FireRed hack: [HotM October 2009] Pokémon ToxicPurple (Team Rocket hack)

[zlayer200]

This hack look real good, One question why doesnt the main characters have rocket hats?

 

[mineowyn]

This hack look real good, One question why doesnt the main characters have rocket hats?

Most likely because ckret2 is aiming for a unique uniform design for each character to differentiate them from the nameless NPC Rockets..

Also, rocket hats = rocket grunt, and I don't think it looks nice on females anyway..

 

[~Poke~]

Hey, glad you're commenting now. :D

Yeah, they do look a bit wide. That's one of the things that needs fixing. I try to fix her shoulders, and then can't do it in a way that doesn't make them more ugly... yeesh.

The post's too wide? How so? I didn't do anything at all to the formatting. The only formatting that the main post has are {SIZE="#"}{B}{COLOR="Indigo"}these{/COLOR}{/B}{/SIZE} for the headers, double returns between paragraphs, two HTML lists, and a single spoiler. No CSS layout, no tables, no frames, nothing. It's the same way I've formatted every post I've ever made on PC. What themes does it look bad in, and how does it look "too wide"?

Thanks, glad you like the scripts so far.

Edit: I just scrolled through all of the themes at the bottom of the screen and I didn't see any problems with the width. (Although I did notice some coloring problems. Dark purple headings and Midnight Misty Revived do not go well together.) Are you seeing something different from me? Can you take a screenshot?

"Darkness prevails once more" (in Firefox)

I shrunk it, but you can see the scroll bar.
You could just press enter every now and then, that would fix it.

 

[mineowyn]

First off, Male Corey: Excellent, loved the design. I just darkened his neckline and added some shadows since that's all that needs to be done about him, and he looks good without a collar anyway, so I left his shirt alone.

........Female Corey:

Spoiler:

I did more than one edits because I wasn't sure if you'd like any further improvements I made. Basically I started with just editing the upper torso. Not sure if you'd like her high white collar, but I added it in as I felt her neck wasn't really defined while editing her shoulders. I reduced her shoulder and arm width and altered her sleeves to make it look ripped. Altered her bust and waist line and her R sigil.

Longer Gloves:

Shorter Hemline:

With Earrings:

Above Knee Boots vers. 1:

Above Knee Boots vers.2:

And of course, finally her sprite:

Hope her sigil and belt reds are within the colour palette. If not I'll see if I can find a colour within the palette limits.

Yup, that's it for now. Tell me what you think. I'm intrigued however, about Leon's original dark purple colour scheme, I thought for trainer sprites (not OW) the limit should be more than the OW sprite? I don't see why you can't have different separate colours for the trainer sprite and the OW sprite.

 

[Raxsel]

I have to say, Kudos to you! It is a very origianl idea to make a pokemon game in the perspective of a Team Rocket Grunt. Alot of people would overlook this perspective. I have to say, the screenshots ad videos are all exciting to see. I will, like others support this hack.

 

[Shaded]

Do you have a scripter or need one? I'd gladly help to the best of my ability.

 

[ckret2]

First off, Male Corey: Excellent, loved the design. I just darkened his neckline and added some shadows since that's all that needs to be done about him, and he looks good without a collar anyway, so I left his shirt alone.

........Female Corey:

Spoiler:

I did more than one edits because I wasn't sure if you'd like any further improvements I made. Basically I started with just editing the upper torso. Not sure if you'd like her high white collar, but I added it in as I felt her neck wasn't really defined while editing her shoulders. I reduced her shoulder and arm width and altered her sleeves to make it look ripped. Altered her bust and waist line and her R sigil.

Longer Gloves:

Shorter Hemline:

With Earrings:

Above Knee Boots vers. 1:

Above Knee Boots vers.2:

And of course, finally her sprite:

Hope her sigil and belt reds are within the colour palette. If not I'll see if I can find a colour within the palette limits.

Yup, that's it for now. Tell me what you think. I'm intrigued however, about Leon's original dark purple colour scheme, I thought for trainer sprites (not OW) the limit should be more than the OW sprite? I don't see why you can't have different separate colours for the trainer sprite and the OW sprite.

Thanks for the edits to male Coreys's sprite. It looks good. How did you edit it? Did you use the colors already available in the sprite, or just edit the colors to however they looked best? If it's the latter, they won't be palette compatible. I've got a long explanation on how palettes work that I think I'll just stick behind a spoiler:

Spoiler:

The way Pokémon palettes work, a single sprite--be it OW or trainer or anything else--can only have sixteen different colors. Technically fifteen, because one is the background, "invisible" color that tells the game "this is the part of the sprite that won't be visible, so you can see the background underneath it." So, just eyeballing the colors, or even borrowing colors from one sprite and sticking them on another, won't work; in the latter case, it's because one sprite doesn't use the same palette as another.

