A friend wants to make a Mystery Dungeon fangame

[Alilatias]

A friend of mine recently discovered the various Pokemon fangames, but appears to be disappointed that Mystery Dungeon ones don't really exist. They want to try programming one, but we don't even know where to begin?

 

Does anyone have any advice, particularly which tools we should try using? I assume Essentials likely won't cut it for a Mystery Dungeon game.

[Gentleman Jaggi]

I looked into PMD fangames myself some time ago and apparentally something about how the dungeons work makes PMD notoriously difficult to work with? Didn't really dig into "creating one" part, only if any exist. There seems to have been a bunch of attempts that all died before they really got anywhere.

Anyhow, this guy on Reddit made a post early this year about some ROM hacking tools he was working on. (I don't know how to link specific posts on Reddit, so here's the relevant thread.) You could try messaging him to see if he can help you get started.

[AiedailEclipsed]

Okay, so I can give a teensy bit of information on this from a fan-game perspective. Basically, Essentials does work for it, but it would require a fair bit of work. If you want a good idea about how a Mystery Dungeon-esque game works, check out this entry to Relic Castle's recent Game Jam (you can also find the resources they used to create this here). I've never been particularly interested in a PMD-style game, so I've never looked into the mechanics behind it heavily, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

• The PMD-style battle system would be the "big" ticket item to work on.
  • Without coding knowledge, you'd have to do what the project I linked above did -- use the default Pokémon battle system.
• Finding the PMD-style graphics might be a bit difficult as it just isn't that popular for fan-games.
  • With freely available to use graphics being scarce, you'll need to learn how to make your own or figure out how to get graphics otherwise.
• Essentials does have very, very basic random dungeon generation capabilities, but it isn't anything to write home about.
  • What I mean by this is that anytime you enter a dungeon in MD, it's randomly generated so that no two dungeons are ever the same. Essentials emulates this on a basic level, but it wouldn't be as pretty unless you improved that system or "hard coded" the maps (ie just mapped a single map for a single dungeon or multiple maps for a single dungeon).

Your friend should also check out a non-Essentials based solution (ie a hack), which the best place to go to get started with that is probably PokéCommunity. I don't even know if there are hacks of PMD games, but that'd be the place to go to find out.

 

So, to wrap it up, creating a PMD-style game would be a fair amount of work possibly for little return. With the PMD games being relatively niche spin-offs in and of themselves, there has been little demand for PMD-style fan-games. Should your friend want to proceed with working on this, they need to be prepared for the fact that it might not ever get more than an average following or regular players. At the same time, who knows? Maybe your friend will bust out on the fan-game scene and create the resources needed to make PMD-style games more mainstream. I'd recommend taking things slow and working towards the end goal steadily, keeping in mind that it won't be easy, but to have fun while doing it. The best course of action is probably to find other like minded PMD-style fans who want to see these resources available and more PMD-style fan-games.

 

Good luck!

[Ice Cream Sand Witch]

It's discontinued, but there was a Mystery Dungeon adaptation of Reborn.

[KingCoin]

I've been developing Pokemon Safari in java without any preexisting tools. It's more work but it allows me to add any features I want without limitations. If you want any tips on that I'd be happy to help