PokéForce is moving, and upcoming Demo information!
Hello, PokéForce! Today the staff team are excited to announce that we have begun the process to transition to the Godot Game Engine, and effectively move away from the LibGDX Game Framework we were originally using. There's a lot of variables, decisions, and exciting things we want to share with you in this announcement, so without further ado, let's get started on why we're doing this!
Why and what is Godot?
Godot is a cross-platform, free and open-source game engine. Godot has many industry standard tools integrated into it, and provides a lot of user-friendly ways to build our game. This is particularly exciting for our Designers, as this means they will be able to join the Programmers and assist with things such as adding world flavor, dialogue, non-playable characters, and more. Another exciting feature for our Designers is an all-new powerful map editor, that will give us a lot more flexibility on what we can do with our maps, such as having instanced areas that are different to you during the story!
We chose to transition to Godot after we started looking into the true cross-platform capabilities of LibGDX, and found that a lot of things just weren't working as we expected. Godot will support Windows, MacOS (arm, and intel), Android, and iOS out of the box. We combined this with the fact that with LibGDX, we were re-inventing the wheel over and over, and this slowed down our development considerably. A good example of this development curve slowing down was introducing more complex movement, such as vehicles, or special camera affects during movement. Another good example was the UI code in LibGDX was making it impossible to add more complex UI elements, such as our shops listing the items nicely. In short, it got messy! Godot will help will the Developers make these things faster, better, and without so much headache.
Development greatly impacts Developer & Designers time and motivation, especially when trying to manage our full-time jobs, home life, and social relationships. With something like Godot, we can reduce the overall time required to build the game, and hopefully serve you Demos, and eventually Launch that are more polished, and sooner!
How long will this transition take?
We must give @Rebecca full credit here, as she has been the one leading the transition so far! Within just a few weeks, she has managed to already get the game close enough to where we had it in our Java client, with a few exceptions such as our UI, and other various networking features. Now that we're in a good spot to start adding this stuff back, we feel that we'll have completed the "transition" faster than we expected, by multitudes of weeks!
A screenshot from our Godot client
Upcoming Planned Demo
Obviously with the transition to Godot, we're going to need a bit more time to ensure that we deliver a polished, well thought out and engaging demo! While we were originally shooting for end of February, we're going to give ourselves a better window in order to finish the transition and start taking advantage of the new Engine. I'm going to pass the rest of this portion of the announcement off to @Cpt Lavender, as he wants to discuss what you'll be able to expect and what we've been working on for our next Demo installment!
Lav here!
And I'm excited to give some insight on what our next demo is going to showcase.
We in the Design Team have been hard at work pumping out and refining as much as we can.
The writers @Jack and @Kildaru have been cooking up a lot of really solid quests.
The composers @Tater Mctater and @Jenonen have been putting together an amazing amount of sick tracks.
Our resident Sprite Artist @Eva has been blowing us away with the sprites hes been working on.
And I've been no lifing the map design pretty intensely.
Together we've been able to get a pretty good chunk of content built. Which incidentally expanded the scope of the demo drastically.
Now without further ado lets get into thr details~
Accessible Areas
The following areas will be available to quest, catch and battle in!
Within these areas you will have a plethora of quests and jobs you can do for Trainer experience, PokeYen and Items.
Quests/Jobs
What's the difference between a quest and a job?
Well quests are given out by NPCs and encompass small storylines and tasks to complete while jobs can be found at Job Boards near larger cities Pokecenters.
Quests generally are one and done with a few exceptions such as ore collection quests.
Jobs on the board cycle every 6 hours (1 In-Game Day)
These jobs are fairly simple in concept. Collect x amount of items, defeat x amount of pokemon etc etc. Great for grinding PokeYen and getting some bonus Trainer experience in.
Battle Engine
The engine featured in the demo will be fairly basic in comparison to what we have planned for release. But we plan to have Trainer battles, wild encounters and PVP available.
Within the demo map you will have 85 pokemon to find, capture and train! Its not exactly a staggering number but it directly represents the mons available in the area.
Skills and Tools
The two main skills being featured this time around will be Mining and Foraging.
