In this quick dev update video I show off the new walkie-talkie and alternative player characters!
You can now select a skin tone of your character at the start of the game (your choice affects the appearance of your rival and parents, too).
There's now a reward for connecting star constellations with the telescope. Remember that shooting star I talked about in an earlier dev update?
Seems like it chrashes somewhere on Herringtin's beach! You can dig this mysterious item up with your shovel.
I finished the whole sequence of flying to the randomized islands called Wild Shards.
Talk to the pilot Herby on the roof of a Abstrácto-Center and he will fly you to certain locations on the map (which I redrew, by the way). If you choose the Wild Shards, you can either let Herby pick a random island for you or enter a 5 letter code to fly to a specific one.
Today I'd like to share some GIFs and new artwork of Abstráctomon with ya'll.
The first GIF shows that you can now dig up some sweet money.
The second GIF shows that you can now sort the item list by name, amount, worth and most recent! This took me almost a whole week to implement because of a some nasty bugs in my code. Oh well.
The different shops in the game have a unique menu designs now.
While debugging the item list and waiting for the project to compile, I colored in the drawings of the gym leaders which you can see below.
Stay save and thank you for reading!
New Abstráctomon Screenshots!
The first time you visit a gym you'll receive a new item called League Pass. It acts as a legal document that proofs you're a registered member of the Abstrácto-League and permits you to challenge the gym leaders.
The card's electronic chip holds your personal data and records your achievements as a trainer. The front of the card is fully customizable with photos taken within the game, borders, backgrounds and effects.
After obtaining the League Pass you can access the new "League" menu.
Here you can customize your League Pass, look at so called "Promo-Passes" you might get from other trainers, view your badge collection and see if there are any trainers you've encountered before who are ready for a rematch.
I made a fake 3D effect for turning the League Pass around. You can also choose some cool "shiny" materials for it.
There are now two ways to take photos in the game:
use the Photo App on your Dex (ask the programmer in Prof. Rich's lab!) to take a picture of the various locations you visit on your travels,
or pose in front of the Green Screen in the Pengu Pool Gym to take a photo with an transparent background.
I added the option to pose with your whole team at once (before you could only pose with up to two of them).
Hope you'll have some fun with this feature and create & share some cool League Pass designs!
I finished the League Pass Designer!
In my last post I talked about designing the front of your League Pass, today I'll can show you how!
In the "League" menu, select your name and then choose "Design" start.
Choose a background, borders and a photo taken within the game. You can freely scale and move the photo as you like or choose none at all.
Select a font and color for your name...
...and add some silly decorations for good messure.
Hmm... Somehow this isn't shiny enough.
Much better!
When your're done, hit "Save" and that's it. A copy will be save to your hard drive in the "Drawings" folder where the game is located so you can share your design with others.
I bet you can create much better League Pass designs than my example!
Lastly, I'd like to share some monster icons I made for menus and stuff. These icons are just 32x32 pixels.
Kinda tough to squeeze the big bois in there, but it's fun and I can do it on the side while waiting for the game compile when debugging.
Stay save!
I re-organized and expanded the options menu in Abstráctomon with separate pages for graphics, sound, controls and other settings.
Among the new features are optional auto-saving and setting the in-game clock to real-time (a day in the game takes 24 hours) or "fast" (a day in the game takes 24 minutes and you can fast-forward time by sitting on a chair, etc.).
The game supports the keyboard and all kinds of gamepads. Since the game has been in development for so long, it even still supports a sideways Wii Remote if you still own one (but I included single Switch Joy-Con support too to go with the times). You have to connect those via Bluetooth to your PC (It might take external software / a compatible Bluetooth dongle to do so).
I know these screenshots of menus aren't too exciting to look at, but this "quality of life" stuff is worth talking about, too!
It's now possible to select which save file you want to load or save to anytime from within the game. There are 3 slots available. You could keep a manual save and reserve another slot for auto-saving, for example. Since save files are basically text files on your hard drive, they are easy to archive and share (or edit, if you're a cheater!).
