unviable/crap starmon.
I'm quite tired atm :( The items you suggested all seem interesting, and can probably be implemented with maybe some number tweaking :) We should probably start working on those relatively soon.
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Shinies won't differ at all - They'll just be shiny. Making them stronger only gives hackers more incentive to screw everything up.
Yea, if we do holiday events at all (No real plans) and we do special wild starmon, they wouldn't be very common (Probably the standard 5% chance, like other rares)
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Shinies in starmon get a halo/glow btw (Like when you mouse over characters/objects in the campaign between missions, except that the halo is colored to match the starmon's color scheme (Which is different than the non-shiny color scheme ofc)), so they should be easier to spot and more "special"
One thing to remember is that you can trade starmon. Maybe you don't want a shiny pidgey, but I'm sure someone else will want one. What do you think you'd get for it? An extra legendary perhaps? Maybe the guy will give you his starter? Or the "eevee"? Or a super rare item / tons of cash?
I definitely want there to be multiple... uh... "Choice" starmon? Stuff like Eevee and the starters - You can't get all of them alone. (And as I said multiple times, breeding is most likely not going to be implemented)
I also want there to be a starmon that attacks you after you reach a certain amount of karma. Well, two starmon to be specific - A good one and a bad one. And you can obviously only get one of them.
Another relevant idea I had (But didn't discuss with Zelda yet) was an item that added a halo/glow to starmon when held, and if that Starmon had a second texture set (i.e. it can be shiny) it'd swap textures as well, making it a fake shiny.
As it'd occupy the held item slot, there'd be a tradeoff for having a fake shiny. Plus we could make it multiple items, only one of them being the actual Shiny transformation, and the rest just being colored halos.
If we do add this, I'd make em incredibly rare - One, maybe two guaranteed ones (Story/Arena completion, perhaps), maybe use the secondary currency I talk about and make it super expensive (So you're pretty much sacrificing the other actually useful items for it), and ofc as something Zelda and I can hand out to people.
Talking about dev hand-outs: Zelda mentioned special events and helping in this thread. If the map gets popular enough, I think I might try and host some small tournaments, where we can give away such things as well.
And about not having time to participate in possible holiday events - Trading! Find that shiny pidgey and trade it for a holiday starmon you missed. (Tbh, holiday starmon shouldn't be as exclusive as stuff like Mei, so I think it'd be best if we allow more than 1 per account, like by having them show up in the wild. I'm sure some players will see an opportunity, capture a ton of em and trade em out to players who had no time.)
Oh, and just think I should say this again: I want to have all starmon be competitively viable if possible. We've got a lot less than the pokemon games, so I want to make them count. Reason I'm mentioning this is because chances that you'll catch a shiny that is simply outclassed by other starmon due to stuff like base stats are gonna be low.
EDIT: Completely forgot I already did some testing with halos >.> Not possible. Not sure if its just the specific few models I tested with or all WoW models, but if you have different colored halos on screen on those models they all bug out and start mixing colors and I wouldn't be surprised if they caused epileptic seizures.
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Srry for not answering earlier.
I definitely want to have something that allows you to start preset EV-based battles (i.e. you can pick between a set of trainers that only have specific EVs or combinations of them. And it won't be anything vague or so - It will explicitly tell you that its for EV training). I'm currently trying to think of ways to implement it in a more "fun" way (i.e. having the battles be something special, include special starmon/moves, or... A mechanic we're not gonna reveal until the alpha :p Maybe give a high chance that the enemy starmon is shiny. In addition to making the battles special, I'm also trying to think of how to implement it into the world/story, but that's a bit easier.)
A consumable that increases EV gain for a certain amount of time could work as well (Zelda and I have been talking about ways to make arena progression more "fun", one of the ideas was a special currency gotten only from arena fights - I think using such a currency for the EV booster consumable/held items would be more "balanced" than making them a cash sink, and possibly even promote a sense of competitiveness for arena fights)
We won't change the EV numbers/caps directly, I want to keep as many basic systems the same as possible, so that someone who has played Pokemon, regardless of which level, will know their way around. Only change to EVs I would consider is changing the cap to 252 or 256, seeing as going past 252 is a waste since you can't reach 256 for that last stat point.
