[ti]Game[/ti]Pokémon Shadow Unbound (tentative title)
Oct 4, 2016 19:10:54 GMT -6
KurtBlissZ likes this
Post by Dragonite on Oct 4, 2016 19:10:54 GMT -6
Introduction
Drem yol lok. I'm working on a Pokémon fan game!
Yes, the tentative title is derived from a line in the main theme from Skyrim. If you recognized it right off the bat you REALLY need to get out more. In fact, there are a couple design choices pilfered from Skyrim. If you need to get out more but don't feel like it I guess you can keep a tally of all of the things you spot?
Plot
disclaimer: I've had a dozen or so versions of this and can't promise exactly how much will stick.
So, I'll be plain, I don't like "save the world" plots. This encompasses most games ever, yeah, but if there are other types of stories that can be told I'd prefer to take those instead.
The archetypical version
The local nerdy professor has finally succeeded in securing funding to explore some ancient ruins. You decide to tag along for the adventure and get roped into a world of conspiracy theories hidden in the shadows of an otherwise very ordinary society. There is no planet getting destroyed, no universe to be saved and no threat of Pokémon liberation, but sometimes the worst threats come from the sources you'd least expect.
The fact that word "Shadow" is in the title suggests that I should be working Shadow Pokémon into the plot unless I absolutely am incapable of doing so, although the mechanics and lore of these might be a little bit different from what you're used to from the GameCube games.
The version that my English teacher would be proud of me for
You develop a strange circle of friends who are trying to navigate the hellscape that calls itself "school," "the real world," "societal expectations," "the opposite sex," "wonky physics engines" and "the rest of things you all probably hated about high school" (not necessarily concurrently).I feel like I'm trying to advertise Twilight or something.
There also happen to be things involving "Pokémon" and "adventure" involved, too, if you're into that kind of thing.
If those don't tickle your fancy
There's some kind of weird fourth-wall-denial subplot going on in the house of the ones who call themselves "the game designers." idk.
Features
Screenshots
Download Link
This is currently a demo that does not contain plot, RPG battles or a lot of other things that are standard fare in completed games. But don't worry, as long as I don't die before I finish it, it will some day. Right now I'm kind of looking for people to fool around with it and find ways to crash it.
You can hit F2 to go into an editor which lets you throw around 3D objects, edit Pokémon, items, move data, etc. and a couple other things which may or may not work. You can zoom around with WASD like usual, and turn the camera with Middle Mouse. You can hit Right Mouse + F2 to jump the player to where the camera is in the editor - useful if you manage to clip through the terrain geometry or fall below z=0.
All of these links should go to a Google Drive folder that contains a Default.zip, a YYC.zip and a .gmz. Default uses the standard Game Maker interpreter and should work on all Windows computers but is somewhat slower, YYC has been compiled to machine code and should be considerably faster but may not work on computers with potatoes for graphics cards (example: mine), and the gmz can be extracted in Game Maker Studio to let you play around with the source code and let you laugh about how bad of a programmer I am. The parent directory also has a couple things in that which might be found interesting, but I don't remember if I enabled sharing on it or not.
Yes, these start at version 7.0.2.x. Shows you how long I've been screwing around with this. (Numbered versions not listed were probably shared for testing between me and my friends and never actually posted anywhere.)
Version 7.0.2.17: drive.google.com/open?id=0B45VzBIC4FH2X1gwdllva2JxOEk
Version 7.0.2.16: drive.google.com/open?id=0B45VzBIC4FH2czRBS3RxbnJZN28
Credits
POKéMON IS COPYRIGHT GAME FREAK, NINTENDO AND THE POKéMON COMPANY 2001-present
I've been working on various incarnations of this game since 2011, and if there are any ancient assets here who don't get properly credited let me know and I'll fix that immediately. Anyway:
- Pokémon Essentials . . . okay, it's REALLY weird to explain how much I've used Pokémon Essentials in a project that's about as far away from RPG Maker as you can be and still be in the realm of indie dev, but I owe a MASSIVE thanks to Maruno and all of the other people who contributed to Pokémon Essentials (and, by extension, Enterbrain for RPG Maker).
