I use aorta as well (Nvidia's PS plugin doesn't work for me), and I tried to convert the files for you. Unfortunately, the exact same thing happened to me- the first picture came out with a while background instead of a transparent one.
So it's definitely not just your copy of Aorta. That makes me think something about that image in particular is unusual. O.o
OMG OMG OMG YES YES YES. I hope I'm awake and on here when you plan to have ALPHA, weather I am or not Can you PM me the MAP after you do the ALPHA so I can Replay SOLO as much as I want until the Full Release.
Well, we still have a little ways to go before we'll start the alpha (moz has to finish our terrain, I need to finish up the last quest, and a few smaller things here and there need to be set up for multiplayer to work). When we do start the alpha, we'll send you guys a PM with the information. We're probably not going to send the map file out, though. We haven't discussed it too much, but what we might do is publish the map publicly, but restrict it so only approved testers can play. That way, you guys would be able to play whenever you want, but random people won't stumble upon the map.
The Screenshots look great for the Battle UI, Question though do you think there can be an Option for different ways of how Lv is shown Example's of The Choices I'd like: Lv 20 (Current), Lv. 50, Lvl 75, Lvl. 37 (My Fav). I'd prefer the 2nd or 4th Option myself.
Now that I think about it, I do like "Lvl." better than just "Lv". Honestly, it was text I set up at the very beginning of development without thinking too much about it. It's easy enough to change- thanks for pointing that out :P
Alright, we're now one step closer to alpha! I just finished up the good-guy version of the last storyline quest for the alpha. That means the only story quest we have left is the bad-guy version of that same quest. Because this is the quest where the storyline actually splits, what happens either way is pretty similar, so we can reuse a lot of code. I won't be posting any screenshots of that (don't want to spoil things yet!) but I do have some screenshots of UI improvements we've made...
Maity threw together a cleaner looking UI for battle status frames. As a bonus, we have a few different versions of the UI for special starmon. Legendary starmon have a red panel, shiny starmon have a nice golden one, and normal starmon stick with the standard blue theme we've shown before. This should hopefully make shiny and legendary starmon feel that much more special.
Here's the new version of the "normal" frame:
Here's the legendary frame (this screenshot was from the enemy side of the screen, if you're using a legendary it'll be the same direction as the other ones):
You should be able to replace the terran/zerg images with the protoss ones. So race would become irrelevant, because every race has the same art associated with it.
The trick is to import your own Assets.txt file under the directory "Base.SC2Data/GameData". This will override the usual starcraft assets with any changes you make, but it will leave everything you don't mention as it was before.
This is an example of the assets file we used for runecraft to replace the resource icons with the one we wanted:
The only problem is that I don't know the name of the dropdown menu you would use instead of "UI/ResourceIcon1_Prot". But if you can find that, you can make this work. I have a hunch you could probably find the list of these in "Mods\Core.SC2Mod\Base.SC2Data\GameData\Assets.txt", but I don't know how you'd open that. You may need an MPQ viewer, I'm not entirely sure.
From what I've heard, Chinese SC2 has a monthly fee business model, maybe they just have more money to spend on this.
Wow, that's pretty strange..... I'll ask one of the devs next time I get a chance, it'd be awesome to have those features on the US/EU sites. I'd be interested to know if the Chinese community has a higher percentage of players using the arcade.
I certainly hope you do :) We're trying to make it really good, but we don't want to spoil it here. That way, when you guys get to play the first few quests during the alpha, we can get your opinions on the story as a whole. If the tone, pacing, or style of writing needs to change, it's better to change it now rather than later ^.^
We also put in a "Group Event" type of thing today. If anybody's played Guild Wars 2, it's sort of like that. There's a chance for an odoron horde (odorons are these flying poison starmon) to invade a zone at night. If this happens, they'll cover the area with their toxic gas. This gas will carry over into battles in that zone, poisoning any starmon you send out during battle (but not the odorons, of course, they're immune ^.^). If players work together to kill enough of the odorons, they may eventually leave the zone, allowing the gas to dissipate....
