Hi. I'm back. I apologize for have disappeared for many months, but I hadn't any major update to announce. That's because I stopped working in my hacks since I was busy (REALLY busy) with my life. However, I have been planning many new features during that period of time. And I started working on implementing them during the last weeks.
Keep in mind that all the pictures that I'm posting here are prototypicals and that they're using the Sunset City (Slaterport City) graphics because I have been mainly working in scripting, and I barely created any new graphics. So in later versions they will look different and will have very different graphics and more diversity.
Most of the new major features will increase the level of "roleplaying" a lot:
Special Events: While traveling, you can find different random events. Since they will be random, you can get it the first time that you arrive a certain city, or after visiting it 50 times.
Example: When you reach certain city, suddenly a man will walk to you and ask you to help him find his lost Pokémon. If you help him, you will be rewarded. Or instead, you may cross in the path of a thief, who will steal you Pokénav, and you will have to look for his hideout to get it back. Or you may encounter other event in the same city, or none at all. Because as I said, they will be random. The point of them is that you will not look for them, they will find you.
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Interaction with NPCs: There will be a bigget level of interaction with some NPCs than in the original game. You can befriend some NPCs, who will later trade Pokémons with you, battle with you, send you e-mails, tell you about specials events that are about to happen, or other functions. Read further to know more.
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Jobs: You will actually be able to get a job and work for money. For example, the most basic job will be distributor of daily. You will have to go through all the city to put a daily in each mailbox. After that, you will receive your paid. You will have to do this everyday.
Here is a picture of a mailbox in a prototypical Maintropolis (the first city of the game, previously named Megapolis). There will be many other jobs too.
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City events: These are other type of random events. Sometimes, there may be a celebration in a city like a birthday party, concert, a trainer convention or other type of events. And you will can enter if you want, nobody will ask you for your invitation card. In these events, you may find new persons that you never saw, battle new trainers, trade for rare Pokémon, or even make new friends. But the best part is that sometimes, there will be tournaments for trainers (ala the Battle Dome). You will be able to enter, and if you beat all the trainers, you will obtain a big prize. You will also be able to know new peoples and make new friends in these tournaments.
These events will be day-based like the ones announced in the TV in the original game.
Does this mean that I will have to check every city everyday to catch these events, you ask? No really. You only need to have at least one NPC friend of each city, and he will send you a e-mail advising you when a event is about to happen in some days.
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Battle Center: There will be a Battle Center in every major city. They will be a bit more common than Contest Halls. In a Battle Center, you can battle a trainer (who has Pokémon in a high level) everyday, ala the Trainer's House in GSC. But unlike the Trainer's House, everyday you will battle a different trainer with different Pokémons. And everyday, there will be at least one different NPC here, who will chat, trade Pokémon with you, or befriend you. Also there will be a section exclusive where you will be able to fight the friends with whom you mixed records everyday, same as the trainers in the Secret Bases.
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Get your own house: You will be able to buy or rent houses. However if you don't care about spend much money, you can buy a private territory and pay to someone to construct here a house for you. It can be either a simple house; a house with two floors; a house with two floors, 4-5 rooms and a basement; or if you are really rich, a mansion. Also, you will have a mailbox in you house. That means that everytime that someone sends you a letter, or that buy something in Pokéshop Online, it will be sent to the mailbox of your house.
Also, depending on the type of house, it will have different features:
a) Simple house: Only one floor and room that you can decorate with items same as a Secret Base.
b) House with two floors: Downstairs you will have a T.V. and table. In the 1st floor will be you room. There will be a bed to restore the energy of your Pokémons, and you will can decorate it with items.
c) Big house: It will have 2 floors, a basement and 4-5 rooms. I will come with the same thing as the House with two floors, except that there will be a PC in your room (it will work the same as the PCs of the Pokécenters), and it will have a basement with extra space to store items.
d) Mansion: It will have the same features as the Big house, but it will be HUGE, with many floors and rooms.
However, the real fun about the housed is that you can buy different stuff for your house that will provide different features. Some of them will be:
-A PC with Internet connection. You won't need to go to a cyber cafe and pay to navigate through Internet anymore. Also, since you will be in your house, you can simply buy the items and go to your mailbox to get them without the need to traveling.
-Radio. It will be similar to the radio in GSC, except that the the songs will be random rather than time-based.
-CD player: You will can hear different themes of the game. You will have to buy a music cd for each theme that you want to hear, but they will be cheap, and you won't have to carry them. They will be automatically teletransported to your house and you simply will have to choose the theme that you want to hear everytime that you use the CD player.