-- Almost all of the base stats, move data, items, etc. came from the \pbs\ folder in the Essentials download; I simply wrote a Java program to parse a lot of the CSV/INI text files and compile it into something that Game Maker can use more efficiently. I can post more about that some time, if people want.
-- A small number of graphics (especially for items and whatnot) came out of the \graphics\ folder. Might be a few ground textures, etc. from the Autotiles sheets but I'm not 100% sure.
-- A bunch of sound effects, from the \audio\se\ folder.
-- A lot of my "research" in AI came from the default Essentials AI script (although I did a lot of work on that on my own, adapted it to GML, etc).
Moving on . . .
- I'm the only person working on the codeand unless I somehow manage to teach my lazy butt proper source control it'll probably stay that way.
- Some of the non-standard NPC sprites were made with various RPG Maker character generators like GCH; the rest of them, see below.
- Other sprites come from resource dumps on various sites such as spriters- and textures-resource and floatzel.net. I'm 99% sure there's nothing "stolen" off of Deviant Art anywhere but if you identify anything let me know.
- Sound that didn't come from the default Essentials resource folders were either taken straight out of various ROMs or just made through sfxr. (If you don't know sfxr, you should probably familiarize yourself with it asap, it's amazing.) I'm 99% sure the Pokémon cries came from floatzel.net. Also, I think a couple might have been made by me making weird noises into my microphone when nobody was home, but I'm not sure which ones.
- Music is mainly from ninsheetmusic.org. A complete list of what music was used can be found here.
- A couple textures were printscreened out off of my 3DS capture application. (Not a good method for obtaining graphics, would not recommend.)
- The toilet flush sound effect came from YouTube's audio library. Plus maybe a few other sound effects.
- 3D models were mainly made by me, although there might be a few that (a) get ripped out of old Unreal games and possibly Oblivion or Skyrim, or (b) come from models-resource or similar sites. I might have used a few that I ripped out of the DS Pokémon ROMs, though I'm pretty sure not since the texture mapping on those things is a nightmare and in any case most of them only contain the faces visible from an overhead camera which would not be terribly useful to me.
- Textures (yes, these are different from sprites) mainly came from textures-resource, old Unreal games, possibly Oblivion or Skyrim again or were ripped directly out of DS Pokémon ROMs.
- Any 3D Pokémon models I have were most likely ripped/touched up/made by ROE Studios.
- About the DS Pokémon ROM thing - normally I wouldn't consider this to be noteworthy in the first place, but the person who wrote the tutorial on how to do it asked to be credited, so there you have it. You both are amazing, shiney570 and spikyearpichu.
- While I'm at it, Skyrim resources were ripped with these things called BSACMD and Nifskope, and Unreal resources were ripped with this thing called Unmodel.
- Obligatory thank-you to YoYo Games for all versions of Game Maker. (The page title says it's for making 2D games. Do not listen to them. You can do anything if you're sufficiently insane.)[/s][/s]
Drem yol lok. I'm working on a Pokémon fan game!
Yes, the tentative title is derived from a line in the main theme from Skyrim. If you recognized it right off the bat you REALLY need to get out more. In fact, there are a couple design choices pilfered from Skyrim. If you need to get out more but don't feel like it I guess you can keep a tally of all of the things you spot?
Plot
disclaimer: I've had a dozen or so versions of this and can't promise exactly how much will stick.
So, I'll be plain, I don't like "save the world" plots. This encompasses most games ever, yeah, but if there are other types of stories that can be told I'd prefer to take those instead.
The archetypical version
The local nerdy professor has finally succeeded in securing funding to explore some ancient ruins. You decide to tag along for the adventure and get roped into a world of conspiracy theories hidden in the shadows of an otherwise very ordinary society. There is no planet getting destroyed, no universe to be saved and no threat of Pokémon liberation, but sometimes the worst threats come from the sources you'd least expect.
