Post by BonzaiRob on Nov 29, 2006 21:14:24 GMT
Right, you miserable lot. This project as once again ground to a halt. Here's what we're gonna do:
Programming
There are three programmers: FMY has no free time at all. Antarctros is MIA. I was previously sorting the XML end.
Well, we're buggered, so I've started learning Java. I will make this entire game myself if I have to (but I won't, since Antarctros has sent me a pokemon class
)
What would be nice, however, would be to have mappers working directly into XML (since that's the format we're using). More on this later.
MEANWHILE:
Storyline and Premise
Ok, we all know Cuddles has been writing huge, interminable event stories. However, we only have a few major events fleshed out in this way; there's a lot missing.
You know what's most importantly missing? A final towns list.
Shadolf hasn't replied to the PM/emails I sent a few months back, so we're winging it. We'll work with what we have on those maps, you know the ones. Someoe needs to think up more events and ideas for the locations, you know. This game should be close to official in every way. More on THIS later also.
Legality
The basic thoughts are that we're safe from Big N so long as we don't make money off the project. However, if this gets popular, we will have two problems:
1) Lots of players means lots of servers. We'll need money to pay for servers; it'll be awfully difficult to prove that any money we make from this goes DIRECT to server costs.
2) The more people who know about it, the more chance of someone at Ninty finding out about it (or someone whistle-blowing).
What I propose is this: Whatever we do, try NOT to use anything from Nintendo. That would mean no sprites, fonts, images, texts, characters. I think, however, we can get away with SOME of it, but it might be a good idea to have completely original music (remixes work ok) and to re-sprite any Ninty pokemon we add in. We'll work it out as we go along.
Sprites and Maps
We have a lot of pokemon sprites, which is good. Unfortunately, a lot of these are a little.. second-rate. This is bad. So it'd be best to either hire more spriters or choose a few, good spriters to take over and resprite.
What we don't have is maps. Now this links back to programming; what would be good is if we could get mappers to write straight into XML (since that's how maps will be coded). For this, we'll need a tile libvrary - no big sheets, each 16x16 tile separate in some zipped file, organised by type (floor, building, tree, item, etc). Most of these should be REMY's, we can probably fit a few Ninty in. See legality, above.
However; most mappers are intermediate graphic artists, and we don't want to overload their graphicy brains with nasty code. So perhaps we should also hire some XML peoples to turn maps into XML.
As to what to map - we have no locations, as above. So we need that first, really.
So, staff? Decide what you want to do! Do it!
Programming
There are three programmers: FMY has no free time at all. Antarctros is MIA. I was previously sorting the XML end.
Well, we're buggered, so I've started learning Java. I will make this entire game myself if I have to (but I won't, since Antarctros has sent me a pokemon class
)What would be nice, however, would be to have mappers working directly into XML (since that's the format we're using). More on this later.
MEANWHILE:
Storyline and Premise
Ok, we all know Cuddles has been writing huge, interminable event stories. However, we only have a few major events fleshed out in this way; there's a lot missing.
You know what's most importantly missing? A final towns list.
Shadolf hasn't replied to the PM/emails I sent a few months back, so we're winging it. We'll work with what we have on those maps, you know the ones. Someoe needs to think up more events and ideas for the locations, you know. This game should be close to official in every way. More on THIS later also.
Legality
The basic thoughts are that we're safe from Big N so long as we don't make money off the project. However, if this gets popular, we will have two problems:
1) Lots of players means lots of servers. We'll need money to pay for servers; it'll be awfully difficult to prove that any money we make from this goes DIRECT to server costs.
2) The more people who know about it, the more chance of someone at Ninty finding out about it (or someone whistle-blowing).
What I propose is this: Whatever we do, try NOT to use anything from Nintendo. That would mean no sprites, fonts, images, texts, characters. I think, however, we can get away with SOME of it, but it might be a good idea to have completely original music (remixes work ok) and to re-sprite any Ninty pokemon we add in. We'll work it out as we go along.
Sprites and Maps
We have a lot of pokemon sprites, which is good. Unfortunately, a lot of these are a little.. second-rate. This is bad. So it'd be best to either hire more spriters or choose a few, good spriters to take over and resprite.
What we don't have is maps. Now this links back to programming; what would be good is if we could get mappers to write straight into XML (since that's how maps will be coded). For this, we'll need a tile libvrary - no big sheets, each 16x16 tile separate in some zipped file, organised by type (floor, building, tree, item, etc). Most of these should be REMY's, we can probably fit a few Ninty in. See legality, above.
However; most mappers are intermediate graphic artists, and we don't want to overload their graphicy brains with nasty code. So perhaps we should also hire some XML peoples to turn maps into XML.
As to what to map - we have no locations, as above. So we need that first, really.
So, staff? Decide what you want to do! Do it!
