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Weekly Update - Wondering About Dreamons Again, As A Pokemon Clone?

2 years ago1,775 words

While waiting on mental health treatment to prepare myself for putting myself out into online communities to promote Atonal Dreams, I've been wondering whether to work on Dreamons as a single-player Pokemon clone you can start a game of and just play within minutes without investing into some grand story...



I saw the occupational therapist on Monday... though I can't say anything worthwhile came of it. I'm still waiting on hearing back from a counselling service. Bleh.

After being distracted by that damn trying to get back out into the world palaver, I've just been wanting to retreat back into my cocoon to make stuff, which is when I seem to be the most content and at peace.

Though it's frustratingly hard to get back into things.



I started by working on ports of my Flash games. I've got a CBC port mostly working - including additional features like controller support - though I'll next need to upload that to Steam.

I've been putting that off though because... of some thing I was planning to write about, but ehhh, I've been paranoid these days about talking about certain things in case they just give certain people ideas for how to hurt me. Trauma response, I suppose; the thing I'm waiting on seeing a counsellor to work through.

I should also try to get ports of my other games working, but... haven't yet. I wanted to finish that one first. I may need to delay this for a bit though, because of that thing; we'll see.



I've had the urge lately to just sit down and play one of my games for a bit, partly for the fun of it - I make what I like, after all - but also to rekindle excitement for games dev in general.

I'd play my old Flash games, but there are annoying hurdles to setting them up in a format I'd actually enjoy. I suppose that'll be part of the porting process.



I replayed Atonal Dreams for the first time in weeks, maybe months. I really enjoyed it, and I'm very proud of it and desperately want to finish it... but I also realised perhaps more than before how story- and dialogue-heavy the intro sections are. (I remember the same being true for Taming Dreams, too.) It's not really something you can just start a playthrough of and be exploring on your own within a handful of minutes.

So my mind turned to the Dreamons thing I worked on recently, the one I wrote about in ∞ this public Patreon post ∞ and ∞ a bit in this blog post ∞.

When I last wrote about that, I was imagining it as a spiritual successor to Alora Fane: Creation, which would allow players to create their own stories.

But... I don't know. There are lots of additional difficulties that'd arise from something like that. I've been really reluctant to start a new community for years now because I don't want to have to face... manifestations of human darkness, let's say, but this would definitely require facing just that. Ugh.

I've also been wanting to make a Pokemon clone for years. I've tried several times (Beast Signer, several incarnations of Miasmon, some other thing before both of those that I've since somehow lost forever), and every time I see Pokemon-related content - which is often, because I'm subscribed to several 'Poketubers' (which seem to be a common enough thing to have a term for them) on YouTube - the urge to make my own resurfaces.

I also played the Spyro and Crash Bandicoot remakes recently, and I love the structure of those games: a handful of hub areas which each have a number of portals to 'bite-sized' levels you can potentially 100% complete without too much effort.

Dreamons was at some point in its life intended to be based around a more Digimon-like monster raising anyway - hence the title - though I thought I'd scrapped that. But...



Here's where my mind's been wandering this week for what Dreamons could be:

As in the previous plan, you'd play as a member of a group called the Oneironauts, who venture into people's dreams - their psychepelagos - to cure them of their inner demons.



You'd create a custom character using this pixel face person editor thing I already have (and like a lot), and there'd be minimal dialogue and story stuff before you could wander around as you pleased.

The Oneironauts' HQ would serve as a hub, and there'd be a number of rooms for 'patients'; essentially it'd be like a mental asylum or hospital.

In each room would be a sleeping person, perhaps accompanied by someone who knew them - like a loved one, or a 'doctor' - who'd explain a bit about why they might have fallen into a deep slumber.

You can enter their mind - like going through one of the portals in Spyro or Crash - which would take you to a 'level', a dungeon made by me.

To clear each level, you'd have to battle against a number of human dream figments who'd represent aspects of the dreaming person or their memories or fears or whatever.



