Pokémon Wayfarer: DevLog #2 "Slow and Steady"

[Anthro]

Pokémon Wayfarer
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~First time I'm managing a forum Thread, please don't shoot me.
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Welcome, wayfarer, to what is to be a journey to remember!
Pokémon Wayfarer is to be a long-form pokemon adventure spanning the first four pokemon world regions of Kanto, Johto, Hoenn and Sinnoh. This fan game will, for better or worse, re-imagine level scaling, evolution, pokemon growth, battle progress, difficulty floor, ceiling and the in-between.

Planned Features and their Progress:​

- Re-imagined leveling system [Scripts finished]
- Re-imagined evolution system [Scripts finished]
- Re-imagined/Re-balanced battle progression
- More long-term pokemon growth
- No area-based or region based level scaling
- 100% mapped out and re-imagined first 4 regions of the pokemon world (Starting with Hoenn) [Hoenn done <10%}
- Appropriate [Trainer] - [Gym Leader] - [E4] difficulty
- Fakemons in evolutionary lines where I deem them needed
- Re-balance and improvements to various evolutionary lines
- Overall commitment to a certain form of "realism"

I'll put out DevLogs every other week or so, when I've made a chunk of progress to keep those interested up-to-date and informed (and hopefully drive up traffic for the thread). I won't be revealing everything that I've put in through the devlogs, as I'll want people to explore and find stuff themselves once the game is out.

DevLog #2 "Slow and steady"
Work has been moving slowly, but steadily. I've caught some intel on how long it takes people to get their fangames to a "1.0" release, and the answer was roughly a year... Yeah, I can feel it now. In-between work and free time however, I have been putting together some good stuff, worked on some quality "cutscenes", have fullproofed the start of the game and populated a bunch of the maps with various NPCs (noteworthy and not).
I've also nailed down the "plot" of the game, it'll generally follow the RSE story, just with a few extra bits and pieces that will develop into something tangible down the line hopefully.


As for the balance part of things, I'm still trying to nail it down - as much balancing as I've done on my other projects, everything came in retroactively after players completely broke one number or another, I doubt that this will be any different, but I'm at least trying. The game is going to have a slow start with trainers taking a bit of time and a few of them requiring a couple of tries to take down, but you'll be given plenty of tools to get through the early game, until you get a solid team.
The battles are slower, so status effects and stat alterations are extra important.

I've been doing a bunch of work on small stuff behind the scenes, so there's not much to show otherwise, but I wanted to put out a DevLog just to show that this is still moving forward.
~ See you next time, wayfarers!

Spoiler: DevLog#1 "From your own burrow, to Rustboro"

Whenever I get some free time on my hands, I continue slowly piecing the map together. The goal currently is to put together a small sandbox of a few cities and routes to have enough space for testing purposes. Every necessary exterior map from Littleroot to Rustboro is "finished", however some exploratory optional areas are still to be added.

Littleroot is now made up of two "subareas", the town itself with a few houses and the town labs, which are scaled up to meet prof. Birch's reputation. Route 101 is chunkier, meeting a river to the east which will be passable with Surf, and hitting Littleroot lake to the west, a small optional area that will be used as a shortcut later to go to [REDACTED]. Oldale has a few extra buildings and was given a more rustic feel to it. Route 103's western chunk is also enlarged and has a cut-based shortcut into the danker portions of Petalburg Woods. Petalburg City itself was given a larger makeover, with a bunch of extra buildings, residents and is now home to the best brickmaker in Hoenn. Route 104 is largely the same, with the exception of some extra room to move about. Petalburg Woods are now a multi-tier "dungeon", with the entrance being available at the very start, and the deeper portions being available after obtaining cut. Rustboro CITY is now a proper city, with a mall, large pokecenter and high-rise residential areas. Mapping will take a little break for now, as I start to investigate trainer creation, battle balance and xp growth formulas.

I also put together a tileset to include Hoenn structures and have modified some already existing, user-made sprites to fit the game a bit better. Credits will of course be given to everyone who's stuff I used when some kind of playable release of Wayfarer will be out.

I also ran into the first limitation that I need to work around - map amount. As it turns out RPGMaker XP has a limit of 999 maps. Not a problem right? - Right. For now at least, Hoenn will very easily fit into that even if every interior has it's own separate map. But if I get around to adding the other regions, we might run into a bit of a problem. I already started implementing efficient mapping techniques - mostly just smashing separate maps into a single larger map (for example building interiors), so hopefully the map limit problem won't become important until much, much later.

