Information is secretly being kept from us like the coop thing
At this point, I can't think of anything we're keeping secret except what Maity referred to in his last post, and that's only a secret because it's very important to the storyline. So other than the storyline details, feel free to ask about whatever you want now ^.^.
I know it was frustrating when we didn't talk about the 2v2/co-op systems at all, but to be honest, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get them working. I didn't want to promise we'd add something and then have to say "yeah, sorry, can't do it". So we decided not to announce it until it was actually in game and working.
@TheAlmaity: Go
About shinies, I know they're supposed to be rare and special but can it be like master balls? Every trainer should have a definite way to make 1 starmon shiny of their choice (maybe by a prototype scientific device that explodes after the first use :P) imo. It's still special but we get to have it sooner.
The chance of any starmon being shiny in the actual pokemon games is about 0.01%. We realize that we won't have nearly the same playerbase as the actual pokemon games though, so we've tweaked the probability of shiny starmon to be roughly 0.09%. That's nine times as likely as the actual games. Shiny starmon are only special because of their rarity, so if we gave everybody a guaranteed one, you'd end up seeing them a lot more often and they'd loose that special "Oh my gosh, that's a shiny, I'm screen-shotting this to cherish forever" feeling. With a chance of about 1/1000, most people won't find a shiny unless they're playing a lot, but some people definitely will. For every player that catches all 100-ish starmon, about 1 of them will get a shiny (which is extremely likely compared to the real games). We can tweak the numbers in the future if needed- we'll have to see how things feel with an actual playerbase. It's very difficult to tell how rare or common items or starmon should be when there's just a few of us.
We also plan on giving out some type of special rewards for "events". For example, Mei (the creepy doll starmon you saw in the video) is not obtainable in-game. In order to get one, you'll have to actually receive it from somebody on the dev team. We can also include shiny or particularly rare starmon for rewards. We're not totally sure on how exactly this will work, but we'll probably be giving out gift starmon on holidays or as rewards for any type of tournament that could happen.
<sub>...And of course we may slip a few starmon in the direction of our loyal forum goers and alpha testers..</sub>
Ah, so it's like diablo. I'm wondering how realistic coop will be. Can we watch battles that our friends are involved in? Will 2 players get to fight the same trainer meaning the one being fought performed a genetic duplication of themselves? :P. It's better if once an AI NPC has been locked in battle it cannot battle with trainers talking to it on the overworld.
While it's not ready yet, we plan to make any battles going on in the town arena watchable. It's a big special arena where PvP battles and other high-level bosses are fought. The idea is that any player can spectate you if you're in there.
2 players won't fight duplicate trainers. If you and me are in a party, and we wander upon a boss, he'll just send out 2 starmon at once. Me and you would both send out one starmon. It's not unfair because once me & you lose 6 starmon between the two of us (you could lose 2 and I lose 4, for example) the battle ends. So it's not like we have twice the firepower as the opponent.
NPC's are phased, like many of the other elements of the game. If an NPC gets into a battle with your party buddy, you'll both fight him together. If you're not in the same party, you won't even notice that NPC is battling- it will look as if he's just walking around still. Only the player actually involved in the battle will see the NPC run up to him, and then start the battle.
I'd like to hear the full backstory. That was very interesting and believable. I just thought of this but will starmon include in the plot (at some point) a suggestion that starmon will rebel? It might be interesting having scenarios of a humans vs starmon war or humans + loyal starmon vs rebellious starmon. Those creatures might be biding their time to attack cuz they're sick of us :P.
We plan on working the backstory into the game. Like maity said above, most of the plot isn't written yet (we just have some general plans/ideas, the only stuff written for now is the story that will be ready for alpha). We plan on including a visit to a drop-pod impact site at some point, so you'll definitely become aware of the backstory throughout the plot.
I think the town map like from pokemon is enough. If we had an sc2 minimap won't that make caves too easy to navigate? I also like how view is restricted to what's around the player which is realistic. Maybe have an explorer NPC at the entrance of each zone give directions saying things like "If you ever get lost, go west or south, otherwise hope for the best :P". Maybe have the option to talk to and ask the following starmon to lead us out?
Yeah, we're not super sure what we'll do for the map, but we'll have at least what the pokemon games had (a basic map that shows you which direction to go for each area). Navigation should be pretty easy once that's in, but we'll also include signs. Some of the signs were moved when Moz was terraining, but we had a sign outside zone enterances that gave directions. You can also ask the mentor back in town for advice on where to find any particular thing.
