The Staff Team and I are excited to go over what we've been working on, what's coming up, and how far we've progressed since our Summer Demo.
We've got a lot to cover, from our enhancements to our overall user-interface & experience, our progress on the game maps, to our enhancement of overall data, so without further ado, grab yourself a cup of tea, relax, and enjoy
.UI Enhancements
One thing we've been really focused on is improving our existing user-interfaces to be more clear, concise and modular enough so that we can better support future user-interfaces.
One of our biggest requests in the Summer Demo was the ability to scale our UI to decimal points (so 1.25x, or 1.5x instead of 2x). With our previous UI, this proved to be difficult when it came to pixel-scaling, and our implementation that some of you may have seen in the Summer Demo was more of a band-aid fix than a proper solution.
Alongside this general improvement, we've been focused on improving our user-experience, including adding things like tool-tips, improving how controls work, and making things a bit more obvious than they were before.
One of the first improvements we've made was to our log-in interface. While not visible to the end-user, the code behind the log-in screen has been improved and is ready to add some new features.
For an example of these features, we're hard at work adding one-time pass-codes, to ensure not only security for your account, but also give you the ability to have a 1-click login experience. We know this was a major request in our last Demo, and we're listening!
Another major improvement was our in-game HUD, and improving the base look and feel. One of the bigger complaints during our last Demo, was how small things felt. We're learning that everyone plays at different resolutions, or have different abilities to see smaller or large elements on their screen. Referencing back to our inability to scale our UI, locking our UI to a specific size and built to fit a specific resolution wasn't a great long-term strategy. We hope this new HUD paint proves to be a comfortable "middle-ground" for everyone, and that our decimal point UI scaling supports this in the future.
You might also seem some in-progress changes to our chatbox! We're planning to support language channels, and a few more options such as being able to scale the font size, colors, and other various things. We'll have more information on this soon!
Tool-tips! Another huge request from users in our last Demo, was the ability to hover over certain things to receive tool-tip information. We're going on adding these to other various things such as cuttable trees, mineable rocks, signs, and other various in-game interactions.
Included alongside our HUD base look and feel, is our new Field of View. We've introduced a new feature that ensures that the viewable map around your character is consistent across all different resolutions. After some testing, we realized that this Field of View can be quite "zoomed-in" when playing at higher resolutions, so we've given players the ability to change their field of view slightly, in order to ensure their game view remains comfortable.
Also, did we mention themes? That's right! One of the neat features of standardizing our UI, has been the ability to introduce theming to our UI. We're planning to offer a few different options such as Catppucin, Heartgold, Soul Silver, and GruvBox.
We're continuing to make these sort of improvements to the UI in general, and our commitment to you is to ensure that it feels great to use and interact with. In the mean time, check out some more screenshots of these improvements.
Game Map
Alongside our efforts to improve your interaction in the game, take a look at some of the new areas that @Cpt Lavender has been creating. No spoilers though!
Overall Game Enhancement
Of course, there's always tons of changes that happen in the background; that aren't so easily shown in a screenshot or some form of media. I'd like to take the time to list off some of the enhancements we've made since our last Demo, and what's to come from our internal Roadmap.
Of course, there's always tons of changes that happen in the background; that aren't so easily shown in a screenshot or some form of media. I'd like to take the time to list off some of the enhancements we've made since our last Demo, and what's to come from our internal Roadmap.
- Controls
- Added the ability to interact with Resource Nodes (Mining, Foraging, Farming nodes, NPCs), and other various interactions directly by using our "Interact" key.
- What this means is you'll be able to go up to a tree, for example, and press interact and the game will auto-select the best axe in your bag and interact with the tree. What this means is you're no longer forced to find and select the tool in your bag in order to train skills.
- You can now use number keys (and eventually re-map these keys) to use an item in your bag.
- What this means is you can now use "1" to use the first item in your hot bar, which will remove the need to scroll to the item you wish to use.
- Furthermore, we're working on a system to drag & drop item(s) or nodes, with a controller, similar to how Stardew Valley approaches this. Presently, it's only possible to drag & drop with a mouse, and we really want the controller experience to feel comfortable and eliminate the need to use a mouse & keyboard for anything.
- ROMs
- A major milestone for PokéForce was an upgrade to how we load, cache and retrieve data from ROMs. In the past, we required you to have either an English or Spanish version of a ROM, and they had to be unmodified. This is no longer the case, and you are free to use any ROM you wish (as long as it's not extremely modified, and is still the required version)
- We plan to open-source this new ROM loader in the future, so any interested programmers, keep your eyes peeled on our public repositories!
- Chunks, map data
- Another fun thing we're working on is improving how chunks are loaded, improving the speed and efficiency of how these are loaded, and abstracting map data to be more concise.
- Overall project structure
- Once more a background development for our programmers, we've been undergoing a massive refactor of our internal project structure to improve our roadmap(s), development processes, and ensuring our code is standardized to support and speed up future development. We're really excited about the changes that are coming with this, because it means we'll be able to speed up our workflows and bring the game to you sooner than later!
