Thanks Muz. All of the ZENFORMS in the game come from one of 3 "Newborns" (baby). It's not like other games where these are just random critters. In saying that, a Newborn ZENFORM has about 5 stages of evolution, and each stage can branch out 3 or 4 ways. In total, there is 144 ZENFORMS. If you check the graph posted in the first page, you'll notice it doesn't add up to 144..... I've got some surprises in store lol...... Okay, update to the debate on changing the characters. We've redesigned the possible new sprite look. The body hasn't changed much, but the shoulders have been given a bit better definition. The head has changed, it's now wider and slightly taller. So the current sprite is on the left, and the newer possible redesigns on the right. Not only can you vote, but you can now pick one if you choose yes lol.
i thought the old fat people were cute.. the first new one is better than the second one. head is too big on the 2nd new one. I don't like how the 1st new one's arms goes straight down though..
I can't believe we're being so pedantic about this haha I vote for the new design (male and female), and the first new guy
Well, I like the new girl better, but I like the old boy more. His shape has more character and the hair feels more illustrative and stylized, where the new feels a little more generic.
Don't get caught up on the hairstyle and outfit. There is currently 50 outfits overall, and about 20 hairstyles for each gender in the game. All of them will be getting revamped with this. Don't pick based on their outfit, pick based on the shape of the character, and the style art. Oh and I won't be mixing and matching old boy with new girl type thing lol. No point saying that. I'll work with the artist again tomorrow and see if we can make some changes. I'll try address the arms sticking out. We don't add things by mistake. That was intentional so that the female sticks out from the male. I want to give the female curves. But until then keep letting me know. The best way to say it will be "Old Style" for the current look. Or "New Style with the small/big head". EDIT: I should say thanks for even replying. Please remember your not hurting my feelings by picking one. As I said, I just want characters you are happy with. I know some people complained before about the OLD (current) look of the characters. I plan on investing in adding a lot more outfits and hairstyles, so before I do that, I want to make sure everyone is happy with the style of the characters. I can't pay money on getting all these really cool outfits and looks for updates, then in 6 months have people ask me to change the art style of the characters. I don't have that type of cash. I need to know what look makes you happy, and we have time to decide and pick which one is best, I'm rushing no one, but the faster I do get a solid answer the faster I can get the artist working on it while I focus on other areas ;-)
Weeell in that case I like the old ones. They look cuter Edit: And just something about them looks more natural in that world.
Honestly both versions of the characters look fine to me; I can't even tell the difference unless you zoom in. So I'd stick with Old Style (IMO it's better to allocate your money towards adding more content, rather than a small change that most people won't notice or care about in the long run)
I much prefer the new design for the females, for the male I'm not too fussed but I have a slight preference for the new ones (with the small head, the larger head one I'm not overly fond of). Also thanks for responding to my question regarding the Zenforms. To follow up on the 144 Zenforms, with a lot of them being (the non-surprise ones at the very least) originating from the same three newborns am I right in assuming it will indeed be possible to capture the other two newborns using Zencrystals? Edit: One last thing,when the body type is decided why not post a template with a colour pallet and have a community driven design your own clothes contest? The winning designs that fit with the overall art style could be added to the game. This would be fun for the Zenform followers to partake in and if all goes well should boost the games art assets without hitting your budget.
Oh yeah yeah. The first ZENFORMS you will see in the wild will most likely be the Newborns and the different colors of the Newborns (each ZENFORM before the Adult stage has 3 colorsets, with each color representing which move pool the ZENFORM can learn from). Your Newborn from the Protector school will have a higher stat set then most wild Newborns - at least all the wild Newborns in the local area. Of course, there will be other ZENFORMS (from the child stage) in the wild in the early local areas too, I was just using that as an example to clear up any confusion lol. Oh.... I won't be accepting any fan submissions for any thing. It can get kinda messy, especially considering this will be a commercial product. I've had people ask could I accept fan maps, characters, or ZENFORM designs and the answer I'll be sticking with it not at all. Another massive downfall of this idea would be the clashing art styles. Check this: This is the same ZENFORM designed by 3 different (and very talented) spriters. This was from the early days when I was looking for a commissioned ZENFORM spriter. It's very important to have the artwork designed by the same artists (at least in the same areas). Other wise, I'll lose any of the professional big team look that I have. Edit: I don't mind fan art or anything like that but unless I asked you to do a commissioned job for me, I won't be placing any of that in the game resources lol.
I must say those artists have done a great job matching the styles. I agree that fan submissions can get quite messy, was just an idea, I've never done pixel art once in my life so the contest idea wasn't for me. I'll stick to working in the labs where I know what I'm doing!
Weekly Update: 28th of July Sorry for no true update last week. I did very little work last week. Still working on sorting out the battle system. It's still not playable fully playable yet. Lots of variables are taken into account, so I need to make sure I don't mess it up like I did before (I completely forgot to check for any secondary effects of an attack until this week lol). Withdrawing a ZENFORM while battling a Rinba at night I'm testing it a lot with different conditions. Other than the human errors I was making with my code, so far, there has been no major bugs. I'm happy to report that lol. Speaking of human coding errors (they are all human code errors, but by definition I mean somewhere the code I wrote was fine, but I made a mistake with what I wrote) I was having a weird bug with forgetting attacks. It was not counting all of the attacks a ZENFORM had. I spent one morning trying to figure this out, logging everything, and it turned out I made a silly mistake. When checking to see if an attack was in the attack slot, I was checking the attack slot against the value of the attack slot. Example would be, if I was checking to see if Attack Slot 4 had an attack, I was checking to see if it was greater or equal to 4. This meant, if the attack database value of the attack was less than that value, it wouldn't count it lol. So I fixed all those errors just yesterday lol. Amount* - corrected If you can't get the hint with this update.... I've been bug testing and making sure everything works as one big game, rather than testing the game in chunks. Another bug, which I still can't fix has to do with the mini game "WarZone" on the PCom device. And yeah.... WarZone is supposed to look crappy. It's made by an independent developer in the game's world lol. That's the joke. The bug is the bullets you can shoot cause the whole app to crash after hitting a monster and getting deleted. I honestly haven't touched the PCom code since it was fine for a while now. I don't know what's causing it. It seems to work if I remove the line for removing the bullet, but I'll keep working on it. As you can kinda tell, I worked on the game overall this week so I could remember why I love this project. Working on my own, in my bedroom of all places, can be very hard. Not stressful, but hard to.... keep the flame burning. Last week, I done pretty much zero work on the game, so this week, my plan was to start playing the game. I was playing and discovering bugs along the way. It wad fun to play the game since I probably only play it once a month, if even lol. Sorry for no update last week, I think I'm over my slump. I have some big secrets planned, a lot you won't see until updates, but they are big. Stay tuned, and thanks for the support.
Don't forget there are plenty of willing beta testers that would love to play and extinguish the bugs if you do ever change your mind!
