Would you be interested in a procedurally generated pokemon game?

[KingCoin]

I've finished the first stage of generating towns. The buildings cannot be entered and have no collisions yet.

I also added a large list of possible town names to the game however I haven't added a way to set and show town names yet.

Here's some fresh screenshots:

Edited September 29, 2016 by KingCoin

[DemICE]

how some randomly generated towns have better general design than some canon towns

i mean, all they miss are decorative stuff

Edited September 29, 2016 by DemICE

[Twilightwing]

This be great for a survival nuzlocke. Just keep on going until all your pokemon faint

[KingCoin]

Added the following:

• Added 10 possible NPC's to the towns. They currently just stand where they spawned and change directions occasionally.
• The player now properly collides with and isn't able to pass through buildings or NPC's.
• Added the menu to the game. You can toggle the menu by pressing ENTER. The buttons in the menu don't do anything yet however this is the menu you will eventually use to access your bag, check on your pokemon, etc.

Here's another screenshot showcasing the progress:

Edited September 30, 2016 by KingCoin

[Dreamy]

looking good!

[KingCoin]

Is it better to post small frequent updates or less frequent larger updates? I'm wondering if I should make a new post for every little change or if I should wait until I have like 10 changes before making a post. Should I post information about progress as I make it? Once every day? Every 2-3 days? Or should I wait like a week or two between posts. What do you guys think is best? I feel like waiting too long will make people stop following the thread but posting two often can cause people to miss some of the information. Another thing worth mentioning is that some changes may take a lot of work to implement but still be able to be described in very few words so they don't sound very impressive.

[DemICE]

well i say keep it like this if its easier for you. humans handle small bits of information better than large bits

[KingCoin]

Added the following:

• The world can now generate both towns and routes instead of choosing to spawn either entirely towns or entirely routes.
• The pokemon button in the start menu now functions properly. Choosing this button will display your current team as well as their current health, name, and gender.
• The "switch" option in the pokemon screen now works properly so you can switch around your pokemon team's order.
• The color of pokemon's HP changes colors depending on how close they are to fainting. If health is above 50% the hp bar will be green, if health is above 20% and below 50% it will be yellow. If it is below 20% then it will be red.
• The "cancel" button on the pokemon screen now brings you back to the start menu when it is pressed.
• Added the basic code necessary for items.
• Added about 100 items to the game. These items are no where near complete yet and only store their name and stack size. A couple of them have descriptions but the rest still need their descriptions added.
• The "bag" button in the start menu now opens up an inventory screen which has 6 categories that related items will be stored under.
• The item categories on the inventory screen can be scrolled down or up if they contain more items than can be displayed on the screen at once.
• Your position in each of the 6 categories on the inventory screen is not reset after exiting the inventory screen. This means the items you used most recently will already be selected when you re-open your inventory after using them.
• Pressing the X key now properly closes most windows and menus.

Getting all of these new screens and menus working properly took a lot of time and effort but they bring the game another step closer to being playable as a game.

Here are a few new screenshots:

This one isn't a new feature but I included it anyways because it represents a nice town that was generated when I was testing.

[2tousent]

the only reason i check the forums is too see if you've posted something new, keep up the good job, i'm exited for this game and hope everything turns out well

[KingCoin]

the only reason i check the forums is too see if you've posted something new, keep up the good job, i'm exited for this game and hope everything turns out well

Here you go, a new post

Added the following:

• It is now possible to open and navigate the bag while in battle
• It is now possible to access the pokemon screen in battle which allows you to switch pokemon around during a fight.
• Partially added the pokemon corresponding to national pokedex numbers 201-251. They still need their moves, evolution levels, base stats, and information about what they can evolve into added.

This isn't a new feature but I'm pretty sure I never showed a screenshot of this feature after I added it. When you encounter a wild pokemon it will have a silver star under it's name for each IV it has that is greater than or equal to 20. The star will be gold if the corresponding IV is a perfect 31. Here are a couple screenshots to demonstrate:

This has only one silver star. This means only one of it's IV's is above 19. If you wanted to catch an arbok for your team, you might want to look for another one.

This Yanma has one gold star and four silver stars, this means it has quite good IVs(one is perfect, 4 others are greater than or equal to 20). If you were looking to add a Yanma to your team, this one would be a good catch.

[DemICE]

very handy , this IV thing

[2tousent]

thats a powerful yanma

[KingCoin]

I've finished adding an additional 51 pokemon and I need to decide where you should be able to find each one. If anyone wants to help me figure that out, here's a list of all of the possible locations to find a pokemon:

• Short Grass
• Tall Grass
• Cave
• Surfing
• Old Rod
• Good Rod
• Super Rod

Here's a list of the new pokemon that need their encounter locations determined:

• Wobbuffet
• Girafarig
• Pineco
• Dunsparce
• Gligar
• Snubbull
• Qwilfish
• Scizor
• Shuckle
• Heracross
• Sneasel
• Teddiursa
• Slugma
• Swinub
• Corsola
• Remoraid
• Delibird
• Mantine
• Skarmory
• Houndour
• Phanpy
• Donphan
• Stantler
• Smeargle
• Tyrogue
• Smoochum
• Elekid
• Magby
• Miltank
• Larvitar

I excluded evolutions and event pokemon because the game will automatically make you encounter a pokemon's evolutions rather than it's first form if you find it in a high enough level area. Event pokemon will get their own special set of circumstances that allow you to find them.