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@Zolden: Go
Yea, the invalid letters/symbols pissed me off as well. I had try a million different things. It says that stuff like numbers and some symbols are allowed, but they actually aren't -.- So yeah, no numbers, no "-"s...
(Fix'd it, btw)
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I changed it for you. "Torhal" was the mod that "banned" it. Seeing as the name doesn't sound familiar, Im guessing he's a curse employee.
EDIT: One reason not to have that as a URL is if someone wishes to give you credit in their map, they cannot link to it (Since the map would be removed from battle.net for using the word penis a lot)
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Use "Units in Unit Group Matching Conditions" then to pick only units you want, instead of all units owned by the player.
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What I meant with randomised rival was that we'd have a list of multiple rivals, and you would be assigned one of them permanently. Your rival won't ever change. There's just a good chance you won't have the same rival as another person. As for party, same thing would apply as with everything else: Player two practically doesn't exist, and nothing is changed due to him, so his rival will never show up, while player 1s will (Both players will fight the rival in a 2v2 (the rival will be sending out 2 starmon) if the second player is close enough when the battle is started. Just like with any other battle)
The opening cinematic will include a part/quick version of the backstory (Just like the pokemon professor "cinematic" at the start of the pokemon games), and I'll make sure the full version of it is accessible somewhere, video may be a good idea or just another optional cinematic ingame.
We are definitely adding a map, I'm just waiting for the terrain to be more or less complete before I start working on one. Also, getting out of the forest is a lot easier - You just head either south or west. If you go west, you'll reach the Lake, which has no obstacles and you can just follow it south to where Route 1 ends. And the reason that going south in the forest is easier than going north is ledges, which is kinda why we got lost - We couldn't use every path available. But as you saw, it didn't really take long for us to find our way, and the map should make it easier once its implemented.
Good point about the what-team-is-a-starmon-on-thingy. I think maybe making it "Enemy [Starmon]" in the chat messages may be better. Zelda will have to look at that.
Yea, we will definitely mention the trainer scaling somewhere. It will probably be a while though before we do as it's not really that important yet, as no one but us is gonna play this (And once we do the alpha... Well, you guys should already know, and we can tell everyone else in chat). But yeah, we wnat to make as much info about the map available in it (The Stardex and Mentor being two of the bigger ways of doing that. We'll also have random NPCs that will occasionally have something useful to say)
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Depends what we want to test. Not sure how far Zelda got with the quests, and he has to fix all the bugs in the videos. My issue is that I need a new comp, some piece of hardware seems to be dying in this laptop (Or at least got a lot slower), seems like either the RAM or the HDD - I have trouble with loading times, stuff just takes forever to load. I can play games and so on since they just load once and everything works fine, but the Editor handles this really badly and has to reload everything every single time I open a field, which means if I open or close a field I literally spend 30+ seconds waiting just for the editor to respond again. Every change I want to make takes me over a minute. Yea, I could do it, but i'd probaly go insane and would need a new window since my laptop flying through it will probably result in it breaking. I should be getting a new comp this month though :)
But yeah, fix everything that was broken in the videos, a bit more terraining from Moz and implement the quests we wanted, and we're pretty much ready.
We *still* haven't contacted the guy who made it >.> But I'll have to look into it. Not sure whether express permission is even needed though (In some cases just giving credit is enough (When no profit is being made off it)), and even if it is, I highly doubt the guy will mind. You make such music because you enjoy it and its source, I highly doubt you wouldn't allow people with similar motives to use it.
I guess I'll explain it again in text, much easier:
There will be two (or two and a half, sort of) quest lines. The storyline will be roughly the same, you just have to pick a side.
