I think this is going to be interesting for the future fans of the game. Honestly I've never written a dev log because I've rarely ever coded anything.
I've tried literally over half a dozen times in my life to learn to program. That isn't even counting my limited experiences, such as with RPG maker when I was a young teen, or my extensive musings into some easier game engines like GB Studio.
At the tailend of 2022, which it is weird to say that year at this point, but I was finally getting around to messing with ChatGPT. I'm a content creator after all, and everyone was talking about it.
I sat there asking any question I could muster, and one of which was how to make a "pokemon-like game".
All the Right Moves but none Super Effective
I was OBSESSED with "Sprites" as a kid, and as soon as I knew of them being online I started collecting. Pokemon, Zelda, Harvest Moon, you name it. I considered myself a Sprite (2D Character for video games) collector.
I would scour forums, and find unique creations hardly anyone had seen. I wanted to aggregate them, but I'd probably be considered stealing them. I purely thought the various artists were amazing, and I would learn from their works. Over the years I'd create my own sprites here and there, but I would spend most of my time on two things:
Revamping old Nintendo or Natsume sprites.
Creating region/world maps for various games.
That experience lead me to garnering some attention for my Pokemon World Maps. https://www.deviantart.com/zeemo71
However I cared more about the potential game I could create. I called it "Neo Spirit Generations". Not exactly sure what I had in mind with that title, except that it heavily involved one of my favorite Pokemon: Celebi.
I'd create my own regions, try to make my own region fakedex, but alas the project creep of trying to keep up with a "National Dex of revamped sprites" for Nintendo kept bringing me back. A bit of a perfectionist in me too.
During this project I've been listening to a mix of Digimon music, and
On a side note RIP Paul Gordon
Pokemon Music to get into the right mindset.
I'm trying to distill the feeling I got when I was kid seeing Alto Mare for the first time, or waking up in the morning to watch cartoons. The feeling I got when a Digidestined got a new Digivolution.
The Fire Under my Butt
Honestly it was interesting because I kept playing around with the ChatGPT bot, and it kept coming up with unique ideas. I once had an idea for a game that I honestly could only say I collaborated with the bot to have. Where you traverse different universes, and that was the game. You would go to different universes finding new planets, creatures, and more. Eventually you'd make your way to the big bad trying to dismantle the multiverse.
That broken down became part of the basis for Phasevos. Formerly Vivantis, as I changed the name early in the development. I was going for this concept of "lifeforms", and settled on "Vivos", but it seemed too generic of a word. Vivantis sort of came out of nowhere too, probably from the chatbot. However it had stuck, but I had an idea one night for Phasevos, as the creatures evolve through phase shifts. Hence why it is such rapid evolutions, compared to the real world slow process of evolution.
I wanted to start this year in a different way. Focusing on content, video game live streaming, and more. However the ideas just kept flowing, and the more I looked at resources the more I found.
On https://itch.io/ alone I found so many super helpful resources to accelerate the development. From world tilesets, to the UI/Hud, and even a base for me to make the sprite characters. Although I'm going to have to pretty heavily modify them.
Although I think that is the way it is meant to be. I wouldn't be satisfied with just some random assets from the site. They would have to have a unique cohesive feel that fits the game.
My skills center in revamping anyways, rather than creating from scratch.
What I've done and Left to Do
I've created a massive todo list to see what I can check off over time. From the simple "design 15 creatures" for the demo, to the launch on multiple various platforms. I see this as a cross platform game, although multiplayer will have to come later.
I want someone to be able to play a game like this, a creature collecting game, on any platform they choose. Now if Xbox game pass gives me an exclusivity deal I may have to take it, but other than that it is going across the board to the best of my ability. Imagine it on the Steam Deck, or your phone too.
I have a lot left to accomplish, from even starting the programming, to the design of each area. However I found a handful of opensource bases for Godot, and there is one in particular on GameMaker that I can't get my mind off of. In either case it would involve a lot of changes to the code however.
I chose a screen resolution that would scale properly to different screen sizes, it also allows for a decent amount of detail to be portrayed on screen.