For male Corey's OW sprite, it uses a palette that has three shades of green, three shades of purple, three shades of gold, a handful of peach shades, white, black, and the "invisible" background. Female Corey's OW palette has three shades of orangish-red, three of something brownish, three of gray, handful of peach, white, black, background. Leone's has five grays, three browns, three oranges, two blues, white, black, background. So, even if there's a red color that would work perfectly for the Rocket sigil on a Magma Grunt sprite, it can't go on a sprite that uses a different palette. (In fact, the palette used on Magma Grunts, which is found in Ruby, doesn't even exist in the available palettes for FireRed.)

I'm not 100% positive on how to get the palettes for the trainers into the game alongside the trainer sprites themselves, because my Mac just doesn't support any of the things that will let the sprites into the game and so I'm going to have to get help to put them into the game to begin with. However, the trainer sprites have the same palette limits as OW sprites: 15 colors + a background color. And yes, I can have different colors for the trainer sprites as for the OW sprites, and in fact do right now in male Corey's case. However, it just seems kinda... ridiculous to have a character that has blue hair in the overworld and purple hair in a trainer battle. Best to make it consistent than have to try to compromise.

Basically, when figuring out whether or not something is an option in the color palettes: if it isn't already in the sprite, then it's not in the palette. If you're reworking a sprite and not changing its palette, use the eyedropper tool to take colors directly off of somewhere else in the sprite, or else it isn't an option.

For female Corey, I think I'll work with the first sprite, thanks. The modified neckline, sleeveline, and narrower arms look good. However, there's a reason why the original female Corey doesn't look busty and curvy, and it's because... well, she isn't busty and curvy. She isn't a super-sexy super-criminal. Just a super-criminal. She has about as much bust as anime-Misty, and she wears a dress that goes past her knees and is significantly longer than the mini-skirts that the average Rockets wear. That's just her character design. And those aren't supposed to look like boots, those are tights.

Thanks for the help on the shoulders/neckline. I think that's all the changes any of the sprites need for now.

"Darkness prevails once more" (in Firefox)

I shrunk it, but you can see the scroll bar.
You could just press enter every now and then, that would fix it.

Oh jeez, that's hideous. O.o Thanks for showing me that. Since pressing enter from time to time would probably screw things up on somebody else's screen (I've seen people do that, and sometimes it ends up look like a line of text and then two words on their own line and then a line of text and two words below...), I'll stick it in a fixed-width table and see if that helps. I'll edit this post when I've done it, and you tell me if it helped.

This hack look real good, One question why doesnt the main characters have rocket hats?

Well, the Male Player DOES have a Rocket hat; it's the same shape as a Rocket Grunt's cap, although it's a different color since he's in a different palette. Same design, though. For the Female Player, I decided not to give her a hat because if she had one, her OW would look almost identical to the generic female Rocket Grunt sprite: it would have the same palette for the clothes and hair, the same general clothing design, approximately the same hair length... take off the cap and suddenly the Female Player is this vivid redhead in a sea of Grunts in hats, which lets the Female Player OW stand out even though she's designed similarly to the others. For the Rival, I guess he just thought he was too cool for a hat. :P

And also, like mineowyn said, to make each of them unique. They're the important main characters, after all--you'll be playing as them--not just one of the endless Anonygrunts.

Do you have a scripter or need one? I'd gladly help to the best of my ability.

I do all my scripting for now, and can't really think of a way to delegate scripting responsibilities without screwing things up. In the time it'd take to explain to someone exactly what I want a script to be like, I could probably do most of it myself, heh.

So. Off to put the first post in a table, and then see if I can't fix that script in Pokémon Tower.

 

[mineowyn]

O I see.. I get it now. I'll re-check the colours..

I zoomed in and analysed the original male corey's pixels and found that in total he has 6 tones of gray including black: Black(0) Light Gray(208) Slight Gray(116) Gray(88) Dark Gray(63) Darker Gray(36)
the numbers denote the red values in the RGB

He actually has 2 tones of green, 4 skin colours, 2 reds and 1 white. Maybe the extra tones of green and gold got wiped out when you saved it in 16 bit? I did pluck in an additional shade of gray in the earlier edit, but mostly I took colours from him so that was an easy refinement. I edited that shade with the existing palette so it should work now:

Actually, for female Corey, what I meant by editing her bust and waistline is that I edited it such that we are looking at her torso from a side angle, to make her shoulders look smaller and give her a more defined neck. That's basically what I did in the first edit, keeping in mind that she's a teen around Ash's age.

