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[Completed] Pocket Monster Project: Ghosts of Knowledge

Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023

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This project was created in roughly a month for Relic Castle's Game Jam #6!

Seasonal explorers Dust and Zee spelunk their way to the bottom of the sea, expecting to find all sorts of relics and treasures of aquatic nature. However, they instead stumble upon a world that has already ended...

Join them in their whimsical and hopefully non-explosive journey through the streets of a former paradise! Collect treasures and uncover the secrets behind the remains of the region!

Who knows what really happened down there?

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Details and Features​


A Different Engine!

- This game runs on the french Pokémon Essentials alternative PSDK which boasts a variety of differences in performance (60FPS), layout, and form. It also allows me to do unique events!

- A special thanks to the entire PSDK team for helping me get this product out and pointing out how everything works. This was not possible without Nuri Yuri and Rey, who helped me the most with PSDK engine related things by fixing crashes, bugs, and scripts.​

The Journey!

- Featuring Dust and her lovely Porygon-Z, they'll traverse their way through the labyrinth in search of gold and knowledge in Generation 4 Graphics with available Pokémon up to Generation 8!​ The story begins with them entering the ruins through an underwater cave, but the region ends up becoming much more complicated to comprehend over as they go on...

​- There are currently two endings to the game, and three unique zones to play through, with a run time of roughly 3-5 hours!​ Follow the It's a game that's short and sweet!

- Pokémon that appear in this game are a bit different. There are tons of balance changes and quality of life fixes that change how some Pokémon are used in order to account for the journey. Change log here, but beware spoilers:
Spoiler:


Treasure!

- There are special items known as Treasures littered throughout the region. Collecting them places them as a little trophy at the main campsite!​
​
- Treasures aren't just for show, however. Someone might give you something nice for collecting a ton of treasures...​

- How you found any Nuggets? All Pokémon have a chance to hold a Nugget, which can be given to a mischievous Ghost Pokémon for rewards.
​
Challenges

- At each zone, a very powerful foe will appear. Defeating them not only gives you the ability to move on, but choose exactly which area to unlock first...​
​
- There are more than battles to overcome however... There are places around the region that test your mind rather than your strength!​

- Look around each and every part of the region to find rooms that lead into each other, Pokémon to befriend, and items to collect...​

DOWNLOAD v 1.8.2!​

Spoiler:


Known Issues:

Spoiler:



Final Thoughts of this Project's Development

Spoiler:


CREDITS

Spoiler:


PSDK CREDITS​

Spoiler:
 
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Luck_98

19
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 25
  • Seen Mar 28, 2024
Hey, I've played it a bit and it's pretty fun. The puzzles are a little annoying sometimes, but mainly because I'm trying to solve it quickly rather than stop and think.

I've found something weird, which I suppose is not supposed to happen. During the puzzle with the plants and the files on the jungle, the second room is just a black space with nothing. I've tried reentering a few times (some times, the games messes up and you're being followed by something weird. On the first puzzle with the rolling stomps, it was a single tile of a stomp. On the water region, it happens with a seaweed that even gave me an item!), restarting the game, going out and reentering again... And nothing happens.
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
Luck_98 said:
Hey, I've played it a bit and it's pretty fun. The puzzles are a little annoying sometimes, but mainly because I'm trying to solve it quickly rather than stop and think.

I've found something weird, which I suppose is not supposed to happen. During the puzzle with the plants and the files on the jungle, the second room is just a black space with nothing. I've tried reentering a few times (some times, the games messes up and you're being followed by something weird. On the first puzzle with the rolling stomps, it was a single tile of a stomp. On the water region, it happens with a seaweed that even gave me an item!), restarting the game, going out and reentering again... And nothing happens.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback! Sorry you had to deal with that. The following bug is definitely something weird, but reentering and exiting should've fixed it, i'll take a look at that.

I found out that the tileset broke in that one area with the blank room, thanks for letting me know. I really appreciate it
 
Last edited:
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
Swiftly pushed out an update (1.4.4) that fixed one of the puzzle rooms! The tileset corrupted and I had to retile all of the houses from scratch. I hope it didn't bother too many people~
 

Luck_98

19
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 25
  • Seen Mar 28, 2024
Well, now I've finished it, ending A. It was a lot of fun, though a little short :(

The pokemon available were cool, and the bosses too. I'm assuming that the ending is not the "real" one, and if you were to expand it, you would explain a little more about it? I'm really curious about the place. And I also want to use freaking dive! I noticed the spot at the very beginning, and when I could surf but cannot dive, I died a little inside. Not complaining, I understand that you did everything you could on the time you had.

