CodeWalrus

I think it's about time I introduced the project I've spent the last several weeks working on. This was supposed to be in the recent CodeWalrus contest but as it turns out, battle systems are a pain to code and I didn't have enough time to complete the project. Some of you may already have seen my video from the contest thread. If not, you can see more or less the current state of the project here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNQ1Fr5TJyM

Some updates to that:
- We now have a WIP text system in the game
- Walking animations and direction facings
- You can activate things
- Textures have been sharpened a bit using linear filtering, instead of bilinear.

So what is this project? It's basically Pokemon with Walrii. :D Once finished, you will be able to go out and capture wild Walruses, train them, and pit them against other Walruses in mortal combat.

I do plan to make some departures from the classic Pokemon formula with this project. They are as follows:
- First, Walrii will have 6 moves instead of 4. And there will no permanent moves, like HM's. I believe this will make combat deeper, as status and stat changing moves become more viable to carry around. I find that in traditional pokemon, moveslots are at a premium so only using damage dealing moves becomes a First-Order Optimal Strategy (which is bad, see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6op8eV5OBwE)
- Next you, the trainer, participate in the battle. If you are K.O.'d, the battle ends. As the trainer, you are the only one on your team who can use items.
- Finally, battles aren't 1v1 turn-based affairs. Battles will take place on a grid, ala Fire Emblem. You and up to 3 Walrii move and attack on this grid against a competing team. I'll make some mockups of this when I can.

Cooool!!! :walrii:
Though I'd love to see this on the TI-84+ CE or in greyscale on the TI-84+ SE.
If you need a beta tester, I'm in.

Quote from: Dudeman313 on January 21, 2016, 03:02:41 AM
Cooool!!! :walrii:
Though I'd love to see this on the TI-84+ CE or in greyscale on the TI-84+ SE.
If you need a beta tester, I'm in.

The project is written in Lua using the Love2D framework. So it's possible I could make a port for Nspire or any other calc supporting Lua. However, an Axe/Z80/etc port is highly unlikely since I'm already depending on quite a few 3rd party libraries.

Ok! I'd still want to test the PC version.

Nice1 I am sad you didn't have time for the contest :'(

A Walrii-based Pokemon clone or RPG inspired by Pokémon would be cool. I once considered making one for the HP PRime called Pokéwalrus, but it would have been way different in the way that you are not a trainer but rather a group of walruses of different kinds.

Too bad you didn't have time for the contest, but I can probably understand with such project O.O. Also if you make it Fire Emblem style, it would be good to speed up the pace of battles and make sure they are intuitive to people not used to tactic RPGs or turn-based strategy games.

Do you have newer screenshots of videos of the progress?

Looks nice! Are you going to use all the current Walrii, or just the first gen Walrii?

I think he should use all the current :walrii: , especially MegaWalrii :P

You should make a game with the first gen and then when we have enough walriis make another game with the 2nd gen

Wait, are you using all of the Walrii that have been made?

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 28, 2016, 08:52:29 AM
Do you have newer screenshots of videos of the progress?

None yet, I still need to code the battle system, which could take a while.

Quote from: pimathbrainiac on January 28, 2016, 01:55:48 PM
Looks nice! Are you going to use all the current Walrii, or just the first gen Walrii?

Quote from: alexgt on January 28, 2016, 06:10:50 PM
You should make a game with the first gen and then when we have enough walriis make another game with the 2nd gen

Quote from: SiphonicSugar on January 28, 2016, 11:53:33 PM
Wait, are you using all of the Walrii that have been made?

I'll be using most of the walrii we have currently, including newer ones that pop up. :)

Idea: have "legendary" Walrii (like Warii for the Original 5s (although I guess only two of the O5s have Walrii at this point)).

Using newer walruses would be nice even if second gen is far from complete. As for legendary Walrii's I like the idea, as long as it doesn't make the game unbalanced to the point where everyone just use the O5 non-stop then never use the weaker walruses again.