If you take a comparison between Misty standing at a similar angle, the bump is slightly more obvious, you might think it's larger but actually it's pretty flat.

Spoiler:

TA DA! Game compatible edit:

So anyway, I went back and revised the colours I used since I'd gone way beyond the limit with too many shades to count, and I'm glad I'm forced to stick within the given palette because now her collar looks crisper. I also counted a total of only 14 colours used originally. I analysed it and she's got

Spoiler:

4 shades for hair (orangey & red shades)
2 extra red shades in sigil
2 shades of pink for skin
5 shades of gray including black
1 white

So I decided to keep the lighter shade of gray (E8E8F0 - male swimmer's cap in Fire Red) used for her collar. Could she keep the longer gloves though, pretty pleaseee, cause I think it'd be a waste of the extra gray if it was used only for the collar. And erm..longer gloves=MUAHAHAHA bad-assed villain?

Leon's trainer sprite is perfect. But if you were to translate it onto the OW sprite, it might look odd as the size is significantly reduced hence details like his sigil and hands will not be as prominent without brighter highlights.

However, is there no way to create additional colours outside the palette of colours for Fire Red? Or maybe replace the entire fire red palette with a customized palette? Gary's purple wasn't the purple you were aiming for Leon was it? I think I read somewhere about such a possibility, I'll have to look it up later.

Something else I noticed though, you saved the sprites in gif.. Wouldn't it be best for colour preservation to save it in png?

 

[coolollie26]

It sounds cool cant wait to play it !!

if anyone can script plz let me no.....

 

[agel]

hmm im new here and i saw that u cant ask for release dates.... well i have always been a fan of looking at things from another point of view and this hack sounds very creative but also very plausible. i like how in the original post by the creator he said that after u get defeated in johto, then the 3rd rocket "mission" is up to the player... and this is pretty sweet. i want to make team rocket succeed xD . anyways my question, since i cannot ask for an exact release date, is: are we close to being able to play this game, anytime in the close future? again great ideas by whomever created this game, i am looking forward to playing it, and if i had any computer skills at all, i would have tried to make a game with this idea LONG ago lol kudos

Edit: i would also like to say that starting off with a rattata is a genious idea, not only does it add to the challenge but doesnt every friggen rocket grunt you play in the actual games have a damn rattata! lol . i wouldnt want to start off with a good poke, this way at the start we would have my rattata vs my rival's rattata LOL probably at lvl 2 i assume? cuz thats the worst of he worst right there, therefore the fitting poke for this game i think.

 

[Chesu]

I love rom hacks that make a great departure from the original game, storyline-wise... this looks great!

 

[ckret2]

O I see.. I get it now. I'll re-check the colours..

I zoomed in and analysed the original male corey's pixels and found that in total he has 6 tones of gray including black: Black(0) Light Gray(208) Slight Gray(116) Gray(88) Dark Gray(63) Darker Gray(36)
the numbers denote the red values in the RGB

He actually has 2 tones of green, 4 skin colours, 2 reds and 1 white. Maybe the extra tones of green and gold got wiped out when you saved it in 16 bit? I did pluck in an additional shade of gray in the earlier edit, but mostly I took colours from him so that was an easy refinement. I edited that shade with the existing palette so it should work now:

And, as I said in my previous post:

For male Corey's OW sprite, it uses a palette that has three shades of green, three shades of purple, three shades of gold, a handful of peach shades, white, black, and the "invisible" background. Female Corey's OW palette has three shades of orangish-red, three of something brownish, three of gray, handful of peach, white, black, background. Leone's has five grays, three browns, three oranges, two blues, white, black, background.

I was describing the OW palettes. OW as in Overworld, the tiny sprites that actually walk around. I made the trainer sprites separately, reduced them to sixteen colors, and thus they have different palettes--different, but equally limited. The OW color palettes are built into the game, so they aren't as flexible; I don't even know how much flexibility there is in the trainer palettes, because I haven't put any trainer sprites into the game yet. So, no, the other colors weren't wiped out; they are the colors available in the OW palettes, not all of which I even used for the OW sprites.

