[Discussion] Alternative to Three Starters

[IgnisDeveloper]

I am the lead programmer for Ignis Studios, working on a new monster catching came called Deozoa - Legends of Eden (deozoa.com). Our core team all grew up playing a lot of Pokemon, obviously. And while that certainly inspired our current project, we are not trying to make another Pokemon clone. For example, we will be mixing in some turn-based strategy awesomeness into the soup, rather than your standard 1v1 system. And ideally, we would like this to be a community shaped and driven game, so we need your braaaains, I mean thoughts and helpful suggestions.

We've been plugging away at the art, concept, story, and programming for a while now, but we thought some of you PokeCommunity people might like to provide some input on some of the game mechanics. For example, we have been discussing a few options for your starter Deozoa on our Facebook page. Pokemon's fire, water, plant starters are very iconic and work very well for them, but we are interested in exploring a few alternatives for our game. So tell me, if you were to play a new monster catching game, how would you like to get your first monster?

 

[Dragonite Ernston]

"Deozoa" - "God animals"? I approve (._.)b

As for the whole three starters thing, how about the option of actually encountering one without any monsters of your own in some sort of training ground, requiring you to fight it somehow? Kind of like a special battle just for that one.

Or, rather than having just three, choose from a range of twelve - one of each element, in a breeding ground of sorts, visiting a different person to get them?

Or perhaps you'd even buy your first Deozoon at some sort of "monster market".

(P.S. consider using "Deozoon" or "Deozo'on" as the singular form, as that's where "Deozoa" comes from, right? Right now it's just "Deozoa" for everything on your site :P)

 

[IgnisDeveloper]

The origin of "Deozoa" is actually a funny story. Early on, we were considering going with something of a DNA theme, so "Deo" originally came from deoxyribonucleic acid. We liked the sound, and it ended up sticking. The "Deo=God" interpretation came to us later. We are leaving the meaning open to everyone's own interpretation though.

It's funny you suggested the idea of catching one on your own - that idea has actually been winning in our own internal discussions. It could also act as a tutorial to battling and catching Deozoa. We talked about having a large number of starters from different elements, but that seems to take away some of the specialness of your first one. We are leaning towards 4 starters you encounter in a battle right now.

I can see what you mean about "Deozoon", it is a little more linguistically correct. But we also don't want to confuse people. Some people already had a hard time figuring out how to pronounce Deozoa as it is. Thanks for the ideas, though.

 

[Lord Varion]

The two most popualr alternate ways I've seen are:

Single Creature:
Basically you only get the choice of one, and it seems to be related to the storyline or point of the game.

Questionarre based:
This seems more freely done, you make the player answer a couple questions and give it 5 - 6 possible outcomes, the questions based on how the player would act in situations or events and what they'd think of something. Kind of like PMD.

 

[Dragonite Ernston]

The origin of "Deozoa" is actually a funny story. Early on, we were considering going with something of a DNA theme, so "Deo" originally came from deoxyribonucleic acid. We liked the sound, and it ended up sticking. The "Deo=God" interpretation came to us later. We are leaving the meaning open to everyone's own interpretation though.

"Deoxyzoa" would be too much like "Deoxys" for your comfort, eh? :P (Not to mention it means "animals without oxygen" which is weird :P)

It's funny you suggested the idea of catching one on your own - that idea has actually been winning in our own internal discussions. It could also act as a tutorial to battling and catching Deozoa. We talked about having a large number of starters from different elements, but that seems to take away some of the specialness of your first one. We are leaning towards 4 starters you encounter in a battle right now.

So 4 starters, one of which you encounter in a battle without a Deozoon of your own. That seems nice. I'd go for that myself.

I can see what you mean about "Deozoon", it is a little more linguistically correct. But we also don't want to confuse people. Some people already had a hard time figuring out how to pronounce Deozoa as it is. Thanks for the ideas, though.