Here's a screenshot of a plagued zone- this is same grassy zone we've shown off before (Route 1)... As you can see, there's gas all over the place and the sunlight doesn't shine through very well- and there's odorons all over the place. It's usually a lot nicer looking ^.^
Another dislike from pokemon is it reduced their happiness from simply trading away then trading back. This is prob unnecessary (and easy to make complicated) but have you guys considered happiness affecting more things? It could be interesting having a more happy starmon doing more damage in battle or using less energy for moves. Or if starmon were aligned by karma too, frustration could make an evil starmon more battle productive. What if starmon hapiness affected quests and other things too?
At the moment, happiness doesn't really do anything. That said, we made sure to add a slot in the banking system to save it, so it will be easy to make it have some effect in the future if we decide to. In other words, starmon currently have a happiness number, but it has no effect on gameplay. If/When we add happiness we'll definitely look into that, I honestly don't know enough about how it worked in the pokemon games to really comment.
Today I put in a bunch of improvements to the game which should speed up our development/testing process a bit. It was taking us longer than it should to add new trainers into the game, so I redid the way we input new trainer types into the game. Similarly, it was taking us longer than we'd like to test the quests, so I threw in a bunch of quest debugging features that let us to zip around rapidly to whichever bits of the story we need. You guys won't notice any difference, except an earlier alpha date from the time we save, I suppose :P
What else do we have... Well, I tested all of Zelda's quests today, found a minimum of one bug in each of them, but they were all really good :) He actually did a pretty damn good job at using sounds and music, I'm pretty impressed :)
Heh...I spent all day fixing those bugs. I should probably get better at not making them in the first place :P
We've gotten the story finished up to the good/evil split, so we've got 2 more quests to go (well, technically it's the same one quest but from opposite sides, so there's going to be some reused code). I'll see if we can get another video soon(ish). I've been having more computer problems, so I'm not entirely sure how things will go.
Oh man, I was never able to catch one when I was a kid. Those game designers were evil! Luckily for you guys, there isn't a way to check the date inside the editor. Otherwise I'd definitely get my revenge- Probichu would show up at midnight every third Wednesday, but only it's raining and snowing at the same time.
I like the idea of the conversation box commenting on the gamey nature of RPGs. I would offer feedback when I have a feel for the map's humor.
We're working on making the side quests fun and interesting. The main story is definitely going to be much more serious overall- it's not all written yet (we have the starting and ending bits, not so much of the middle), but there's definitely some sad/emotional parts with more serious moments. That's not to say it's all serious; the police chief you'll be helping out in the alpha is so paranoid that he refuses to go anywhere without his power armor and his chaingun (he calls it Betsey).
Unfortunately, that's not true. It's a process that takes a matter of seconds.
I'm not sure if talking about how it works is against SC2Mapster policy, but I'd at least like to reply to this so some mapmakers dont think that just because you use the bank signature, you're fine. If a "hacker" wants to change the banks stats and he's just slightly more determined than a normal player who tried to open the bank in notepad and change stuff, he can find the information on how to do it easily.
Well, I don't care actually. I doubt that more that 1% of players are capable of doing it.
Both of you are right here- It's really not hard to hack a bank signature, but I'd wager a solid 95% of players have no idea what a bank is. If you really want to secure a bank, you can use starcode or obfuscate your mapscript. But in the end you can't protect a bank from somebody who is really dedicated, you can just make the hacking process so painful and slow that they won't bother.
What if you use the arena space (like I suggested above)?
Keep in mind that the arena doesn't use any physical space. You talk to the Arena manager, he shows you the roster of competitors, you pick the one you want, and a fight starts. We do have an actual arena for players to fight in, but that's going to be used for spectate-able PvP fights as well as some dramatic storyline fights. The idea is that any PvP fight going on inside the arena can be watched by anybody who is interested. This "Grand Arena" is pretty big compared to the other areas that we have, and it's going to be terrained to look very fancy. If somebody is already using the arena, we'll give you the option to fight somewhere else instead (so there's no queues to get into a fight).
Regarding the map space- It is going to be a very tight squeeze to get everything we want into the game in addition to the battle areas. So we're not going to have random buildings/homes where you can go inside just to chat with the occupants. Pretty much all of the map space is going to be used for something important. The Arena town will be your main go-to area for most of the game. We're going to be putting pretty much everything you'll need in the town as well- it contains a starcenter (complete with a starmon storage box & a healing machine), the actual arena itself, a lot of quest NPCs, a teleporter console, the mentor, a general goods store, and (maybe) the IV/EV modification lab.
