I am in the early stages of learning to make my own game and i have an idea to make it somewhat unique. I just want to see if this is even possible as this idea will probably be end game. Any game i make prior will be small and experimental. What i want to know is would it be possible to split the story at the beginning? What i mean by that is i want to have the male protag go to Sinnoh and then to a more primitive new region. While I have the female protag go to Unova and then to a more futuristic region. Somewhere along the line, I do want them to be able to travel between them as well. This is a very Space/Time base story.
Realistically, anything is possible, you just have to be determined to learn and push the limits of this 20 year old software. Your only limit is your imagination and how willing you are to get in the weeds.
That is fair. I also probably need to learn how to make pixel art for certain parts of the game...or pay someone to do that for me. Doing gen 4 and 5 in 3's style doesn't seem all that great and someone figured out how to do the 3D2D style for their game. Going to have to figure out if I want to do that or not.
There are a decade and a half’s worth of resources, tutorials, and everything in between to guide you on your journey. Use them to your advantage.
If you want my honest opinion on what to focus on learning it’d 100% be Ruby. Then i’d say pixel art. Those will be the foundation of your game one way or another, but people really tend to underestimate how important Ruby is until they’re knees deep into trying to figure out how to script this or read an error message.
Ruby? Oh the programming side of things. I will need to get a book on that or find a resource for that online. Thank you.
I did find Thundaga's videos on how to do a few things and I am sure they lead me to the other resources you mentioned. I am not quite sure to look for just yet.
The pixel art is certainly going to be a challenge for me
There’s plenty of videos on Youtube for Ruby as well, but truthfully I’ve learned all that I know just from tinkering around with the Pokemon Essentials scripts and reverse engineering them. 9 times out of 10, whatever you want to make happen has already been done or set up in a different manner. You just have to know how to read the language so you can understand why certain things that are already done work the way that they do.
I’ll say similar to Pixel Art. You’re saying you want a Gen IV-V style, the best I can say is to study your inspiration. Take apart DS game sprites, learn what makes them tick, what makes them unique, and then use your knowledge to recreate that uniqueness.
It will take time. Lots of time. Above all you need to have patience in the process and with yourself. You will make mistakes, you will get frustrated, you will want to give up.
However, you will have victories, you will gain confidence, and you will succeed if you want it badly enough.
Good luck, and welcome to the community.
Just wanna pitch in to your idea of paying someone to do pixelart for you. Yesterday, I searched for an artist in fiverr. I was asking for overworld sprites and battle sprites for an anime character. He was going to charge me 55$ per character, both overworld and battle sprite. I was going to need 10 of them so that'd be 550$ just for sprites. I ducked out of it cause the price was steep for a single dev game. I looked up tutorials for pixel art in yt and it seems doable but it will take a bit of practice though.
Yeah, and it wouldn't be too difficult to do. The real tough part would be the amount of work it would take to make two different sets of maps and keep all that straight. But coding-wise, you'd just have a conditional branch in the intro (or wherever you want) that has the PC wake up in one map or the other, depending on gender choice.
Traveling between maps/regions wouldn't be difficult either, it'd be like teleporting to any other map in the game. Now granted, I haven't messed with different "regions" in my game myself, but I don't see why it would be too difficult to do.
Really going to learn Ruby's code then.
Well, this seems simple on paper. If you have a gender mechanism then youll have a variable GENDER which could be either M or F. From there I would assume you could set 2 starting points and set it so each one is linked to the respective gender.
That makes sense. Those two points would have to be extra zones on the map to make work.
If they're starting in different regions then I'd assume they'd be in the players house like how most pokemon games start.
No, actually. For the male in Sinnoh, I want to expand the Lake Valor area. Give it an abandoned mansion and little camp area. Arceus plucked them from time and the player is coming to and will have limited memory on how they got there along with a new starter pokemon I made up for this. We choose between Solarpunk, Steampunk, or Cyberpunk style of starter. The Mansion is a tutorial on how things work. The reward is a Psuedo that has an alternate end stage. Storywise/lore wise they are connected to the Starters.
For the female protagonist, I am going to do some similar. Just have not figured out the exact area.
There will be a bit of a backwards gym challenge before a major story beat happens and the gym challenge turns into something different
Yeah, what you're describing is not too difficult from a technical standpoint, but you gotta understand that that design choice balloons your workload by 2x or more, depending on the implementation details.
Multilinear narrative is cool. People enjoy it. It's difficult to achieve by oneself. Plus, you have to be extremely organized from a technical and narrative standpoint.
I appreciate that you're looking to make something small first--that is a great first instinct.
If you're going to play around with the multilinear stuff, I'd approach it from the vantage point of trying to learn how to do it well with the expectation that you very well might end up throwing out or refactoring large portions of your early work (I still look at a lot of my early work and cringe).
Learning is messy, and one of the pitfalls that a lot of new devs fall into is they think that making something messy must mean they're not good enough to do it, so they abandon the project or the pursuit of game dev altogether.
Don't fall into the trap. Just build and learn.
As others have said, anything is possible!
If you want both stories to play out, you can make this pretty easy with NettoHikari's Multiple Protagonists script. You can turn on and off sharing things like storage and inventories, as well as how you swap between them, so you can start with them totally separated and let more things cross over as the game goes on. https://eeveeexpo.com/resources/280/
If you just want it to be the 'origin' based on gender selected at the start of the game, that's all built-in conditional switches. No coding required.
I'm sure it's possible, but I dont know how that could be implemented. I have dynamic Day/night systems in mine (works more like real world time instead of "it's 8p, so it's automatically night", it's "it's 5p in December and it's dark outside with night encounters") as well as a few other things and it works pretty well. It's just how deep are you willing to go.
Just determine a variable that is checked by an event which determines the place, your charakter will be sent to. This should be relatively easy
It is possible, you can set a switch in the intro based on the choice you pick (Boy or Girl)
But it will be a lot of work to make sure everything works out... it'll be a lot of play testing, but if it's something you really want to see happen, with a lot of patience, it can be done 😅