As for O5, only @aeTIos and @Juju lacks Walrii fanart at this point. (http://codewalr.us/Smileys/cwsmileys/walrii2.gif) (http://img.codewalr.us/streetwalrii3.gif) (http://img.codewalr.us/pirii.gif), and if we also include non-founding past (Eiyeron) and present CW staff (Cumred and Ivoah), then we also got  (http://i.imgur.com/bMuNMG2.gif) (http://img.codewalr.us/walriisnake.gif) (http://img.codewalr.us/Walriichu.gif)

Oh wait I forgot the original Walrii is you :P As for relative power, I think they should be balanced, but have some sort of unique move for each, like some generations of Pokemon do.

Would EVs and IVs be included? I mean to say, how in-depth will Walriimon be?

Quote from: Araidia on January 29, 2016, 05:09:50 PM
Would EVs and IVs be included? I mean to say, how in-depth will Walriimon be?

EVs and IVs are unlikely, partly because I don't know a whole lot about them.

Quote from: Scipi on January 29, 2016, 11:56:36 PM

Quote from: Araidia on January 29, 2016, 05:09:50 PM
Would EVs and IVs be included? I mean to say, how in-depth will Walriimon be?

EVs and IVs are unlikely, partly because I don't know a whole lot about them.

EVs are dynamic versions of stat boosts at level up, and IVs are stat boosts at level up that are set. At least that's how I understand it.

Quote from: pimathbrainiac on January 30, 2016, 12:09:59 AM

Quote from: Scipi on January 29, 2016, 11:56:36 PM

Quote from: Araidia on January 29, 2016, 05:09:50 PM
Would EVs and IVs be included? I mean to say, how in-depth will Walriimon be?

EVs and IVs are unlikely, partly because I don't know a whole lot about them.

EVs are dynamic versions of stat boosts at level up, and IVs are stat boosts at level up that are set. At least that's how I understand it.

I'll probably have something like that later on. My plan is to use this as a testbed for a larger game, so I have some ideas for organic growth of stats.

If I recall correctly, you gain EV by KOing pokemon (each species has its own bonus yield), while IVs are indeed tied to the level. It is possible to manipulate the EVs of a pokemon, check out bulbapedia, it has all the info you need if you want to remain faithful, otherwise I'd be interested to see what you come up with.

People like to talk about EVs and IVs because they are an important component of minmaxing in the competitive scene, and as a series Pokemon has used it for all their main games. It makes them feel smart, but they're only scratching the surface of the meta.

It doesn't make sense to adopt those details for a game with completely different mechanics from Pokemon. If Aradia had read the topic post, I don't understand why he would ask for something so silly.

Well, it still doesn't hurt to ask. I forgot the context myself but in the end it's Scipi's call to choose where he's going with this. :)

Quote from: JoeYoung on January 30, 2016, 08:20:41 PM
It doesn't make sense to adopt those details for a game with completely different mechanics from Pokemon. If Aradia had read the topic post, I don't understand why he would ask for something so silly.

The thing is IVs are not new to JRPGs (even in this style (although they are called different things)). In Fire Emblem Awakening, for example, there is an asset (or boosted) stat and a flaw (a stunted stat) for each character.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on January 30, 2016, 08:46:51 PM
Well, it still doesn't hurt to ask. I forgot the context myself but in the end it's Scipi's call to choose where he's going with this. :)

Yeah I agree, especially that just because the mechanics of Walriimon will be different doesn't mean they will necessarily be much different. That said, Pokémon clones are large projects, so I recommend starting with something not too complicated, then expand later with more features.

Quote from: Streetwalrus on January 30, 2016, 08:05:33 PM
If I recall correctly, you gain EV by KOing pokemon (each species has its own bonus yield), while IVs are indeed tied to the level. It is possible to manipulate the EVs of a pokemon, check out bulbapedia, it has all the info you need if you want to remain faithful, otherwise I'd be interested to see what you come up with.

Right now I'm thinking something like having natural IVs for each Walrii and include something like EVs based on how you use them. That way, your team naturally builds around your playstyle. So, say, if use use one as a tank/defensive unit, they'll naturally get better defense and more hitpoints. I might even apply this to moves themselves, so the more a Walrii uses a particular move, it gains mastery over it and will do more damage/have a more potent effect.