One last question for now. Can EV training be made alot easier? Like letting the vitamins go beyond 100 or make it easier to get those items like power brace. I'd rather not grind at a million rattata in the wild for speed EVs.
We have the genetics lab as a feature that will be unlocked over time. We haven't set up the system entirely yet, so I'll see if we can find a way to speed up the process. At the very least we'll allow you to remove EV's and re-train them, although I realize that's not what you're looking for :)
We've got some pretty exciting news coming your guys's way very soon! Me & TheAlmaity have spent the last two days testing, debugging, and then testing some more in preparation to record our next update video.
The good news is that we finally managed to get a video recorded, and it's going to be posted here as soon as it's finished. The bad news is that we had some audio problems. Maity is re-recording the commentary as we speak, but that means it's not going to be ready today. To make up for it, here's one of the original tests that went...well, less than perfectly.
Edit: I stand corrected! Maity came through and stayed up until 5 in the morning waiting for the video to render & upload. Please give him your applause :P The actual video is in the post right below this one, and as Maity said, we'll post more information about it tomorrow. It's sort of the middle of the night right now O.o
Our first failed test (actual video is in the post below this one):
Anyways, the real video should be ready tomorrow. You'll get to see the surprise feature we've been working on for the past few months!
I was wondering about the level scaling. Won't that affect difficulty too much? I liked pokemon where it was kinda quick and easy to finish trainer battles and keep moving (but against reasonable levelled pokemon so it didn't feel too easy and exp was good).
We don't think it will be a problem. But what's great about the system is that if it ends up being too hard or too easy, we can easily adjust it so it's just right. The way the system works now is that it makes sure enemies are about your level, not exactly your level. We just use the average level of your party as the starting point- from there we adjust it based on a few different things, and then throw in a few random numbers to mix things up. The higher level you are, the more varied we'll allow the enemy's levels to be.
Also, keep in mind that we don't jam-pack zones with trainers. Many zones in the original games were literally just a linear path with like 20 trainers in the way, and you had to fight through each and every painful battle to get through. Our zones are more open, with trainers being placed further apart. They also walk around or turn (usually) instead of staring at the wall waiting to kill you the second you walk by. So you can sneak more of them than in the actual games. We don't want monotonous fights, which is why we're encouraging leveling up through quests.
Levels won't affect difficulty much if type advantages are considered.
Trainer "Classes" are determined by the zone you're in- you won't find bug catchers in the desert, for example. So this ends up meaning types are usually reasonably uniform throughout a zone. If you're in a volcano area, you can expect a lot of fire-type starmon. If you're in the desert, you can expect lots of sand-type starmon. So you can prepare appropriately if you want.
That said, Trainers will attempt to counter you if they have types to do it. Say you're using a fire-type and you kill their current starmon. And say the next starmon we gave them was a grass-type. If they also had a water-type available, they'll send that out instead of the grass-type that we originally decided would be next, assuming their AI level is high enough.
Again, we can tweak these randomization numbers as much as we need, if necessary. If it becomes too hard/easy, we can look at your party and modify the opponent's team before the battle starts.
Lower level starmon opponents are also wanted when you want train that new low level starmon you just caught (assuming exp. share hasn't been obtained).
I can't remember if I mentioned it, but we did add exp share after you asked about it last time, since we felt it was a really good way to train. Lower level starmon opponents are always available via the arena if you want to train that way. Keep in mind that we reward your party with experience when you finish quests, so you'll end up leveling a little faster that way.
Some of you mappers from the SC1 days may remember "Spawning"- it's when you could put one disk into another person's computer to allow them to play the game with you, even if they hadn't purchased it. A similar feature has now been brought to sc2. From now on, every member of a party has the same access to the game as the person with the highest expansion level in the party. If a starter edition player is in a party with a WoL player, he can access the WoL ladder, custom games, and arcade. The same thing goes for HotS. And perhaps most importantly, using this feature will net you a fantastic in-game portrait.
What does this mean for mappers? Well, a WoL player can get into a HotS-only arcade map, as long as they are in a party with a HotS player.
Can we re-battle trainers in zones? That would add so much to the re-use of zones and be really fun. I'd like to rematch trainers that get tougher or maybe get new party members.
EDIT: It's also a good alternative before we unlock the arena or wherever your'e stashing the elite-trainers/EV-trainers, etc.
What Maity said is right- all our trainers are generated randomly every time you load. So you won't find the exact same trainer a second time, but the newly-generated trainers will fight you. Since we've made it super easy to avoid old zones (the teleporter system is very cheap and easy to unlock), this shouldn't become a problem for players.