[DemICE]

Height dependent for grass?

Short grass = short pokemon (and some plains-themed species like cows, horses etc)

Tall grass = tall ones and some bugs/grass types regardless of height

[Bazaro]

First off, I'd like to say that this is a fantastic idea and it's more than amazing the amount of work you've done for this, much kudos.

I have a list below for sorting things, but do you think adding things like Rock Smash boulders or small Headbutt trees would be possible? It would help with distribution quite a bit.

I'm also curious to see different types of caves, like water or ice caves and volcanoes. But that's getting a bit ahead of everything, isn't it?

I've finished adding an additional 51 pokemon and I need to decide where you should be able to find each one. If anyone wants to help me figure that out, here's a list of all of the possible locations to find a pokemon:

Here's a quick list:

Short Grass

Girafarig

Pineco

Gligar

Snubbull

Shuckle

Houndour

Phanpy

Elekid

Tall Grass

Girafarig

Scizor

Heracross

Skarmory

Stantler

Miltank

Cave

Wobbuffet

Dunsparce

Sneasel

Teddiursa

Slugma

Swinub

Delibird

Smeargle

Tyrogue

Smoochum

Magby

Larvitar

Surf

Mantine

Old Rod

... seems like a "Magikarp Only Club"

Good Rod

Qwilfish

Corsola

Remoraid

Super Rod

Qwilfish

Corsola

Remoraid

[KingCoin]

First off, I'd like to say that this is a fantastic idea and it's more than amazing the amount of work you've done for this, much kudos.

I have a list below for sorting things, but do you think adding things like Rock Smash boulders or small Headbutt trees would be possible? It would help with distribution quite a bit.

I'm also curious to see different types of caves, like water or ice caves and volcanoes. But that's getting a bit ahead of everything, isn't it?

I appreciate your input. I'll use the list you created and if anyone sees any issues with it I can always change it later. There will eventually be rock smash rocks and probably headbutt trees but those aren't as essential as some of the core game mechanics so I haven't began working on them yet. I'm trying to get a lot of the core stuff working before I release the first playable version of the game. A few of the things I need to get working before I can release the first version of the game include:

• AI for enemy pokemon/trainers.
• Procedurally generated building interiors.
• Ability to walk through "doors" and transition between the different game areas without godmode controls.
• Ability to catch pokemon.
• Ability to plant and harvest Apricorns and berries (I haven't decided yet if you'll be able to buy pokeballs in town like cannon games or if you will have to make them with apricorns or find them).
• Determine starter pokemon.
• Procedurally generated plot and trainers/gyms(possibly factions).
• All non-event pokemon from generations 1-3. Having at least this many pokemon available is important do to the large size of the world.
• At least a few legendary encounters.
• Ability to save and load game.
• HM gated areas.

I do intend to add special types of areas like the ice caves or volcanoes you mentioned. These areas will probably lead to legendary encounters.

[KingCoin]

Fixed a rare crash that could occur while transitioning between areas.

Fixed a crash that occured when trying to switch pokemon outside of battle.

Edited October 21, 2016 by KingCoin

[Dragon116]

Sounds like you've made a lot of progress on this since I last checked. Good work!

[KingCoin]

The game now properly states "It's super effective!" or "It's not very effective..." after a super effective or not very effective move is used in battle.

Edited October 21, 2016 by KingCoin

[KingCoin]

Some of you have probably noticed that I haven't been posting updates as often recently. The truth is that I tend to work in bursts of effort. I'll program on one thing for like 12+ hours/day, then I get burned out on that and work really hard on something else for a week or two to recharge before I switch back to working hard on my original project really hard again. I don't want you guys to see the lack of recent updates and assume I'm abandoning this project because I'm not, if I haven't posted recently It probably means I'm just taking a short break.