Eventually I want to do a swap of sprites and maps to turn this into a full fledged game that I could put out on steam or the like. My main plan with that is to have very organic growth and hindrances of your creatures in order to cultivate the same kind of connection you grow with your pokemon during a nuzlocke run.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on January 30, 2016, 09:11:11 PMThat said, Pokémon clones are large projects, so I recommend starting with something not too complicated, then expand later with more features.

That's the plan. :) Luckily, I'm working with Lua, so adding new features is pretty fast and easy. For instance, everything I have so far was implemented within about a week of coding. I just have to be careful not to turn anything into spaghetti-code.

All this talks of EVs and IVs makes me think: maybe multiplayer would be a cool idea a la duelyst (https://duelyst.com/), but without the card/RNG aspect.
I dunno, just an idea :P

By the way, if you include the walrus Zergling in the game, then I think there should be a Starcraft reference, such as the walrus trying to summon a larger army of himself, only to realize "Darn, not enough underlings. If only they spawned more overlords... Let's six-pool then!" and then you need to fight 6 of them in order to capture one. :P

Perhaps there could be other popular references, such as with the Bart Simpson, Darth Vader, and you could have Walriichu so that is has voice and speak like Pikachu but says Walriichu instead :P

Quote from: pimathbrainiac on January 31, 2016, 07:00:21 AM
All this talks of EVs and IVs makes me think: maybe multiplayer would be a cool idea a la duelyst (https://duelyst.com/), but without the card/RNG aspect.
I dunno, just an idea :P

You mean something like PokeMMO (https://pokemmo.eu/)?

Got a new video up showing progress so far in Walriimon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZKk4qqKJPc

I'm also doing dev streams every couple nights on beam.pro (https://beam.pro/Skipi_) and twitch.tv (http://www.twitch.tv/skipi_) if you want to watch/chat.

Cool! What exactly is the char. sprite?

The char sprite is a small little Taokaka sprite I made for testing purposes :3

I'd say thanks for enlightening me, but I have no clue what a Taokaka is. The game so far is awesome. I like the PokeWalriiBall, or whatever you intended the name to be.

Tao is a character from Blazblue :P

(http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/blazblue/images/9/99/Taokaka_(Sprite).png)

Glad to see new progress, and I see you fixed the blurry pixels when the Walrii Pokéball zooms in. Good so far. :)

Quote from: Scipi on February 12, 2016, 04:45:35 AM
Tao is a character from Blazblue :P

(http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/blazblue/images/9/99/Taokaka_(Sprite).png)

And what is Blazblue?

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on February 12, 2016, 05:57:03 AM
Glad to see new progress, and I see you fixed the blurry pixels when the Walrii Pokéball zooms in. Good so far. :)

Yeah, all I needed to do was change the filtering from bilinear to linear and it fixed it.

Quote from: Dudeman313 on February 12, 2016, 08:45:53 PM
And what is Blazblue?

It's a fighting game developed by ArkSys, same people who made Guilty Gear. It's a pretty fun game. ^_^

Couldn't you have used nearest neighbor/no filter, though? Because generally, while linear filtering will remove the blur, it doesn't remove it as much as nearest neighbor.

/me wonders if @Scipi has gotten any luck finding time to work on this :3= game

I've been workinh on it, but I haven't gotten much progress to show yet. I'm actually switching over to Godot for the engine, since it makes working with GUIs much simpler.

I see. Is Godot just for GUIs?

Godot (http://www.godotengine.org/) is a free 2D/3D engine

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out :)

So, what generations of :walrii: are you going to use in your game? I'd love to see my creations there, and Cave Walrii can be in caves, while Trump Walrii (not by me) can be in cities....

I'll probably use a slew of Walrii from each generation. Preferably all of them, if I can.

Can you import them into one large pic, but BLIT that pic to only show the Walrii you need? That's what I do on the HP Prime with any graphics I use, otherwise it would take too long to import 150+ sprites one by one.

offtopic sidenote:
@DJ Omnimaga indexing your sprite files (headerless of course) saves RAM :P

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on March 04, 2016, 08:35:29 AM
Can you import them into one large pic, but BLIT that pic to only show the Walrii you need? That's what I do on the HP Prime with any graphics I use, otherwise it would take too long to import 150+ sprites one by one.