As for Co-op, I think I said this in the video: What the second player did or did not do is completely ignored. When a party is created, the game only uses the first players progress. Player 2 will never be locked out of quests due to having made different choices in his own quest line. If you're thinking how co-op will work in scenario XYZ, just imagine its only one player with two controllable units. Player two practically doesn't exist, whatever he may or may not have done will never interfere with what player one/The Party is doing. You could call him the sidekick. Both players are playing Player 1s storyline.
After the players split up, the game does memorize all the quests player two has completed while in a party, but doesn't mark them as properly completed. Instead it just marks them as completed-in-coop, and when the player actually reaches that quest he gets the option to instantly mark it as complete and skip it. This will prevent players from skipping quests in chains and so on (Like the Mozared quests, he's gonna have multiple ones. Completing quest #2 won't unlock #3 for player 2, he will first have to complete #1, will then get the option to skip #2 which will then unlock #3). Player two practically gets a "Complete Quest Instantly" token, but you need to have the actual quest to use that token.
Hope that was less confusing :)
well, they will definitely be available before the 8th milestone trainer, but that's mostly because that guy will have an average starmon level of 85. We have no concrete plans yet about when we are introducing them, we'd ideally tie it into the story, once we get there. The final legendary (#150, like MewTwo) will be directly tied to the story ending, so that one becomes available as part of the final quest, and we haven't decided yet when that is going to be (Getting to level 100 will take ages, I think we should end the story before then and use unrelated quests to carry players to around level 80-90 afterwards).
Also, I think we already discussed this earlier, but I'd like to bring it up again: The Legendaries will be some seriously badass motherfuckers. Expect lots of collateral when you see them. Literally. Shit's gonna go down, people are going to be burnt and/or torn apart. These guys you really don't want to mess with. The ones you can capture will be weaker versions / not the originals. (My current ideas are offspring, "phoenix rebirth like thingy", and clone) This means the legendaries will be introduced some time before they can be captured, and you'll have to go through a quest chain revolving around them. The exact details about things will be decided as we go along: We've got general ideas, we know where we want to go with the plot and what should happen, but we're going to plan out the details only once we reach them.
Masterball hasn't be planned as well, but I'd probably involve it in the story as well. Not sure how much we told you about the backstory, but I had a good idea when we chose the name Starmon - It's not supposed to mean "Starcraft Monsters" (Pokemon means Pocket Monsters iirc), it's supposed to mean "Monsters from the Stars". Everything you can capture with a "capture core" is actually an alien. A very, very long time ago (Back when cave paintings were still in style), "fire fell from the skies" (Falling stars / Drop pods). Humans, who had barely begun drawing/writing found many strange creatures around the impact sites, escaped from the crashed drop pods (Or, well, emergency ejected). Over time, people started domesticating them, bla bla bla, I'll not go into detail too much about how society developed, if you want the full backstory tell me and I'll post it, I'll just skip to the relevant part: Capture cores.
Capture cores were found in and around the escape pods. High tech orbs that could dematerialize and store starmon, and would also force some small amount of obedience on them (More due to the creatures having adapted to capture cores and their place in society over centuries/millenia than it being something built into the capture core. Obeying the person that captured them is practically an instinct - They understand that they are bonded to that person practically forever, whether they like it or not.) Humans had no problems whatsoever figuring out how they worked, and they were all "master balls" essentially. Fast forward two thousand years or so: Humans have for a long time been trying (and succeeding) to replicate capture cores, but none were ever as perfect as the original ones from the drop pods. There weren't infinite drop pods, and unlike Starmon, capture cores can't reproduce, so there was a finite amount of them. A fairly large amount at first. Then the drop pods crash landed on a rather hard planet. And then they had to survive some 2k+ years, a lot of them being in use for a lot of that time. Most of them at some point just ejected the starmon and refused to work anymore, and no one knew how to fix them. Wars were fought over capture cores (And using Starmon - They are really fucking resilient, screw fighting with weapons when you can just send practically invulnerable beasts at your enemies), so people tried to create their own. As I already said, they succeeded, but they aren't perfect.