Actually, for female Corey, what I meant by editing her bust and waistline is that I edited it such that we are looking at her torso from a side angle, to make her shoulders look smaller and give her a more defined neck. That's basically what I did in the first edit, keeping in mind that she's a teen around Ash's age.

If you take a comparison between Misty standing at a similar angle, the bump is slightly more obvious, you might think it's larger but actually it's pretty flat.

Okay, what I meant by my comments about the image is that I didn't like it. I said that I would welcome help on the female Corey trainer sprite's shoulders and arms; I was not inviting an overhaul of the body shape, much less the gloves, skirts, or jewelry. I'm sorry if I didn't make that clear earlier.

And when I voiced objections to the sprite I'd seen and tried to explain why I objected to them, that didn't mean I wanted justifications for why that sprite was actually right and why my views and objections were unfounded. I meant that that wasn't the design I wanted. I'm sorry, again, if that was unclear.

Thank you for editing the upper arms and shoulders; when I have a chance, I'll put those edits into my main sprite. I would appreciate it if you not do anything else with my sprites, because you went off to edit my OW sprites the moment you saw the post without gaining my prior permission or even asking if I was okay with that, and then when I did say you could edit one particular part of one of my trainer sprites, you edited everything else as well. I understand that you're probably just trying to help, but as the creator and owner of ToxicPurple I don't appreciate it when someone else tries to modify my work without so much as asking me beforehand.

Something else I noticed though, you saved the sprites in gif.. Wouldn't it be best for colour preservation to save it in png?

These aren't the actual sprites. The actual sprites are half the size, have an actual background color (what will be the "invisible" color) instead of just white, and are saved in .psd (for the master file that I edit) and .png (for the version that will eventually be put into the ROM). The sprites posted here are a web-friendly background-color-free 200%-sized .gif image that I made for easy posting and viewing on PokéCommunity--images of what the sprites look like for the posters here to see, not the actual sprite files themselves. Yes, in a mathematical, hexidecimal sense, the colors are off. To human eyes, the green hair is still green, the orangish hair is orangish, the blue hair is blue, and the red Rocket sigils are red, and these sprites are for human eyes, not for the ROM. Which is also why they're too big: it's easier to see them.

Oh, and by the way. A couple of points about this:

Erm..anyone can teach me how to insert the intro sprite?

This is what I got when I inserted

Spoiler:

256 color

grayscaled

I'm working on a Fire Red btw.

1) The sprite that you're trying to insert does not have proper dimensions for the intro sprite. I'm going to be making separate intro sprites for both Player genders and the Rival that match the in-game proportions for intro sprites.

2) I'm sure there must be a very good reason for why you took my sprite and--without asking my permission, or even having the simple courtesy to inform me after the fact--inserted it into a hack? I'm going to assume that you were being nice, wanted to insert the sprites into a ROM for me, and didn't tell me about it so that you could surprise me, or that you were doing a test-run to figure out how to insert sprites and mine happened to be the one you decided to do tests on, and not that you were planning on actually stealing my sprite. This isn't the first time you've decided to do stuff with my sprites without asking me beforehand, after all; and if you WERE actually planning on stealing them, I doubt you'd have put screenshots of your attempting to do so on PC, since I'd be able to see them. If you need sprites to experiment with, The Spriters Resource has tons, it's a great site. Please don't use my sprites again.

Sorry if I sound harsh, but it's angering to discover that someone has been using your sprites without telling you.

EDIT: In light of mineowyn's post on page 13, I rescind the points made above. She was test-running the sprite in order to learn how the process worked so that she could offer to do it for me later. She still didn't tell me ahead of time, but she most certainly was NOT stealing them. I'm sorry for the suspicion, mineowyn.

hmm im new here and i saw that u cant ask for release dates.... well i have always been a fan of looking at things from another point of view and this hack sounds very creative but also very plausible. i like how in the original post by the creator he said that after u get defeated in johto, then the 3rd rocket "mission" is up to the player... and this is pretty sweet. i want to make team rocket succeed xD . anyways my question, since i cannot ask for an exact release date, is: are we close to being able to play this game, anytime in the close future? again great ideas by whomever created this game, i am looking forward to playing it, and if i had any computer skills at all, i would have tried to make a game with this idea LONG ago lol kudos

Edit: i would also like to say that starting off with a rattata is a genious idea, not only does it add to the challenge but doesnt every friggen rocket grunt you play in the actual games have a damn rattata! lol . i wouldnt want to start off with a good poke, this way at the start we would have my rattata vs my rival's rattata LOL probably at lvl 2 i assume? cuz thats the worst of he worst right there, therefore the fitting poke for this game i think.

