Nyarth

There's been some really interesting conversation concerning gyms, so I thought I'd bring a new one to the table. Pokemon Sun and Moon broke away from the mold and had no gyms, instead replacing them with trials. However, that isn't what this question is about. It's whether gyms or gym-like formats (such as the trials) are a requirement for a fangame. That means no gym leaders or set boss you have to beat. Battles would be oriented to story-points rather than gameplay goals. Would that be possible from a gameplay standard? Or do you think that Pokémon games need a battle-oriented goal such as gyms, trials, or the elite four?

This is kind of ramble-y, but this was a super interesting topic so I spammed a bit. Honestly, I think it depends on the context behind your game, and what crowd you are specifically aiming to attract. There is also the matter that 18 gyms/8 elite may just be things added for the sake of being added, and to pile up on the features. I've only seen games with 14-18 gyms and 8 elite four members posted on these forums directly. Everywhere else, it's around 8 gyms always. So I'm pretty sure that there is a different mindset around here about gameplay and story in contrast to everywhere else. Regardless, I believe the way huge length=good story could work is by tying the gyms directly into the plot and not just adding them so you can say "look, we have 18 gyms!" That way, it wouldn't feel bloated since that's literally what the game is focused around. On extending the story, this really depends on what game you're making. How many layers are there to your plot? Everything can be extended if there is constantly some form of mystery or such, but it can fall to the same gym/feature issue by eventually running dry. If you're extending it and you notice that a section is not engaging or the plot is becoming very repetitive, then it probably isn't fit for becoming longer or you have to keep piling up on the details (which if you already have a full story, you probably don't want to do). If added features seem like it's weighing the game down and convulting the plot more than aiding to it, the game probably isn't fit for being longer either. But in my opinion, if you're happy with what you had right now, then don't alter it and just go through with it!

Thank you for this! I still have nightmares of how many tries it took me for the mansion boss-rush battle in Reborn, since it ended up coming down to whether I wanted to start the battle underlevelled and get pummeled, or be at your usual level and lose turns due to the Pokemon not obeying you.

I honestly agree with the one-thread policy. I understand your reasoning, but all of these threads for your own fangame are becoming messy, and as @Commander stated it's a bit disrespectful to other people who want to post since they're drowning the other threads out. For a single thread, if you want to mimic the multiple topics you can just create a table of contents and have the individual posts linked to it. Sure, it'll be rather messy, but it's better than having a ton of threads scattered all over the place. EDIT: Forgot to add this, but I'm talking more about your personal fangame concepts in specific. Not your dev talks and stuff, since those are more like free-form discussions about fangames in general.

I love relationship points with every fiber of my being, but there are a lot of people that don't like them either. For example, in Desolation, where if you didn't get a certain amount of points with one character something bad would happen and etc. People might not like it because they feel that they shouldn't be punished in a game for not having done something, and I can honestly agree. If you want to add relationship points, the best you can do to appease that side is to make the drawbacks and such more fair, but you're never going to be able to appeal to everyone. The variable adding way is probably the easiest and cleanest way to do this. However, with all you want to do with it, I think the variable categories might become extremely cluttered with the sheer amount you're going to need not just for the reputation system, but also for main game stuff. There might be a plug in for this, but honestly there might not be any way around that unless you want to make an entirely new system.