We've been making some good progress recently. ^.^ Moz has been working on the next zone (We'll show screenshots as soon as it's done), and I've been working on the final storyline quest for the alpha. I also made a bunch of improvements to our battle setup system, which is going to let us do more fancy stuff for story-related fights. The standard 1v1 battle can get a little dull if it's not mixed up every now and then, so we'll try and do something special for the important fights.
Finally, we added the player costume system. It's not entirely finished up, but basically players will be able to change their appearance to a variety of different models. You'll start with a few unlocked costumes, and you'll unlock more over the course of the game by completing side-quests or finding specific items/locations/events. You'll be able to change your costume back at town for free (there's no in-game cost). It should be a nice way for players to customize their appearance and also brag about their achievements.
And what's the difference between custom games and arcade? :)
The custom maps section is for custom melee maps or things like 1v1 Obs, where the gameplay is still just standard sc2. The arcade is for non-standard gameplay.
Tbh, I doubt this is it. Where do you get the idea from? If it is this, then Starmon will be banned on release and a huge pile of maps currently in the game (including Mafia) should be banned. For as far as I've known, simply 'copying' another game in a free custom map has always been alright as long as you don't directly associate yourself with the original game. This is because custom maps would fall under the same rule as anything free to play/obtain; people writing Twilight fanfic aren't exactly being sued either.
Here's the deal- you can pretty much do whatever you want unless some 3rd party company gets mad and sends a letter of complaint to Blizzard. You could make a blatent rip-off of Team fortress 2, but your map isn't going to be taken down unless Valve sends a letter to blizzard. It's like youtube- there's tons of copyrighted stuff on there, but it doesn't get taken down unless the owner of the copyright requests a removal. Mafia hasn't been removed because the owners of the Mafia game haven't asked for it to be removed.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects companies like Blizzard or Youtube from being sued as long as they take down any copyrighted material if it's requested by the owner of the copyright. And since none of us have a law team, and Blizzard isn't going to be protecting us with their lawyers, if some company feels you've violated their copyright, Blizzard will remove the map to avoid a lawsuit. But Blizzard is not proactively seeking out and deleting maps which are similar to existing games.
A few minor updates- We've been working mainly on adding content so you guys will have something to do once the alpha starts. Right now, we're up to 9 finished quests. 2 of those are tutorial quests, 1 is a main story quest, and 6 are sidequests. We're working on getting the 2nd main-story quest done (that's going to be where the alpha story ends).
In addition to some of the more standard quests, we're starting to add a couple of random events and repeatable quests. The first random event has been added to the game, and it's called the "Odoron Plague". There's a small(ish) chance that Odorons (our poison cloud starmon) will flood into areas near the city, covering it with gas. While they're flying around the area, any battles fought within that zone will have a special poison-cloud weather effect, which poisons any active starmon.
Another change that we've made has to do with arena progression. Previously, you had to fight through every arena trainer in order to progress. Now, you can challenge any trainer within 2 ranks of your own rank. So basically, say you defeat the level 6 trainer. You can then fight the level 7 or the level 8 trainer. If you then beat the level 8 trainer, you can fight the level 9 or 10 trainer next. So basically, this allows you to skip up to half of the fights in the arena if you want. The only restriction is that you can't skip fights against the arena champions (otherwise that would be pretty outrageous). It also gives you a little bit more flexibility in which fights you choose to take on.
Whenever you beat a fight in the arena for the first time, you receive a bonus pile of credits as well as some Arena points (our PvP Currency). You can repeat any fight you want, but you'll receive less Arena Points (2 instead of the usual 5) and you won't get the bonus credits. You'll still get the standard credits reward as well as the experience you gained from battle, but this makes completing all the fights a worthwhile bonus, not a required timesink.
Some of you may have been listening to all the E3 news. There was lots of great stuff announced, but we also got some nice details on Pokemon X & Y. One big game-changer for the balance is the brand-new Fairy type. When we made the starmon battle engine, we set it up so we could add more types if we ever needed to, and the opportunity has now presented itself. So we figured we would ask you guys here- If it were up to you, would you add the Fairy type into Starmon? Right now we're tentatively leaning towards a "Yes", partially because we feel it would be a good type for the "Good karma" starmon (with dark being the "Bad Karma" type), but we're going to wait for official information on the type strengths/weaknesses.
