PKM Battle Arena Official Week 1

Disclaimer

This is a fan made project based on a prior mod. We do not own any of the models created, engines used, or names and assets provided. All Pokemon likenesses and names are owned by the The Pokémon Company. Any models are from Vex’s Pokemon Collection, and are merely references of the Pokemon from their respected games. We have no intention of selling our mod for Warcraft 3, and DotA 2 will be experiencing MASSIVE overhauls to avoid any copyright problems with The Pokémon Company’s IP if we choose to set up Patreon-esque services.

Introduction

Hi all, Austin posting today. Marshall and I are thrilled with the amount of visitors we gained last week, and now do not want to disappoint with the posts. As stated last week, we intend to post every week, and have decided Saturday is the best day to do it. We have a couple things to bring to you today, them being our unique mechanic Gyms, our core design mindset, and a new logo that will be used in conjunction with the current one. If you are interested in any of these things, check them out below, and we thank for reading!

 

First Feature: Gyms

In Pokemon, gyms are one of the core pieces to pushing the fantasy of a trainers evolution. You explore the tall grass around you, picking out specific Pokemon you like, and leveling them up, but there isn’t a point to leveling them up if you have no one to beat with them. Sure there are other trainers out in the wild as well, but generally they are either all bug type, or significantly weaker than you, so they tend not to pose any threat or give any satisfactory reward other than currency. Gyms are that bridge of progression, defeating trainers of a certain type for that gym, that get progressively difficult until you reach the hardest of them, the gym leader. Once you gain the power to defeat the leader, you gain some interesting rewards: A badge, a TM/HM, some currency and the ability to move on to the next city to defeat the next leader. Gyms are not the ultimate end game enemy though, which is something we are hard at work attempting to make work. In Pokemon, there are 8 gyms you need to clear to challenge the elite four, to prove yourself as a master trainer. Each of these gym ideas are something we are putting into our game, and we want to explain them today.

Mechanics

Our gyms will be very similar in relation to their Pokemon counter part. They will be the bridge you need to cross to start gaining more and more power, you cannot clear the next gym without clearing the previous, there will be 8 gyms in total, after clearing all 8 there will be an event for the team that does so (we are unsure of the event as of right now), each gym will drop a badge, a TM/HM and some currency, the power of the gyms will be played with so that you cannot solo them on first clear, each gym will be a different type, the gyms will have a respawn timer upon defeating them meaning that whoever beats it first gains a power boost for a certain time due to their ability as a reward for being more tactical than their opponents, if one person dies in the gym and there are others around the fight will not end, the person that died will not be able to enter that gym again if they die, and gyms will not be pvp areas as the enemy team cannot enter if your team is already in there.

Rewards

As of right now, we know what the rewards will be visually, just not their effects or abilities. We know that gyms will have badges drop for each player, likely a consumable that you use to give you a passive effect so that it does not take up an inventory effect. We would also like for there to be a chance that a player gets a TM/HM that gives them a new ability related to that TM/HM, though it will likely be a low chance, as gaining a new move in these modes can either be overpowered or extremely useless. Currency will also drop, though we are not sure how much should be rewarded, gyms in Pokemon give ludicrous amounts of currency when cleared.

I realize this is quite vague, we have our own personal document to follow, but we really want to keep a lot of things quiet, as we know it will be much more fun experiencing gyms in game rather than me telling you in words how they work action by action. We feel that if we get gyms working properly, any sort of PvE content we have in game should fall in line simplistically as well, so when the time comes to post about those as well, we should have a lot more ideas and explanations as we will know what we’re doing.

 

Design

A lot of the people that play Warcraft 3 and DotA 2 are about our age (20), and we feel it is best to stick with the generation that influenced us as kids, generation 1. While we both would have been the age of 1 upon release of gen 1, I (Austin) distinctively remember playing Pokemon blue on my Gameboy Advanced at a very young age. Generation 1 is where it all started, and where you will find the most recognizable Pokemon ever: Charizard, Squirtle and Bulbasaur as the three starters, Weedle, Rattata, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Onix, Machop, Bellsprout, their evolutions and tons more. We really feel that every choice that isn’t numbers or balance related, revolves around generation 1. This even comes down to the map, where we have very distinct elements that take from the Kanto region layout. While of course not everything can be generation 1 as there are plenty of things from further generations we want to add, it will only compliment our ideas for gen 1 aesthetics. Anything major that happens in game, the first visual thought will always be, “can we make this using something from gen 1.” This comes down to Pokemon, the map, the items, the gyms, the bosses, and everything else we have in store for the game. We really hope this doesn’t defer anyone, but we have extreme ties to gen 1 that date back to our earliest childhood memories playing video games, and we don’t have any plans to change that.

New Logo

My (Austin) fantastic cousin very quickly drafted a new logo based on our current one we have now. It is a 2D rendition, with a little more resemblance of a Pokeball, which makes is look much more playful. We intend on using the 3D one for every media post, but will use the 2D variant as the loading screen, and primary logo for the game itself as it is definitely much better suited than the 3D version. Below is the new logo, and just past that is the conclusion for this post. We hope you enjoy the new logo!

 

Conclusion

We are extremely busy people right now, so much so that Marshall hasn’t been able to touch his computer for about a week now, and I am still in heavy planning phases for moving and college, but we are working on this. We love this project so far, and love that people are interested enough to visit and read our whole post last week. We plan for planning phase to be done by the end of July, I write 1-2 documents a week on our features and things to follow during development, and I want August to be development month, to push for an early Alpha by the end of the month before my schooling starts. Thank you for reading this post, we hope that we have kept your interest for next week, and cannot wait to read some reactions. Thank you!