The fact that word "Shadow" is in the title suggests that I should be working Shadow Pokémon into the plot unless I absolutely am incapable of doing so, although the mechanics and lore of these might be a little bit different from what you're used to from the GameCube games.
The version that my English teacher would be proud of me for
You develop a strange circle of friends who are trying to navigate the hellscape that calls itself "school," "the real world," "societal expectations," "the opposite sex," "wonky physics engines" and "the rest of things you all probably hated about high school" (not necessarily concurrently).
There also happen to be things involving "Pokémon" and "adventure" involved, too, if you're into that kind of thing.
If those don't tickle your fancy
There's some kind of weird fourth-wall-denial subplot going on in the house of the ones who call themselves "the game designers." idk.
Features
- There's a fancy loading graphic at the beginning.
- Because I evidently hate my life, this game is going to be in full, first-person 3D (those of you who are familiar with Game Maker know that's not a thing that sane people generally say) and therefore shouldn't confine the player to a grid. I'm doing this mainly because I want to add another, well, dimension to exploration of the world of Solaris. As such, a few traditional systems have been completely reworked. See the screenshots for details.
- There are seamless mouse/keyboard and gamepad controls. This is a thing that I think a lot of games are doing nowadays, but worth noting all the same.
- No, there will not be fakemon. I am a programmer. I am not an artist.
- Most of the game will take place on one of two maps (and the second will be optional). Unless there's a huge future change of plans or the size of the world I want to build inflates to perposterous proportions, there should be very few/no loading screens.
- Assuming your computer does not have a bottom-of-the-line graphics card like mine does, it should run relatively smoothly. If you're playing it, keep an eyeball on the performance stats on the side and let me know how it goes.
- The game is playable exclusively in first person and there won't be any playable character sprites. This is because I want to take the "role playing" aspect a step farther and minimize the number of constraints I put on your character and their backstory and totally and totally, TOTALLY not because I'm too lazy to program a character builder, I swear! (I'll also be avoiding the use of gender-specific pronouns when referring to you in writing through various methods, so there's that too.)
- Achievements/medals/whatever, I guess.
- The fourth wall is actually not broken when it would be inappropriate to do so (it's mostly, if not entirely, confined to a discrete aspect of the world).
- Whatever exactly this is supposed to be.
- A regional Pokédex that's not overly ambitious, not lacking cohesion, and most importantly, not completely unbalanced.
- It probably won't hurt anyone, so if you're bored, or feel like figuring out how the game works, or get stuck in a wall and are in a charitable mood, you can hit F2 and start messing around
- You can change the UI color and brightness; more customization may be added at a later date. The color swap might be removed at a later date since it relies on "if" statements in shaders, which most shader experts would probably have me hanged for.
- Fancy title screen, sort of, I guess. It was fun to make even if it looks like rubbish, okay?
- Because I evidently hate my life, this game is going to be in full, first-person 3D (those of you who are familiar with Game Maker know that's not a thing that sane people generally say) and therefore shouldn't confine the player to a grid. I'm doing this mainly because I want to add another, well, dimension to exploration of the world of Solaris. As such, a few traditional systems have been completely reworked. See the screenshots for details.
- There are seamless mouse/keyboard and gamepad controls. This is a thing that I think a lot of games are doing nowadays, but worth noting all the same.
- No, there will not be fakemon. I am a programmer. I am not an artist.
- Most of the game will take place on one of two maps (and the second will be optional). Unless there's a huge future change of plans or the size of the world I want to build inflates to perposterous proportions, there should be very few/no loading screens.
- Assuming your computer does not have a bottom-of-the-line graphics card like mine does, it should run relatively smoothly. If you're playing it, keep an eyeball on the performance stats on the side and let me know how it goes.
- The game is playable exclusively in first person and there won't be any playable character sprites. This is because I want to take the "role playing" aspect a step farther and minimize the number of constraints I put on your character and their backstory and totally and totally, TOTALLY not because I'm too lazy to program a character builder, I swear! (I'll also be avoiding the use of gender-specific pronouns when referring to you in writing through various methods, so there's that too.)
- Achievements/medals/whatever, I guess.
- The fourth wall is actually not broken when it would be inappropriate to do so (it's mostly, if not entirely, confined to a discrete aspect of the world).
- Whatever exactly this is supposed to be.
- A regional Pokédex that's not overly ambitious, not lacking cohesion, and most importantly, not completely unbalanced.
- It probably won't hurt anyone, so if you're bored, or feel like figuring out how the game works, or get stuck in a wall and are in a charitable mood, you can hit F2 and start messing around
- You can change the UI color and brightness; more customization may be added at a later date. The color swap might be removed at a later date since it relies on "if" statements in shaders, which most shader experts would probably have me hanged for.
- Fancy title screen, sort of, I guess. It was fun to make even if it looks like rubbish, okay?
- I've talked about this before, but there is no set order to take on the Gyms; in fact, the gym league and plot are not tied together in any way. (The Elite Four, on the other hand, is a slightly different story.) NPC trainers' levels scale to match yours. I'm reluctant to use the phrase "open world" because it seems like every indie game and its grandma claims to be "open world" and I think that's either desensitized a lot of people to the concept or turned them off of it completely. Regardless, the plot, whatever that happens to turn out to be, will most probably be going in a vaguely straight line, just completely decoupled from the gym system.
- Day/night system, plus you can change the rate at which time passes.
- You can adjust a bunch of battle mechanisms such as using certain Smogon clauses, the physical/special split, the game difficulty (in terms of both opponent levels and AI) and maybe a few other things.
- Automatic HMs; i.e. if you have access to Surf you can automatically traverse the water, the game doesn't have to ask you every single time.
- No one-way ledges, because they just looked really dumb in first person and they were kind of a pain to add to maps anyway; there is a Jump button, but it's more because it feels nice to have a Jump button than because you're going to be doing a lot of platforming. (I somewhat deliberately made the jump height pretty low, and there is no wall climbing except in map cells that I haven't made collision models for yet.)
- Day/night system, plus you can change the rate at which time passes.
- You can adjust a bunch of battle mechanisms such as using certain Smogon clauses, the physical/special split, the game difficulty (in terms of both opponent levels and AI) and maybe a few other things.
- Automatic HMs; i.e. if you have access to Surf you can automatically traverse the water, the game doesn't have to ask you every single time.
- No one-way ledges, because they just looked really dumb in first person and they were kind of a pain to add to maps anyway; there is a Jump button, but it's more because it feels nice to have a Jump button than because you're going to be doing a lot of platforming. (I somewhat deliberately made the jump height pretty low, and there is no wall climbing except in map cells that I haven't made collision models for yet.)
Screenshots
The general style of the world.
Tall grass and NPCs.
Water effects, and other types of particles.
The editor.
Spot the error.
Tall grass and NPCs.
Water effects, and other types of particles.
The editor.
Spot the error.
Download Link
This is currently a demo that does not contain plot, RPG battles or a lot of other things that are standard fare in completed games. But don't worry, as long as I don't die before I finish it, it will some day. Right now I'm kind of looking for people to fool around with it and find ways to crash it.
You can hit F2 to go into an editor which lets you throw around 3D objects, edit Pokémon, items, move data, etc. and a couple other things which may or may not work. You can zoom around with WASD like usual, and turn the camera with Middle Mouse. You can hit Right Mouse + F2 to jump the player to where the camera is in the editor - useful if you manage to clip through the terrain geometry or fall below z=0.
All of these links should go to a Google Drive folder that contains a Default.zip, a YYC.zip and a .gmz. Default uses the standard Game Maker interpreter and should work on all Windows computers but is somewhat slower, YYC has been compiled to machine code and should be considerably faster but may not work on computers with potatoes for graphics cards (example: mine), and the gmz can be extracted in Game Maker Studio to let you play around with the source code and let you laugh about how bad of a programmer I am. The parent directory also has a couple things in that which might be found interesting, but I don't remember if I enabled sharing on it or not.
Yes, these start at version 7.0.2.x. Shows you how long I've been screwing around with this. (Numbered versions not listed were probably shared for testing between me and my friends and never actually posted anywhere.)
Version 7.0.2.17: drive.google.com/open?id=0B45VzBIC4FH2X1gwdllva2JxOEk
Version 7.0.2.16: drive.google.com/open?id=0B45VzBIC4FH2czRBS3RxbnJZN28
Credits
POKéMON IS COPYRIGHT GAME FREAK, NINTENDO AND THE POKéMON COMPANY 2001-present
I've been working on various incarnations of this game since 2011, and if there are any ancient assets here who don't get properly credited let me know and I'll fix that immediately. Anyway:
- Pokémon Essentials . . . okay, it's REALLY weird to explain how much I've used Pokémon Essentials in a project that's about as far away from RPG Maker as you can be and still be in the realm of indie dev, but I owe a MASSIVE thanks to Maruno and all of the other people who contributed to Pokémon Essentials (and, by extension, Enterbrain for RPG Maker).
-- Almost all of the base stats, move data, items, etc. came from the \pbs\ folder in the Essentials download; I simply wrote a Java program to parse a lot of the CSV/INI text files and compile it into something that Game Maker can use more efficiently. I can post more about that some time, if people want.
-- A small number of graphics (especially for items and whatnot) came out of the \graphics\ folder. Might be a few ground textures, etc. from the Autotiles sheets but I'm not 100% sure.
-- A bunch of sound effects, from the \audio\se\ folder.
-- A lot of my "research" in AI came from the default Essentials AI script (although I did a lot of work on that on my own, adapted it to GML, etc).
Moving on . . .
- I'm the only person working on the code
- Some of the non-standard NPC sprites were made with various RPG Maker character generators like GCH; the rest of them, see below.
- Other sprites come from resource dumps on various sites such as spriters- and textures-resource and floatzel.net. I'm 99% sure there's nothing "stolen" off of Deviant Art anywhere but if you identify anything let me know.
- Sound that didn't come from the default Essentials resource folders were either taken straight out of various ROMs or just made through sfxr. (If you don't know sfxr, you should probably familiarize yourself with it asap, it's amazing.) I'm 99% sure the Pokémon cries came from floatzel.net. Also, I think a couple might have been made by me making weird noises into my microphone when nobody was home, but I'm not sure which ones.
- Music is mainly from ninsheetmusic.org. A complete list of what music was used can be found here.
- A couple textures were printscreened out off of my 3DS capture application. (Not a good method for obtaining graphics, would not recommend.)
- The toilet flush sound effect came from YouTube's audio library. Plus maybe a few other sound effects.
- 3D models were mainly made by me, although there might be a few that (a) get ripped out of old Unreal games and possibly Oblivion or Skyrim, or (b) come from models-resource or similar sites. I might have used a few that I ripped out of the DS Pokémon ROMs, though I'm pretty sure not since the texture mapping on those things is a nightmare and in any case most of them only contain the faces visible from an overhead camera which would not be terribly useful to me.
- Textures (yes, these are different from sprites) mainly came from textures-resource, old Unreal games, possibly Oblivion or Skyrim again or were ripped directly out of DS Pokémon ROMs.
- Any 3D Pokémon models I have were most likely ripped/touched up/made by ROE Studios.
- About the DS Pokémon ROM thing - normally I wouldn't consider this to be noteworthy in the first place, but the person who wrote the tutorial on how to do it asked to be credited, so there you have it. You both are amazing, shiney570 and spikyearpichu.
- While I'm at it, Skyrim resources were ripped with these things called BSACMD and Nifskope, and Unreal resources were ripped with this thing called Unmodel.
- Obligatory thank-you to YoYo Games for all versions of Game Maker. (The page title says it's for making 2D games. Do not listen to them. You can do anything if you're sufficiently insane.)[/s][/s]