But please, share your opinions on the Fairy type! Let us know if you like or dislike the idea, and why.
I'd like to extend on DaFunk's idea. The dev team should be made memorable characters. That was really interesting from DaFunk saying that you guys will likely make the first successful pokemon project.
Heh, we'll see. We're all going to referenced in the game somehow or another. As you've already seen, moz is an explorer with his own sidequest chain. We have a couple ideas for where we'll put myself and TheAlmaity, but nothing solid yet. :)
Are you guys still taking requests for side stories and/or special events?
And are you making one of those cemetery- like places? Yaknow, pokemon tower, celestial tower, old ceatau, lost tower, etc. EDIT: Also, please tell me what, if anything, you are accepting requests for these days.
If you want to throw ideas for sidequests at us, I'll chuck them in our idea box. But I think we've got what we need idea-wise for the alpha, we just need to actually get the quests into the game.
And yes, we will have a ghost-type zone. It's going to be a sort of "haunted woods" type area. It's not going to be ready for the alpha but once it's been terrained we'll put up some screenshots. It's a pretty cool idea for a zone, I can't wait to see how it turns out :)
I'm hoping you guys want item ideas so I'll start with some and tell me if you want more (and I'll try to think them up) :
I don't remember if I've mentioned it, but we did implement an item-holding system a while back, so items like what you described will work. I'll definitely steal those ideas whenever we start to add items. Thanks :)
Right now, my current focus is anything that has to be ready for the alpha to launch. Moz is going to be terraining the last zone that we need for the alpha's storyline (there's lots of zones that we still have to make, of course, but we only need one more for the alpha). After that's done, we need to create the next storyline quest and a few sidequests for the zones we have now.
That means that the alpha will have 4 or 5 zones when we start it (depending on moz's schedule for terraining as well as our ability to make content for those zones). The "bug-catcher park" area, the forest, the road leading up to the mountains, the zone for the quest, and the town will be available when we start for sure. As a bonus, here's a sneak-peak at what the next zone will be (this one likely will not be ready for alpha, but it will be added later). Pretty nice terrain if you ask me.
So basically, we need to make one more zone, one more storyline quest, and a few more sidequests. As far as we can tell, everything seems to be working. All of the bugs from the video have been fixed, and everything else looks pretty stable :)
I don't know the specifics of hardcore mode (which sounds like a way to make single player insanely challenging) but I think there are easier ways. From games like FTL or some others, several difficulty levels could be chosen before starting the adventure. Each one does something simple like scaling money rewards, exp, etc.
We don't know the specifics of hardcore mode either :P It's just something we've talked about, and you guys have mentioned a few times. The idea would be that the player could play with a different rule set. I believe somebody mentioned a version where you must nickname every starmon and whenever a starmon faints, you must release it. The idea would be that you can choose to use those rules when you start, and then we'll actually enforce them. Some players are sadistic enough to do that to themselves- I'm definitely not O.o
I also trust Zelda to make super intelligent AI which strongly contributes to difficulty.
Oh no, now I have to meet expectations! The current AI's aren't exactly rocket scientists, but we'll work on smarter AI at a later point. For the alpha, you'll face the mighty power of our easy & medium AI's. It's not a super big deal because you wouldn't really encounter a super smart trainer at that point in the game anyways- we'll probably reserve smarter AI's for boss fights or later game enemies.
0
I use aorta as well (Nvidia's PS plugin doesn't work for me), and I tried to convert the files for you. Unfortunately, the exact same thing happened to me- the first picture came out with a while background instead of a transparent one.
So it's definitely not just your copy of Aorta. That makes me think something about that image in particular is unusual. O.o
0
Well, we still have a little ways to go before we'll start the alpha (moz has to finish our terrain, I need to finish up the last quest, and a few smaller things here and there need to be set up for multiplayer to work). When we do start the alpha, we'll send you guys a PM with the information. We're probably not going to send the map file out, though. We haven't discussed it too much, but what we might do is publish the map publicly, but restrict it so only approved testers can play. That way, you guys would be able to play whenever you want, but random people won't stumble upon the map.