Thinking about it now, we could put in an option to "unlock" the maximum level cap for zone scaling. In other words, enemies in zones you're over-leveled for will scale up to you with more evolved and higher-level starmon. It could be a reward for something- like completing the campaign, reaching a certain trainer level, etc....
Hidden items that can be found by the item finder
Have special NPCs appear in different zones at different times
Randomised zones (like redistributing trees or obstacles or particular terrain)
While the terrain itself of each zone won't change dramatically (we can't do that properly within sc2) we do a decent amount of randomization. The numer and position of trainers within every zone (and those trainer's classes, levels, and starmon teams) are all randomized every time you play. We also fill each zone with a few hidden goodies. We have a bunch of "potential spawn points" for treasure that we've hidden around, and the game picks a few every time and hides stuff there. The quantity and type of items inside is randomized, with more powerful/expensive items being more rare.
We also have plans to implement random events. These are sort of mini-quests that show up in a zone at random when you load the game. For example, you might come across a wounded starmon you can save to take as part of your team. Or you may stroll into a shop to find that it's the owners birthday and prices are half-off.
We're going to make sure that each zone has at least one pretty rare wild starmon. I don't remember how the original pokedex works, but the stardex provides you with starmon habitats once you've spotted one. Once you've seen a starmon, you'll see it's generalized location- something like "Nocturnal Forest Starmon" or "Enjoys very hot areas". Once you've captured the starmon you can see exactly which zones it spawns in. This should help you track down any particular starmon you have your heart set on. Spawns currently rotate with Day & Night, and we may cause them to rotate with the weather as well (which is randomized on a per-zone basis and cycles every day/night).
Have something seen for the first time but isn't accessible (like requiring a HM)
We're going to try and pack as much content as we can into every zone. I'm not sure exactly how things will turn out, but we'll try and put some stuff into the game like this. We have one side-quest chain where this one guy travels around the whole map, and you'll find him in various precarious situations he's gotten himself into. Quests like that will hopefully allow us to reuse old zones.
I prefer smaller but more areas (doesn't have to be wild starmon zones) to check out.
We do too! The sc2 map size limit is really small for RPG's. Keep in mind that we have to have space for a battle arena for each player, and that's with some serious effort on our part to keep things compact. We actually re-build your personal arena to fit the theme of the zone you're in instead of having a separate one for each zone. We haven't set a hard player cap yet (although all of my systems can support up to 15 people, we'll have to see how lag ends up) but with just 10 people that's a ton of space we have to reserve. So whether we like it or not, we're not going to have any gigantic zones.
We're also providing the player with teleporters to use (and those are available almost immediately after completing a low-level quest), so traveling to any previous zone should be quick, regardless of the actual distance. We plan on opening up the world more than the pokemon games. Once you complete our "introductory stuff", which consists of a few tutorial quests, we're going to open up 3 or so zones immediately. The story will follow a particular path but you're free to go wherever you want and do the sidequests there.
I actually think caves would be a GREAT idea. Let's be honest no one thoroughly goes through the caves the first time through, running into pokemon every 10 seconds, you can't see everything, trainers, not to mention the puzzling atmosphere. Plus caves would be easy to make, just limit the trainers vision and pow your good.
Caves are cool! But again, we're super tight on space. If we have extra space available, we might add a cave. There's lots of things we'd like to add (Safari, caves, gigantic evil lairs, large cities, huge ocean zones) but we just can't fit them.
@JacktheArcher: Go Endless Zubats appearing at every step... Damn I hated that.
We could add repel if it's needed. Technically speaking it'd be easy enough to add, although it would need to be based on time or distance moved rather than steps taken (because our movement isn't on a grid). Although because of the teleporters, you won't need to travel through tons of grass to get places.
Another thing: Zelda seems to be making some great progress on the big thing we want to show off in the video. 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
Yes, it's looking good. I know we've been teasing announcements of bigger announcements for a while, but we've had to keep pushing things back. This system took way longer for me to get in than I had planned, then Maity's computer wasn't working, then I had technical problems giving me terrible FPS, etc.... But barring any more unforeseen obstacles or gigantic bugs we're back on track and just about ready to record.
Have you guys considered the difficulty of the game from battles?
We're aiming for a reasonably gentle difficulty curve in the world's various zones. I never really liked when MMO's would say "This is a level 15 to 25 zone" but if you went in at level 15, you'd be torn apart. So we scale the level of difficulty for battles to suit the player. We take a bunch of things into account, but we try to make sure the enemies are about the same level as you are, as long as you're in the an appropriate zone for your level. In other words if you're using level 10 starmon in a 15-25 zone, the trainers will scale down to 15, but you'll still be killed pretty easily. But if you're within that level range, the trainers will usually be about your level.
That said, most of our quest-related battles are "Pre-Built" by us, meaning the starmon team of the enemy was hand-picked by us (including levels, move sets, AI level, etc..). So quest-related fights don't "scale" to your level in the same way ordinary trainers do (although any random trainers you run across during that quest will scale as usual), but because we don't open up quests until you're reasonably close in level, you shouldn't run into a difficulty wall. I've also worked on trainer AI in the past, although it's far from complete. We can increase the difficulty of fights by just turning up the AI level on trainers. We feel this is a good tool to make "Boss Fights" harder, rather than just jacking up the enemy's level so it's harder to win. Yes, the champions of the arena will have strong starmon, but so do a lot of other trainers. What will (hopefully) make them particularly challenging is their ability to choose the most effective combinations of moves at any given time.
With side quests I don't know if we talked about this but ideally players should have too much than they can handle :P. When we want a break from the story there should always be something useful and maybe more fun to do.
Like TheAlmaity said, space is limited and there's only so much we can add. But my goal is definitely to have enough quests so that you always have at least a few in your quest log throughout the whole game.
If you do want to grind, the Arena fights are all repeatable, so it's available if you'd prefer to level that way. The story missions will likely be spaced at least a couple levels apart, so if you only did story missions, you would likely be under leveled. We'll probably tie the story progression to your Arena rank in some way, so that will help people level themselves up.
Speaking of quests, I made a bunch of improvements to the quest system. One thing that we wanted to ensure was that the player always had something they could be doing, and never felt lost. Given the fact that we also wanted to make this more open-world than real pokemon games, we had a little bit of a problem. So now there's always a "Main Story" section in the quest log, which will point you in the right direction if you want to advance the plot.
If you want to do sidequests, we created what we're calling "The Mentor". We talked about him a little bit before, but I'll repeat it here. Basically, the mentor serves a dual purpose. First, he serves as a walking tutorial if you need it (you can ask him questions about various game systems and he'll give you more information). But second, he's able to recommend quests for you. He picks a side quest appropriate for your level and tells you where it's located.
These systems together should (hopefully) ensure that you never feel lost. If you want to do a story mission, the quest log will say where to go, and if you can't seem to find a side quest, the mentor can point you to one.
It would be cool getting rewards for building up our starmon collection and completing it. Maybe this could be a side quest through the professor.
I think more starmon related goals 'like catching them all' would help increase the fun.
Yeah, we like the idea of having a reward for stardex completion. We haven't nailed down the details, but we want to give everybody a "Trainer Level" that's based on a few different factors, one of the major factors being your stardex completion. In other words, the more starmon you discover or catch, the higher your trainer level. It'd take a few more things into account, like how far you've progressed through the story and how high your starmon's levels are. We don't have a purpose for the trainer level yet (other than it being a nice bragging tool on your trainer card), but we'll implement something.
I also like the suggestions you made for achievements . I don't know if we'll actually put achievements in the game (we haven't really talked about it yet), but they could be used for some kind of "Trainer Club" sidequest type thing.
Can I make it so that my map can only be played once? Ever. Like ever.
Not really. I don't know why you'd ever want to do this, but you could create bank files on the player's computer and then check for their existence. If they're found, end the game. But a smart player can find those files and delete them all.
It does belong somewhere else, and I'll go ahead and move it for you :)
I'm not sure what you mean by "remove requirements", but if you want to change what they can attack, it's "target filters" under their weapon. If you meant the building requirement, then you'll have to remove the requirement from the ability that builds them.
You can do this a few ways. With triggers, you can use "Unit enters/leaves area" to catch the unit leaving, and then move it back somewhere else. Or you could place pathing blockers around it, but that would block every unit from moving
To remove an attack, you can do two things. First, you could remove the weapon of the unit from it's "weapons+" field. Or second, you could remove the attack ability from it's "Abilities+" field. Both are required to attack, so removing either will fix your problem
To change the supply given by the depot, just change it's food from -10 to -200 in it's unit properties
You can just turn on your grid (press g to toggle it) and see the size of a building square. Then count out 24, and raise the cliff there
You can open a unit's collision field and uncheck the "ground" box. That should allow it to move freely
For the supply depot, make a trigger that fires on the event "ability used", and set the ability to your supply depot ability. Then use the "text message" action. Set the message to "Combine text". Set the first part of the text to "Convert string to text" and then set the string to "name of player (Triggering Player)". Set the second part of the text to "'s Maze is ready!".