The puzzles overall were great, and the difficulty was okay. I actually had to revive my team on the few final bosses. On a side note, I noticed a couple of things at the end, when you have to face the three last bosses before the ending. You get some treasures, but they don't show at your base. And when you gave a nugget to your ghost, it gives you the shadow ball mt. Like, three times consecutevely. Not sure if it was intended, but I though it was worth mentioning it.

I'd love to play it more if you decided to keep working on it! And if not, well, it's still a pretty good job.
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
Luck_98 said:
Well, now I've finished it, ending A. It was a lot of fun, though a little short :(

The pokemon available were cool, and the bosses too. I'm assuming that the ending is not the "real" one, and if you were to expand it, you would explain a little more about it? I'm really curious about the place. And I also want to use freaking dive! I noticed the spot at the very beginning, and when I could surf but cannot dive, I died a little inside. Not complaining, I understand that you did everything you could on the time you had.

The puzzles overall were great, and the difficulty was okay. I actually had to revive my team on the few final bosses. On a side note, I noticed a couple of things at the end, when you have to face the three last bosses before the ending. You get some treasures, but they don't show at your base. And when you gave a nugget to your ghost, it gives you the shadow ball mt. Like, three times consecutevely. Not sure if it was intended, but I though it was worth mentioning it.

I'd love to play it more if you decided to keep working on it! And if not, well, it's still a pretty good job.
Click to expand...

I'm so glad you enjoyed it!! Yes, I can go a bit into detail about most of the things you mentioned:

Ending A was finished during the last 5 hours of the Jam. It wasn't what I wanted exactly to happen, but it's pretty close to what the ending wouldve been. There were a few buildups I wasn't able to include however (it was supposed to be an entirely new zone with more characters and events).

Dive was planned for both the undersea area for (and was actually the original idea for the game) and the first part. I had to rush the Ending A section unfortunately!

I had the final treasures for the Shuppet set up, but ran out of time to add actual rewards. It's not difficult, but I'm focusing a lot more on bugfixes.

Thanks for the review! I always want to do post jam versions of my jam games, so its a matter of weighing whether if enough people are interested enough to expand on it or move onto another project.
 

TailsMK4

527
Posts
5
Years
Been playing it for a bit so far, although at this point, the only thing I've done is getting Pokemon in the first area. I was happy to get Marill in the first spot as Azumarill is my favorite Pokemon. Got Marill to evolve at level 20 (it wouldn't evolve at level 19, which was strange), but Azumarill on evolution lost the Fairy typing and is now pure Water. Was this an intentional choice? Decided to revert the evolution for now just in case. Continuing to grind experience a little bit with the Pokemon I have now before I explore the area further.
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
TailsMK4 said:
Been playing it for a bit so far, although at this point, the only thing I've done is getting Pokemon in the first area. I was happy to get Marill in the first spot as Azumarill is my favorite Pokemon. Got Marill to evolve at level 20 (it wouldn't evolve at level 19, which was strange), but Azumarill on evolution lost the Fairy typing and is now pure Water. Was this an intentional choice? Decided to revert the evolution for now just in case. Continuing to grind experience a little bit with the Pokemon I have now before I explore the area further.
Click to expand...

Ah, thanks for letting me know. That's an oversight! We'll fix it immediately after testing these bugfixes in this next release (1.5)
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
Finally! After many days of playtesting, update 1.5 is here! This should be the final update to the Game Jam version.

- Fixed up terrain and tileset bugs
- Fixed game breaking issues with Nuggets
- The last few Treasures now show up in the Motherbase
- The reset button in one of the puzzles should now work
- Added a disclaimer to allow your own Keybindings (for all you people used to Essentials)
- Fixed up late game dialogue and events so it looks less rushed
- Scyther can now properly evolve.
- Added more preventative measures for the FollowMe bug (it is still not perfect however)
- Fixed an oversight where Azumarill was not a Fairy type.

This is hopefully the best the Game Jam Version of the game can be without actually adding content. If we do any more significant updates to this project, it will be after judging is over.

We hope you enjoy!
 

TailsMK4

527
Posts
5
Years
Spent about 3 ingame hours exploring the first zone and putting a team together before I made some significant progress and made it to my second zone. It's actually kind of sad that it sounds like I'm already about a third through the game. This is very much different from the usual Pokemon game, and I look forward to playing more of this later. I had briefly worked with PSDK before, and going back to it might be something I will do again in the future. I only had a couple of things to mention, although I believe this is PSDK itself and not the game:

1. Helping Hand (I think only Marill as an enemy had it), actually boosts your Pokemon's attack power even though it was used by the enemy. Granted, I think this mechanic could actually be interesting if the target is confused, but other than that, just seemed strange to see Helping Hand work this way.