It's possible to do that, yeah, but unfortunately not all Walrii are the same size, so I'd have to custom set each one anyways. Plus I have to do things like descriptions, encounter rates, movesets, and stats for each anyways, so importing each sprite isn't a whole lot of overhead, relatively speaking.

Will you have your own file format for your pokemons? Then you could even put the filenames for your sprites in there...
Together with a nice little self-written tool, you could edit that stuff quite fast. Also, memory isn't expensive on PC anyway, and looping through your files 'one-dimensional' is easier than picking 'two-dimensional' from a sprite sheet - especially with different sizes of your walriimons :P

Just my thoughts, but I bet you have long thought of this better than me.

Quote from: p4nix on March 04, 2016, 08:01:00 PM
Will you have your own file format for your pokemons? Then you could even put the filenames for your sprites in there...
Together with a nice little self-written tool, you could edit that stuff quite fast. Also, memory isn't expensive on PC anyway, and looping through your files 'one-dimensional' is easier than picking 'two-dimensional' from a sprite sheet - especially with different sizes of your walriimons :P

Just my thoughts, but I bet you have long thought of this better than me.

What would the format be? .WMS(walriimon sprite)?

That's up to your imaginaaatioooon. It would be more like a Walriimon Data File though.

Quote from: Scipi on March 04, 2016, 04:56:13 PM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on March 04, 2016, 08:35:29 AM
Can you import them into one large pic, but BLIT that pic to only show the Walrii you need? That's what I do on the HP Prime with any graphics I use, otherwise it would take too long to import 150+ sprites one by one.

It's possible to do that, yeah, but unfortunately not all Walrii are the same size, so I'd have to custom set each one anyways. Plus I have to do things like descriptions, encounter rates, movesets, and stats for each anyways, so importing each sprite isn't a whole lot of overhead, relatively speaking.

Can't you just specify the size in the Walrii data, though? That's what I would do for an HP Prime Pokéwalrus game, since BLIT allows using sprites of any size (including scaling them)

Quote from: p4nix on March 04, 2016, 01:51:21 PM
offtopic sidenote:
@DJ Omnimaga indexing your sprite files (headerless of course) saves RAM :P

What do you mean by indexing sprite files? I don't think this feature is available on the HP Prime.

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on March 07, 2016, 06:02:34 AM
What do you mean by indexing sprite files? I don't think this feature is available on the HP Prime.

I don't have a HP Prime. But if you have like a folder SPRITES on your calculator, you could name the images in it img000, img001, img002 and so on. It will also allow you to load them quickly in the program.

The HP Prime lacks folder support for external files :P

@Scipi ,how's this project so far? And does it have graphic card dependencies? I have a Windows 10 computer that was formerly Vista, and I still have OpenGL 1.1.
Will I be able to play this when it's complete?

Quote from: Dudeman313 on March 21, 2016, 01:46:53 PM
@Scipi ,how's this project so far? And does it have graphic card dependencies? I have a Windows 10 computer that was formerly Vista, and I still have OpenGL 1.1.
Will I be able to play this when it's complete?

It's a bit slow going atm, since I'm working on another project to better learn Godot before continuing, but it's certainly not dead or even on hold.

I'm not sure if Godot's 2D API is completely independent of it's 3D engine, but the minimum requirement as far as I can tell is OpenGL 2.1.

Strange that 2D API's would have such high requirements, especially considering the SNES capabilities.

By the way, you should post about your other project if it's another program you plan to release :)

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on March 22, 2016, 05:13:00 AM
Strange that 2D API's would have such high requirements, especially considering the SNES capabilities.

By the way, you should post about your other project if it's another program you plan to release :)

I'll be revealing the other project along with a Kickstarter campaign once I have enough done to show. For now it's under wraps, though. ;)

Godot's 2D engine supports things like 2D lighting, normal mapping, particle effects, etc. With all that stuff, it may need a high OpenGL version. And actually, most 2D engines nowadays are really 3D engines with the an orthographic camera aligned to one of the axes. Not sure if Godot does that though.

Ah I see. And yeah I wish they still sometimes did 2D engines that are lightweight for the purpose of making it easier to port games to old school hardware or stuff like that. Anyway, good luck @Scipi and I can't wait for more progress on Walriimon and your other games :)

Yeah, progress is always a good thing. :)

amazing !!  :w00t: