[Developing] Pokémon Roll

[G-Master]

Happy new year!

As with a lot of fan projects, our development team can sometimes struggle to find time to work on Pokemon Roll (hence the reason there hasn't been an update since August). But fortunately, winter break gave us lots of free time!

Today I can present something a little more exciting ... a first look at our levels!

There's obviously a lot more work to be done (especially on the water), but the isometric sprites are working a lot better than I thought they would.

Moving forward, here is what I'm going to be focusing on when it comes to the environment:

• Improving the water - the water obviously looks rough, but my hope is to make it smooth and responsive
• Adding more tiles - different types of trees and such, as well as making more types of ground
• Making outer generation nicer looking - invisible barriers are fine, but I'd rather the outside of the map look smooth
• Add dynamic interactions - one of the cool things we're staged to do is have attacks alter the environment (fire attacks burn foliage, etc), but some work needs to be done as far as visuals go
• Improving the lighting - the background is a bit dark right now, but when I include the day/night system it will improve significantly

While I'm doing all that, my partner will be focusing on refining the Pokeball movement so it's as smooth as possible, and ensuring that it works properly underwater.

We've also animated 10 or so of the moves, which is a good start despite there being like 600 or so total.

Winter break is now over, so I can't guarantee that we'll make a lot of progress. We're going to continue working regardless, but simply commenting. liking this post, or showing us you're interested is a good motivator :)

Thanks,
G

 

[G-Master]

Just posting to let the community know that I haven't left. I did not know the admins personally and wasn't even online for the entire thing.

Regardless, I've been a bit busy and haven't done much on this project in the last couple of months, but for the few that might care it has not been canned. We may have found an artist who will do a bit of sprite work for us, but he has been busy as well. Hopefully I'll be able to post an actual progress update soon.

 

[megaman d]

Really fascinated to see the amount of work you have put in even with such low traffic on this thread. I believe it wouldn't be much famous as it's a far different game than traditional pokemon but still good luck with it

 

[G-Master]

Really fascinated to see the amount of work you have put in even with such low traffic on this thread. I believe it wouldn't be much famous as it's a far different game than traditional pokemon but still good luck with it

Thanks. We never expected it to garner much traffic because as you said, it's not a traditional Pokemon game. We're hoping we can make a fun platformer with the same Pokemon collection mechanics everyone loves. When we get further along and release a demo I think it'll gain more attention when people can determine for themselves if it's fun to play, even if it's not the same genre of game.

 

[G-Master]

Just a small update for everyone. Work has slowed since our gameplay programmer is not readily available to work on the project. I'm capable of doing gameplay programming myself, but this obviously pushes back our beta date since there's more I'd have to do. I'm open to bringing someone else on the project should they know Unity and C#, but Roll is a very complex project so I'd want to see some prior code samples first.

Progress-wise, I've been spending most of my time working on a move tester. Pokémon Roll has hundreds of moves and I have to individually hand author each one using particle systems in Unity. Once I get this move tester done, it will be much easier to make, test, and balance all the different moves in the game.

The silver lining of having to hand author each move is that I've made the moves customizable. You can now apply "modifications" to all of your Pokémon's moves to make them truly unique!

So say you have a Charmander that knows Ember. If you catch another Charmander that you don't want to keep, no worries, just use the second Charmander to make Ember stronger! For each Charmander you use (up to 10) you can choose between several modifications such as doing more damage, increasing the range, or even changing the type of the move! There are tons of ways to customize the moves using modifications, and the modifications are different for each move!

The system will be a lot easier to explain once I'm able to make a video of the moves in action, but hopefully the thought of customizing your moves has you excited to try all the different moves in Roll.