Now that I think about it, I do like "Lvl." better than just "Lv". Honestly, it was text I set up at the very beginning of development without thinking too much about it. It's easy enough to change- thanks for pointing that out :P
0
Alright, we're now one step closer to alpha! I just finished up the good-guy version of the last storyline quest for the alpha. That means the only story quest we have left is the bad-guy version of that same quest. Because this is the quest where the storyline actually splits, what happens either way is pretty similar, so we can reuse a lot of code. I won't be posting any screenshots of that (don't want to spoil things yet!) but I do have some screenshots of UI improvements we've made...
Maity threw together a cleaner looking UI for battle status frames. As a bonus, we have a few different versions of the UI for special starmon. Legendary starmon have a red panel, shiny starmon have a nice golden one, and normal starmon stick with the standard blue theme we've shown before. This should hopefully make shiny and legendary starmon feel that much more special.
Here's the new version of the "normal" frame:
Here's the legendary frame (this screenshot was from the enemy side of the screen, if you're using a legendary it'll be the same direction as the other ones):
And here's the shiny frame:
0
You should be able to replace the terran/zerg images with the protoss ones. So race would become irrelevant, because every race has the same art associated with it.
The trick is to import your own Assets.txt file under the directory "Base.SC2Data/GameData". This will override the usual starcraft assets with any changes you make, but it will leave everything you don't mention as it was before.
This is an example of the assets file we used for runecraft to replace the resource icons with the one we wanted:
The only problem is that I don't know the name of the dropdown menu you would use instead of "UI/ResourceIcon1_Prot". But if you can find that, you can make this work. I have a hunch you could probably find the list of these in "Mods\Core.SC2Mod\Base.SC2Data\GameData\Assets.txt", but I don't know how you'd open that. You may need an MPQ viewer, I'm not entirely sure.
0
Wow, that's pretty strange..... I'll ask one of the devs next time I get a chance, it'd be awesome to have those features on the US/EU sites. I'd be interested to know if the Chinese community has a higher percentage of players using the arcade.
0
Darn, you got me >.>
I certainly hope you do :) We're trying to make it really good, but we don't want to spoil it here. That way, when you guys get to play the first few quests during the alpha, we can get your opinions on the story as a whole. If the tone, pacing, or style of writing needs to change, it's better to change it now rather than later ^.^
We also put in a "Group Event" type of thing today. If anybody's played Guild Wars 2, it's sort of like that. There's a chance for an odoron horde (odorons are these flying poison starmon) to invade a zone at night. If this happens, they'll cover the area with their toxic gas. This gas will carry over into battles in that zone, poisoning any starmon you send out during battle (but not the odorons, of course, they're immune ^.^). If players work together to kill enough of the odorons, they may eventually leave the zone, allowing the gas to dissipate....
Here's a screenshot of a plagued zone- this is same grassy zone we've shown off before (Route 1)... As you can see, there's gas all over the place and the sunlight doesn't shine through very well- and there's odorons all over the place. It's usually a lot nicer looking ^.^
0
At the moment, happiness doesn't really do anything. That said, we made sure to add a slot in the banking system to save it, so it will be easy to make it have some effect in the future if we decide to. In other words, starmon currently have a happiness number, but it has no effect on gameplay. If/When we add happiness we'll definitely look into that, I honestly don't know enough about how it worked in the pokemon games to really comment.
Today I put in a bunch of improvements to the game which should speed up our development/testing process a bit. It was taking us longer than it should to add new trainers into the game, so I redid the way we input new trainer types into the game. Similarly, it was taking us longer than we'd like to test the quests, so I threw in a bunch of quest debugging features that let us to zip around rapidly to whichever bits of the story we need. You guys won't notice any difference, except an earlier alpha date from the time we save, I suppose :P
0
OH, he called you out, moz!
Heh...I spent all day fixing those bugs. I should probably get better at not making them in the first place :P
We've gotten the story finished up to the good/evil split, so we've got 2 more quests to go (well, technically it's the same one quest but from opposite sides, so there's going to be some reused code). I'll see if we can get another video soon(ish). I've been having more computer problems, so I'm not entirely sure how things will go.
Oh man, I was never able to catch one when I was a kid. Those game designers were evil! Luckily for you guys, there isn't a way to check the date inside the editor. Otherwise I'd definitely get my revenge- Probichu would show up at midnight every third Wednesday, but only it's raining and snowing at the same time.
