Long time no see,

It’s been a while since I’ve made a proper update, hasn't it? What have I been up to all this time? Well, college being college, a frustrating loss of progress due file corruption, and just overall not doing the proper planning beforehand all led to some pretty slow progress. All the craziness of the last year or so sure hasn’t done any favors either. To put it simply, I fell into the habit of developing things as they went along, just trying to build on what was there before, instead of biting the bullet, and doing proper planning from a largely clean slate. And so a while ago, I decided to start planning the story, lore, characters, etc from a fresh state. Instead of deciding where I wanted the story to go as it went along, I spent quite a bit of time getting as much as I could planned ahead of time.

Of my current thoughts, probably the biggest change to the gameplay formula is that it is no longer entirely linier, “A tale of three trainers” as I’ve been calling it. Essentially, at the start of the game, you’ll be given the selection between three different aspiring trainers, all with their own background, history, and goals they hope to achieve. One of which would loosely follow the story of the current project, albeit with some changes to fit the new themes and lore of the project.

Despite their different pasts and motives, they’ll find themselves working together (and at times butting heads) throughout the story, with a shared goal at the end of the road. I’ll probably make an entire progress update about the story and gameplay ideas in more detail.

These characters have a lot more personal stakes in the story, and may or may not actually speak in cutscenes, I haven’t fully decided yet. You’ll still be able to choose a different name/gender regardless of which path you choose to take, but these are the defaults options, as well as the “cannon” characters you’ll interact with when not doing their campaign. For the time being though, I’m just going to focus on getting a single campaign rolling, with the other two coming after this first campaign is fully playable and released.

I’ve alluded to this before, but I actually have been working on a handful of projects that take place in this world, with plenty of opportunities to expand upon these characters and designs. The two main projects I shuffle between working on are the main Pokemon style game, alongside a more traditional JRPG, that focuses more on exploring the lore of the monsters and locations seen throughout your journey, alongside many new monsters and locations.

Besides those two, there are a handful of other small projects that work on occasionally, mostly just if I get a spark of inspiration. These are in varying stages of functionality, and likely won’t see the light of day until after the main two projects are well underway. One of which is a card game, which I may eventually include as an optional minigame in one of the main projects, similar to the current implementation of Triple Triad. All of that said, I’d wager at least 95% of development time goes into the main two projects though, so no need to worry about a myriad of spin-off projects further postponing the main project’s progression.

With all of that said, I do have more than just a fistful of ideas and planning to show for my work. As mentioned in an older update, I’m starting to work on “De-Pokemon-izing” the project. This won’t change the gameplay or anything like that, but will be changing anything directly from Pokemon (the name, sprites, music, etc) to something entirely our own, now taking place in it’s own fantasy world. Besides that though, I have the vast majority of unfinished battle sprites now completed, and now only that, but more than 120 of them also have overworld sprites now too! I’m planning on my next update post to be mostly about sharing these, and getting your thoughts on them, although feel free to ask if there’s a couple in particular that you’re interested in seeing early.

Oh, and something I’m surprised that took me this long to think of is that I should probably set up a Discord server for the project. It should make communication and possibly collaboration a bit easier, and would probably just be fun. I’m planning on getting one set up in the next couple days.

Hopefully this helps quell some of your worries about the project. I’ve said in the past that I’m determined to see the project through to the end, and I still stand by that. I’ll be back with the next update in the coming days, but feel free to comment if there’s anything else you’d like to know about/want answered.

Take care,
Vis_Mage