Misty and her water Pokemon were without a doubt my favorite and so I decided to name this emulator "Misty" (name is subject to change over time). I'm also not very creative so deal with it.
I was thinking about writing a side attraction for the SteadfastMSE project and sure enough (thanks to the first season being on Netflix) I decided to dive into Pokemon emulator ideas. I've extracted and reformatted Yellow, Crystal, Emerald, and Soul Silver ROM's (I don't think I'll allow Pokemon past generation 3 for legacy purposes) and as I was planning things a few ideas crossed my mind.
The Path of the Gods (completing the Ash and Misty sub-plot ... detailed "Pokeknowledge" is assumed):
My first idea was to conclude the Ash and Misty romance that we all wanted to see happen so they could get written off so we could see new characters replace the group but that never happened so I felt like I wanted to provide some sort of closure to the scene myself. The idea is basically an optional back story whose quest chain can be initialized as soon as you start the game, or later on if you don't feel like it right away. When you start the game you will be spawned in a house in Pallet as usual except its neither Ash's or Gary's, it is a new house that your family built. You will walk into the grass (as usual) but professor Oak doesn't stop you, Ash spots you without Pokemon and decides to catch the wild ??? (not sure yet) and leads you to the lab where an unusually long conversation happens, which includes an interactive introduction featuring both Ash, Professor Oak, and your Rival who is Gary's nephew. Once your little battle finishes and you leave Ash will talk to you by the towns fountain and request a favor of you initiating the sub-plot (not sure yet).
Over the course of the game you will run into Brock, Misty, the Cerulean sisters, Brock's father, etc, etc ... and do side missions for them as well. At the very end of the game (not sure when I should make this) you will run into team rocket who battles you without saying anything to you, and after you win (if you win) they will let slip something about Ash, eventually leading you to find that Brock's father replaced Brock at Pewter city gym, The Cerulean sisters game back from their world tour in a hurry to replace Misty, and all of the team rocket headquarters (including the buildings) were reduced to ash (<- no pun intended) shortly before you arrive at each of them. As your little world wide goose chase comes to a close you discover it was Ash, Misty, and Brock who demolished these headquarters in an attempt to find Jesse, James, and Meowth who had finally succeeded in stealing Pikachu ... the next part of the story line is hard because I can't figure out where to go with it ... but somewhere in this story line you wind up defeating Team Rocket and returning Pikachu to Ash ...
So finally after this huge struggle Ash invites you to the Path of the Gods which was established by him as a contest for the greatest Pokemon masters in the entire world. Here you can battle NPC's, other players, etc, etc ... but before hand you have to defeat the Gary (80-89), Brock(90-99), and "Ash & Misty"(12 level 100 Pokemon ... also where this sub-story ends if you can win). Before you say anything, during the Ash & Misty fight they will tell you that they have been "united as one" and that you need to select 6 additional Pokemon for this fight, so it will be even. I'm not sure about whether or not I should do a cut scene here or what but I feel like it would best come to a close where Ash & Misty wave goodbye to Brock in front of Cerulean Gym (or in front of bills old house ? ) and then show credits or what.
Over the course of the game you will run into Brock, Misty, the Cerulean sisters, Brock's father, etc, etc ... and do side missions for them as well. At the very end of the game (not sure when I should make this) you will run into team rocket who battles you without saying anything to you, and after you win (if you win) they will let slip something about Ash, eventually leading you to find that Brock's father replaced Brock at Pewter city gym, The Cerulean sisters game back from their world tour in a hurry to replace Misty, and all of the team rocket headquarters (including the buildings) were reduced to ash (<- no pun intended) shortly before you arrive at each of them. As your little world wide goose chase comes to a close you discover it was Ash, Misty, and Brock who demolished these headquarters in an attempt to find Jesse, James, and Meowth who had finally succeeded in stealing Pikachu ... the next part of the story line is hard because I can't figure out where to go with it ... but somewhere in this story line you wind up defeating Team Rocket and returning Pikachu to Ash ...
So finally after this huge struggle Ash invites you to the Path of the Gods which was established by him as a contest for the greatest Pokemon masters in the entire world. Here you can battle NPC's, other players, etc, etc ... but before hand you have to defeat the Gary (80-89), Brock(90-99), and "Ash & Misty"(12 level 100 Pokemon ... also where this sub-story ends if you can win). Before you say anything, during the Ash & Misty fight they will tell you that they have been "united as one" and that you need to select 6 additional Pokemon for this fight, so it will be even. I'm not sure about whether or not I should do a cut scene here or what but I feel like it would best come to a close where Ash & Misty wave goodbye to Brock in front of Cerulean Gym (or in front of bills old house ? ) and then show credits or what.
Mounting attacks/abilities & counter attack system:
My next idea was a system where you could mount certain abilities as secondary. This system would clear the way for a "counter attack" system as seen in the Anime where a Pokemon has a chance to dodge an attack, and then a chance of retaliating without costing the owner a turn. This counter attack system would also support multiple counter attacks per battle and even per turn and factor in things like levels, terrain, gym fight, legendary Pokemon, the Pokemon types, etc. I think this would be a huge addition to the game that would expand on the multi-player aspect of the game in the respect that the user needs to be slightly more interactive because they need to actually think before a fight since the secondary attack cannot be changed (unmounted) once a battle has been initiated.
MMO-Oriented Graphical user interface:
A more multi-player friendly user interface where you will be able to drag and drop up to 6 items into quick-usage slots instead of having to painstakingly dig through your bag for them. Also instead of having to go through several menus to see your team and stats there will be a 6 slot bar (location is up to you, but will be at bottom by default) that will show your Pokemon as well as brief details when your mouse has been hovering over them for X amount of seconds. Suggestions are highly encouraged.
Companions:
Human companions sounds like a good idea in theory but in practice I'm not exactly sure how I would pull it off, or if I even want to pull it off. Something like this would require a lot of extra thinking and additions to the story lines based on whether or not you have human companions and I'm not sure about whether or not I want to go to these lengths for a side attraction. You may put forward ideas though, and I'll consider them.
PokeQuest System:
This little system would be designed as a quest assistant to eliminate the non stop headaches in situations where you can't figure out where the hell you need to go, or you forgot some required information and can't get the NPC to say it again. The idea is that you have a "PokeQuest" menu, as well as a phone that can be used to call NPC's by number, accept calls that come in from NPC's regarding missions (players can use this as an IM system, etc ...). Ideally PokeQuest menu should have important details on the major conversations as well as back-story and a "Locate" button that will render an arrow guiding you to the next portion of your mission (dependent on various factors, mostly mission difficulty, and level requirement ... some are designed to be difficult, and thus, won't allow you to be automatically guided).
Ideas regarding custom missions, group PokeQuests (missions that require a group), etc, etc ... would be greatly appreciated ...
Ideas regarding custom missions, group PokeQuests (missions that require a group), etc, etc ... would be greatly appreciated ...
Those are my only idea's as far as content mapping at the moment since I barely thought of actual project design yet. I would greatly appreciate thoughts and suggestions though! Please feel free to put forward things I didn't mention, as well as ideas regarding general game layout since I don't know for sure how I'm going to do that yet either. This is purely friendly discussion so unless you have something to say in regards to game content, or game production (in regards to programming), please refrain from posting because I'm not interested in seeing posts about whether or not this will get completed or really anything of a negative nature since I don't want my thread loaded down with that poop.
Thanks in advance for your contributions.
- The SteadfastMSE game development team
