Replying to this was the worst and I am never multiquoting again. Ever. Also, this will probably spam your notifications, so sorry about that.
Hi! Thanks a bunch for playing, and thanks even more for your in-depth review, it's really appreciated! :)
First of all, thanks for playing our hack and giving us your (extensive) feedback!
Of course! I really enjoyed my playthrough. The whole experience was very refreshing, and the storyline was innovative. This is probably among the few hacks that I'd recommend to others. Like I said, great work guys!
One large update we're toying with is the ability to travel backwards through the Islands. Backtracking is one common feature of the Pokémon games, that was missing from ours. Given the nature of our story, it sort of makes sense, but it'd still probably suit to have some sort of back-travelling method.
Furthermore, there is little to no postgame at present; that's something we figured we'd add after the competition. Your guesses and suggestions on what we should add are precisely what we have in mind - we just haven't gotten around to it yet. The main story was, typically, our main concern. On with my response to your review!
I'm not sure if backtracking is really necessary during the main storyline, in fact, in may ruin the sense of urgency that the plot has when the player discovers Team Rocket involvement. "Adrienne's in mortal danger, but I want to head back to One Island for a few hours." Unless the backtracking involves maybe thwarting Rockets that are simultaneously messing around elsewhere. That might be a good idea to bring more of their plot to light without forcing it directly on the player. Like little sidequests. It might also help shore up the level curve, and gives the player a moral choice. Do I immediately go and save Adrienne and possibly miss what a group of Rockets are doing on Three Island? Or do I head off and take care of them while Adrienne is in danger? I feel like having some missable side content like this would be perfect for a game of this length that is easy to restart and enjoy again. It'd do wonders for replayability. Perhaps, since we see that the PokeGear sort of works on the island, that the player could have one as well and gives out his number to the main inhabitants of the islands just in case they see Adrienne while he's on his wild Swanna-chase. Then, they could call the player and ask for his help to initiate the sidequests. Maybe, if the player decides to skip the side events, then when the islands do open up in the postgame some people will instead talk about how the Rockets terrorized the town and no one was there to stop them. This would tell the player, "Oh, maybe I better replay this and see what that was about." It wouldn't be anything too fancy, just a checkflag for some NPCs with an alternate text if the player didn't show up to save the day, and the sidequest events themselves could be similar to the bikers taking over Three Island. Celio could call about a hold up at the Ember Spa or something. Just an idea!
...or you could just enable backtracking until the Rocket plot is revealed. That'd probably be easier :P.
Yes, the level curve is a factor that's very difficult to manage. Originally, the final battle of the game was level 50 rather than 43, and I have to laugh at how naive I was to think it'd work. On the whole, we tried to scale the Wild Pokémon's levels so that they'd never reach those of the Trainers in any given route. That's reasonably true of all the Pokémon games. The starter is given at level 35 for the sake of people being able to teach them the Ultimate Moves; admittedly basing the idea slightly on the Pokémon ORAS demo. Long story short, this isn't the hardest thing to change, and depending on how others perceive it, we'll update and (hopefully) improve the challenge the hack provides.
Yeah I was a bit afraid that we would require the players to grind in order to be able to compete with the Trainers, although I have to admit that we intentionally made the game a bit challenging. Especially in the Trainer Tower, we wanted to make the players consider their moves more thoroughly than in any regular battle. When I played it through, I also grinded a bit and used all the Rare Candies that I had found, resulting in having a team of three Pokemon at levels 38, 39 and 40 which was just high enough for me to make it through the Tower. I do realize that the Trainers are pretty strong, even if we already lowered their levels quite a lot, so we'll most likely have to change them again.
The scaling of the wild Pokemon in relation to the Trainers in the same area seemed fine. It was the fact that there weren't enough mandatory battles to adequately prepare the player for the Trainer Tower. Unfortunately, I don't think that just adding more Trainers is a good idea, as the routes themselves aren't really big enough for that. Granted, I always test with a team of five or six to get a good sense of the level curve, so Navenatox, I can see how our experiences were different. I've outlined
my thoughts on the standard GameFreak level curve in another post, but if I were fielding a team of three or four, I should've been right under (within one or two levels) the competition. An evenly leveled team of six should probably be five or six levels under. I was more than ten through some of the hack (not counting my given Empoleon). You guys have Trainer Tower Trainers with competitive movesets and a good AI setting, which would inflate their "effective levels", I guess I would call it. The sailor in the fifth floor with the Dewgong and Swampert was especially painful for me in particular. Aqua Tail would OHKO or 2KO my Pokemon (even Empoleon), and I didn't even see Swampert until I wiped three times and decided to grind. The Frosslass after that was cruel too, because of how fast it was and its coverage. Again, I think the coverage was wonderful and added the right kind of difficulty, but combined with the level chasm it ended up being a more severe level spike. I would suggest lowering the levels in the tower by 1-3.
