Phasevos are these powerful creatures that come through the rifts in the multiverse into our world. Some are small, some are large, and some can turn the whole world inside out. You are a young tamer setting out to discover more about them, while taking on the Pillar of Champions.
In the time before the current era, there was a great convergence of the multiverse. In that primal universal event, it lead to the first appearance of what we now call “Phasevos”. Lifeforms that phase into this plane of existence to live amongst humans.
Some are friendly, and others not so much. However we have learned to tame most of them that we know of, but there are still countless creatures we have never seen.
This is a game I am developing in the "Monster Taming" genre, and I have had ideas flowing through me ever since I was a child. These have compounded into something more, and thanks to ChatGPT I have been able to flesh out many more ideas.
An Agile use of AI
Something I think is amazing and fascinating is that we are in a time of great evolution in the realms of Artificial Intelligence. There are a ton of amazing tools, and some might say it is cheating to just use AI. However I disagree, as the point of these tools is not to REPLACE human ingenuity. Rather it is to accelerate the progress of the project, and inspire ingenuity. For the sake of consistent design, and to support artists I am having every final beta design (i.e. the ones chosen to go into the game) to be revamped by an artist.
That way they can all have a similar artistic style, and it makes it easier too to turn into sprites (2D character models). It is really interesting how skills I gained over the course of my life are coming into play here. I spent years turning artwork into sprites, or revamping old sprites, recoloring (great for alt versions), and even creating world maps too.
These pixel art graphics design skills are now finally getting used to make something of my own. I had a long list of creatures I wanted to turn into Fakemon, but now I get to use them for my game. The AI helped advance those concepts further, while also using Image generators to come up with beta designs for them.
I had plenty of ideas for people, towns, and locations. Although ChatGPT was able to get me to make even more interesting locales and folk.
Here are a handful of Tools that I used:
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/
https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/fantasy-world-generator
https://replicate.com/lambdal/text-to-pokemon
This one I used a lot, and even paid for the premium features. https://nokemon.eloie.tech/
Grand Scope but One Developer
Well look I wasn't a game developer before this, and I have honestly struggled to learn how to code many times over my life. However this has given me the motivation to keep pushing to learn. I also dug around to see if I could find any open-source code bases to learn from. Perhaps even use if it fits my project dynamic. Not only did I find all of them, but the engine of choice for me is Godot. Godot ironically has more code bases for something like this than all of the other engines combined (i.e. Unity, Unreal, Love2D, JavaScript, and GameMaker Studio2).
By using AI I am able to accelerate more of the more tedious tasks, like naming people or quests. Heck even coming up with quest ideas. I used data from every Pokemon game for example on how many Trainers are in each game, or how many creatures each game introduced. I averaged them out, and I am using that average as the ideal number for my game.
By doing these little hacks I am able to accelerate the process for just one dev, and create something of a big scope without losing quality.
Tons of Creatures to Choose from!
One thing that I really wanted from this game is that of choice. Sure there are some limitations to that, and given the slippery slope of project creep; I had to make sure I wasn't adding too much to the to do list.
There are about 100 creatures in this first game, but every creature has at least 3 forms (some even have up to five). Those being the Standard form, Shine (a light or "Shiny" form), Shadow, and a "Supercharge" form. The latter being the most interesting as it is a powerup form that is temporary, that imbues the creature with even more raw elemental power.
In the standard form too I am hoping to add deviations to the basic sprite, which means that ideally each creature will have a semi-unique look to them. Allowing for you to have a more unique team.
Check out the website!
I thought about hosting the blog posts here with PolyInnovator Gaming, but it seems like this endeavor really needed a separate site. Especially when eventually I'll need to share various links to platforms like Steam or Xbox Store, etc.
Once a month I share DevLog on what I did or didn't work on each time. Trying to keep accountability more that way. Although of course I stay busy making content for PolyInnovator/Gaming.
Learn more about this amazing world here:
