Dev Blog

As almost anyone can tell you who’s played an mmo, guilds are more often then not a pretty awesome part.  One of the difficulties we’ve had in designing Twilight is finding a good guild system and making sure the guilds have purpose inside of the game.  For a while there were serious questions about incorporating a guild system into the game since what purpose would they serve?  Sure it’d be fun to own a guild, but the question was “why”?  Secondly there was the question of an actual guild system.  Since the native guild modifications for ADR leave much to be desired.  So in the end one of my friends coded us a new guild system to my specifications.  Which ended up to be a very good thing as the guild system that he built is amazing.

The purpose for the guild systems is going to be primarily to allow players to organize and help each other progress in the game.  One of the requirements at various points in the game for various classes and paths will be that to progress further you’ll need an item; and item which is only obtainable from a different class!  Therefore you’ll have to cooperate with other players to get them to trade you an item.  Thus the best way for people to progress is to organize themselves into guilds around certain classes and alignments so as to collect the items which players will need to progress.

The guild system that we designed is also a true guild system and rivals the guilds that gaia and world of warcraft posess.

Below are a couple of screenshots of the guild system.

Above you can see of how the main guild screen looks.  News is fully manageable by the guild master through the guild forum where you can select an option to make a post into a news item.  Furthermore you have the ability to select a guild emblem through a gallery available in addition to selecting your own banner (the banner must be linked, there is no upload option).

Above is the screen for donating items to the guilds.  This helps especially for guilds who try to help player’s as they move through the game and allows guilds to immediately dispense items to a player who needs an item to pass on to another area of the game.  It would also help keep track of especially rare items and could serve to facilitate the distribution of prizes for guild events and the like.

Above is a shot of the officer panel.  Leadership in guilds is divided between the leader and officers, both of which have a control panel from which they can affect changes to their guild which for officers, as you can see above, includes adding ranks to the guild forum, setting a guild to public or private, as well as managing a guild’s banner and emblem.

Interestingly enough Twilight has this strange base rpg system which is more akin to a final fantasy or something then it is the typical pokemon strategy.  That’s because the rpg system is actually a phpbb 2.x mod called ADR (Advanced Dungeons and Rabbits) wierd name I’m sure, but that’s what it is.  Anyway, because it’s more akin to a final fantasy set up it’s got some interesting stuff.  It’s got space for weapons, armor, gloves, helmets, monster opponents, etc.

Unfortunately as you can see this creates some difficulties for me since obviously I’m not going to be using a lot of certain types of items.  So one of the challenges in creating Twilight is to convert this system to our methods.  Course we knew that was going to be the case going in.

Fortunately however the ADR does include an amazing npc system which is what I’ll be utilizing to move the game and the storyline forward.  So when you’re playing the game you would talk to the npcs and they would control your progress, not overtly.  It would be through class/alignment/item requirements or even random chance.  Like only certain classes can talk to an npc or to talk to an npc you need an item, or to get to a certain zone an npc will need to give you an item, etc.

The design of the npc system is such that it offers me a huge amount of control in determining paths for classes and how Twilight will express the Revolutions storyline.

Secondly the entire world inside of the ADR system is expressed through “zones”.  Basically everything you can do in the game will be done through zones and zones provide movement to other zones.  In this method it is very much akin to a text based rpg then it is to say something you would make with RPG Maker XP or one of the other pokemon mmos that are scattered around the net.

That said Twilight is truly not going to be like the pokemon games nor will it be like other pokemon mmos on the net, I’ll dig some up for examples.  Twilight is being driven by the Revolutions plot and that is it’s primary reason for existing, to allow players to play through and experience Pokemon Revolutions.  Twilight is not a trainer journey, by any means.

Hey all,

Welcome to the development blog for Pokemon Twilight.

This blog is pretty much your primary source for all news on the development of Pokemonfan.net’s awesome pokemon mmorpg.  It’s more efficient for me to create a development blog for Pokemon Twilight then it would be to post all the news on the site, since there’s going to be a LOT of news about the development of Twilight as time goes by, and I don’t want to make the site homepage into an extension of Twilight.

So anyway, couple things to start us off with.

Unfortunately I’ve got a couple other things to worry about before we start work on Twilight in earnest.

- complete site content
- begin scanning manga
- test forum for Twilight (gemini)
- define classes and paths
- determine mod list for Twilight
- create portal for Twilight (polaris)

Also, one warning first.

Pokemon Twilight is going to be a very large mmo, and as such it will take a while to develop it, especially since I’ll probably be one of the few people working on it until we get to a point where I’m confident about the project and know what to assign people.  Therefore as I’ve said previously, it will probably not be ready for beta testers for over a year, from now.  But fear not, there’ll be plenty of fun stuff to look at in the mean time.

Also, the number one thing I need help with right now is graphics.  Please check this thread on Shingetsu for more information:

http://pokemonfan.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=53