These are the other projects which I've worked on in between working on this project in case anyone wanted to know:

• University homework of course
• I created an AI which has learned to identify roughly 27,000 possible combinations of cell structures found in pictures of cell samples taken with microscopes. There's a bit of an interesting story behind this program. Basically some cancer researchers needed to be able to identify various cell structures from a massive selection of millions of slides quickly. They were apparently unable to solve this problem(identifying the different cell structures in pictures of cells) even with the super computers they tried to do it with so they ended up working with some game developers in an MMO to add a sort of minigame to the MMO. Players in the mmo can do a minigame where they are given these pictures of cells and asked to identify the structures found in them. They are occasionally shown slides with known answers in order to test how accurate they are and they are paid money in the game based on how accurate they are. Essentially, the players are paid currency in the mmo to help the cancer researchers solve this problem. I knew I could automate this process so I decided to make a bot that could do it for me. The bot started out with very low accuracy, it actually had 0% accuracy for the first 2,000 samples it attempted. The horrible initial accuracy of the bot may seem like a problem but I actually programed it to learn from it's mistakes. Every time it failed to correctly identify a sample it recorded information about the sample and would make modifications to it's chosen answers for future samples based on that data. After reaching a "critical mass" of experiences it was able to solve samples with 50% accuracy. The accuracy quickly grew and now it's been solving samples for 8 hours/day with 99.9% accuracy for me in the game for the past month making me rich in the game. The funny thing about this bot though is that bots are against the rules of the game so I actually had to also design it to behave like a human would behave to avoid detection. I'm not sure how the developers would react if they did catch me, none of the players in the game or the developers think it's even possible to solve the samples with a computer instead of a human and it's technically helping cancer research by running so I kind of wonder how they'd react to it. On a forum thread where someone raised the possibility of someone writing a bot for it everyone was saying it was probably impossible but if someone did solve it they'd probably get a nobel prize, then promptly get banned from the game lol. They did make an announcement shortly after I started running my bot on two computers though that was kind of entertaining. They were happy to see that there was "an increase in players doing the minigame recently". I did the math and apparently my two bots running 8 hours/day each accounted for half of that increase and the developers have no idea.
• The other project which I've worked on recently is a computer vision system that could be used as a general program to bot hundreds of different games in an undetectable manner. It looks at what's on the screen and analyzes the way it changes to determine locations of monsters/players in games as well as mapping the game's terrain as you/it play the game. It also reads the text on the screen and looks at cause and effect to learn to play games which it hasn't been exposed to yet. This project isn't even close to done yet but it shows promise. I intend to do some more big updates to pokemon safari after I get this AI to a usable state which shouldn't take too much longer. Here's a screenshot of this program learning about the game "RuneScape oldschool". The window on the left is the game window, the window on the right is showing what the bot is seeing in the game window.
  

Edited November 4, 2016 by KingCoin

[Dreamy]

Some of you have probably noticed that I haven't been posting updates as often recently. The truth is that I tend to work in bursts of effort. I'll program on one thing for like 12+ hours/day, then I get burned out in that and work really hard on something else for a week or two before I switch back to working hard on my original project really hard again. I don't want you guys to see the lack of recent updates and assume I'm abandoning this project because I'm not, if I havent posted recently I'm just taking a short break.

To be honest I don't think anyone minds. you've already done an amazing amount of work very quickly and all of this is awesome regardless of how fast or slow the progress is so just keep working at your own pace.

[DemICE]

Interesting stuff you wrote there.

Dont worry too much, do your thing at your own leisure. Its a hobby after all.

[Scottieboy2020]

ddduuuuuuuuude

this looks outstanding XD

I would really enjoy using this, too--

Could you make your own game out of this (theoretically)? I wanted to make a fangame for my showdown league, but I quickly realized I was in WAAAYYY over my own head and decided I'd do something else instead...

just wondering.

[KingCoin]

ddduuuuuuuuude

this looks outstanding XD

I would really enjoy using this, too--

Could you make your own game out of this (theoretically)? I wanted to make a fangame for my showdown league, but I quickly realized I was in WAAAYYY over my own head and decided I'd do something else instead...

just wondering.

You could if you knew how to program in java. Otherwise it is possible that I could eventually make a tool for it but that would be a lot of work so I'd probably only do it if a lot of interest was expressed by multiple people after I finished the original game itself. Could you elaborate more on what my mean by making a fangame out of it? Do you mean an alternate story that uses the same procedural generation or what?

Edited November 13, 2016 by KingCoin

[KingCoin]

• Wild pokemon now fight back when attacked. (This took a lot of time)

Changed the number of seperate pokemon species in each area from always being 8 to being a random amount between 2 and 7.

Fixed a crash caused when any wild slowpoke tried to use any moves. (I forgot to give it a move list for leveling so it had no possible moves to use)

Fixed a rare crash that could occur while transitioning between areas.

Fixed a rare crash that could occur while new areas were being generated. (I'm pretty sure it's fixed anyways)

Fixed a bug where totodile was learning a move which didn't exist and wasn't coded called "Aqual Tail" instead of "Aqua Tail".

Fixed a bug where venusaur was learning a move which didn't exist and wasn't coded called "Petal-Dance" instead of "Petal Dance".

Fixed a bug where venusaur was learning a move which didn't exist and wasn't coded called "Worry-Seed" instead of "Worry Seed".

Fixed a bug where wild pokemon that were the evolution of another pokemon knew the wrong moves. (high level evolved wild pokemon had the movesets of their unevolved form)

Fixed a problem where the animation for gaining experience was behaving very strangely after the first time experience was gained or when gaining more than one level from one fight.

Edited November 27, 2016 by KingCoin