Crystal hack: [Hack of the Year 2017] - Pokémon Orange (GBC) [Suloku Patch] (Fin)

[Pi25]

Also looking forward to the completed version. This is looking to be good so far. Keep up the good work. :)

 

[PiaCRT]

Mandarin North and Sunburst are shaping up pretty well. Will be releasing another alpha once the Crystal Onix event is complete.

 

[PiaCRT]

Mandarin Island North is done. Now working on Sunburst Island and the Crystal Onix event. The Bazaar in sunburst is complete; you can purchase evolution stones, miscellaneous items and permanent stat boosters.

Due to my poor internet access I might not have a video to showcase on my youtube channel for the upcoming release, but I will be releasing an alpha once the Onix event is complete. There is another obstacle coming soon: Pinkan Island. I have the Pinkan code essentially done but there are other issues that still need to be worked around before release.

Also a huge thank you to Mmmmmm for providing music for the hack. I was able to give a lot more life to the previous sections of the game playing vanilla crystal music.

 

[Bloodless]

Mandarin Island North is done. Now working on Sunburst Island and the Crystal Onix event. The Bazaar in sunburst is complete; you can purchase evolution stones, miscellaneous items and permanent stat boosters.

Due to my poor internet access I might not have a video to showcase on my youtube channel for the upcoming release, but I will be releasing an alpha once the Onix event is complete. There is another obstacle coming soon: Pinkan Island. I have the Pinkan code essentially done but there are other issues that still need to be worked around before release.

Also a huge thank you to Mmmmmm for providing music for the hack. I was able to give a lot more life to the previous sections of the game playing vanilla crystal music.

Progress is coming along great! Also good to see Mmmmmm has finished your requests, not had a chance to give them a listen yet but I'm sure they sound amazing.
Quick question, have you used the Alolan Muk sprite I edited? Did the best I could with the limited pallete but hoping you've made something better ;)

 

[PiaCRT]

Nope, using yours. I have no problem with it :p

 

[Bloodless]

Always a pleasure to see my work in games (especially this one) but still somewhat disappointed on this occasion, maybe being too hard on myself haha :P Still though, the Alola Pokemon are well suited, can't wait for the next alpha!

 

[PiaCRT]

Alpha 3 is out!

You can download it from the attachments (Dropbox link will be posted later)

What's new:
-2 More Routes
-2 More Dungeons
-2 More Islands
-Crystal Onix Event
-Team Rocket Event
-Spinda added
-Alolan Pokémon Movesets updated
-New music tracks for towns

Bugs:
-Naming Screen still shows default crystal palettes
-Looking up AREA on the Pokedex displays bugged graphics on the second row
-NPC warps to Crystal Cave -fixed-
-TMs/HMs broken -fixed-
-House in Cherrygrove broken warp -fixed-

If you notice anything off or broken please let me know, I do my best to self bug-test but I'm sure there are things I have missed. Feedback on encounters is appreciated as well, it is one of my weak points in game design.

 

[JahnFvN]

Thanks for the update!

A little Bug that I noticed, when you walk into this house and try to get out again, you'll land in some trees.

 

[PiaCRT]

Very sorry about that. I've fixed it and will upload it with the dropbox link in a few hours (at work so I can't upload it right now).


EDIT: Also included in the release are revamped ports for Valencia to Tangelo. No longer have to go through like 3 floors to reach the boat, and Tangelo actually has a port now as opposed to an NPC. I have gone ahead and uploaded this as an attachment.

 

[kalarie]

Found two more bugs I think

One is in the first town when talking to this guy (See pics) causes a warp to somewhere further in the game where you're not supposed to be yet.

The second is about the TM's and HM's (See pic), I think the picture speaks for itself.

Promising hack though;)

 

[PiaCRT]

As soon as I saw your post I knew what I did wrong to break that, so thanks for that. Was an easy fix (hopefully). Note to self: stop trying to organize spaghetti code.


Here's the fix:

 

[Rangi]

Alright! I've been looking forward to a new Orange release.

The day and night roofs don't match:

Also, your last GitHub commit was in February?

And it would be nice if the title screen said A3.2 instead of V1. Makes it easier to keep track.

 

[PiaCRT]

Alright! I've been looking forward to a new Orange release.

The day and night roofs don't match:

Also, your last GitHub commit was in February?

And it would be nice if the title screen said A3.2 instead of V1. Makes it easier to keep track.

Github is blocked at my school (I assume because proxy applications can be found there). Haven't been able to upload.

I also am not sure which palette is what in the roofs.pal file since nothing can be commented in there. Been meaning to fix that but not ready to have another roof fiasco when it's low priority.


Lastly, it should really be V0.3.2 because V1 is supposed to be Beta1, but yeah...Another low priority thing. Will fix it when I get to adding clouds to the title screen.

 

[Rangi]

Github is blocked at my school (I assume because proxy applications can be found there). Haven't been able to upload.


I also am not sure which palette is what in the roofs.pal file since nothing can be commented in there. Been meaning to fix that but not ready to have another roof fiasco when it's low priority.

That's crazy. I didn't know any school would block GitHub, high school college, whatever. Does nobody develop software there?

