What takes the most time when making fan games, and why?

[Risakisa]

Making a pokémon fan game is a lot or work. A lot, I assume, tedious and/or hard and/or frustrating work. Months and months between updates for many games, often extending the game by relatively few hours.

 

I don't participate in making games, but I am still curious.

 

What is it that takes the most time, why does it to do, and does it need to? Are the tools insufficient? Is every team re-inventing the wheel?

 

From the consumer's PoV, making a pokémon game looks mostly like making the maps, placing objects, choosing what happens when you interact with them, and so on. The floor looks like this, here's an impassable object, here's a door leading to Area092, here's a trainer and if you move into the areas in front of him then that will trigger a text event followed by a battle using these mons, defeating him causes another text event followed by reward, and so on.

 

After making all the foundational stuff, of course. This is what happens when adding another chapter.

 

In other words, a lot of the same over over and over again, with variations in detail but not general concept. I know that, obviously, there's more to it, there's special triggers and flags and things to remember and there's often various events that are not battles and/or text.

 

If I am right, and this work takes up most of the time, or at least a lot of time.. isn't it possible to streamline the process? Some tool or kit or method to make it easier for devs to blaze through this process? I think we'd all benefit if making fan-games was easier and/or simpler and/or quicker.

 

Obviously if the big time-sink is writing, polishing, balancing, etc. then that can't be improved a whole lot through mechanical changes.

[Leenu]

It could be possible that developers find it very difficult to find time to develop games. Most developers also have jobs and responsibilities such as rent and school. That might add another layer of difficulty.

[Deleted User]

In part it depends on what someone is most experienced with.

Coding can be incredibly varying in time consumption. Sometimes it's a simple edit, sometimes you have to write a complicated block from scratch.
When it comes to mapping, experience plays a huge factor into how quickly it can be done.
Eventing is similar though testing those events to make sure they aren't stepping on eachother's toes or that you didn't make one small thing to throw it all off. So sort of a combination of the previous two.

Spiriting/Assets takes quite a bit of time as well, though that's not something I'm really good enough at to offer my opinion on.

[Amethyst]

I ask myself this every day. 

 

 

So, the tools could use some improving.

 

Recently (as in over the last year or two) Cass has made a lot of improvements to the engine that actually plays the game and to optimizing workflow by exporting scripts into text files. This has all let us start using git in the last year, where before we were roughly trying to synchronize stuff with Dropbox which was slow, messy, overwrote stuff, and crashed during compiling. I think that change will have a permanent positive impact on the cadence of development; it did for us, and I know the other major teams are using it now too

 

The actual development program, however, is still from 2005, and there's not much any of us can do about that. Classes are hidden, data files are encrypted. The front end isn't bad but there's no built in way to search through events or maps. We now have an explort script to help with the former and some ideas about how to work around the latter, but it's still hacky either way. Reborn has 900 maps now. Say there's a typo. The actual fixing of the typo will take two seconds, but navigating the maps and finding the right one and event can take a couple minutes, especially if I get distracted doing so. And there's a lot of typos. Plus everything else. 

 

 

Mapping doesn't have to be slow. If you make a lame map with only corridors, like many of our older maps were, it can be very quick. However, more complex maps like I prefer get very slow. In particular gen 3's style of mapping cliffs is insufferably tedious compared to other RPGs' cliff styles because there has to be a 1:1 ratio of elevation on each side for each level of elevation on the front. In and other game you could do a straight vertical cliff wall and call it a day, but that doesn't match Pokemon style. Very tedious. Games that use oceans as a barrier are at all advantage here; I picked mountains for some reason. 

 

 

Reinventing the wheel-- to some extent, across projects, yeah. Cass is exploring solutions to this within our community but there's always going to be bugs and chances are if a bug exists in one game it exists in most of them. Essentials wasn't complete when we first started-- most moves after 3rd gen had no effect. We all have had to come up with sprites and code for each new generation and frequently solve the same problems with them as we went. There's too much going on to trade notes on everything, but at least we can see how each other did it. Rejuv is on a later essentials version than us though so that complicates it. Essentials itself is now more open and using git though, so hopefully future projects starting from it will have an easier time moving through versions; we have to update code differences ourself.

 

 

Bugs suck. 

 

 

But mostly, like has been said, and I think this is true of any project, there's just sooooooo many small varied little things to deal with. Certain things are slower than others and unideal but the volume is from all categories rather than a single one. 

[Tabletpillowlamp]

Easily the motivation.

[Dark Legend]

im working on 2 different pokemon fan games right now, and I can easily say this:

starting the game itself. i dont mean creating, but i do mean coming up with the beta version.its kinda hard to explain. Its like this: you create a map of the region. that map will shape the entire game.

Edited January 5, 2022 by Dark Eclipse

[Risakisa]

"The actual development program, however, is still from 2005"

..jeez. Time to crowdfund the development of a better one? I wouldn't mind tossing a few bucks into a pot to hire people to make an open-sourced program that makes developing pokémon and pokémon-like games easier. I get that there's some legal copyright nonsense regarding actual pokémon games, but funding a program that has no copyrighted stuff should be legally a-ok.

 

But I'm glad to hear that the tools are improving. And I'm especially glad to hear (or infer) that they'll be available for others. It'd be super swell if more fan-games possessed the technical excellency of reborn & rejuvenation, and if the tools are better then the work is easier and so more people can get their hands dirty.

[Dark Legend]

On 2/8/2022 at 7:10 AM, Risakisa said:

But I'm glad to hear that the tools are improving. And I'm especially glad to hear (or infer) that they'll be available for others. It'd be super swell if more fan-games possessed the technical excellency of reborn & rejuvenation, and if the tools are better then the work is easier and so more people can get their hands dirty.

Well, I'm hoping that my game gets to be as big as Rejuvenation and Reborn on these forums.

[Oscarus]

7 minutes ago, Dark Champion said:

Well, I'm hoping that my game gets to be as big as Rejuvenation and Reborn on these forums.

Ambitious. 

I like that; yet don't soar too high, or you might meet with disappointment.. 

[Dark Legend]

Yeah

Just now, Oscarus said:

Ambitious. 

I like that; yet don't soar too high, or you might meet with disappointment.. 

Thats why I decided working on two games is too much. Its just me and Pokemon Revenge now.

[BIGFriv]

On 2/8/2022 at 1:10 PM, Risakisa said:

"The actual development program, however, is still from 2005"

Theres already different programs for fangame development, the tools for Rom Hacking keep getting better every year.
PSDK, MK, and a few other programs exist, Theres a lot more but I don't remember them all.

RPGMaker XP and Essentials simply are the most popular, and Essentials has done a lot of work to improve itself over the last 2 years so not everything is lost

[Dark Legend]

The coding part is still hard for me, but I love planning the game. Sometimes I get ideas for side versions of my game, like a sequal, prequel, and even a game where you play as the champion when he was younger. Probably won't do them but planning is the best part.