Milestone 6 - The Overworld

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Milestone 6 is done! It's basically an entirely different prototype layered on top of the old one.

What's New?

I think it goes without saying: SO MUCH. 0.0.5 was a duel simulator, but 0.0.6 finally feels like a game. Where to even start..

• THE OVERWORLD. IT'S HAPPENING. Of course it's ugly looking right now, and will be for a couple milestones. But as with the duel portion I want to get everything working and working well before focusing on beautification. With that the vague plan is to go for that 2d character sprites on a 3d overworld idea that's been popular in modern classical rpgs lately. But for now, character squares on a grey maze. Thaaaat's prototyping. 

•     The pause menu! Most of the features were present in previous versions, but now they are finally organized neatly into sub menus.

• Game Progression! - There's only like two things to actually achieve in the game so far, but that alone has laid a TON of groundwork for more. 

  • You can finally see a few differences with the other Gameboy games. I'm adding an exterior area to each club, wherein there is a lower tier of challenge to become a member to enter. In the later game those will of course be more complicated than just battle one guy, but hopefully you can at least see where I'm going with it. Also master medals will be coins if coins are your thing.

• Card inventory! - It's hard to say what the real mvp of this milestone is, but having a limited card inventory really made gave me purpose to play some duels outside of debugging. It makes the early game as hard as I remember it in the gbc. It makes the entire game loop work even at this early stage.

• Booster Packs! They're fully implemented, technically! There are eight pack types (or maybe seven, depending how you count Present), with the placement of cards into booster packs fully decided upon up to the inclusion of all Rocket, Vending, and Gameboy cards, which should keep them fixed for a good long while. Cards will be added to each pack as they are implemented, which does mean that some of the booster packs are more complete than others. While Journeys is mostly complete with 56 cards, Zenith has only 19 - barely enough to field enough unique common cards per pack. By the time the game is done that will even out.
  • Also right now npcs only award one booster pack, which I understand will make progression slow. I'm planning a feature that will allow them to give more.
• A Dialogue system! NPCs! And they're using decks of my own -hasty- creation! Like those character portraits have names and talk to you now! HUGE step to making it feel more like a real game.
• Over 60 new cards! These being some of the easier cards to implement from the Japanese-exclusive Vending Machine expansions, and the Gameboy game. I was going to translate all the Vending cards myself, but I found versions of them on PokemonAaah.net, big thanks to them. I've been informed that some people there are working on updating them, but I figured in the meantime I would start implementing them using the old translations. One way or another those will eventually be updated to look as nice as the other cards. This will likely be the last push for new cards of this scale for quite a while, probably until we start considering next steps on what steps we want to add.
• Minor bug fixes. Slight improvements to the retreat algorithm. Fixed some softlocking issues involving doing things before card animations finish, fixed some card animation fixes concerning the ai using specific trainers.

What's Next?

So the idea for Milestone 7 is to have it be the "Beginner" milestone. I knew I wanted it to include the tutorial, so vaguely it will focus on that and some other features to make the game more accessible to new players.  I, and I'm sure many of you (at least my peers, shit I'm old...), first learned how to play the Pokemon Trading Card Game via the original Gameboy game, so I want to at least allow that to continue in this one.

•   A Tutorial Duel! It really focuses around this. This will be a tough one. I don't know how much I will have to rewrite the duel engine to make this possible in the way I want it to be - a step-by-step walktrough of a fixed duel.

  • Rest assured, the tutorial will be skippable.

• A slight overhaul of the status icons. Right now not all card effects have an icon. But what I want to do is have a tooltip that gives rule info on each effect when you hover over it. A small but useful quality of life improvement for someone who's never played the game before.

• A second location! The lab! Remember the lab in the old games? That's where the tutorial will be, as well as a few other features, many of which to come later.

• The World Map! You'll be able to travel between at least TWO places!

• Expanding the club size! That single screen layout for each area will be able to scroll some, allowing all the areas save for maybe the lobby to be a bit bigger

• Similar to how I've said each milestone will add a handful of new cards, you can now probably expect each milestone going forward to add at least a bit of new content. A new club here, some new npcs there, a new coin here, a new dialogue option there. Hard to say exactly what when but be assured more is coming. That's the easy part.

As for milestone 8, I know one thing I want to do is make an advanced deck builder. Right now it's modeled after how the default gbc builder is. Modern deck builders have a layout that allows you to much better see what's in the deck, whereas this one focuses more are allowing you to read every card and decide individually if you want to add it. I would argue a more understandable approach for beginners, but kind of clunky if you know what every card does and just want to build and visualize your deck. You'll be able to toggle between the two versions for hopefully the best of both worlds.