I'll make my own Pokémon, with Blackjack & Hookers!

[Xhukari]

Killing and Frankensteining sounds cruel and unusual, to be honest haha. Maybe make everything “evolve” using a “soul stone” of some sort? So you can manually evolve at your own will.

I did consider something like that, but it felt close to the evolutionary stones that Pokémon has. Though the main issue I had with it, is it essentially is just 'use item to evolve'. Just doesn't sound like an engaging way to do it...
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Another possible idea, as a modification of the previous FMA idea, is that you gather materials for a ritual, in which you essentially pull forth souls of extinct monsters / daemons / whatever from the afterlife and then bind them to yourself. So you're not frankensteining a monster to just kill it.

 

[Xhukari]

Progress is slow, but I have decided to go with fusions!
Started to populate my bestiary of monsters too; just the basics right now... name, appearance description, and their 'pokedex entry' (and if they are fused, then what 2 monsters were used).

I got 3 to start with...

• Tilbin, the Tilting Robin monster. Think a Robin combined with a drinking bird toy, who needs to constantly drink so their blood can circulate (or it will pool at the bottom of their body, leading to death).
• Depthoom, the Haunted Sea Mine. Think a sea mine with a jacko-o'-lantern face cut into it; its haunted with the souls of dead sailors.
• Bombin, the Bomb Robin. A fusion of Depthoom and Tilbin. Think a metal robin, whose body is a like a cartoon bomb, with the fuse as the 'tail'.

I'm also planning to take inspiration from real life symbiotic / parasitic relationships for some of these fusions... such as hermit crabs with sea anemones (probably have the anemone replaces the shell entirely, instead of attaching to the shell as seen in real life). I'm planning to make the hermit crab's shell be a drinks can.

 

[Xhukari]

Return
This is not dead! I won't let it! (Though not having a laptop for about 6 months didn't help) I'll be rethinking my approach to the monsters and the like, but in the mean time I've recently began working on the game basics itself. I have become enamoured with Sprite stacking... this is how it currently looks in my game:

Graphics

My screencap weren't the best, but it shows the general idea I'm going for (and NPC / player graphic style)! I may look into doubling the layers but halving the distance to each layer to help alleviate the jagginess. But it isn't as noticeable on a coloured background, and doubling the layers will almost double the number of objects... Though not shown here, the player can walk around (with a little bob -- no animations will be done). And something that you can see a bit from the guy in red, is that the head can turn separate from the body; the intention here is that the player will look at interactables, whilst the NPCs will look at you. Though it looks a bit creepy having a few NPCs stare at you as you walk pass...

Control
The control scheme is a bit weird, as I'm intending to have it playable on mobile, PC and gamepad (maybe a console down the line, though I think only Xbox One currently supports it). So you can essentially walk forward and rotate your move direction (or camera direction if standing still). I currently got it so you can customise the camera; at the moment it shoots far in front of you when you are moving, so you can see further ahead, but centres on you when idle. The settings allow you have it so you're always in the centre, or always at the edge of the screen, or something in-between.

Design
Nothing set in stone, but I'm planning to scale back a bit; maybe 50-75 monsters total. Reduced amount of evolutions, levelling no longer provides stat advantages (but will provide skills), and essentially make it more open about where and when you go to places. And you'll fight with your entire team of 3 monsters each battle.

 

[Xhukari]

I'm back with another low quality image! Showing the mostly-implemented chat system, moving, looking around, and the UI. Though it does show a lot of placeholder stuff too; primarily the 'ground'. Except when chatting, the rest of the UI is touch-screen specific, so won't be visible if turned off / not present. At the moment the text speed is on one of the slowest speeds, just to show the 'skip to end' part.

I may look into uploading videos to YouTube and linking them here instead. I can't seem to get a good quality / size balance for gifs.
Here's a half-scaled screenshot from my phone. It's on a preview mode, so can't go proper fullscreen. Still not as crisp as it in in real, but oh well.

 

[coyotecraft]

That's really awesome!

 

[Xhukari]

Let's try this again...
So I did some stress testing on the spritestack style, and suffice to say, it performs terribly when stress tested. Worse than I thought. I tried to figure out a way to make it work, but it just wasn't going to happen. So I took a little break to work on some other ideas, which didn't pan out. So now I'm back to this project, and back with Adobe Animate for the graphics! Say hello to my little NPC here! :smile:

Don't mind his nakedness, he's a template for all the characters! I've done more than this though; I have an 8 frame walk cycle for all 4 directions. I feel the artstyle may be a bit too cutesy though, as I have already hashed out a bunch of the design doc for this, and I'm not sure how well it will fit with themes of limbo, death and the 7 deadly sins.

Concept
The idea is a combination of classic Resident Evil with a Pokémon Nuzlocke; so you have limited monster captures and it is permadeath; if your monsters die, it is dead forever and you can't replace it, and if your whole team dies, it is game over. You'll be exploring a mansion, slowly gaining access to new areas as you solve puzzles and the like, these new areas will have new monsters and monster 'trainers'.

It is based in Limbo; you and the NPCs are all dead, and you try to figure it all out so you can move onto your afterlife. You use someone's memento as an emotional anchor to bind caught monsters to your soul (a Pokéball essentially). But since you're using mementos you find / given, that emotional anchor isn't yours' and the memento breaks after use as it cannot handle it. Meaning the supply of mementos is limited.

The monster types are based upon the 7 Deadly Sins, and instead of having statistical bonuses against each other, each Sin encompasses a different playstyle (e.g., Wrath is simplistic with big damage numbers and aggression, but little defence capability. Whilst Sloth is a procrastinator and lazy, so a lot of their strongest moves have some sort of delay, or they are based around being Asleep (one of the status conditions)). Some also have status conditions which belong to their type; Sleep for Sloth, Mesmerise for Lust, (Food)Poison for Gluttony and Burn for Wrath.

Scope
I'm planning for this to be a small game, but with replayability; I'm thinking about 35-50 monsters. With the replayability aspect coming from New Game Plus, as when you finish a playthrough you will get given a choice of an item to add to your inventory at the start of the next game, which these stack. So for instance, one could be a Skeleton Key that lets you open doors out of order which could have events play out differently (e.g., you pass a locked door that you hear screaming from, by the time you get the key and get inside, the person is dead, but with the Skeleton Key you can go in there and save them from the boss monster). Another could be that you get your actual Memento, which as it is yours', it won't break. This could be used to in a secret ending that only triggers once you catch every monster; something you cannot do without this item.