Also, in general, we prefer a one-question per thread setup, instead of posting tons of questions at once. If you want to get a bunch of little questions answered quickly, you can try our free web IRC Chat.
You guys just nearly gave me a heart attack- we use this system for starmon a ton. After some testing though, it looks like it's working in multiplayer. I ran the command to phase the thing out for player 2, which would make the actor go invisible for him only, but I could still see it. When I ran the command for myself, it phased in/out properly. So unless that the trick only works for player 1, it looks like it's working.
Hopefully the error is something you're doing, because this is a really powerful tool, and I hope more people get to use it :)
I know we haven't posted much content recently (Again, I apologize for the lack of videos. I can't record with my setup and maity's computer is dying), so I'll try to make up for it with a screenshot of the second online test ever :D It was just me on two computers, though, so I wouldn't really call it multiplayer- more like multi-computer, but still. You get the point.
Anyways, I was checking out a few things to ensure they worked in multiplayer (most importantly the phasing system that we use heavily to instance quests). I swung by the star center that we had put so much work into to get a quick heal for my starmon. But when I arrived, I see this....
Now that's what I call beautiful terrain. Unfortunately I made an oopsie with our mod files, and Soul Filcher's super awesome teleporter and healing machine models didn't make it to battle net. It's fixed now, but I had to take a screen shot when I had the chance ^.^
Anyways, it was mostly good news from the test. It looks like things are working as expected, in-game cinematics seemed to work properly in multiplier, battles still work, conversations still work, etc.... I also made some progress on our first storyline quest. We won't be posting any spoiler screenshots of that, though ^.^
So I would assume that the makers of Starmon play, or at least did, but I was wondering if anyone else still does?
I never played pokemon as much as some people think. I played a little bit of Red when it came out, and then I played Pokemon Colosseum. Pokemon Colosseum is pretty under appreciated (*cough cough* it's not on your list *cough cough*), but I really enjoyed it.
Does anybody know if there's some kind of Pokemon game for PC or IPod/IPhone app?
There's nothing official out. I was searching for fan PC pokemon games forever when I was looking for inspiration for our UI. There really isn't anything worth mentioning. :/
I've been kinda uninteresting in the pokemon games, since to me, they don't change much each time. But it looks like they're really changing things up with X/Y, so that's exciting.
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At this point, I can't think of anything we're keeping secret except what Maity referred to in his last post, and that's only a secret because it's very important to the storyline. So other than the storyline details, feel free to ask about whatever you want now ^.^.
I know it was frustrating when we didn't talk about the 2v2/co-op systems at all, but to be honest, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get them working. I didn't want to promise we'd add something and then have to say "yeah, sorry, can't do it". So we decided not to announce it until it was actually in game and working.
The chance of any starmon being shiny in the actual pokemon games is about 0.01%. We realize that we won't have nearly the same playerbase as the actual pokemon games though, so we've tweaked the probability of shiny starmon to be roughly 0.09%. That's nine times as likely as the actual games. Shiny starmon are only special because of their rarity, so if we gave everybody a guaranteed one, you'd end up seeing them a lot more often and they'd loose that special "Oh my gosh, that's a shiny, I'm screen-shotting this to cherish forever" feeling. With a chance of about 1/1000, most people won't find a shiny unless they're playing a lot, but some people definitely will. For every player that catches all 100-ish starmon, about 1 of them will get a shiny (which is extremely likely compared to the real games). We can tweak the numbers in the future if needed- we'll have to see how things feel with an actual playerbase. It's very difficult to tell how rare or common items or starmon should be when there's just a few of us.
We also plan on giving out some type of special rewards for "events". For example, Mei (the creepy doll starmon you saw in the video) is not obtainable in-game. In order to get one, you'll have to actually receive it from somebody on the dev team. We can also include shiny or particularly rare starmon for rewards. We're not totally sure on how exactly this will work, but we'll probably be giving out gift starmon on holidays or as rewards for any type of tournament that could happen.
<sub>...And of course we may slip a few starmon in the direction of our loyal forum goers and alpha testers..</sub>
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While it's not ready yet, we plan to make any battles going on in the town arena watchable. It's a big special arena where PvP battles and other high-level bosses are fought. The idea is that any player can spectate you if you're in there.
2 players won't fight duplicate trainers. If you and me are in a party, and we wander upon a boss, he'll just send out 2 starmon at once. Me and you would both send out one starmon. It's not unfair because once me & you lose 6 starmon between the two of us (you could lose 2 and I lose 4, for example) the battle ends. So it's not like we have twice the firepower as the opponent.