Another factor in the relative difficulty was the lack of TMs to use. My Pokemon would've been much better if I had the ability to customize their moves a little bit. Perhaps the Trainer Tower could have a TM Corner (that is hinted to by Adrienne so the player doesn't skip it) that sells some (limited) coverage and status moves. Instead, I was stuck with technician Fury Swipes/Feint Attack Persian, for example. I got Power Gem too late. I hate to suggest this, because I love Persian and hate Liepard, but perhaps Liepard would be a better replacement for Persian. It's more specialized, and I can see its niche being useful in the Trainer Tower. I would suggest other niche Pokemon be catchable around Six or Seven Island at already okay levels that would have gimmicks to creatively mess with the Trainer Tower Trainers. That way, even if the player is severely underleveled, they could choose to catch these guys instead of grinding and get creative to win. Another Pokemon that was basically dead weight was my poor Bronzor. He was replaced last minute with a Kirlia that I Rare Candied into Gardevoir.
Because not one of these level curve changes can be made in a vacuum, I would experiment with including more niche Pokemon and giving out a few TMs before lowering the levels in the Trainer Tower itself. Maybe some more customization is really all that's needed to fix it.
Actually I think you confuse something here. I agree that you should use [.] instead of ..., but that's what we did most of the time. Since you mentioned that you only saw like one right ellipsis, I assume that you mixed up the looks of the ellipsis and a triple-dot. The ellipsis uses smaller dots and has smaller gaps in between, while three dots in a row are larger and have bigger gaps.
As for the dash, I knew that the way we used isn't quite the very correct one, but since the game doesn't seem to have any dash other than the short hyphen, I thought that this way of using it wouldn't be such big of a deal. To be honest, I for one think that a single hyphen surrounded by spaces still looks better than a double-hyphen with no spaces at all, but if that's the correct usage, we maybe should consider changing it.
I even noticed myself, the nature of the dialogue just didn't really fit well in the game's text box. This'll take a bit more time (and time was a factor in its release), but again, it's something we can fix up.
Honestly, Navenatox, you may be right about the ellipses. I was pretty tired while playing, and may have confused the two. I do, however, distinctly remember two instances where the ellipses were definitely not formatted correctly. One was in the defeat text of a female Trainer somewhere, and the other was in a house on either Two or Three Island. I'm going to be replaying the hack again soon, and will have my notepad open to document things more thoroughly, like I normally do when critiquing. Don't bother looking for them, I'll find em!
The lack of the correct dash character was why I mentioned that sometimes GameFreak has made up its own conventions when the formatting required it. I feel like many of the dashes could be outright pruned by rewording the text without losing the tone and connotation of the dialogue, while the remaining will have to use a consistent style. I would suggest using a single dash with no spaces separating it from the words it's between if the double dash looks awkward or jars other players.
And, giradialkia, I didn't notice any instances where the way that the text was actually sitting in the textboxes was awkward, other than in Mr. Briney's text. That actually added to how awful it was to get through, because the line breaks were placed in such a way as to create unnatural pauses in his dialogue. When you go over the text, try to reword his text in particular to align his natural pauses with the line breaks, even if you do nothing else to his text. I think that would make what he's saying flow better. Hackers should really try to do that anytime they have to use the "\l" escape character. You'll notice that GameFreak tries to do this in vanilla as well. They've even reworded the original text from Red and Blue in some instances specifically for that.
I was in charge of the Trainers and NPCs - I'm glad you found some of them funny and/or memorable, and as for those who were a little misleading (I believe I know who you're talking about). I was going to scatter some Sevii Island lore throughout the islands, but again, time was a factor, so we devoted all of our attention to the main game's completion.
Admittedly, I think we didn't even take into consideration that texts like this could lead players to become curious and to want to find out more about it. But thinking of it now, maybe we really should add small details like this more to round off the stories that these people tell.
Before I say anything here, I literally giggled at the Tuber girl on--I think it was--Bond Bridge that started the battle by being exasperated at how wrong calling it an "inner tube" was, and just kept on ranting right into the defeat text. She was probably my favorite background character. The guy who caught his Pidgey in the same spot and had a pretty powerful Pidgeot was great too. Even little things like that really brought some of the Trainers to life. Also, I guessed that that first Fisherman was going to be the mandatory Magikarp guy the second he was onscreen. Naturally, I ran over to fight him and destroyed his blasphemous second-Pokemon-Goldeen.