Will you object to me calling it Deozoon, though? After all, it could simply be one of the strange plurals of the English language :P

Even worse would be me injecting some old English or Greek in there and calling it Ðeozoon or Theozoon in singular. :P

 

[FL]

Quotes from my opinion in old starter discussion:

I think the starter thing is VERY overrated and even make the players to only trains one pokémon, is only just a pokémon, and several other are in wild.
Now we have 649, so be stuck on three is only for tradition or even if you didn't wish to make a many rival possibles teams.
Put all the gen starters or even one for each type can make more variable teams for your game.
If you make the cliché thing of few pokémon to choose, at least put some pokémon that have several evolutions like Eevee and Tyrogue. For rival I like the Yellow scheme, maybe you can further refine to check that pokémon the players gets first on pokédex (like Vaporeon, Flareon, etc...) and make rivals using distinct teams.

I don't like the Mystery Dungeon questions because its make to most of players reseting the game util they picks their favorites ones. Maybe this can work if you can put an option like "I don't like it" that player can have other pokémon or even goes to a selection screen.

 

[IgnisDeveloper]

The two most popualr alternate ways I've seen are:

Single Creature:
Basically you only get the choice of one, and it seems to be related to the storyline or point of the game.

Questionarre based:
This seems more freely done, you make the player answer a couple questions and give it 5 - 6 possible outcomes, the questions based on how the player would act in situations or events and what they'd think of something. Kind of like PMD.

Those were actually a couple of our top picks as well. Weighing all of the factors, we are actually leaning to the option of having 4 Deozoa that you encounter early on in a battle and you get to choose which one you catch.

"Deoxyzoa" would be too much like "Deoxys" for your comfort, eh? :P (Not to mention it means "animals without oxygen" which is weird :P)

Your linguistic skills excel mine. I immediately saw the oxygen reference, but that is really funny that it means "without oxygen."

Will you object to me calling it Deozoon, though? After all, it could simply be one of the strange plurals of the English language :P

Even worse would be me injecting some old English or Greek in there and calling it Ðeozoon or Theozoon in singular. :P

That is pretty funny. You are welcome to call them whatever you want. In order to pacify the less linguistically gifted, we are just going to stick with Deozoa in the official literature, though.

 

[Dragonite Ernston]

Your linguistic skills excel mine. I immediately saw the oxygen reference, but that is really funny that it means "without oxygen."

Even in "deoxyribonucleic acid", the "deoxyribo-" part comes from "deoxyribose", which is "deoxygenated ribose", or "ribose with a few less oxygen atoms" or "ribose without oxygen".

That is pretty funny. You are welcome to call them whatever you want. In order to pacify the less linguistically gifted, we are just going to stick with Deozoa in the official literature, though.

Alright, will do :P

 

[Radical Raptr]

i'm assuming you're asking for people's input on starters, while the game chose water fire and grass, you could make your own 3 starter type, like:

electric-water-ground

 

[IgnisDeveloper]

Saving Raven, That's actually a pretty good alternative starter trio. They are all pretty basic types, but form a nice triangle. Our game isn't really going to have the "rival" so the element triangle doesn't actually affect the play of our particular game very much. At this point, I think we've decided to just go with 4 starters: Earth, Plant, Fire, and Water.

 

[Involuntary Twitch]

Gosh, this looks like a really cool game! I'm always on the hunt for cool monster battlers for iOS, and your team is obviously putting a lot of thought into this, which is great! I will definitely be buying/DLing this when it comes out.

As for starters, I'm a fan of the questionnaire-form (with an option to reset), or a broader selection of one-per-type, excepting Dark and Light which I see are more plot-significant. If you are going for a more pokemonesque trio, I'd urge you to deviate from fire/water/earth and maybe go for something a little different, like electric/air/physical or something.

Looking forward to this! I'd toss some money at the kickstarter, but it seems to redirect me back to the main page of the site. Aw. :(

 

[IgnisDeveloper]

@Zephyr+, we appreciate the enthusiasm. We probably should have been clearer that the Kickstarter campaign is not live yet. We just got approved yesterday and are planning on launching next week, probably Wednesday.

I should also mention that we are working on coming up with some appropriate in game rewards for our most enthusiastic fans and promoters (admittedly a somewhat subjective measure).