The "Master Ball" you will get will be an original capture core. I think we'll make the player actually visit a drop pod to retrieve a core (Or for some other reason and give the capture core some other way, but I definitely want a drop pod visit)
Also, a while ago you guys were throwing out random ideas and some concered pokeballs/Capture cores. I can't remember whose idea it was, and what it was originally, but I think we're going to add a second pseudo-master-ball. It will be a capture core that will not be consumed until it actually succeeds in capturing something, and each failure (in the same battle) will increase its capture rate multiplier, so at a certain point it will plain simply be guaranteed to capture, just like a masterball, but unlike the master ball you can't just instant capture something, and weakening the starmon first will still help as it will make it easier to capture something as you work your way to 100% capture chance.
The original plan was to tie it into the Karma system. Your rival will be who you chose not to be. So if you go dark side, the rival will be the good guy and vice versa. We haven't implemented him/her yet, and haven't had too many discussions about him/her. What I'd personally like to do, but may be a bit too hard/time consuming, is have multiple preset rivals, so that the rival isn't the same for each player. My rival might end up being Kenny while Zelda's rival will be Kyle. They will have different lines and different lineups, but they would still appear at the same places and so on (So in essence I'd just like to have multiple possible characters and lineups for the rival, which one ends up being the actual rival would be randomised, but those are just changes in-battle and in conversation. Your quests and when/where/how you meet the rival will always be the same regardless of who your rival is)
Ok, I hope I answered everything :)
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There's a good reason we didn't answer this question ;)
He's lying.
4:15 AM. Time to sleep. Will answer questions tomorrow! (And again: I seriously don't mind walls of text. I like them. Seriously.)
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Just to add to what Zelda said in reply to lower level opponents: Trainers are scaled with your current party, not with all starmon including those in storage. Dump your high levels into the box and you'll fight lower level trainers (Assuming you're not in a zone where the minimum level is above your average level)
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@Trieva: Go
The arena is unlocked almost instantly (After the very short tutorial quest)
As trainers are completely randomized, we can't really save which ones you defeated in the first place as the next time you'll load up the map there'll be completely different trainers. So to get a "rematch" you'll simply have to start the map over again (Although we can probably reset trainers ever 2-3 ingame days or add some other rematch mechanic for playing a single session)
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@Trieva: Go
Map size constraints more or less force smaller zones, so they shouldn't take too long to cross. We're trying to make them feel larger/longer by using things like ledges to block direct paths. How much of the map there will be left to "Explore" is something I'm not sure about - We'll most likely have to use every nook and cranny Moz leaves us for (side-)quests. Still, if the forest he made is anything to go by, there'll be plenty of space to explore, the zones will not feel any smaller than in the pokemon games, and they won't take too long to get through (Plus there's the teleporter system)
Another thing: Zelda seems to be making some great progress on the big thing we want to show off in the video. I think we'll just make it a single video (We'll just use Zolden's model during it to show it off ;) )
Not sure whether he mentioned it in the thread, but he's found a way he can record on good settings with stable high FPS. Once he gets all the systems to work, we set up the quests we need for what we want to show off and I make all the remaining 2D art we need, we should be able to finally deliver the video =D
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I've watched one of my favourite youtubers play a variant of that mode ;) I'm sure we can add something like that at some point, shouldn't be too hard. Maybe even with customiseable options (So that you can pick only "permadeath" if you don't like force nickname and only capture first per zone and so on).
One issue is banks and bank size. Blizzard allegedly increased the max size to 1 MB, in which case it isn't an issue, but I have yet to see someone test that limit and confirm it. How we save stuff might have to be altered, not sure whether that would be a big issue though since I think we're using only one section for everything atm (Which means we can pretty much just make the section a variable and use different ones for different profiles, easy)
If we can't make multi-profile work, we'll have to overwrite the players usual save file with this if they decide to play it.
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Maybe make the death animation a separate actor created on the impact effect with the site operation "SOp Attach Target Point Stationary"? (If you need more details on this, I'm sure someone else will provide them, and if not I'll check back here tomorrow - About to head off)