But yeah, the NPCs that were misleading got me really excited. I was mentally invoking the "The Dev Team Thinks of Everything" Trope and was eager to get some more lore out of these hidden extras, but ended up disappointed. Again, I understand the time constraints and overlooking it, but should you guys should totally comb through the game and add those extra text strings that a few of the NPCs hint at. Since I booted up and realized the timeskip, I was actually expecting a newspaper to show up somewhere that had some Kanto news about how some major character or town was doing 5 years after Fr/Lg. Just to tease the player a bit on how Kanto has changed in that time. Though, I appreciated seeing Brock and Misty hanging out. Those sorts of minor character development of existing characters and places was perfectly executed.
On my replay, I'll talk to everyone again and note who and where NPCs are hinting at stuff and what I thought would be there so you guys can have those suggestions. For most hacks, I wouldn't be thinking about this, but all of the background characters have such personality that I thought that that liveliness would extend to this as well. Again though, I totally understand why it was overlooked.
We'll also have a look at how Briney speaks. Again, my writing tends to get suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper drawn-out (you should've seen Oak's initial speech in the lab. I actually lost interest, myself). It's tricky, because we're sticking with the golden rule - the protagonist must never speak! So we just wanted to completely clarify events as they transpired. Sometimes it's hard to know if you're being clear, or if you're just conscious of what's supposed to be happening, when it just might be a poor implication.
I'll need to re-read to be certain on his dialogue about Team Rocket, but remember, Briney is from Hoenn. He's an old friend of Oak's, but even Oak has never had much to do with Team Rocket's exploits, and so Briney would only have heard tales of "some team dressed in black".
Still, we'll review it and try to make his dialogue less drawn-out.
Hm... I personally didn't perceive Briney's texts as to blown-up or something. Granted, I might be a bit biased here. I guess we should wait for other users to tell us what they think about it.
This is where we will have directly opposite opinions Navenatox. Mr. Briney's text after every island was really long and much of it was unnecessary, in my opinion. Basically, you're going to have three kinds of players. You're going to have people like me, who will talk to everyone, read every sign, and check every rock for hidden items. You're going to have people who read text that is obviously main storyline plot, but speed through everything else without reading. And then, you're going to have the people who aren't going to read at all and zoom through your hack in 25 minutes. There's no pleasing the third kind of player because they don't read. But, Mr. Briney's text does a disservice to both the first and second kinds of players. Both kinds are paying attention to the plot points that are unfolding in front of them, and don't need Mr. Briney regurgitating those events back to them right after they've happened. I feel like much of Briney's text can be cut without losing any of the characterization and emotion you've imbued him with. What's left can be reworded or given to other characters before the player gets back to Briney (that way, it can be implied to be told to Briney in the "Player: [.] [.] [.]" fashion and he won't have to go over it). For example, the explanation of who Team Rocket are could easily be moved to the character that tells the player initially that Adrienne was seen with people dressed in black. This keeps the Briney text after that brief, and separates the exposition dumping into several segments instead of one big text dump.
As for making sure that the plot is clear, even without reading you're going to know by Three Island that you haven't found Plot Goal Girl for Professor Tree, and by Five Isle Meadow you're going to know that Evil Team has her. You don't need Sailor Man to reiterate those points. He can say that he's worried. He can say it's a big deal. But he doesn't have to tell me what just happened to my character. I was there Mr. Briney! Maybe you could even have Peeko spying on you to make sure you're okay so that the character doesn't even
have to tell Briney what happens after every trip inland, he just knows. This would also feed into the concerned authority figure characterization you're going for quite nicely. Where was Peeko anyway? I missed her; she was mentioned but never appeared.
I did think him getting the turbo engine was cute though. That exchange was giggle-worthy.
The island names - I considered it, but as we're going for our own canon with the official games, we stuck with the numbers rather than the names. I know, they suck, but eh, I'll give the actual names some attention in the Sevii lore.
We might actually consider this, although I have to admit that before we started working on the hack, I wasn't even aware that these islands had other names than the ones we used. So if Briney said, for example, "Let's head to Floe Island next.", I would have been left wondering what island he's actually referring to. I don't know about the others, but I definitely associate their numbers with them a lot more than their real names.
Totally get why you don't want to mess with possible canon here. It would've been my preference. I mean, it just doesn't make sense to me. I bet the locals wouldn't even call their home island by its number. As for not knowing where Briney is taking you with the other names, maybe he could say, "Let's head to Floe Island next; that's the fourth one," or "that's the fourth island in the chain," or other variations like that.