Mining was a hit during our Christmas Event and that was only a concept of the mechanic. This time around it will be much closer to how it will be featured on release.
Foraging will be very basic in comparison to what it will be in the future. Mostly focused on wood chopping and Berry Picking.
The Pickaxe, Axe and Clippers will be available for purchase in the two Local Shops on the map.
The Pickaxe acts as a tool for gathering ores as well as replaces the Rock Smash HM. 3 different tiers of this tool will be available.
The Axe is both for gathering wood and replaces the Cut HM.
The Clippers are solely for foraging berries granting you the chance to receive a higher yield than you would from simply picking them.
Vehicles
Though running will finally be implemented, it still might not get you across the map fast enough.
The Bike: classic vehicle featured in nearly every pokemon game.
The Motorbike: somewhat similar to Gen3's Mach Bike, this vehicle will get you from A to B in no time.
The Raft: allows you to cross fresh water at the same speed the Surf HM does.
The Boat: much faster than Surf, this vehicle allows you to travel across salt water and acts like a basic repel.
Equipment
Exo-Gauntlets: Allows you to move large boulders, replaces the Strength HM
Lantern: Allows you to light dark areas, replaces the Flash HM.
Gameplay
After logging in and setting up your character you will have to choose 1 of the 3 Johto Starters
From there the demo and how you tackle it is free reign.
Battling, capturing, training and questing will all be immediately available to you.
However because this demo won't feature the Crafting system we have planned you will have to earn money by questing and taking jobs in order to purchase all the items listed above which will allow you to progress further and get to newer areas.
I hope this is a sufficient amount of insight on what we have planned! The Godot transition, although a bit of a time sink and forcing us to push the Demo back even further, has us all very excited and we really can't stress enough that we want to deliver a well rounded fun demo that properly represents a portion of what our final product will be.
We apologize for the wait, we definitely jumped the gun with our roadmap, but we're hoping that this upcoming Demo is going to be the real cats pajamas
And finally below we have a few sneak peeks we'd like to show you as well!
Hello, PokéForce! Today the staff team are excited to announce that we have begun the process to transition to the Godot Game Engine, and effectively move away from the LibGDX Game Framework we were originally using. There's a lot of variables, decisions, and exciting things we want to share with you in this announcement, so without further ado, let's get started on why we're doing this!
Why and what is Godot?
Godot is a cross-platform, free and open-source game engine. Godot has many industry standard tools integrated into it, and provides a lot of user-friendly ways to build our game. This is particularly exciting for our Designers, as this means they will be able to join the Programmers and assist with things such as adding world flavor, dialogue, non-playable characters, and more. Another exciting feature for our Designers is an all-new powerful map editor, that will give us a lot more flexibility on what we can do with our maps, such as having instanced areas that are different to you during the story!
We chose to transition to Godot after we started looking into the true cross-platform capabilities of LibGDX, and found that a lot of things just weren't working as we expected. Godot will support Windows, MacOS (arm, and intel), Android, and iOS out of the box. We combined this with the fact that with LibGDX, we were re-inventing the wheel over and over, and this slowed down our development considerably. A good example of this development curve slowing down was introducing more complex movement, such as vehicles, or special camera affects during movement. Another good example was the UI code in LibGDX was making it impossible to add more complex UI elements, such as our shops listing the items nicely. In short, it got messy! Godot will help will the Developers make these things faster, better, and without so much headache.
Development greatly impacts Developer & Designers time and motivation, especially when trying to manage our full-time jobs, home life, and social relationships. With something like Godot, we can reduce the overall time required to build the game, and hopefully serve you Demos, and eventually Launch that are more polished, and sooner!
How long will this transition take?
We must give @Rebecca full credit here, as she has been the one leading the transition so far! Within just a few weeks, she has managed to already get the game close enough to where we had it in our Java client, with a few exceptions such as our UI, and other various networking features. Now that we're in a good spot to start adding this stuff back, we feel that we'll have completed the "transition" faster than we expected, by multitudes of weeks!