Battles would involve using dreamons (figmon) in a Pokemon-like way (the opponent 'humans' would summon them, like trainers summon Pokemon). You'd have a party of just them, and would acquire new ones by taming them.

I've yet to decide on the exact combat mechanics, but they'd definitely use the elements/runes/etc stuff I've already used in other stuff (and got working in the Dreamons version I currently have, where you battle with teams of humans).

I could have maybe ten levels, based around common, relatable nightmares or fears (eg being chased, falling, arachnophobia, death). The map editor I've already made should make building the dungeons fairly quick and simple.

There would likely also be some overarching story, but only to the degree that, say, Crash or Spyro had one (so it's more of an excuse to go into levels and collect stuff, and rarely comes up inside the levels themselves).

My biggest concern, were I to do something like this, would be how many dreamons there'd be, whether they'd evolve, things like that. Y'know, the most important aspects of a monster-collection game. Pokemon originally had 151. Setting myself a goal like that would be insanity.

Beast Signer was even more insane in that it had a number of elements (6? 8?), and Digimon-like growth charts for each pair of them (annoyingly I don't seem to have any screenshots of Beast Signer).



I wondered whether I could do something like that, but more sensibly: I'd use the six elements I'm using in Atonal Dreams (Viscereal, Abstral, Discord, Harmony, Gravitoom, Levitality), and for each unique pair of non-conflicting elements (where order didn't matter so Discord/Gravitoom and Gravitoom/Discord would be the same), there'd be just two dreamons: a base form and an evolved or 'realised' form. Acquiring these evolutions would be a special thing, a big deal, a reward for completing a side quest, rather than something you'd achieve just by levelling up as you went along.

That'd only be 36 dreamons though, which is a piddling amount compared to the number of Pokemon. But they were designed over many years by a whole team, and each Pokemon was just a static sprite (in Generation 1), whereas I'm just one guy, and the dreamons would be fully animated 3D models.

I've already made many of those models for Atonal Dreams, which I enjoyed and have been really eager to get back to, but I can't for Atonal Dreams right now because I need to build some more areas first, but should promote it first, so I keep putting it off...

If I could just work on some other project I was less concerned about succeeding - Dreamons - and could use any new models I make for it in Atonal Dreams eventually anyway, that might be a way to rekindle some passion for making stuff while waiting for mental health treatment, with the bonus that I could use assets I make for it in Atonal Dreams as well.

I'd love to get to the point where I could just sit down and create content for a working engine rather than worrying about some grander story I was trying to tell or how I'd make money from it in the end.



But bleh. My mind's drawn in that direction because I really want to just make some stuff, but I feel like I can't with Atonal Dreams due to needing to promote it first, and I can't promote it first because of trauma I should get mental health help for before diving in and just making matters worse, but it's a tedious, slow process and I'm still waiting and...

So I might as well use that energy to make something rather than just procrastinating, feeling worse, and writing posts about why I've not achieved anything week after week. Right? Right???

I don't know. Everything's so complicated.





I just replayed Beast Signer for the first time in ages... though not far enough to get past this starting area because of something like embarrassment about the character dialogue, less because of some objective evaluation of its merits and more because it brought back a flood of memories and feelings from the time in my life when I wrote it (which isn't what anyone else would feel from reading it).

Some stuff I noticed from the handful of minutes I just played for:

- Ha, there's a donation link on the title screen. I'd need to remove that.

- You're able to wander around as you please immediately with zero intro story, though you're in the 'Remnant Colony', effectively your hometown, before going off to join the Signers. You have to pretty much enter random houses until you find the right one that triggers a cutscene. I don't imagine bothering with anything like that with what I have in mind for Dreamons.

- The character creation involved a personality quiz. I'd like to do something like that again, especially since the elements I'm using now are based on actual academic psychology concepts.

I'll probably give that another go next week. It'd make sense to work on a port of it while doing that, but it's one of my old games that's in AS2 rather than AS3, which makes it more awkward to work with.