Nullspace

On the tedious journey of making a PSMD-like toolkit. Episode 0: What I am even trying to do.

Since I have no idea where in the forums could this fit, I place it here, in a sort-of blog manner. I suppose if this continues, I shall aggregate these later where appropriate.

I might fail in the endeavor, but the way walked to failure will be registered too.

1st: Why.

Just because. Well... that and there seems to be a lack of proper Mystery Dungeon fan games. I believe there's some console mods out there, but I am not acquainted very well them; there's also a weird mix of an real-time multiplayer rpg (PMD Universe, if I recall well), but I didn't quite like it, although I might steal, compare get some ideas from it.

I am quite unsure if I will finish this, but I am already learning a lot from bashing my head against dumb problems that happen even this early. If someone wants to continue (or in the unlikely, and hard, case of collaboration) this work, you are very welcome.

Now, why not classic 2D Mystery Dungeon? Here a list

• Let's do something different. There are a lot of 2D rougue-likes-likes (ie. Mystery Dungeon series). It also allows for things that would be very hard or time consuming with 2D sprites (camera, animations, non planar dungeon topology)
• The latest sprite based game only covered up to generation 4, thus I would find myself needing to use a lot of fan made sprites.
• I hate some of the PMD sprites.
• USUM/SwSh have all the animations I think I will require up to their generation. (A mystery-- USUM has walk and run animations for every poke but doesn't uses them)

Why this could be a disaster:

• Importing stuff it's not usually trivial. I will talk about that in another instance, but suffice to say, the games' models have some idiosyncrasies and limitations, thankfully none of them fatal (I hope). The bigger issue here it's that  I cannot (yet, perhaps) only require an 3ds image and automagicly extract the data required. Thus it will be required to provide all the models and textures. That's so obviously asking for a DYMCA. I get they might let games like Reborn live (hopefully forever), but it seems they are a bit more protective of the 3d stuff (It looks like Let's Go Unity was terminated, for instance).
• 3D Art is harder to make (At least for me, that's, I have no idea how to texture a donut). Also, there are a lot more 2D artists.
• Actually taking advantage of 3D in dungeon gameplay breaks many, many common tropes of game mechanics of the genre. I think I will make some compromises. PMSD despite rendering in 3D, it's more like 2.5D, as all dungeons are planar, square lattices.

Thus I have abandoned the hope of making a full game (I would have loved to make a heart-breaking story), and decided to make "just" a toolkit, so that in the remote possibility that I in the future (or you reader) might be able to tell a story in that style.

2nd: What.

So in the end, what _should_ be the result

• A ludicrously short demo
• The project files of the game
  • (The polished textures/models/animations???) [What do]
  • Source files of the game and plugins/add-ons of the engine that were developed to aid development
• Tutorials/Blogs (like this one, hopefully it's not garabge) that describe the journey. Also: Comments and critique are more than welcome

3rd: When.

Uh...

3st: How.

That's the whole purpouse of this series. See you soon, hopefully