Literally an exact description of how I'm feeling right now. Pre-game stages of anything are my favorite, since I like seeing everyone collaborate together for stuff like this The easiest way to get rid of "Team" in front of the name is to either add "The" in front as @Combat suggested, or change the name into a fancy word that can work as a standalone. However, with you being set on Royale I think just adding a different word in the front would work better. You may have mentioned this in a previous thread, but what kind of status does this team have? Do they hold any power at all? Are they actual terrorists or are they just labelled by that? What does the public think of them? Do they have differing thoughts on them too? It might just be me, but even evil teams should be treated like characters. Which means a great opening to them, development for it and it's members, and emotional investment. The thing with a game that is trying to be morally ambiguous is that being "gray" is an assumption made by the player themselves. Sure, you can amplify and encourage it by giving unique options and choices in the game, but if either the government or the Royale aren't given equal amounts of development, then there will always be a "good team" vs. a "bad team". This might sound like something you are going for, but in perspective it can completely throw your game's intentions off-course. Look at Team Plasma, or even Team Flare in the main series. Or even Team Meteor from Reborn, who also made this mistake. The Pokemon gave them rather honorable intentions, but they are still painted as the villains of the game for obvious reasons. In Team Plasma, N was probably supposed to serve as the exact moral-questioner, but Team Plasma was so warped already that it really didn't matter at that point. They didn't do anything but villain-ing and bad guy-ing, so the player will immediately paint them as "bad guy team with good intentions but they suck so there", and that's all there is to them. That is why it's important to treat your villain teams like characters. Obviously, it's easier said than done, as the player will come in with pre-set expectations of what the team will be like. So use them. Abuse tropes and defy them like there's no tomorrow, use cliches like your best friend since the moment those are broken, the player will not know what to expect. Honestly, I really do love regional teams in Pokemon and even more so in fangames. That's why this thing is stupidly long lol. But since you're trying to make the player question their morals, you yourself can't view them as the regional evil team either. And you can't do that to the government to make the Royale more sympathising either. If either one of them are just a bunch of big scary bad guys then there won't be any form of "morally gray", and you'll just have a game pretending to be that.

Woah, woah, woah. The Reborn E17 blog just wrapped up, and today was going to be my procrastination-free day since I had no more fangames to obsessively check on. Now you're hitting me with this? I-I'll be fine. I've learned from my past mistakes and blunders of development blogs, and that people would be very nervous if they saw that this was 80% of my search history. I'm a strong, independent-- homework is for plebs and good students anyways

I think the term "inspired" is a key here. I'm going to be perfectly honest--I haven't seen a single bad game that was directly "inspired" by Reborn. However, the reason for that is due to the exact audience it is going to attract. Along with most people, I had played Reborn previous to playing Rejuvenation or Desolation. So I came with an idea of what the game was going to be like, with already high expectations due to my enjoyment of playing Reborn. These games all boasted the similar mechanics and features. I was not only a fan of the field effects and etc, but I was very familiar with them at that point. These games were all independently posted on the forum here and that's where they have their main audience, who are all people who played Reborn and liked it. Desolation and Rejuvenation would all be very bad entry level games for people who are not familiar to field effects, or to the sudden difficulty. They come with the expectation that the player had already gone through with Reborn. That is where the main issue comes in though. As much as I love Rejuvenation and Desolation, they cannot be seen as independent games. Even though I far prefer them over Reborn itself, they aren't just "inspired". They will always feel like a Reborn spin-off no matter how far they stray. So how is your game "inspired"? You've stated that you'll be using the field effects and the overall gist of Reborn. But you have to know that you'll never lose the connection players will make from your game to Reborn. It will be incredibly difficult for your game to stand independent when you're using the exact stuff that is the signature of Reborn, especially if you're making it the key concept of battling in your game too.

I really love hearing everyone's experiences on this! It's really quite interesting. Anyways, for me most of these originated from the V9 update. But the one thing I will always remember from my original run is sweeping Narcissa with one Pokemon that had Grassy Terrain, and I still ended up with full HP in the end of it. That was just great. For V9, the first thing I grew really fond about was the Blacksteeple part. I know a ton of people hate it and I can see why, but there's just something so satisfying about a mid-transition arc that sets everything up. I feel like I probably despised this part in my original run, but the updated scenes and tiles made it so much better. The highlight of this was beating Madame X, although not nearly as impressively as I've heard other's done so. But the new dialogue after you kick her in was really cool, since I didn't expect it to effect anything. The surprise Puppet Master fight is probably my favorite Gym Battle in the game, and it was the sole time I got blown back almost immediately on my first try. I've never had to reset for a Gym Leader so quickly before, and it took me an insane amount of times since my team was so badly stacked against it. The Reuniclus and it's Thunderbolts would just constantly smash through my team over and over again. The first time I've had to use a Revive :(.

Okay, yours was being a bit funky since different screen settings, but I think it's good now. If there are any more issues, you should put them up for save file troubleshoot. Game.rxdata

Yours should be good now! Game.rxdata

I can fix it as well, or you can post it over on the Save File Troubleshoot. You have to send the game.rxdata file, which is located in Saved Games>>Pokemon Rejuvenation.