-DVD player: You can "see" the dvds that you bought. Well, actually, you only will get to read text about what happens, but still this will be a neat feature. The DVDs won't have movies tough. They will have documentals instead. They will tell you about events in the history of the Pokémon world of Sunshine, or you can even buy dvds that talk about Nick's previous adventures in New Journey and Bluesky (Nick is famous because of the events in New Journey and Light & Darkness [previously named Bluesky]).
-Telephone: You can use it to contact the NPC that you did befriend. Sometimes they will tell you about events that are about to happen, or thing that happened to them, or they will want a rematch with you, or sometimes, they will offer to trade Pokémons with you. This will be a very important feature.
-More items that I will implement.
Note: The picture of above is only a prototypical house using the graphics of the hero's house in Maintropolis. Later versions will feature different graphics.
Note 2: If you don't have a house, the stuff that you buy and letters will be sent to you mom's house in Maintropolis.
Note 3: You can own only 1 house.
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Bankers: Do you miss the GSC feature to deposit your money? Well, now it's back! There will be banks where you will can deposit your money. However, they will work different that your mom from GSC. You will receive a ticket for each deposit that you make, and you can use them later to recuperate your money. So while the maximum amount of money that you could get in GSC was $1999998, here it will be unlimited (well, actually it will be limited by the ammount of ticket that you can keep).
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For rich peoples: You can pay to make build a park to display Pokémon (as a zoo) that you will own. You can either make it in the territory of your house, or buy a new territory for it. In it you will can display Pokémon that you own. Depending on the rarity of the Pokémons, you will receive more peoples and gain more money. Also you can meet more NPCs here and make more friends.
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Multiplayer mode: You will be able to actually go throught some of the regular cities linked with 1-3 real life friends. Also, there will be places throught Solen that only can be accesed in Multiplayer mode. They will have events for 2 or more players like races, labyrinths, collect flags (this is a cool little game to be played by two teams of 2 players), dungeons, or even more.
Here is a picture showing multiplayer in a Venezuela-based city (unnamed thus far):
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Multiplayer land: The real fun of multiplaying. There will be a area in Solen with 4-5 cities and about 10 routes, plus the extra areas, dungeons and secret paths that only will be playable in multiplayer mode. These are the features:
-The gameplay will be very similar to when you go traveling in a regular area. You can travel through cities, routes and beat dungeons.
-There will be 5 main dungeons in the multiplayer area. You will have to be conecter with at least one friend to beat them. These will be dungeons similar to the regular ones, except that at least two players will be required to beat them. There will be puzzles that will require more than one player. Also, these dungeons will have "guardians". The guardians will be animated statues that will battle you, give you solve puzzles to solve or, in some cases, give you items.
-There will be also extra dungeons, secret areas and secret labyrinths with fully multiplayer gameplay.
-While being in this area, you will be able to battle your friends or trade Pokémons and items. To battle, you will have to go with your friend(s) to a Battle Arena. They are in every city. And to trade you will have to use a trading machine. They are located in the Pokécenters.
-In this are you can also trigger events that will later happen in the regular, 1-player areas
-You can also open new 1-player paths from this area
However, there will be some limitations. The original game wasn't created to be played with more than 1 player, so don't expect it to have as many functions as a MMORPG. Most of the limitations will be:
-You can't fight a NPC aided by your friend. So if you are dieing in a trainer battle, your friend won't be able to help you or heal your Pokémons.
-There won't be battles with wild Pokémons. There will be, however, trainer battles.
-You can't run nor use your bike
-You and your friend(s) must be in the same map. That means that it you want to go to another area, you will have to go with your friend(s) at the same time. However this isn't a bad thing, since the areas here only can be beaten by two or more players. If you friend dies while you are conected, he will be teleported out of the multiplayer area, but you will be able to stay in the same map alone. However, you won't be able to go to another map because two players are required. So you will have to talk to a special NPC to end the connection so you can reconnect with your friend.
I attached a video showing some multiplaying.
It shows two trainers connected traveling through the first multiplayer city. As you can see, the NPCs and the trainer battles are still intact and working 100%. An althrough the two trainers remain close during most of the video, this isn't necessary. You can be in one extreme of the are and you friend in the other extreme, doing something completly different (as long as both of you are in the same area).
Note: This city was created as a test area for the multiplaying mode, and is only a prototype of the first multiplayer city. The final version will have more peoples, a Pokécenter, a Pokémart and bigger variety (there will be more styles of houses). Also, it will feature NPCs and trainers created by me (in the video, there are two of the NPCs from the original game because I'm only using them to test the interaction with NPCs in multiplayer mode, but they will not be there in any released version).