Spoiler: Original Post Ramble (DevLog #0)

After rediscovering pokemon after what feels like more than a decade not more than a year ago, I've rushed through most of the official games to gen 6 and then have consumed a bunch of fan games that were labeled as "good" wherever I'd find them. But during playing I ran into a bit of a problem of no pokemon/fan game nailing what I'd like to see in one of these titles, and most big projects just seem to be sticking to the effective, yet safe and stale formula of what the official games have, just with a twist or two, mostly related to the plot/or adding a new region (some are very impressive though). As such, I've decided to make a crack at it myself and have started development on the title I *kinda* want to see, made on Essentials (and have been making steady progress).
Some of my main gripes with pokemon games is level-scaling, lack of difficulty curves/too harsh difficulty curves for no reason, and own pokemon growth, which while explainable and understandable, I feel like *could* be "fixed".​

A little bit of context about me (Anthro) ~ I am an avid modder of games, have been participating in various modding scenes for close to a decade now, mostly in the Paradox genre, and I'm damn good at what I do. I occasionally get these obsessive *needs* to work on some side-project and I put in an unacceptable amount of time into it, often producing things that on the surface level could almost be mistaken for official work - a true badge of honor for a modder. The only issue here is - I'm not a programmer, don't really know any coding language outside of the spaghetti of the Clausewitz engine. What I've always done in other projects is reverse-engineering code, and I've already hit a few jackpots while making this in RPGM-XPs Ruby script.

And before you ask, I know what my nickname means on the internet, trust me, it's not that. It's a 5-layer deep, multilingual political joke that would take more text to explain than I'm willing to write on a forum post.

Spoiler: My Mapping Philosophy

I LOVE making maps, a bit of a past-time of mine that developed through a DnD-esque project that I ran for a couple of years till recently, and so I have certain needs that a map must meet. For one thing - no space wasted - if you CAN put something in that empty lot of land - do it.
Here we can see the first draft of Hoenns Litleroot - Route 103 corridor reimagined. Normally pokemon maps-routes (not counting the modern switch games) are small and don't have much exploration value aside from backtracking when you grab a new HM, and you spend more time escaping wild battles in them than actually walking through them. I want my maps to have branching paths, more exploration value, be much better at the whole shortcut-post-HM thing, and not be annoying to move through to encourage some soft back-tracking. If you check any interactive Hoenn map or just the whole map up on images, you'll see that there is A LOT of empty space there, my goal is to fill it and to fill it with something interesting (not just a bunch of water). Fair warning - I will be taking some creative liberties with the maps, the regions will still be recognizable, but slightly different.

There's only one problem - while RPGMXP is a very handy tool to make maps, what I want to do still takes loads of time, so completing all of Hoenn will take a galactic rotation at this rate (maybe a little bit less).

Spoiler: Reimagining of Levels and Evolutions

I simply dislike the whole idea of pokemon from the wooded route A being 5x stronger than pokemon from the grassland route B, simply because the protagonist visits route B earlier. And I dislike how a random lad from route 110 is 5x stronger than a similar random lad from route 101. I understand it makes sense game-progression wise, but it doesn't make sense RP wise, so I've decided to change that.

What I'm doing here is a bit controversial - there are only 10 levels. Every level boost stats by 10% (technically 11% since you start at level 1), so a level 10 'mon will be twice as strong as a level 1 'mon, not counting for a wide difference in moves and EVs. And levels are gained at a much, much slower pace.

I also fixed levels in place based on the "encounter type". For example - unevolved wild pokemon will always be lvl 1 (regardless of the route), their evolved forms (which are also available on the same routes, except much rarer) would be anywhere from lvl 1 to lvl 3, basic trainers would range on the same 1~3 level array, elite route trainers would be harder, gym leaders would range from 3 in their chaff to 7 for their Ace, and E4 members would stack the whole team with 9s and 10s (roughly).

As for evolutions - they no longer happen due to leveling up, and instead happen due to your pokemon's growth (a combination of total EVs, happiness and levels) and will happen at (pseudo)random after a battle once they reach that growth threshold. Trade evolutions aren't a thing anymore, item based evolutions will probably be adjusted to fit the growth model, just with the item held.

~Sorry for the typos.

Do I think that the changes I'm making should be put into the official pokemon games (asides from mapping) - no, god no. But it's what I want out of my side project :).

 

[Nanulak]

Nice! And welcome to the forums! I'm new here too, and it's nice to see other people interested in Fakemon! I'm honestly gonna have to find a way to get you to make my region's map lol