Either way, Seven Island is begging to have a Destiny Knot giveaway on it. It's Knot Island and its sign mentions destiny.
As for music, I solemnly swear that I am making some remixes. Time was short; that's all. :)
You're right, we just left the maps with their original tracks. As giradialkia said, he had plans to slightly 'remix' the existing music to give it a nice new touch, but due to the lack of time, we ended up just leaving the music as it is. I wouldn't have thought that it would become annoying so fast though. Assigning new tracks to the maps isn't that much of work, so you can probably count with more varied music in a future release.
You don't even need to remix it. Just put something different on two of the three initial islands. I'd say that this was the worst part of the hack for me. It was just annoying and grated on my nerves, as I already don't like Viridian City's theme, and being stuck with two themes for a good third of the game sucked. The SS Anne theme would be good for one of the islands and would be my suggestion for a replacement.
But if you are doing remixes, having slightly different battle music between some of the island sets would be cool. Not whole new tracks, but small variations in the melodies. Maybe a few instrument differences. I've never composed or inserted a music track, so I have no idea how much work this would be or if it were feasible at all. Perhaps the big reveal at the end could pause the music and play the Hall of Fame remix of the first town's theme. Make it sort of eerily dramatic. I don't know.
Glad you weren't totally expecting the top of Trainer Tower - that's the aim. I am pretty sad to hear the reveal was dampened for you, but I guess that's life. As for Oak speaking to Adrienne despite the urgency of the situation, this is another instance where we were worried about clarity. The game obviously ends here (well, the main game ends, anyway), and so we were concerned people would just think "Wait, what the crap just happened?". We had Oak speak to Adrienne to sort of say "Okay, good to see you but I have no time" - we wanted the player to be aware that they wouldn't be accompanying Oak (and the others) to whatever the big issue is.
Well, I think that this trio fits well together, so it's sad to hear that all of them being there has weakened your impression of this moment. As for Oak stopping to talk, that was to emphasize that only then he realized that Aidan, Adrienne and Briney had returned.
I have nothing to say about the trio appearing instead of just the one character, because that was just a personal expectation and not a gameplay or text issue. Thinking about it again, it is very fitting, because the character I expected to be there needed a mouthpiece through which to ask what's up to Oak in the epilogue, and including that other character was the best way to do that.
As for pausing in the middle of that conversation, didn't Aidan, Adrienne, and Briney come back on the same ship as the other three? That's what I assumed. If they all arrived in separate groups, than I can see how Oak wouldn't've realized that they were there. Again, I'd make Oak desperately frantic about what's going on at
that location, and offload the "we're happy you're safe" thing to Briney. The epilogue happened really quickly anyway. I don't know if you were trying to be intentionally vague with what was so dangerous in
that location, but I would draw out the epilogue to be about as long as the intro. Just to bookend the experience. It ended so quickly that it was pretty jarring for me.
As giradialkia has said, we didn't implement much post-game content yet, among other things because of the lack of time. However we were thinking of the same thing as you - giving the player HM Surf in after the main story to allow them to travel areas that were unaccessible before.
Furthermore, there is little to no postgame at present; that's something we figured we'd add after the competition. Your guesses and suggestions on what we should add are precisely what we have in mind - we just haven't gotten around to it yet. The main story was, typically, our main concern.
Oh, totally get that the postgame had to be lacking because of the time constraints. But I'm glad to hear that I guessed correctly with the Surf extras and am looking forward to playing through it when it's released!
There's one further thing I have to get off my chest: I'm glad that you didn't run into any game-crashing bugs, because I did. By the looks of it, our game uses and outdated version of MrDollSteaks's patch that may cause the game to crash when certain moves are used. I'm already working on finding out how to fix this, I'll supply a patch as soon as I can.
That must've been hard to discover. Hopefully it all turns out all right. I heard that some of the animations in his ROMBase can sometimes cause crashing on hardware as well. I haven't tested this hack on hardware, but maybe I will for my second playthrough. Hadn't actually thought of doing that until now.
Pretty biggish spoiler here (for other people), so you honestly shouldn't read if you like to be surprised. Deokishisu, keep reading! :D
Cool! Looking forward to it! I'll beta test once you're far enough along if you'd like. But, like, not the noobs who want an early look kind of beta tester. Like an actual beta tester. The kind that tries to break the game.
Again, thank you for playing and reporting, I also hope you could enjoy the game at least a little bit. :)
Thank you for playing, and for your review! I hope, on the whole, it was an enjoyable experience, and we will work on improving it for everyone. :)
No probs. If I enjoy a hack I feel that it's my obligation to report potential bugs/issues with it. Just as a sort of thank you to the hacker/hack team. So thank you!