Hey, welcome to PC. :D You might want to be careful about even asking if you'll be able to play in the close future, since some poeple might consider that "asking for a release". I don't mind, though. In the near future, there might be an alpha released, which will have the first mission and maybe a few other features; it's far, far away from being anything resembling a complete hack, though.

The Rattata is actually level 3, but close. And yeah, that was my logic; every Grunt's got a Rattata, makes sense that they'd hand them out to rookies.

(By the way, I'm the creator of the game, and I happen to be a "she," not a he. I get that mistake a lot in this forum, hah.)

 

[Sarcastic Prince]

This Hack has the Best Team Rocket OW's
ever. GL on this!

 

[ckret2]

This Hack has the Best Team Rocket OW's
ever. GL on this!

Thanks, glad you like! :D

BIG NOTICE! Looks like I'll be able to get out an alpha within the next couple of days, homework permitting. I'd like to make a few other changes to it beforehand, but if not, it's cohesive enough to be released as it is. Woohoo.

 

[mattattack]

hm... nice hack. I have to say this is promising. Only thing you have to work on is possibly the tiles. Overall that's it, but try to tweek it up a little more in mapping

 

[ckret2]

hm... nice hack. I have to say this is promising. Only thing you have to work on is possibly the tiles. Overall that's it, but try to tweek it up a little more in mapping

What do you mean by tweaking it up in the mapping? I'm using the original Kanto maps, because this happens in the canon R/B/Y/FR/LG and G/S/C timelines. Do the official Nintendo maps look too unprofessional? :P Or were you referring to the Rocket Base interior? Because that's the only mapping in the game that you'd be able to see so far, from the video.

Unless I hear a really good argument for why I shouldn't, I'm using the in-game tiles. Again, this happens in the canon timelines, so it looks like the same setting for that reason.

 

[mattattack]

what I meant to say was it's a good hack and I know you are trying to keep originallaity, but like add tiles from R/B/Y/G and/or G/S/C and revamp them to make that oringinal feel you know what I'm saying dude.

 

[absol16]

no offense ckret2...

but i don't really like the COREY M overworld sprite.. it looks more like he's wearing brown rather than black...

i hope you don't get mad at me for saying this... 'cause i couldn't have done it better anyways

 

[TombolaMan]

In my opinion there is no need to change the tiles. I'm sure most people would play this game for it's storyline not for the way it looks. As Ckret said the original tiles from fr/lg are fine. Adding in revamped tiles from previous games would just add to the workload that is already extremely large as it is.

My opinion on Corey's sprite is that I disagree with absol16. Corey's sprite is fine and doesn't need any major work done to it. If absol16 dislikes it so much why doesn't (s)he suggest some changes that could be made?

Anyways, that's all I wanted to say for now. Very excited about the possibility of an alpha soon! :)

 

[ckret2]

no offense ckret2...

but i don't really like the COREY M overworld sprite.. it looks more like he's wearing brown rather than black...

i hope you don't get mad at me for saying this... 'cause i couldn't have done it better anyways

I'm not mad, though he's not wearing brown; he's wearing purple. xD I wanted Corey to have green hair, but the only OW palette in the game that had green didn't have any shades of gray to make a black uniform. So I had to improvise and make it purple.

At some point in the future, I might try to edit one of the OW palettes the game doesn't use in order to give him green hair AND a black uniform. (In FireRed, palettes 0 and 16 are pretty much just copies of each other, if I remember correctly, and one of the other palettes--19, I think?--has only four colors on it, and the rest of it is just a bunch of black, so it can be reused.)

So, yeah, there's a reason it doesn't look black to you. It isn't. This bothers me too, so I might work on that once I've gotten some other things out of the way.

In my opinion there is no need to change the tiles. I'm sure most people would play this game for it's storyline not for the way it looks. As Ckret said the original tiles from fr/lg are fine. Adding in revamped tiles from previous games would just add to the workload that is already extremely large as it is.

My opinion on Corey's sprite is that I disagree with absol16. Corey's sprite is fine and doesn't need any major work done to it. If absol16 dislikes it so much why doesn't (s)he suggest some changes that could be made?

Anyways, that's all I wanted to say for now. Very excited about the possibility of an alpha soon! :)

Thanks! :D I'll be trying to get the alpha up later today. As to the tiles, if I do anything about them, that'll probably be one of the last things in the game to be changed, since, like you said, the most important part of the game i the storyline, not the tiles.