- Triston
- In other news, we have been hard at work on implementing a complete overhaul on our approach to game data in all aspects of PokéForce. Our previous system was quite clunky with various files scattered all over the place, and no true relationship between data sets. We have completed a full migration in how we both maintain and load game data, which will allow us to more easily fine tune all aspects of the game, as well as easily reference that data in our code. A good example of this would be Pokémon evolution.
- Our first iteration of Pokémon as seen in the Summer demo only factored in the level requirement for a Pokemon to evolve - we now have full support for evolution through trading, item usage, and conditional evolution such as those which require a specific time of day, happiness level, or even move to be learned. This new data system will also tie in very nicely to our new and improved battle engine, as the entire suite of Pokemon moves and effects are made available to us. This means that supplementary move effects such as temporary changes in battle stats like accuracy or attack power are able to be implemented, along with status effects such as poison, sleep and paralysis.
- Alongside this, the battle engine has been completely overhauled and is now modeled as a completely independent service from the main game servers. This won't actually affect how it is used by players in practice, but it does mean that we will be able to very easily scale how we handle battles during our live release, such as in cases where we have multiple game servers and want to support player-v-player battles. It also has the added benefit of being much more flexible with regards to code changes, as the battle engine is no longer tightly coupled with the game server. This new system will allow the development team to make live changes to battles without interrupting the actual game - bug fixes and the likes can be implemented while you are still actively playing the game.
- In other news, we have been hard at work on implementing a complete overhaul on our approach to game data in all aspects of PokéForce. Our previous system was quite clunky with various files scattered all over the place, and no true relationship between data sets. We have completed a full migration in how we both maintain and load game data, which will allow us to more easily fine tune all aspects of the game, as well as easily reference that data in our code. A good example of this would be Pokémon evolution.
- Vizaryll
- The Design team has been filling out the theory-crafting documentation for upcoming features, mechanics, and gameplay loops. More than 400 Crafting Skill recipes have been designed so far. The next step will be to add these into the Crafting dataset, in-line with Triston's data changes as mentioned earlier in this post.
- The dataset for the Crafting Skill is set-up to include:
- Crafting level requirement
- Experience yield on crafting
- Output item, and item quantity
- Success chance of craft
- Input item(s)
- We used to use YAML for Pokémon spawn data. Instead, this now sits within its own dataset, called Pokémon Encounters. We started this dataset off by always ensuring we include a key that links it to @Cpt Lavender's mapping layer that contains the spawn tiles (such as grass or mud).
- Then, we list:
- Which Pokemon that can spawn
- Their minimum, and maximum levels
- The rates for Morning, Day, and Night Spawns
- Finally, any Held Item Groups and their rates
- Then, we list:
- Additionally, we've also been filling out datasets for other skills, such as the Mining Skill. This dataset details all the specific variables that go into the Mining Skill, such as:
- Each ore type (there are currently NINE!)
- The level required to mine those ores
- The experience value per ore mined
- The spawn timer for each ore
- And what the ore has a chance to drop; either Ore, a secondary item group, or nothing
- There's a bunch more datasets that we've created too, such as: Item Groups, Job Boards, and NPC Trainer Battles. This method of Design work has only been made possible due to our coders taking the time to set-up the ability to read data input via spreadsheets, where before it would require a bit more coding knowledge from the Designers (which simultaneously takes Designers away from Designing and means Coders have to check our Code, which takes away their time to do actual coding work). All of these custom mechanics and features will require careful tweaking, but I'm sure our Beta Testers will be willing to take on that challenge to ensure the community gets a well-polished game to play on release
Closing Remarks
Moving forward, our commitment to the next iterations of PokéForce are to prepare us for launch, instead of offering "testing grounds", as we really want to start taking this project to the next level, and I hope some of the things we showed today offer some insight into how we're approaching this next step. After our Summer Demo, we came to the conclusion that this project is bigger than any of us could ever imagine, and we want to ensure that we execute it properly.
For those that got to enjoy our Summer Demo, I want to thank every one of you who offered feedback, insight, and things that you didn't particularly like; that kind of response is exactly what we're looking for with these Demos. We understand things were rough around the edges, and our commitment is to ensure that we smooth those out, and offer a premium Pokémon experience. We can do much, much better than what we have offered so far!
With that being said, it's with a bit of regret that I can confirm that we're not going to be offering a Christmas Demo/Event this year, as we truly want to finish off our polish before we invite everyone into the game again. Our focus for the future of PokéForce is to get ready for launch, and for that we need to be writing content, and updates that will be present in the first live iteration. I can, however, confirm that we're aiming for early Quarter 1 to showcase our next bits of content (such as the Artisan class, Crafting, a vastly improved Battle Engine, and more in-depth quests), and I look forward to announcing that information sooner than later!
From the entire team at PokéForce, we all want to say thank you!
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