2. Every now and then, my game would lag a lot, but it was fixed real quick by moving the mouse around on the screen. It happens every now and then, so I did not notice any particular pattern as to how it occurs.
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
TailsMK4 said:
Spent about 3 ingame hours exploring the first zone and putting a team together before I made some significant progress and made it to my second zone. It's actually kind of sad that it sounds like I'm already about a third through the game. This is very much different from the usual Pokemon game, and I look forward to playing more of this later. I had briefly worked with PSDK before, and going back to it might be something I will do again in the future. I only had a couple of things to mention, although I believe this is PSDK itself and not the game:

1. Helping Hand (I think only Marill as an enemy had it), actually boosts your Pokemon's attack power even though it was used by the enemy. Granted, I think this mechanic could actually be interesting if the target is confused, but other than that, just seemed strange to see Helping Hand work this way.

2. Every now and then, my game would lag a lot, but it was fixed real quick by moving the mouse around on the screen. It happens every now and then, so I did not notice any particular pattern as to how it occurs.
Click to expand...

I'm glad to hear it seems you found it interesting! Yes, unfortunately, I could not make the game as in-depth as I wanted to due to time constraints.

Yes, this is actually the first full PSDK English Game release ever (according to them) so my games also a bit of a guinea pig to the PSDK Dev Team! My development and learning experience with PSDK has been absolutely amazing however. I absolutely recommend it even if its still a little bit rough around the edges. I think the pros outweigh the cons at the moment, but Essentials does have the advantage for being more popular and older, so there's more public resources to play with. Definitely going to report those bugs to the Dev team! It actually really helps them, so thank you.

To everyone else, we've released a hotfix! 1.5.1 fixes a Nugget oversight!
 

TailsMK4

527
Posts
5
Years
Ranko said:
I'm glad to hear it seems you found it interesting! Yes, unfortunately, I could not make the game as in-depth as I wanted to due to time constraints.

Yes, this is actually the first full PSDK English Game release ever (according to them) so my games also a bit of a guinea pig to the PSDK Dev Team! My development and learning experience with PSDK has been absolutely amazing however. I absolutely recommend it even if its still a little bit rough around the edges. I think the pros outweigh the cons at the moment, but Essentials does have the advantage for being more popular and older, so there's more public resources to play with. Definitely going to report those bugs to the Dev team! It actually really helps them, so thank you.

To everyone else, we've released a hotfix! 1.5.1 fixes a Nugget oversight!
Click to expand...

Ah, is it really the first English one? I consider this a fine start. I actually just finished the second zone when I went to check on this thread.

Spoiler:


I'm taking a dinner break now, then going to check out zone three. I'll download the hotfix before I resume.

EDIT: I forgot to mention probably another PSDK-related thing. If you refresh the game (via F12), before an attack finishes (often with multi-hit moves), the dialogue will carry on from before when you enter another battle. I had a fatal crash happen this way since an "attack" didn't finish when I reset the game due to losing my Pokemon (said attack didn't actually take place on the next battle, but its dialogue did).

EDIT2: The description for the EXP Share is incorrect, it only gives extra EXP to the Pokemon holding it, not all Pokemon. Also, there is a small warp error in the wilderness area. If you keep holding up entering the first cave, you will not only go into the cave, but holding up further also puts you inside a house inside the cave. If you wait to press up until after you are in the cave, you will not warp inside the house. Also, the map is not filling out as I move around, only when an event happens that fills some of the map automatically.

EDIT4: (Not a typo, my third edit is in spoilers) Close Combat does not lower the user's Defense and Special Defense.

My further edits are endgame spoilers, so in a spoiler tag they go...

Spoiler:


I do hope you will expand the game beyond Game Jam. This was a joy to play through.
 
Last edited:
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
TailsMK4 said:
Ah, is it really the first English one? I consider this a fine start. I actually just finished the second zone when I went to check on this thread.

Spoiler:


I'm taking a dinner break now, then going to check out zone three. I'll download the hotfix before I resume.

EDIT: I forgot to mention probably another PSDK-related thing. If you refresh the game (via F12), before an attack finishes (often with multi-hit moves), the dialogue will carry on from before when you enter another battle. I had a fatal crash happen this way since an "attack" didn't finish when I reset the game due to losing my Pokemon (said attack didn't actually take place on the next battle, but its dialogue did).