NPC's are phased, like many of the other elements of the game. If an NPC gets into a battle with your party buddy, you'll both fight him together. If you're not in the same party, you won't even notice that NPC is battling- it will look as if he's just walking around still. Only the player actually involved in the battle will see the NPC run up to him, and then start the battle.
Most likely :D We want to make a good use of the super awesome cutscene tool that's been added.
We plan on working the backstory into the game. Like maity said above, most of the plot isn't written yet (we just have some general plans/ideas, the only stuff written for now is the story that will be ready for alpha). We plan on including a visit to a drop-pod impact site at some point, so you'll definitely become aware of the backstory throughout the plot.
Yeah, we're not super sure what we'll do for the map, but we'll have at least what the pokemon games had (a basic map that shows you which direction to go for each area). Navigation should be pretty easy once that's in, but we'll also include signs. Some of the signs were moved when Moz was terraining, but we had a sign outside zone enterances that gave directions. You can also ask the mentor back in town for advice on where to find any particular thing.
We have the genetics lab as a feature that will be unlocked over time. We haven't set up the system entirely yet, so I'll see if we can find a way to speed up the process. At the very least we'll allow you to remove EV's and re-train them, although I realize that's not what you're looking for :)
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We've got some pretty exciting news coming your guys's way very soon! Me & TheAlmaity have spent the last two days testing, debugging, and then testing some more in preparation to record our next update video.
The good news is that we finally managed to get a video recorded, and it's going to be posted here as soon as it's finished. The bad news is that we had some audio problems. Maity is re-recording the commentary as we speak, but that means it's not going to be ready today. To make up for it, here's one of the original tests that went...well, less than perfectly.
Edit: I stand corrected! Maity came through and stayed up until 5 in the morning waiting for the video to render & upload. Please give him your applause :P The actual video is in the post right below this one, and as Maity said, we'll post more information about it tomorrow. It's sort of the middle of the night right now O.o
Our first failed test (actual video is in the post below this one):
Anyways, the real video should be ready tomorrow. You'll get to see the surprise feature we've been working on for the past few months!
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We don't think it will be a problem. But what's great about the system is that if it ends up being too hard or too easy, we can easily adjust it so it's just right. The way the system works now is that it makes sure enemies are about your level, not exactly your level. We just use the average level of your party as the starting point- from there we adjust it based on a few different things, and then throw in a few random numbers to mix things up. The higher level you are, the more varied we'll allow the enemy's levels to be.
Also, keep in mind that we don't jam-pack zones with trainers. Many zones in the original games were literally just a linear path with like 20 trainers in the way, and you had to fight through each and every painful battle to get through. Our zones are more open, with trainers being placed further apart. They also walk around or turn (usually) instead of staring at the wall waiting to kill you the second you walk by. So you can sneak more of them than in the actual games. We don't want monotonous fights, which is why we're encouraging leveling up through quests.
Trainer "Classes" are determined by the zone you're in- you won't find bug catchers in the desert, for example. So this ends up meaning types are usually reasonably uniform throughout a zone. If you're in a volcano area, you can expect a lot of fire-type starmon. If you're in the desert, you can expect lots of sand-type starmon. So you can prepare appropriately if you want.
That said, Trainers will attempt to counter you if they have types to do it. Say you're using a fire-type and you kill their current starmon. And say the next starmon we gave them was a grass-type. If they also had a water-type available, they'll send that out instead of the grass-type that we originally decided would be next, assuming their AI level is high enough.
Again, we can tweak these randomization numbers as much as we need, if necessary. If it becomes too hard/easy, we can look at your party and modify the opponent's team before the battle starts.
I can't remember if I mentioned it, but we did add exp share after you asked about it last time, since we felt it was a really good way to train. Lower level starmon opponents are always available via the arena if you want to train that way. Keep in mind that we reward your party with experience when you finish quests, so you'll end up leveling a little faster that way.
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Some of you mappers from the SC1 days may remember "Spawning"- it's when you could put one disk into another person's computer to allow them to play the game with you, even if they hadn't purchased it. A similar feature has now been brought to sc2. From now on, every member of a party has the same access to the game as the person with the highest expansion level in the party. If a starter edition player is in a party with a WoL player, he can access the WoL ladder, custom games, and arcade. The same thing goes for HotS. And perhaps most importantly, using this feature will net you a fantastic in-game portrait.
What does this mean for mappers? Well, a WoL player can get into a HotS-only arcade map, as long as they are in a party with a HotS player.
Here's the official Blizzard post on it.
What do you guys think? I know a lot of mappers haven't purchased HotS yet, so do you plan on trying out the ladder or arcade with your friends?