We're working on making the side quests fun and interesting. The main story is definitely going to be much more serious overall- it's not all written yet (we have the starting and ending bits, not so much of the middle), but there's definitely some sad/emotional parts with more serious moments. That's not to say it's all serious; the police chief you'll be helping out in the alpha is so paranoid that he refuses to go anywhere without his power armor and his chaingun (he calls it Betsey).
0
Both of you are right here- It's really not hard to hack a bank signature, but I'd wager a solid 95% of players have no idea what a bank is. If you really want to secure a bank, you can use starcode or obfuscate your mapscript. But in the end you can't protect a bank from somebody who is really dedicated, you can just make the hacking process so painful and slow that they won't bother.
0
Keep in mind that the arena doesn't use any physical space. You talk to the Arena manager, he shows you the roster of competitors, you pick the one you want, and a fight starts. We do have an actual arena for players to fight in, but that's going to be used for spectate-able PvP fights as well as some dramatic storyline fights. The idea is that any PvP fight going on inside the arena can be watched by anybody who is interested. This "Grand Arena" is pretty big compared to the other areas that we have, and it's going to be terrained to look very fancy. If somebody is already using the arena, we'll give you the option to fight somewhere else instead (so there's no queues to get into a fight).
Regarding the map space- It is going to be a very tight squeeze to get everything we want into the game in addition to the battle areas. So we're not going to have random buildings/homes where you can go inside just to chat with the occupants. Pretty much all of the map space is going to be used for something important. The Arena town will be your main go-to area for most of the game. We're going to be putting pretty much everything you'll need in the town as well- it contains a starcenter (complete with a starmon storage box & a healing machine), the actual arena itself, a lot of quest NPCs, a teleporter console, the mentor, a general goods store, and (maybe) the IV/EV modification lab.
We've been making some good progress recently. ^.^ Moz has been working on the next zone (We'll show screenshots as soon as it's done), and I've been working on the final storyline quest for the alpha. I also made a bunch of improvements to our battle setup system, which is going to let us do more fancy stuff for story-related fights. The standard 1v1 battle can get a little dull if it's not mixed up every now and then, so we'll try and do something special for the important fights.
Finally, we added the player costume system. It's not entirely finished up, but basically players will be able to change their appearance to a variety of different models. You'll start with a few unlocked costumes, and you'll unlock more over the course of the game by completing side-quests or finding specific items/locations/events. You'll be able to change your costume back at town for free (there's no in-game cost). It should be a nice way for players to customize their appearance and also brag about their achievements.
0
The custom maps section is for custom melee maps or things like 1v1 Obs, where the gameplay is still just standard sc2. The arcade is for non-standard gameplay.
Here's the deal- you can pretty much do whatever you want unless some 3rd party company gets mad and sends a letter of complaint to Blizzard. You could make a blatent rip-off of Team fortress 2, but your map isn't going to be taken down unless Valve sends a letter to blizzard. It's like youtube- there's tons of copyrighted stuff on there, but it doesn't get taken down unless the owner of the copyright requests a removal. Mafia hasn't been removed because the owners of the Mafia game haven't asked for it to be removed.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects companies like Blizzard or Youtube from being sued as long as they take down any copyrighted material if it's requested by the owner of the copyright. And since none of us have a law team, and Blizzard isn't going to be protecting us with their lawyers, if some company feels you've violated their copyright, Blizzard will remove the map to avoid a lawsuit. But Blizzard is not proactively seeking out and deleting maps which are similar to existing games.
*Disclaimer- I'm not a lawyer
0
Wow, that's a real shame. I'm sorry to hear the bad news guys, Barcraft was one of the nicest looking games on the Arcade.
I wish you the best of luck with wherever you choose to take the game next!
0
A few minor updates- We've been working mainly on adding content so you guys will have something to do once the alpha starts. Right now, we're up to 9 finished quests. 2 of those are tutorial quests, 1 is a main story quest, and 6 are sidequests. We're working on getting the 2nd main-story quest done (that's going to be where the alpha story ends).
In addition to some of the more standard quests, we're starting to add a couple of random events and repeatable quests. The first random event has been added to the game, and it's called the "Odoron Plague". There's a small(ish) chance that Odorons (our poison cloud starmon) will flood into areas near the city, covering it with gas. While they're flying around the area, any battles fought within that zone will have a special poison-cloud weather effect, which poisons any active starmon.
