The VG Resource

Well I'm rather new to the message board, and I noticed a forum about game development. Which just so happens to be what I do most of the time now. Well, when I'm not at school .-.

Anyway, I didn't see anything that said you couldn't post web games. Right? Well anyway-

I've been working on an online Pokémon RPG that will communicate with Adobe Flash.

Currently, I have an online Pokemon RPG with nearly 400,000 users... since I'm not sure I'm allowed to post the link to it, I'll play it safe and not post it. It is, however, not exactly a complex RPG, and is quite repetitive, and not big on graphics either.

So I thought, why do people like Pokemon? Well, it's because of the actual games. Therefore I decided to start a completely new version of the site (called "Version 2.0"). This new one is much different, and will make use of Adobe Flash and in some cases, HTML5 (I chose Adobe Flash as the main one over HTML5 as HTML5 is much slower, slower to create, and currently doesn't have great browser portability).

It will be a lot like the actual games - mechanically and style-wise. The battle system will be very similar to Black/White versions (originally intended to be similar to HGSS, but I'm of course changing that around). There will be a story mode where you can walk on maps, battle trainers, and such, which will also work similarly to the actual games (although it will look like gen 3).

I feel I'm not being very concise here. Well, basically, I'm making an online Pokemon RPG to succeed the current version of it, and it'll be very similar to the actual games, yet with many things that make it unique and new.

I'll be doing all the coding. I love coding, been doing it since I was around 8. And I prefer not to work with others unless necessary. However, I would like it if I could get spriting/graphic assistance. Well first, I'll post a demo video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=487sDDAv6Mc

A few points about the video. First off, Youtube of course screws up the quality. Secondly, Darkrai's Bad Dreams ability does not take effect because the battle system is not fully completed, and it happens that that ability is not coded. Third, the "SLP" icon doesn't disappear when Arceus wakes up. This is fixed now. Fourth, we're TRYING to get animated sprites (and certainly can implement them if we have the proper resources) but they need to be formatted a certain way into a sprite sheet - each frame separated equally by a certain dimension (i.e. each frame would probably be 96x96), and without shadows. Finally, the trainer backsprite when the battle starts looks weird. It'll look better later. Oh and, don't be too confused by Arceus using Splash.



Higher quality screenshot. About the bottom screen ("FIGHT", etc.), it'll be updated to look more like B/W eventually. But not now, as there are more important things to do.

The zooming out thing is smoother when you actually use it (Youtube... .-.). There will be zooming out on your side of the field as well. However I need the "entire" battle background, which I don't have yet.

Alright, there are still many things but I think I'm gonna bore you all... Sorry for not being concise. If anybody actually replies, I'll answer whatever questions you have, provided of course you have questions.

If you're using Flash and you're adding zoom-ins and zoom-outs,

why don't you make Vectors?

It looks a helluva lot better than pixels when zooming.

Being a webgame, I'm trying to make it work as fast as possible. I believe vectors in this case would only serve to make it slower.

Besides, being similar to Black/White, I believe Black/White also uses the pixelized zoom similarly to this. Or am I wrong?

(10-06-2010, 09:47 PM)Cless Wrote: [ -> ]Besides, being similar to Black/White, I believe Black/White also uses the pixelized zoom similarly to this. Or am I wrong?

Why would you sacrifice quality to rip-off another game?
The Zoom isn't that good anyways.


Vectors being zoomed in or out retain their image quality.
It's what makes Flash games look good.

except vectors don't look good
the only way to make this look good would be to sprite the zooming and stretching

or 3D models, though those are a pain to do in flash

I don't believe I've ever seen a game that zooms into what is originally a bitmap, but uses vectors, where it actually looks good.

And yeah, 3D models would be quite a pain. o-o

Well, since most of the animated sprites are ripped, I have decided that animated sprites will be used in the battle system. A few days ago, I made a tool that would rip all frames from the animated GIFs and use them in a spritesheet that can be manipulated by code. Here is an example of that:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nVMaRPP6rk

Note: I was doing this coding quickly to test it, so the Birijion in that video has a somewhat -glitched- animation. That is, the foot sort of, teleports, I guess, at a certain part. It's fixed now and the animations are running fine.