Taka's Pokemon fan project!

[Takafumi]

A certain person on Twitter was messing around with a Pokemon Rom and adding in Key related stuff, so I decided to make a wordwall thread showing my own Key related Pokemon experiences!

Pokemon is very interesting to mess around with. The tools are really buggy right now, however a couple of big tools are planned for release this year. A map editor named MEH and a large compilation project named Gen III Hacking Suite are planning to stabilize the currently unstable traditions of Pokemon Hacking.

As for how to go about it, Pokecommunity is a great place to figure everything out. Personally, I like to visit the Tutorials sections and the Toolbox, as well as the Research and Development forum.

So if you have the time to look around at a Pokemon Rom, and decide to do something Key related, I’d love to look at it!

A-anyway, onto what this is about. The project!

Background

Around July 2013 I was kicked out of my house and was homeless for a couple of months. While I was moving around temporary housing without internet I decided to randomly doodle stuff. I had just finished Rewrite in June so my memories of it were fresh, and Pokemon X and Y hype was flooding my social life. I have some past experience with Pokemon so I decided to randomly mix the two!
I grabbed a folder and lots of paper (well… card. They were out of paper) and got to drafting some early ideas! I was going to make two different titles, which would each have two sub-titles. (Think of Fire-Red +Leaf-Green/ Ruby+Sapphire)

After thinking for a few minutes and mixing some puns into silly titles I settled on Un-Familiar and Super-Familiar. Both are set at the same time. They explain the events of the ongoing Kagari hunt while Kotarou is in the Middle East.

~Unfamiliar~

This titlescreen WILL be changing. I errored a bit on the “unfamiliar” text so I need to fix that.

Synopsis (without the spoilers :P)

Based on the unnatural damage caused by waste Aurora from Summoning. It follows the viewpoint of a young ignorant male who, after joining Martel, stumbles into a different dimension where he witnesses a village being pillaged by Summoners. He gets lost in a panic, but is brought back to his senses when he finds a white-haired girl who is caught in the flames. After saving her and returning to Martel to ask what was going on, he is given a position in Gaia. What he doesn’t know, is that his work will involve him hunting the girl he saved.
The main character will be brought by Sakura into a testing facility. There you will be asked whether you want to “Change the world,” or “Change yourself.” The answer you choose will determine what Familiar you use for the tutorial. (A Leaf Bird or a Hound.)
After this you will participate in three battles, and at the end of each battle you will be asked a question.
A few minutes in paint and thiiiis is what the questions look like!

As you can this, this determines the Familiar you start with. I think that’s more entertaining for people who don’t know what they are getting into~ After going through all of this you will be sent out into the story! Yay~ \o/

Gameplay will be a mix of stealth-mechanics and Pokemon battling, where Pokemon are replaced with controllable familiars. Instead of the familiar catching mechanics of Pokemon, Un-familiar will utilize a crafting function, whereby a player is able to mix parts of felled foes at a summoning table to create new Familiars. For example: a leaf , proboscis and a couple of Wings will create a Leaf Dragon.There are 34 different parts that are usable in crafting, 2 for each type.

There are some favorite types sticking around, but a lot of them have been replaced with new ones. The Fairy type has been added as well because I want to include some Pani and Gil-esque familiars in there~ ^^
I think the most interesting topics here are Spirit/Night and the strange Time type.
Spirit is very much a “Spirit of the forest,” or “Spirit of the dead,” kind of thing~ Mythological stuff! Night is more about Youkai and phantoms~ There is a thin line between the two at a glance, but they work very differently. The Spirit type will never be found alone, and it adopts the type it is coupled with. (It’s similar to Hidden Power.)
The Time type focuses on tricking a creature’s perception of time. It is strong against easily confused types (Fight, Bug, Hunter etc…) but weak against types that are aware of, or unaffected by, the capabilities of time attacks (Super, Dragon, Mech.)

Due to the nature of Familiars, there will be no wild encounters. Most of the battles encountered through the main playthrough will be against high leveled members of Gaia and Guardian who will probably destroy you. This is where the stealth aspect comes in: The less enemies you bump into, the less chance of you dying horribly~ Ahaha
If you want to stick to the Pokemon style however, you can level your Familiars early on through friendly challenges in the Gaia bases. If you choose to spend a bit of time leveling up there you should be able to keep up with the level-curve.

