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
Hello everyone! We are now one month in and we can safely say that we are more than a week ahead of where we hoped. This weeks post outlines where we are right now, our plan by the end of August, how we make our characters, and how we treat media presence. This week we are adding a Tl;Dr at the end of the post right before the conclusion, because we know that these posts get lengthy and not a lot of people want extreme details about our progress. Thank you for reading so far and check out below what we have for this week!
One Week Ahead
So what does this mean exactly? Well we are far past the point of early stages of development. We have our full character roster decided, we have most Pokemon moves chosen, and are just over 3/4’s of the way done how the moves function. Last week we etched into development phase, thinking it would take about 2 weeks to line up the chosen Pokemon and figure out their move sets. This is in large part to picking up a new team member! He puts together Pokemon moves for us to decide on, pushes for new ideas, picks out all of our sound clips, and gives his insight on general design. With where we stand now, we want to get a playable version of our characters out by the end of August (formerly end of September). These characters will be extremely unbalanced, but it will give us a great idea of what players like, how to better design counter-play and evolve more basic kits for fun play. The map that will be played on will be an extremely basic stadium style map, and no items will be in the game. Currently what we have to do left to get this out is scale stats of all Pokemon, get moves functioning and animations playing, and add proper text and typing to everything. We will do a couple internal tests then ship it out for people to try out and send feedback!
Character Design
The way we make our characters is just about as unique as any other game mode with chosen characters with specific abilities. In Pokemon, each character gets 4 total moves, so we decided to combine how players choose their moves for their Pokemon and make kits unique to each Pokemon. Most Pokemon players enjoy picking what they think is cool, what sounds powerful, and what is powerful, so as Pokemon players that’s what we have done. Unfortunately, almost every move in Pokemon is focused around doing a single target effect, so a lot of the moves we have chosen have been altered heavily. An example would be Bubble. Bubble in Pokemon does damage to one Pokemon and has a chance to reduce said Pokemon’s speed. We have kept the general design of Bubble, but took our own twist on it. Bubble is now an Area of Effect (AoE) move that the player throws on the ground which when popped, slows and damages all hostiles in the range of the explosion. Of course, tons of moves stay the same from Pokemon to our game. For example, Defense Curl has the exact same effect of increasing the users Defense for a short while, or Poison Sting as a single target move that Poisons the chosen target. We have every intention of sticking to the feeling that you are playing a Pokemon in another game, just with some game-play tweaks and changes that fit the genre we are working in.
Why no Pictures?
We have gotten this a few times. “How come you don’t post pictures?” “Are you actually working on anything?” “Give us something to be excited about.” Of course we are working intently on this project, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing these weekly posts. While we would love to post pictures, what we are working on right now isn’t something a picture or video can make interesting. We are putting stats on Pokemon, choosing moves from Pokemondb, writing extremely long text files going in depth about these characters. And the stuff that would warrant pictures or video aren’t fully developed and we are afraid we would show off too much. Only one other person has thought of making a Pokemon Arena game mode, and what they did to be honest is extremely primitive to what we have even just a month in. We do not want to accidentally leak our back-end, triggers, code, functions, art, etc. We have put a lot of time into this now, some days I (Austin) put 6 hours into it, and we do not want to leak out information that can be taken and done more quickly by someone faster or more efficient than ourselves. We will show pictures when we get the chance, when everything gets close to being ready for an alpha build, but right now, what we do isn’t appealing to most people in picture form, and we can not take the risk of accidentally showing something fundamental to our development process. We are sorry and we are trying to push for more of a media presence soon.
Tl;Dr
We’re much further along in development than we expected, we have a new team member working on design, our Pokemon are close to being in a playable state, we are pushing for this state to be the end of August, Pokemon will feel like Pokemon just with Arena style moves, we cannot take pictures because the work we do isn’t fit for them, we also do not want to take the risk of leaking something crucial.
Conclusion
This was a big week for us. We pushed hard to get these Pokemon moves decided and function able in the environment we have, and we are close. We have lots of work to do, we have slowly been deciding on core set pieces for our map, and as phase two rounds out in the next few weeks, phase 3 will be dedicated solely to getting an interesting and extremely fun map working. Thank you for reading this week and we hope your interest is higher than ever!
PKM BattleArena 
Leave a comment