If you want to play with a real-time clock, you might want to offset it. I added an option to offset the real-time clock by -12 to +12 hours. Like any other option, the change happens immediately and there's no need to restart the game.
The only time you need to restart the game is for connecting / changing gamepads, since the game might not recognize them otherwise. I recommend connecting your gamepad before starting the game, especially if it is paired via Bluetooth. That's a limitation from the engine I'm using.
I touched up some monster sprites for Leechew, Dropchew + Wetchew. Especially Wetchew looks less like a used condom now XD
Remember the random islands I talked about a few weeks ago? I successfully ported over the prototype's island generation code into the actual game. There're still a few little bugs to iron out, but it's almost done.
You can visit these "Wild Shards" via Herby's helicopter, but as you an see you have to swim the last couple of feet...
This one is pretty small, but there might be some rare Abstráctomon to find! Right now there are 4 sizes (S, M , L and XXL) along with over a dozen different biomes to discover.
Last but not least, I'd like to show off new battle backgrounds I made. These will be used in the Tuca Forest area and islands with a autumn trees.
By the way: I'd like to thank you all for reaching 1.000 downloads of my stuff on itch.io and 10.000 views of this devlog!
Stay save !
The 5 letter island code will now be shown in the main menu next to the island's name when you're visiting the Wild Shards.
I added an animation of your Abstráctomon running away when you flee from a wild battle.
I made new sprites for tall grass and reeds in cold areas.
This is just a neat screenshot I wanted to share :)
Happy Halloween!
The Wild Shards island can now have caves! I added this feature after fixing a lot of bugs my brother and I discovered recently. Some of them had pretty strange effects like turning every item in you inventory into water bottles.
Anyway, below are some more impressions of generated islands with caves!
I finished overworld sprites for the three Starter Abstráctomon so you can see them outside battles, too. Here you can see the aftermath of you first battle against your rival!
The monster that neither of you chose stays in the lab and roams around the upper floor.
I made some cac-tiles! Sorry for the bad pun.
Caves on the Wild Shards islands now feature some atmospheric sounds.
Here are more 32x32 icons!
That's all for today!
One of the unwritten rules of game design is that if you have an ice level, you gotta have a lava level as well. So I converted one of the island types of the Wild Shards into a vulcanic landscape with dead grass and lots of lava!
Lava can also appear in caves and acts as a light source.
Downhill mountain biking became even more fun with a new jumping animation.
"Shiny hunting" might be fun for some hardcore players, but most of us never get to see an odd colored monster during a normal playthrough. What if you just could ... recolor your 'mons at will? This machine in Herringtin's lab can do just that!
Put your regular old Abstráctomon in there and *BAM* it's shiny now! There's only one catch: that thing needs alotta juice. It's powered by "Shiny Pearls" that take a little effort to find. But you can even turn your starter into a shiny after the fact! Or give a shiny back its original color if you don't like the new look.
If you don't feel like cheating nature, you can still encounter shinies in the wild, too. Just ignore the machine and go huntin'. Oh, and I heard the Shiny Pearls can assist with that, too...
Here you can see my Spitsuck's new look along with improved stat-readability.
I had some fun with real time shadows in Abstráctomon. This isn't raytracing or even real 3D lighting, just some fakery with mirroring and rotating the sprite, depending on the player's position relative to the light source.
For now only the player's shadow will react to a nearby light source. If you move away too far, the shadow will turn into the regular old drop shadow again.
Just a neat little effect. Maybe I'll add it to other NPCs later if it doesn't affect the framerate.
In the team overview, fainted monsters are now highlighted with a red box to make it easier to tell how your team's doing.
I added some useful features to the A.S.S. (Abstráctomon Storage System). You can now store up to 300 monsters in 12 boxes. Boxes can now be renamed and you can change their background image.
Monsters can be moved freely between boxes and you can take a stored monster's item without having to put it into your team first.
I made some tiles for ditches. They add some depth to the sand dunes on the beach, for example.
I also changed this rock. Yeah.