 

[Fire Flyy]

Quotes from my opinion in old starter discussion:

Gonna disagree with the second sentiment. People know the Pokemon a bit better than they know Deozoa, so it would make sense that they reset for a Chimchar when they get Meowth or Psyduck or something lame. I'm not sure about anyone else, but as long as the design is decent, I'd probably be more receptive to using a pokemon that was assigned to me from a game I know little about. I don't know I think it would be sort of cool.

 

[djonn]

First of all, nice project.
The art is really nice and the video looks good (only played it without sound)

After that I'd like to see some more of the combat system, from what I've seen it could be either like many facebook games (bad) or like Heroes Might and Magic (good), I'm of course hoping for the latter (also it sounds like that's what you want from the turn based strategy)

And a last thing, the 1500$+ kickstarter pledge "price", the cheat code thing, i suggest you rethink that, I'm suggesting an option for the specified account in the settings (or something like that)

 

[char83]

How about you work at a pokemon breeding house as a kid and you pick from the top five tat like you the most

 

[IgnisDeveloper]

I am a huge HOMM fan. I probably played more of that through the years than any other PC game. That is actually a decent comparison to our battle style. Just imagine that without the movement grid (everything is free form) and a larger battlefield that you can scroll around on. Also, each unit will have a selection of attacks. Our early concepts use 2 attacks per Human-Deozoa pair (one for the human and one for the Deozoa). We thought about doing 4, but since you will already have so many units fighting at once, that seemed like too much to keep track of. Each human and Deozoa will have a variety of attacks, you will just assign one each to be set for the battle. I hope that explains the mechanics a little better.

Could you elaborate a little more about what you mean by the "cheat code" thing. We removed the particular language from Kickstarter since it could be possibly taken the wrong way. The intention was that if you payed to have us put you as a custom character, you might want to have control of who is allowed to play as you. So if we implement it as a cheat code, then you can choose whether or not to share that cheat code and let other people play as your character.

How about you work at a pokemon breeding house as a kid and you pick from the top five tat like you the most

This is a pretty cool idea. We would like to do another game in the future with more of an emphasis on breeding. We kind of already have a backstory for our main character - he is a mercenary for hire.

Thanks for the ideas though.

 

[djonn]

I am a huge HOMM fan. I probably played more of that through the years than any other PC game. That is actually a decent comparison to our battle style. Just imagine that without the movement grid (everything is free form) and a larger battlefield that you can scroll around on. Also, each unit will have a selection of attacks. Our early concepts use 2 attacks per Human-Deozoa pair (one for the human and one for the Deozoa). We thought about doing 4, but since you will already have so many units fighting at once, that seemed like too much to keep track of. Each human and Deozoa will have a variety of attacks, you will just assign one each to be set for the battle. I hope that explains the mechanics a little better.

Glad to hear I understood the battle system right, sounds good :mudkip^_^:

Could you elaborate a little more about what you mean by the "cheat code" thing. We removed the particular language from Kickstarter since it could be possibly taken the wrong way. The intention was that if you payed to have us put you as a custom character, you might want to have control of who is allowed to play as you. So if we implement it as a cheat code, then you can choose whether or not to share that cheat code and let other people play as your character.

It sounds to me like this "cheat code" is more like a promo code which is typed in at character creation, is this right?

 

[IgnisDeveloper]

It sounds to me like this "cheat code" is more like a promo code which is typed in at character creation, is this right?

Yeah, that's the idea for now. But it's really just an implementation issue. We may go with some downloadable content or another alternative in the future.

 

[FL]

Gonna disagree with the second sentiment. People know the Pokemon a bit better than they know Deozoa, so it would make sense that they reset for a Chimchar when they get Meowth or Psyduck or something lame. I'm not sure about anyone else, but as long as the design is decent, I'd probably be more receptive to using a pokemon that was assigned to me from a game I know little about. I don't know I think it would be sort of cool.

Yes, this reasons may make a good number of resets reduction, but I believe than still will be people resetting.

 

[djonn]

Yeah, that's the idea for now. But it's really just an implementation issue. We may go with some downloadable content or another alternative in the future.

Would be pretty cool as well, the word 'cheat' just threw me off.
How would you ensure the donator that he could choose who got access to it? and wouldn't people easily be able to make their own character? (I don't know if that is bad)