Life's hit me hard recently, making it difficult to find the time to work on this. Not gonna let it die, just... it's a lot for a one-man team right now. To address a few of the questions and comments:
The Level Cap thou could be a bit higher, i mean like the same level as the strongest Pokemon the next gym leader has. so far i always cap out 2 levels below that, what sometimes even prevented me from having an evolved Pokemon to go into battle.
Level Cap will definitely be worked on. Things like that, balance issues, are something that I can only really nail down once the game is mostly complete (I'm already worried we're going to hit levels 60-70 with the way the game's progressing, which would screw with a lot of balancing, like the movesets). Currently, the level cap being set below the first gym leader's ace is intentional, but I'll see how I feel about it moving forward.
Another thing is how strong random trainers are, no matter what trainer i face the Pokemon always hit like a truck. I actually got my Rockruff two shot with tackles by an Rattata of the same level.
maybe it has something to do with ev and that stuff but man, some of these hits dmg way more as they should.
last thing, and i dont know if that is just my bad luck. But it seems to me that opponents have way higher chances of getting Status changes like Paralyse and the like in and keep them on you then the other way around.
I'll check out the code just to be safe, but it's all base Essentials. I haven't changed anything in the battle formulas beyond a few custom moves. However, I will say that basic trainers are definitely supposed to be a bit more challenging. Personally always hated the Bug Catchers coming at you with Lv9 Caterpies when you just took down Brock's Lv14 Onix.
Rattata still shouldn't be 2-shotting Rockruff, though.
Have noticed a few minor bugs though, mainly that Pluck doesn't do its effect at all having seen multiple pokemon chow down on a berry right after it being used on them.
Noted. As mentioned above, the battle system is base Essentials, no changes made. So I'll look into Pluck to see what's going on.
Also at least one mon has its TM learn set messed up, that being Trumbeak being unable to learn Bullet Seed.
Movesets right now are however they come packaged in the Gen 8 & Gen 9 packs, so take it up with them! But in all seriousness, I will be making custom movesets for every 'mon in the game, so things like that will be fixed, but at the same time, apologies if at some point your favorite becomes unable to learn certain moves you've been accustomed to.
Smaller issues with the game, if you've rolled into a stone heavy evolution set there doesn't seem to be any actual way to evolve those mons yet? That could be me misunderstanding how the prism shards are supposed to work though (which is an idea I like).
Upon rescuing Bill (after the 3rd gym), you'll unlock the ability to convert Prism Shards to evolution stones. Right now it only works by talking to Bill at Bill's Cottage, but since that's a bit out of the way, I do intend to make something more accessible later down the line. But rolling a stone-heavy team is exactly why I went the Prism Shard route. No real way to know what stones each player is going to need in any given playthrough.
Also it's possible for new trainers to spawn in while you're on a route, which can make pokecenter runs harrowing to say the least. They can also even replace a trainer you've just battled, meaning you get no chance at all to heal up in between.
Hmm... THAT needs some looking into. Trainers shouldn't rotate on you out of nowhere, it should only be an illusion of constant rotation. What's actually happening is there's multiple spots in the game where the trainer variables get re-rolled while you interact with another event (two of the Pokemon Centers do it when you heal your Pokemon, for example). But I tried to make sure they were only placed in cities or maps without trainers, specifically to avoid new trainers popping up while you're in the middle of a route. Do you remember which routes this was happening on?
Thank you both for the feedback!