Currently I have been waiting for the unbuggy tools to release ^^; While waiting I have been working on the game’s music, writing the script and practicing my spriting skills. I don’t have much to show off, I do have my bug testing rom that features a few sound tracks (Including RING RING RING from LB!) and some of my custom sprites. I’m not sure if anyone would bother downloading a patch of it since there really isn’t much, but I’d be willing to give away the Midi files if anyone wants them~

Just as a note, almost all of the gameplay is finished. (Type matchups, new moves, crafting system) however the new moves will probably be totally changed.
A large amount of Familiars have been drawn out and given Recon (the Unfamiliar Pokedex) entries, movesets, types, evolutions, cries, and craft combinations. The protagonist and the heroine have been drawn out, and the Guardian abilities have been designed. All I really need to do is give everything a sprite, add in a revamped tileset, and then map everything out and fill in the gaps! Judging from the amount of Rom-deletions I get from tools like Sappy and AMap, that might take a while.

I had actually started making the sprites in November, originally using Emerald so that I could animate sprites, but I found out that the coding was largely unknown to the Rom hacking community… so I moved to Fire Red and deleted eeeeverything! The only evidence I have is an old blurry Twitter image from November… The sprites were very ugly then, apart from Lyf’s backsprite which was pretty okay~ As soon as MEH comes out I can start making a prettier tileset~

Superfamiliar

Apart from the plot and the basic gameplay I don’t have much to say about this one. I want to focus on Unfamiliar first

This is all about the Supernatural events in the Rewrite universe. The 22 year old protagonist is returning home after an unsuccessful job hunt, when he gets lost in a never-ending alleyway. A couple of Hounds begin to chase him, and this unleashes his Aurora-based weaponry. Unfortunately the blade that he conjures is… brittle to say the least. It breaks immediately and the Hounds attack. This is when the Rewrite ability is introduced.
This form of Rewrite is slightly different to the ability belonging to Kotarou. While Kotarou has to focus and wish for a Rewrite, the protagonist of Superfamiliar has no control over it. When he is in danger, his body will automatically rewrite to survive. This is great in-the-moment, but it has horrendous long-term effects.
After dealing with the Hounds, our Protagonist is confronted by a Guardian member and eventually ends up joining them. To celebrate his new “job,” he goes to eat at a food stall in the park where he jokingly brags about being a superhero. This catches the attention of a young boy.
“You joined too?” he asks. Stunned, the Protagonist talks to this young boy, and finds out that they have both been recruited on the same day. The boy tells a heroic tale of saving a girl in a fire earlier that day. According to this boy, he saw other members wearing a cloak uniform while he ran through the flames.
They both come to the conclusion that they will receive their cloaks when they are deemed worthy, and promise to meet again when they get their uniform.
Unfortunately for the Guardian-based Protagonist, the cloak uniform is something that belongs to Gaia…

Gameplay will be similar to the standard Pokemon games without any wild encounters. Most fights will be against the familiars of enemy summoners.
Instead of using creatures the Protagonist uses different forms of Aurora which will be unlocked as time goes on.

[Aspirety]

Wooow, that’s super impressive! I dunno how far you’ll get, but I’m really excited to hear more! It really seems to be deviating from the standard Pokemon gameplay and becoming it’s own thing, which is something I can really get behind.

I’m hoping to see more of this when the appropriate tools become available!

[liclac]

Wooow, this takes me back. I used to do Pokémon ROM hacking years ago.

I’m just gonna say right away though: you shouldn’t expect unbuggy tools anytime soon; hack tools are done by enthusiasts, who do it because it’s fun, and fixing bugs that don’t bother them (or aren’t trivial to fix) is boring. Most tools are stable enough for the author’s purposes, but not stabler.
They’re also not used by a whole lot of people, which means bug reports don’t exactly come by the dozens.

In other words, the best you can do is to just get started and make something, and report any bugs you find, because idly sitting back and waiting for a hacking tool to mature is idiocy - and a common beginner’s mistake.

(Obligatory mention of the glorious XSE master race)

[Takafumi]

It really seems to be deviating from the standard Pokemon gameplay and becoming it’s own thing, which is something I can really get behind.

Almost every Pokemon hack out there attempts to either enhance the Pokemon gameplay, or provide a story worth reading. It annoys me sooo much, because all of these talented people are putting effort into… clones…
I get bored of Pokemon battles really quickly, so I wanted to give people a choice on how to progress. For people like me, it’s all about finding the ideal route through the area, avoiding danger whenever possible. For others, it’ll be all about farming and then running into the enemy head-first!
It transcends into the movesets and designs of familiars too! If you love battling then you could use Dynamosaurus at the frontlines with a couple of Treemen to fall back on. If you want to avoid battles, then go for the utility familiars with moves that affect the over-world. Early game, this would be Recon-based familiars such as Leaf Birds or Leaissance/Yggnesis.