EDIT2: The description for the EXP Share is incorrect, it only gives extra EXP to the Pokemon holding it, not all Pokemon. Also, there is a small warp error in the wilderness area. If you keep holding up entering the first cave, you will not only go into the cave, but holding up further also puts you inside a house inside the cave. If you wait to press up until after you are in the cave, you will not warp inside the house. Also, the map is not filling out as I move around, only when an event happens that fills some of the map automatically.

EDIT4: (Not a typo, my third edit is in spoilers) Close Combat does not lower the user's Defense and Special Defense.

My further edits are endgame spoilers, so in a spoiler tag they go...

Spoiler:


I do hope you will expand the game beyond Game Jam. This was a joy to play through.
Click to expand...

I'm so happy you enjoyed the playthrough, it really means a lot to me. Also, thanks a lot for reporting those bugs! It helps the PSDK team a lot.

I will heavily consider trying to develop the game into what I truly wanted it to be! Time permitting of course. We'll see how things play out in the future...
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
We went a few days without any major issues, so I was able to fix some minor issues with the game! v1.6 is out with a few balance updates and miscellaneous changes!

- Animations have been updated. This is going in a bit untested, so bear with us if something happened to break.
- Balanced the Speed stat of certain bosses to complement players speedrunning the game. You can play around them going second with good 'mon choices, and if you were training, you were outspeeding them anyway.
- Fixed a few loading issues.
- Last round of late game clean-up.
- Console added to allow larger screen sizes, including 3x3, 4x4, and Full Screen! (May cause screen tearing). Read the text document in the download to know what steps to take.
- More TMs in the overworld to facilitate balance.

We've isolated the Following Bug (You ever have Honedge or bushes follow you?) and have figured out how to replicate the issue 100% of the time. The solution is pending, but here's the cause:

Saving the game DIRECTLY before entering certain rooms (not all of them) causes synchronization issues. If it happens, literally all you have to do is exit the room and reenter. Nothing big! Hopefully it can be killed soon!

Since this update doesn't change much but has potential to break, it'll be going out as a separate download from the last one. Thank you for the great support so far and everything who's reached out to me via DM. It means the world to me.
 
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Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
1.7 is out. Notably...

- The following bug has been vanquished. Finally

- Adjusted Zee's moveset to have Psybeam in slot 1 by default. This allows you to use Conversion without having to set it up yourself.

That's all major bugs known so far. Thank you all for your support so far.
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
And with Thundaga's playthrough yesterday, we fixed every issue he found! Check out the vod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAhOrwlGytM

Thus, 1.8 is now released.

- Tentative fix for lagzone
- Fixed more broken moves
- Removes X Items from the game as they crash the game if someone decides to throw them on not the lead pokemon
- Adjusted Zee's moveset at later levels (because he's easy to grind)
- Adjusted other movesets
- Fixed typos
- Fixed level curve of some Pokemon

Thank you!
 

pokemonbelch

111
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 24
  • Seen today
So i am stuck and need to know a few things.

1. Where is surf?

2. I cant get the shuckle to move.

3. I cant seem to get past the fourth puzzle in Beyond the Depths.

4. Where do I put the Lost Wilderness key?

Edit: Nevermind I Figured it out.
 
Last edited:
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
pokemonbelch said:
So i am stuck and need to know a few things.

1. Where is surf?

2. I cant get the shuckle to move.

3. I cant seem to get past the fourth puzzle in Beyond the Depths.

4. Where do I put the Lost Wilderness key?

Edit: Nevermind I Figured it out.
Click to expand...

I'll definitely touch that the Depths puzzle is quite difficult. Check out Thundaga's stream vod if it becomes too much. It's at https://youtu.be/sAhOrwlGytM?t=6670 1:51:00.

Spoilers of course!
 
Ranko

Ranko

Aloof Unmoving Maiden
98
Posts
6
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Sep 14, 2023
We've decided to go forward with a post-jam version of Ghosts of Knowledge (2.0). This version will not be released until after the judging period of the Relic Castle Game Jam. Conclusion link here: https://reliccastle.com/threads/2694/

We're starting on QoL, and this includes PSDK related things (such as lack of repels etc). If you've played/watched the game and noticed anything with the base game or even PSDK that is editable (UI for example), lemme know! Big things are going to happen and I want this to be out just about a few weeks after the Jam period ends. I don't want it to be a 5 year project that never finishes.

thanks yous. and also thank you everyone so much for the support so far.
 
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