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What Maity said is right- all our trainers are generated randomly every time you load. So you won't find the exact same trainer a second time, but the newly-generated trainers will fight you. Since we've made it super easy to avoid old zones (the teleporter system is very cheap and easy to unlock), this shouldn't become a problem for players.
Thinking about it now, we could put in an option to "unlock" the maximum level cap for zone scaling. In other words, enemies in zones you're over-leveled for will scale up to you with more evolved and higher-level starmon. It could be a reward for something- like completing the campaign, reaching a certain trainer level, etc....
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Alert! Wall-o-text incoming! :)
While the terrain itself of each zone won't change dramatically (we can't do that properly within sc2) we do a decent amount of randomization. The numer and position of trainers within every zone (and those trainer's classes, levels, and starmon teams) are all randomized every time you play. We also fill each zone with a few hidden goodies. We have a bunch of "potential spawn points" for treasure that we've hidden around, and the game picks a few every time and hides stuff there. The quantity and type of items inside is randomized, with more powerful/expensive items being more rare.
We also have plans to implement random events. These are sort of mini-quests that show up in a zone at random when you load the game. For example, you might come across a wounded starmon you can save to take as part of your team. Or you may stroll into a shop to find that it's the owners birthday and prices are half-off.
We're going to make sure that each zone has at least one pretty rare wild starmon. I don't remember how the original pokedex works, but the stardex provides you with starmon habitats once you've spotted one. Once you've seen a starmon, you'll see it's generalized location- something like "Nocturnal Forest Starmon" or "Enjoys very hot areas". Once you've captured the starmon you can see exactly which zones it spawns in. This should help you track down any particular starmon you have your heart set on. Spawns currently rotate with Day & Night, and we may cause them to rotate with the weather as well (which is randomized on a per-zone basis and cycles every day/night).
We're going to try and pack as much content as we can into every zone. I'm not sure exactly how things will turn out, but we'll try and put some stuff into the game like this. We have one side-quest chain where this one guy travels around the whole map, and you'll find him in various precarious situations he's gotten himself into. Quests like that will hopefully allow us to reuse old zones.
We do too! The sc2 map size limit is really small for RPG's. Keep in mind that we have to have space for a battle arena for each player, and that's with some serious effort on our part to keep things compact. We actually re-build your personal arena to fit the theme of the zone you're in instead of having a separate one for each zone. We haven't set a hard player cap yet (although all of my systems can support up to 15 people, we'll have to see how lag ends up) but with just 10 people that's a ton of space we have to reserve. So whether we like it or not, we're not going to have any gigantic zones.
We're also providing the player with teleporters to use (and those are available almost immediately after completing a low-level quest), so traveling to any previous zone should be quick, regardless of the actual distance. We plan on opening up the world more than the pokemon games. Once you complete our "introductory stuff", which consists of a few tutorial quests, we're going to open up 3 or so zones immediately. The story will follow a particular path but you're free to go wherever you want and do the sidequests there.
Caves are cool! But again, we're super tight on space. If we have extra space available, we might add a cave. There's lots of things we'd like to add (Safari, caves, gigantic evil lairs, large cities, huge ocean zones) but we just can't fit them.
We could add repel if it's needed. Technically speaking it'd be easy enough to add, although it would need to be based on time or distance moved rather than steps taken (because our movement isn't on a grid). Although because of the teleporters, you won't need to travel through tons of grass to get places.
Yes, it's looking good. I know we've been teasing announcements of bigger announcements for a while, but we've had to keep pushing things back. This system took way longer for me to get in than I had planned, then Maity's computer wasn't working, then I had technical problems giving me terrible FPS, etc.... But barring any more unforeseen obstacles or gigantic bugs we're back on track and just about ready to record.
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We're aiming for a reasonably gentle difficulty curve in the world's various zones. I never really liked when MMO's would say "This is a level 15 to 25 zone" but if you went in at level 15, you'd be torn apart. So we scale the level of difficulty for battles to suit the player. We take a bunch of things into account, but we try to make sure the enemies are about the same level as you are, as long as you're in the an appropriate zone for your level. In other words if you're using level 10 starmon in a 15-25 zone, the trainers will scale down to 15, but you'll still be killed pretty easily. But if you're within that level range, the trainers will usually be about your level.