A screenshot from our Godot client
Upcoming Planned Demo
Obviously with the transition to Godot, we're going to need a bit more time to ensure that we deliver a polished, well thought out and engaging demo! While we were originally shooting for end of February, we're going to give ourselves a better window in order to finish the transition and start taking advantage of the new Engine. I'm going to pass the rest of this portion of the announcement off to @Cpt Lavender, as he wants to discuss what you'll be able to expect and what we've been working on for our next Demo installment!
Lav here!
And I'm excited to give some insight on what our next demo is going to showcase.
We in the Design Team have been hard at work pumping out and refining as much as we can.
The writers @Jack and @Kildaru have been cooking up a lot of really solid quests.
The composers @Tater Mctater and @Jenonen have been putting together an amazing amount of sick tracks.
Our resident Sprite Artist @Eva has been blowing us away with the sprites hes been working on.
And I've been no lifing the map design pretty intensely.
Together we've been able to get a pretty good chunk of content built. Which incidentally expanded the scope of the demo drastically.
Now without further ado lets get into thr details~
Accessible Areas
The following areas will be available to quest, catch and battle in!
- New Bark
- Route 29
- Cherrygrove
- Route 30
- Route 31
- Dark Cave
- Violet City
Within these areas you will have a plethora of quests and jobs you can do for Trainer experience, PokeYen and Items.
Quests/Jobs
What's the difference between a quest and a job?
Well quests are given out by NPCs and encompass small storylines and tasks to complete while jobs can be found at Job Boards near larger cities Pokecenters.
Quests generally are one and done with a few exceptions such as ore collection quests.
Jobs on the board cycle every 6 hours (1 In-Game Day)
These jobs are fairly simple in concept. Collect x amount of items, defeat x amount of pokemon etc etc. Great for grinding PokeYen and getting some bonus Trainer experience in.
Battle Engine
The engine featured in the demo will be fairly basic in comparison to what we have planned for release. But we plan to have Trainer battles, wild encounters and PVP available.
Within the demo map you will have 85 pokemon to find, capture and train! Its not exactly a staggering number but it directly represents the mons available in the area.
Skills and Tools
The two main skills being featured this time around will be Mining and Foraging.
Mining was a hit during our Christmas Event and that was only a concept of the mechanic. This time around it will be much closer to how it will be featured on release.
Foraging will be very basic in comparison to what it will be in the future. Mostly focused on wood chopping and Berry Picking.
The Pickaxe, Axe and Clippers will be available for purchase in the two Local Shops on the map.
The Pickaxe acts as a tool for gathering ores as well as replaces the Rock Smash HM. 3 different tiers of this tool will be available.
The Axe is both for gathering wood and replaces the Cut HM.
The Clippers are solely for foraging berries granting you the chance to receive a higher yield than you would from simply picking them.
Vehicles
Though running will finally be implemented, it still might not get you across the map fast enough.
The Bike: classic vehicle featured in nearly every pokemon game.
The Motorbike: somewhat similar to Gen3's Mach Bike, this vehicle will get you from A to B in no time.
The Raft: allows you to cross fresh water at the same speed the Surf HM does.
The Boat: much faster than Surf, this vehicle allows you to travel across salt water and acts like a basic repel.
Equipment
Exo-Gauntlets: Allows you to move large boulders, replaces the Strength HM
Lantern: Allows you to light dark areas, replaces the Flash HM.
Gameplay
After logging in and setting up your character you will have to choose 1 of the 3 Johto Starters
From there the demo and how you tackle it is free reign.
Battling, capturing, training and questing will all be immediately available to you.
However because this demo won't feature the Crafting system we have planned you will have to earn money by questing and taking jobs in order to purchase all the items listed above which will allow you to progress further and get to newer areas.
I hope this is a sufficient amount of insight on what we have planned! The Godot transition, although a bit of a time sink and forcing us to push the Demo back even further, has us all very excited and we really can't stress enough that we want to deliver a well rounded fun demo that properly represents a portion of what our final product will be.
We apologize for the wait, we definitely jumped the gun with our roadmap, but we're hoping that this upcoming Demo is going to be the real cats pajamas
And finally below we have a few sneak peeks we'd like to show you as well!
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