Another change that we've made has to do with arena progression. Previously, you had to fight through every arena trainer in order to progress. Now, you can challenge any trainer within 2 ranks of your own rank. So basically, say you defeat the level 6 trainer. You can then fight the level 7 or the level 8 trainer. If you then beat the level 8 trainer, you can fight the level 9 or 10 trainer next. So basically, this allows you to skip up to half of the fights in the arena if you want. The only restriction is that you can't skip fights against the arena champions (otherwise that would be pretty outrageous). It also gives you a little bit more flexibility in which fights you choose to take on.
Whenever you beat a fight in the arena for the first time, you receive a bonus pile of credits as well as some Arena points (our PvP Currency). You can repeat any fight you want, but you'll receive less Arena Points (2 instead of the usual 5) and you won't get the bonus credits. You'll still get the standard credits reward as well as the experience you gained from battle, but this makes completing all the fights a worthwhile bonus, not a required timesink.
Some of you may have been listening to all the E3 news. There was lots of great stuff announced, but we also got some nice details on Pokemon X & Y. One big game-changer for the balance is the brand-new Fairy type. When we made the starmon battle engine, we set it up so we could add more types if we ever needed to, and the opportunity has now presented itself. So we figured we would ask you guys here- If it were up to you, would you add the Fairy type into Starmon? Right now we're tentatively leaning towards a "Yes", partially because we feel it would be a good type for the "Good karma" starmon (with dark being the "Bad Karma" type), but we're going to wait for official information on the type strengths/weaknesses.
But please, share your opinions on the Fairy type! Let us know if you like or dislike the idea, and why.
@caparosmith: Go
Yea, Cipher will be promoting talented Grunts to squad leaders. The player will likely rise through the ranks of Cipher if they choose to join.
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Heh, we'll see. We're all going to referenced in the game somehow or another. As you've already seen, moz is an explorer with his own sidequest chain. We have a couple ideas for where we'll put myself and TheAlmaity, but nothing solid yet. :)
Oh noes! I don't want anybody to die!
If you want to throw ideas for sidequests at us, I'll chuck them in our idea box. But I think we've got what we need idea-wise for the alpha, we just need to actually get the quests into the game.
And yes, we will have a ghost-type zone. It's going to be a sort of "haunted woods" type area. It's not going to be ready for the alpha but once it's been terrained we'll put up some screenshots. It's a pretty cool idea for a zone, I can't wait to see how it turns out :)
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I don't remember if I've mentioned it, but we did implement an item-holding system a while back, so items like what you described will work. I'll definitely steal those ideas whenever we start to add items. Thanks :)
Right now, my current focus is anything that has to be ready for the alpha to launch. Moz is going to be terraining the last zone that we need for the alpha's storyline (there's lots of zones that we still have to make, of course, but we only need one more for the alpha). After that's done, we need to create the next storyline quest and a few sidequests for the zones we have now.
That means that the alpha will have 4 or 5 zones when we start it (depending on moz's schedule for terraining as well as our ability to make content for those zones). The "bug-catcher park" area, the forest, the road leading up to the mountains, the zone for the quest, and the town will be available when we start for sure. As a bonus, here's a sneak-peak at what the next zone will be (this one likely will not be ready for alpha, but it will be added later). Pretty nice terrain if you ask me.
So basically, we need to make one more zone, one more storyline quest, and a few more sidequests. As far as we can tell, everything seems to be working. All of the bugs from the video have been fixed, and everything else looks pretty stable :)
We don't know the specifics of hardcore mode either :P It's just something we've talked about, and you guys have mentioned a few times. The idea would be that the player could play with a different rule set. I believe somebody mentioned a version where you must nickname every starmon and whenever a starmon faints, you must release it. The idea would be that you can choose to use those rules when you start, and then we'll actually enforce them. Some players are sadistic enough to do that to themselves- I'm definitely not O.o
Oh no, now I have to meet expectations! The current AI's aren't exactly rocket scientists, but we'll work on smarter AI at a later point. For the alpha, you'll face the mighty power of our easy & medium AI's. It's not a super big deal because you wouldn't really encounter a super smart trainer at that point in the game anyways- we'll probably reserve smarter AI's for boss fights or later game enemies.