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Secret dungeons: There will be dungeons secret that only can be accesed by using certain information provided by the NPCs. However, they only will give you a part of the information. You will have to ask your friend of the other parts. Explanation: Depending on your ID Nº, cenrtain NPCs will give you a part of the information to access certain dungeons. Example: "The rumors say that there is a secret entrance in the tree closer to the river in the Route x. But they must be fake because I can't find it". Other NPC will say to your friend: "I heard that you can open a entrance to a secret path in the Route x by using cut, but I can't find the location of the entrance". So, by asking to your friend about what the NPC says, you will realise that you have to use Cut in the tree closer to the river in the Route x to open a entrance to a secret dungeon.
Some of these dungeons can optionally be played in multiplayer mode.
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More info:
Although the released demos features many characters from the original RS games, I will replace almost all of them. You will have a different rival (Chris, from Pokémon Light & Darkness), and all the Gym leaders will be replaced, and so will most of the characters.
However, some characters from the original game, and some from previous generations will be featured in Sunshine (one of them is Prof. Oak).
You can "create" a village. There is a area in Solen that you can buy, and pay NPCs to build houses. This will be a village that you can customize. That means that you will be able to choose what services are offered in it by hiring different NPCs (example: you can contract a NPC to run a Shop in a certain house, or other NPC to run a different Shop selling vitamins in the same or in another house, or other NPCs that will offer other services, etc.). Also you will be able to change some stuff in the map, like the mosaics of the city, the design of the houses, etc.
In Sunshine, you actually may be punished by doing bad things, such as being in a place where you should, or thiefting. That is, IF they catch you. What would the punishment be? I won't spoil it! But that will be the fun about exploring forbidden areas!
In case that you're wondering how long this hack will be: It will have 20 main cities, 3 hidden cities, 3 "extra cities" (cities out of the main route) and 4 cities from the multiplayer land. So the game will have a total of 30 cities. And there will be 16-20 Gyms, but you only will have to beat 8 of them to enter the Pokémon League. You can, however, beat all of them if you want. Plus 4 gyms will be exclusive from the multiplayer area, that makes 20-24 gyms. However, this doesn't mean that the game will be linear. Actually, it will be less linear that the original R/S. The "extra gyms" will be only extra additions, so you may skip most of them and continue with the walkthrough.
You may ask: This means that the walkthrough will be linear for peoples like me who want to beat all the gyms? Not really, since 4 of them will be hidden, 4 will be super hidden, 4 of them will be there for players with Pokémons in high levels, and 4 will be in the multiplayer area. So only 10 of them will be easy to find. Also, there will be a big diversity of cities. Example: There will be a city located in a snowy mountain, a city located in middle of the desert, a underground city, a city in the top of a mountain, a underwater city, etc.
And maybe, only MAYBE, I will implement in the future the day/night system that I used in Pokémon: Light & Darkness. But it wouldn't be convenient right now.
I would release a demo right now, but I think that it would be a better idea to wait until I can complete the scripts for the areas that will be available in the currently demo so that everyone who plays it will have a little REAL taste about how gameplay of the hack is gonna. Without these scripts, the gameplay will be completly different.
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Now, here are some pictures of my other hacks:
Pokémon: Rob's Adventure
Pokémon: Golden Sun & Silver Moon
Not a real screenshot, but a pic edited by me with Paint to show how the game would look if I implement a day/night system (what I probably will):
If I implement a day/night system, however, it wouldn't work like the system of GSC because that couldn't be done with scripting (I think). And I don't know nothing about ASM hacking.
Instead, I will probably use the same day/night system of Pokémon: Light & Darkness. However, I haven't decided yet how it will work in GS/SM here.
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And thanks for posting that link, Perappu. But everyone who downloads it, keep in mind that this was a VERY early version, very different from the current one. The hack is supposed mainly based in scripting. That's what will make the gameplay. And that old version hasn't a single new script. Also in that old version the game starts completly different from how it starts now. Not only because of the lack of scripting, but because now the first city is Maintropolis (no Sunny Village, the first city of that old demo) and the first routes are completly different now, plus the maps and graphics were improved, and there are new paths in these areas availables in that demo.
So try that demo if you want, but keep in mind that the gameplay in Sunshine won't be like that at all.
And everyone, feel free to ask for pictures, or even videos, if you want to see any of these new features in action. I only posted a few pics because of the lack of new graphics.