The change in gameplay gives me an excuse the make the Pokemon tileset look a little darker and more robust too

Honestly I wanted to create the thing with RPG Maker… but then It wouldn’t be portable! I don’t see a point in making a 16-bit rpg if I can’t carry it around on my PSP or on an Android device~ ^^;

I’m just gonna say right away though: you shouldn’t expect unbuggy tools anytime soon; hack tools are done by enthusiasts, who do it because it’s fun, and fixing bugs that don’t bother them (or aren’t trivial to fix) is boring.

I am mainly waiting for a tool named MEH (Map Editor of Happiness) because the current mapping tool is dreadful when it comes to inserting tilesets. It’s being headed by Shiny Quagsire (Who is also creating a new scripting tool for Linux users) and interdpth, people who spend waaay too much time in the Pokemon hacking scene. If it wasn’t for Quagsire, lots of the advances in R&D wouldn’t have happened. Both of them are aware of pretty much everything that can go wrong with map editing, so they have put in automatic functions to prevent most of the issues I have with AMap.
The thing looks more promising than anything that has come out of Pokecommunity.

XSE~ <3 That thing was scary to get into I admit >A<

I have a bug testing rom where I test out some of my ideas. Noticed a few things relating to Tileset palettes, music volume, and Title Screen tiles. Some weeeird stuff happens sometimes XD My biggest issue is definitely the music which is why I am adding it while there is nothing to lose: At first it is a really awkward process and there is quite a big risk of bumping into a fatal error, ahaha~ I’m familiar enough with the tool to know how to avoid it now, but it still scares me every time.

[Aspirety]

I’m definitely interested to hear some of the music you’ve brought over~

[Takafumi]

I patched a few onto my test rom~ I’m not sure how stable it is, but the parts that feature the music should be fine.
New music starts at the title screen and ends in Pallet Town.

Hope your okay with a rom file. Normally I’d send an ips file but the ips creator I use doesn’t like files larger than 16mb and I passed that while figuring out how much stuff I can repoint. ^^;
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B31Tf9j1VWKmX2tQanU5NFZBNTA/edit?usp=sharing

Oh, and in some emulators (mainly gpsp and VGBA) the sound will lag whenever a menu is opened. Can’t figure out why that is happening though. I guess they aren’t capable of playing in-game sound effects while the custom BGM is playing~ I’m experimenting with the amount of direct sounds and the volume of tracks to see if that fixes anything…

Here’s a screenshot of some of the tracks I have been playing around with. Some of them aren’t suitable at all, but it’s funny to see how things turn out~

Guess the songs!

[Takafumi]

I feel like I should be posting updates >A<

Sooo, after around 6 hours of drawing, importing, failing, redrawing and reimporting, I discovered a method that helps with my Tilemap woes. I could never understand how palettes worked for tiles, and I haven’t seen a single tutorial that tries to explain it. The basic premise of AMap’s Tile inserting process is that if you use a color that isn’t part of the tile, it will look like a solid block of color instead of a sprite.
Today while working on one of the many Tree sprites, I noticed that even if I correctly replaced part of the palette, the tileset would still bug out and erase a section of the image. I have tried importing palettes a bunch of times in the past few years, but I never got it to work perfectly. Luckily today I wasn’t half-asleep! (A rare occasion indeed.) I said to myself “Hey Taka, why don’t you just draw the tree in colors already established? There aren’t enough greens, so just make your tree red and blue!”
By drawing a red/blue tree, inserting it into the game, and then changing the values of red and blue present in the rom, I was able to correctly insert a tile! It’s a very roundabout way of doing stuff… but it works~! ヽ(＾Д＾)ﾉ

Here’s what the tile looks like in Pokemon!

Note that the Tree will change as more tiles are introduced. It will become slightly darker, particularly at the bottom of the image where the grass color sits. When the grass is replaced, the colors in the tree sprite will be~

Aaaand bonus image!
Here’s an early preview of the hot-headed Unfamiliar Protagonist (in casual clothing.)

This will also be changed as time goes on: moving slightly from the Pokemon styled sprite art~

[Takafumi]

Weeeeell, I spent most of the day watching videos on Youtube, but I’ll post a quick update before I go to sleepy land~

So as I said, the trees will change slightly, and some of that change has already happened!