That said, most of our quest-related battles are "Pre-Built" by us, meaning the starmon team of the enemy was hand-picked by us (including levels, move sets, AI level, etc..). So quest-related fights don't "scale" to your level in the same way ordinary trainers do (although any random trainers you run across during that quest will scale as usual), but because we don't open up quests until you're reasonably close in level, you shouldn't run into a difficulty wall. I've also worked on trainer AI in the past, although it's far from complete. We can increase the difficulty of fights by just turning up the AI level on trainers. We feel this is a good tool to make "Boss Fights" harder, rather than just jacking up the enemy's level so it's harder to win. Yes, the champions of the arena will have strong starmon, but so do a lot of other trainers. What will (hopefully) make them particularly challenging is their ability to choose the most effective combinations of moves at any given time.
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Like TheAlmaity said, space is limited and there's only so much we can add. But my goal is definitely to have enough quests so that you always have at least a few in your quest log throughout the whole game.
If you do want to grind, the Arena fights are all repeatable, so it's available if you'd prefer to level that way. The story missions will likely be spaced at least a couple levels apart, so if you only did story missions, you would likely be under leveled. We'll probably tie the story progression to your Arena rank in some way, so that will help people level themselves up.
Speaking of quests, I made a bunch of improvements to the quest system. One thing that we wanted to ensure was that the player always had something they could be doing, and never felt lost. Given the fact that we also wanted to make this more open-world than real pokemon games, we had a little bit of a problem. So now there's always a "Main Story" section in the quest log, which will point you in the right direction if you want to advance the plot.
If you want to do sidequests, we created what we're calling "The Mentor". We talked about him a little bit before, but I'll repeat it here. Basically, the mentor serves a dual purpose. First, he serves as a walking tutorial if you need it (you can ask him questions about various game systems and he'll give you more information). But second, he's able to recommend quests for you. He picks a side quest appropriate for your level and tells you where it's located.
These systems together should (hopefully) ensure that you never feel lost. If you want to do a story mission, the quest log will say where to go, and if you can't seem to find a side quest, the mentor can point you to one.
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Yeah, we like the idea of having a reward for stardex completion. We haven't nailed down the details, but we want to give everybody a "Trainer Level" that's based on a few different factors, one of the major factors being your stardex completion. In other words, the more starmon you discover or catch, the higher your trainer level. It'd take a few more things into account, like how far you've progressed through the story and how high your starmon's levels are. We don't have a purpose for the trainer level yet (other than it being a nice bragging tool on your trainer card), but we'll implement something.
I also like the suggestions you made for achievements . I don't know if we'll actually put achievements in the game (we haven't really talked about it yet), but they could be used for some kind of "Trainer Club" sidequest type thing.
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Not really. I don't know why you'd ever want to do this, but you could create bank files on the player's computer and then check for their existence. If they're found, end the game. But a smart player can find those files and delete them all.
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It does belong somewhere else, and I'll go ahead and move it for you :)
Also, in general, we prefer a one-question per thread setup, instead of posting tons of questions at once. If you want to get a bunch of little questions answered quickly, you can try our free web IRC Chat.
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You guys just nearly gave me a heart attack- we use this system for starmon a ton. After some testing though, it looks like it's working in multiplayer. I ran the command to phase the thing out for player 2, which would make the actor go invisible for him only, but I could still see it. When I ran the command for myself, it phased in/out properly. So unless that the trick only works for player 1, it looks like it's working.
Hopefully the error is something you're doing, because this is a really powerful tool, and I hope more people get to use it :)
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I know we haven't posted much content recently (Again, I apologize for the lack of videos. I can't record with my setup and maity's computer is dying), so I'll try to make up for it with a screenshot of the second online test ever :D It was just me on two computers, though, so I wouldn't really call it multiplayer- more like multi-computer, but still. You get the point.
Anyways, I was checking out a few things to ensure they worked in multiplayer (most importantly the phasing system that we use heavily to instance quests). I swung by the star center that we had put so much work into to get a quick heal for my starmon. But when I arrived, I see this....
Anyways, it was mostly good news from the test. It looks like things are working as expected, in-game cinematics seemed to work properly in multiplier, battles still work, conversations still work, etc.... I also made some progress on our first storyline quest. We won't be posting any spoiler screenshots of that, though ^.^
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I never played pokemon as much as some people think. I played a little bit of Red when it came out, and then I played Pokemon Colosseum. Pokemon Colosseum is pretty under appreciated (*cough cough* it's not on your list *cough cough*), but I really enjoyed it.
There's nothing official out. I was searching for fan PC pokemon games forever when I was looking for inspiration for our UI. There really isn't anything worth mentioning. :/
I've been kinda uninteresting in the pokemon games, since to me, they don't change much each time. But it looks like they're really changing things up with X/Y, so that's exciting.