Okay, it should be fixed now. Sorry for the late response. Game.rxdata

If it's not changing back despite switching the graphics, you can put your save file up on the Save File Troubleshooting. Or if you have RPGMaker, you can edit it personally. I might be able to fix it too if you give me your save file, but I'm a far cry from any expert in this stuff

Returning? RETURNING?! Words cannot describe how happy I am to hear that! I really hope your situation improves, so best of luck to you. Make sure to stay well! Good luck on this project! I am super excited to see what will come.

Look at all of these people using well thought and clever strategies to beat the OP Yveltal. I should be ashamed as I cheaply cheesed it using Perish Song Anyone who beats her down deserves a gold sticker though.

Oh, this looks fine. A region based off Egypt? Alright. I can dig it. This overall seems rather okay, but nothing too-- I'm interested...

Man, I really want a Dimensional Hydreigon now. I wouldn't mind any of your guesses to be correct though--they're all great.

With hype for Version 10 firing up, I thought this would be a great time to start threads like this to spark up some conversation. I want to see what other people think of the game! So here I'll start with a fairly basic question--who's your favorite character in the game? Why are they your favorite? If it's a tiebreaker between several characters, what made those characters stand out to you?

I personally feel like it's Melia. From what we've seen, Melia is extremely unconfident and doubtful in her abilities, so having one of the closest people in her life get essentially killed would really give her a huge whiplash (aside from Jenner, but seeing how Melia hated Jenner up until his sacrifice her perspective would be a bit different). Not only that, but she would see it as her own fault as she's the one that brought the group to Grand Dream City. In fact, I really hope it was Melia. She's a main character, but we really don't know too much about her, so I'm hoping the next version would showcase more of her personality and more character development. It would do wonders for her character ^^ Protagonist would be cool, but they don't speak :P. Maybe it would be someone that's mocking them in a dream or something instead. Huey isn't the one I thought of immediately, but that makes sense too. It's also a likely possibility since he's going to get more showcase in the plot later on, probably due to the whole Rune thing. Speaking of Rune... this is a completely irrelevant thing to the post so I'll put it in a spoiler tab below, so you can check it out if you choose to. Or... it's another new character talking in the preview. GOD NO

I agree with you on all of this! The game is amazing in the visuals and soundtrack department, which adds so much immersion in the game because it carries personality and lacks stiffness, which is a huge problem in many other fangames. On the characters, yeah they need a big amount of work as they end up affecting the plot as well. The V9 update shows that they're being worked on, so there's more room for improvement. The Melia thing is something that I think really needs to be fixed though. There is nothing wrong with non player-centric games and nothing wrong with having a game that also focuses a lot on another character... but literally everything that matters revolves around her, and it's far from being subtle. Since it's so apparent, it really ends up putting so many people off since Melia isn't well-developed enough for the player to care about all the drama surrounding her. This ends up stunting the impact of many events in the game, as so many of those events are about Melia. And it really sucks, as I like Melia . I like her team, I love her design, and the flickers of genuine personality we've seen from her. The only way I can see fixing the listed problems is either axing her role a bit (which is unlikely as the game is plot driven and most likely already written), or clean her character up a lot so the Melia-centricness is less deterring to the game.

Jan, don't overwork yourself! The game is not worth your own personal health, so please take as much time as needed. A dev team sounds really cool, but Commander had really great advice on hiring reliable people. I've seen many projects ranging from game development to animation series die off because there were major conflicts within the team, and it can really pile up on stress and make game-making overall less fun to do. But on the subject of outside help, make sure to listen to the community if you can except when they're shitposting. They can have really great suggestions with tons of things overall

Worship Aevia, the best girl.

Oh god, I can see it already. Everyone-gets-kidnapped™ and we're immune thanks to the vaccine so we have to save everyone... What's up with kidnapping in Reborn and Rejuvenation?

Yeah, I was thinking about it a bit when it came up in the game. I think they're used as some monitoring or maybe control thing. It would explain why Cassandra knew about the location of the corruption (hence also already knowing about Flora being in Bladestar). It's probably another Team Xen antic plot, seeing how Melia got a very special vaccination and how much they want to capture her. Not sure about the player, and I don't know about the purple vaccines either. Maybe it has to do with that moment with Isha when you're crossing the bridge. No idea what that was either