The bottom of the trees are now more vibrant, to blend in with the short grass tiles~ These trees will be one of the few that lurk around the residential areas of Kazamatsuri, and give it that Nature vs Civilization aesthetic!
There are currently 5 different short grass tiles. A couple with small W grass patterns on, one with a few long blades of grass, one with messy long grass, and one with a Foresty style to it~ These will fit nicely with the different trees and plants I have prepared. There will also be some darker taller grass that resides in the Forest areas of Kazamatsuri, however they wont be added for a while.

You probably notice the fancy building with a cute (time consuming) box of flowers outside. That’s new too! I spent a good few hours on that box of flowers though, using random blues, oranges, reds and pinks to draw it, and then swapping the in-games colors to greens and browns. I got really confused by what I was doing @ A @!

Oh, I messed around with the water trying to figure out animated sprites. It’s safe to say that I’ll be changing the water sprites in future.

(This style goes really well with the music! They are perfect together ＼(~o~)／

[Takafumi]

Yays, Taka update time~

Sooo, it’s been a while! I haven’t updated much, partially because of the Suginami sprite thingy (which has hit a bit of a standstill) and kinda also because of exams (final one tomorrow! Yaaay~)
The main reason however, is that I got frustrated with the sprites used by Pokemon Gen III. Originally I was replacing sprite-by-sprite, so that I could stop by Pallet Town and see what everything looked like together. The problem with this is that Gamefreak were incredibly inefficient when making the tilesets, and it bugged the hell out of me! Oh, and there wasn’t enough room for all the trees and skyscrapers.

The positives of this change is that I have less restriction on what I can actually sprite! More trees, more grass, more pavements, more buildings, aaand maybe some 2D sprites for a platformer minigame?
The negatives of this change is that… well, it’ll take some time. To shed some perspective on this, here is a list of the sprites currently imported into the game that will most likely stick around.

I still have the fancy pavement sprites from before, as well as some extra flowers, the pink checked pavement and some nice skyscrapers, but they need to be imported into the game again.

To make up for the loss of Pallet Town Testing Facility, I have added a little debug room that will be used to check animated sprites, scripts, and music.

So, um… if you are bored… https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B31Tf9j1VWKmWjVjcXRYRG1KdFE/edit?usp=sharing There’s a link.

There are some gender-specific references to some Key stuff lying around.

[Takafumi]

It’s only been a week since the last update, but here’s another!

Let’s begin by checking out how the block sheet is doing~

Many sprites oAo I am currently working on a building.That 3x3 grid to the right of the window sprite is what I’m doing currently. Need to finish up with it soon >A<
I am trying to get fitting greenery sprites for the building too~

A few of these sprites can be seen in this image that I tweeted out on the 18th as a comparison with the old version of Unfamiliar running on Pokemon Ruby back in November '13

The top two images show off the little testing town I have set up. It’s essentially a bunch of doors warping to other areas.
I recently inserted some cool boss battle music, so to test it out I added this guy to the town exit.

Horrible sprites are subject to change. Especially the MC’s sprite
Just imagine there are drums and violins playing >.>
Keep in mind that there bright pokemon background in the fight scenes won’t be so bright and colorful… It’d be dark… and green… and muddy…
Right now the dark cloak kinda conflicts with the bright green circle that randomly floats amid a field of pastel-green bars.

You may have noticed the final screenshot from the twitter image shows a “Debug room.” That place is mainly for XSE testing (Advance Map errors so much when I try to open the Wild Pokemon tab now. Messed that up~) however I do use it as a large environment to test objects larger than trees… such as this (very early wip) building~
It is actually too big to get an in-game screenshot of ^^; Ahaha… Have an A-Map screenshot instead~

Just imagine that there is a large glass tower in between the two back buildings, and then trees everywhere else. Oh, and that the bottom building actually has sprites >.> But it’s coming along well… Just gotta figure out how to make a curved glass tower… and also get some larger trees to fill the gaps with~

The previous google drive link has been updated for anyone who wants to listen to the music~
Here’s a sample of the rainy-day music! https://soundcloud.com/takafumi-sakagami/lost-orphan

[Takafumi]

Alright. Remember this from last time?

Yeah, well I took a break from spriting the tilesets and decided to Rewrite-ify the GUI. After spending pretty much all of my birthday in XSE and Paint XP I have this!

After around a week, the Kagari sprite is looking decent. I’ll probably tweak it when I’m actually good at spriting… (My second Familiar sprite eveeeer!)

There’s still some more GUI changes to make, but the custom BGM mixed with the new Backgrounds, sprites and Visual Novel-esque text bar really helps create the atmosphere I’m looking for.
Next up! More tileset changes and some Chrono Trigger inspired overworld sprites! (That means the NPCs will be 32x32 instead of 16x16!