You can use my pal2html.py to preview palette files. The roof.pal on your GitHub looks like this:

Ignore the first row, and the rest of the rows correspond to the map groups. First two colors are daytime, last two are nighttime. Which means that group 24, of New Bark Town, uses the first row in the last column. So it worked back in February, there are two purple hues there, but now it appears to be using the next row's nighttime yellow. Were the two pairs in-between them deleted?

(I know this is totally lowest priority, and you're probably used to it, but the code says NEW_BARK_TOWN and NewBarkTown everywhere instead of VALENCIA_ISLAND...)

 

[PiaCRT]

Nah, I'm in a computer repair class and that's about as techy as this place gets. Government facility and all.


There were originally 27 palettes and as of right now there should only be 13, due to me deleting map groups.


EDIT: I'm actually starting to rename things properly now. It took me a while but I changed some things, everything after Mikan Island is all original maps now with proper names.

 

[Rangi]

Nah, I'm in a computer repair class and that's about as techy as this place gets. Government facility and all.

There were originally 27 palettes and as of right now there should only be 13, due to me deleting map groups.

Somehow that explains it...

A couple more small issues:
? I can keep battling the assistant for easy money and experience. Maybe once per day?
? The Town Map does not close back to the Key Items pocket. Really minor, but a bit disorienting; I thought for a moment the item had disappeared.

Edit: GSC uses "?" not "...".

 

[PiaCRT]

Somehow that explains it...

A couple more small issues:
? I can keep battling the assistant for easy money and experience. Maybe once per day?
? The Town Map does not close back to the Key Items pocket. Really minor, but a bit disorienting; I thought for a moment the item had disappeared.

I'll see what I can do about limiting the assistant a bit.

I have tried fixing the Town Map, and the current result was the best I could get it (before it was crashing the game or causing glitched graphics). Is there a command to return to a specific pocket? That would help a lot more as it is just defaulting to the ITEM pocket via the bag command I have set up.

Might want to take this to VMs until I can get on discord in 2 hours.


Also going to take a week off and go home to hammer out the Pinkan Island code pretty soon here, hopefully you'll be around when that happens as I'm gonna need the help xD

 

[Linnie]

I wanted to wait until a large enough alpha to comment on the hack, since problems in the earliest alphas are almost certainly going to be fixed and I feel this is enough.

The main menu theme is far too high-pitched. What's the original version of the song? I may put the song on my backlog and do my own port of it.

The mapping in this region feels rather cramped outside towns. There seem to be a lot of two-tile-wide paths filled with lots of tall grass, as well as water routes and Tangelo Jungle. At minimum, I think changing Tangelo Jungle from having every step be a wild encounter to adding tall grass within the area and only those spaces with tall grass having encounters (basically switching from Ilex Forest to Viridian Forest in regards to encounters) would help a bit; I do think at least a couple routes changing to be more open would go further to fixing the problem, though. The towns, Underground, and Crystal Cave are all mapped well and I don't have complaints.

I also think the wild distribution is rather skewed at the moment. The vast majority of Pok?mon I've ran into so far have been Water, Bug, Poison, or Flying. Even the Normal-type seems a bit underrepresented with only Rattata and Spinda. Even 1-2 land routes seem to have Water-types like Poliwag despite the large bodies of water. Trainer parties are slightly better by having Pok?mon like Meowth and Mankey (that don't seem to be added to any wild areas yet; I'm sure they'll get added later as more areas get mapped), but with all the water routes populated by Swimmers and Fisherman I find myself still fighting far too many Water-type Pok?mon.

The female swimmer sprite is glitched on Route 54 and has incorrect walking frames.

On Sunburst Island, the NPC who gives you a Sharp Beak has slightly glitched dialogue that cuts itself off as soon as it finishes.

Spinda is currently genderless.

There's a minor visual glitch with the Pok?dex, where the uppermost row of tiles is corrupted when you check for area. It doesn't appear on the Town Map, just in the Pok?dex.

I think all the custom sprites in this hack look pretty good, to try and give more positive feedback after all that criticism. The overworld tiles also look good, but I think it could use a bit more variety so the islands can stand out more individually.


I am looking forward to more progress on this hack.

 

[PiaCRT]

Thank you for all the wonderful feedback, Linnie. Always nice to hear from you.

I definitely need to revisit Route 50 and Tangelo Jungle, they are both rather outdated and were made when I first began the hack, and it shows.

I'll see about having some more variety for encounters. To explain Poliwag, I must give players the ability to have Surf on every island. Otherwise, someone could release Lapras and have no means to Surf, which I am trying to avoid. I will try to add more normal types as well, but I will also say after Crystal Cave is when the game gets interesting (pretty much beginning with the Crystal Onix). I finally have my Pokedex list completed and we'll be seeing Pokemon from pretty much every region aside from Unova (simply put, none made their way to the list).

I think I know how to fix the Nest Area Map, but it will take some playing around. I'll investigate Route 54's swimmers and the Sharp Beak NPC, but the former I am pretty sure from the sprite bank getting full (I was trying to make it more open world but game really needs to move on to a new mapgroup, which thankfully Crystal Cave provides).

The song is ED 6 of the Japanese Pokemon Anime. I think it's called Riding on Lapras.

 

[Cacu123456789]

I love this hack. I congratulate you for the great work you are doing. I'm looking forward to the game being finished. One question, how many routes and islands will there be in the hack?