I had this great idea for a Pokemon game, where you can summon your Pokemon and fight in real time during a battle.

Originally, it was an idea I thought up for the N64...each C button and trigger would use 1 of 6 pokemon.

You didn't have to summon a pokemon when you meet an enemy--you could just let opposing pokemon beat the crap out of your main character until you die.

Summoning a pokemon would enter battle mode, where a field surrounds your and the enemy pokemon. You can't leave the arena (which could be a hexagon shape). And you essentially fight in real-time, with your pokemon's abilities mapped to controller buttons (say, 4 moves, 4 C buttons). And you could pull up a trainer recall/item/utility menu with A and stuff.

I guess the battle mode is similar to Monster Rancher, but I've never played it so I don't know. My original thoughts were that it would run on a Zelda 64-ish engine, but the real-time battle fights within a set area could be done well in overhead too. It would require a lot of sprite CHRs and animation for each pokemon, though, so maybe this isn't the best idea.

One of the ideas I had in mind was to not force the player to fight thousands of slow random battles to level up, because I agree, that was monotonous. Random battles are for catching pokemon. I'm currently entertaining the idea of completely getting rid of exp from 'trainer' and random battles, and implementing new training centers, which you can access with your hard earned money, and will give you massive experience points.

I figured this might be the way to go, because many times the 'battle towers' had weird, arbitrary restrictions on pokemon levels, and by the time you were able to access them, half of your team was unable to compete because their level's were to high. It would be nice and convienient if you were basically able to control the growth of your pokemon by spending money to train them instead of having them level up at the most inopportune of times.

I plan to completely revamp the NPC trainers, making them rechallengable, and with several different pokemon in their stock (usually), so finding someone to fight that is comparable to your team's average level should be a piece of cake. The money you earn can either go to training your team, or maybe perhaps to some other goal that I haven't thought of yet (maybe building up some sort of base to serve as the catalyst for a story, or something else).

The battle system will probably be a piece of cake to recreate - I have all the graphics sitting on my harddrive now. The overworld might take a little more time to do, since I might be recreating the graphics from scratch, but that still shouldn't be too difficult. I have an interesting plan for the overworld. I wonder just how big a single verge map can be and still run at a respectable speed? :D

ahh, good times.

McGrue, maybe you'd like the Shin Megami Tensei/Digital Devil Story games. In terms of downloadable monsters. Or, if you're joking, you'd probably like it anyway.

How about a decent storyline and characters? Enough of this "be the best trainer" stuff. Go get a creative writing booklet and churn out something either epic or very character-focused. Like trying to revenge the death of your best friend or something equally more important than just fighting battle after battle. Fight those stupid battles for a reason.

Go go Hero Rancher!

I'm kinda thinking about making it choose 'yer own story a la Morrowind. A non-linear main story(s), sidequests, etc.

One of the main things I've always wondered about pokemon is... why in the hell does team rocket/magma/aqua just let you waltz through their base after beating them in little pathetic pokemon battles? Why don't they just shoot you, stab you, and leave your broken body in the streets? The obvious answer is that your pokemon can be used for personal defense too, but the games never really touched on that at all (darn kid, you've just beaten me, the master of the mafia, in a pokebattle! I'll never do anything bad again!). I never watched the anime, so I don't know if it covered that.

The trouble with games lacking linear plot is that they tend to degenerate into dozens of retarded fetch quests.

I've actually been working a bit on the battle system, so I might have some screenies soon. I think I might also release like a small little demo quest at the same time to see if you guys like the direction I'm taking. It'll be interesting.

I so totally was going to do one for verge 3, but then I got lazy and decided to screw it. I want to see one more similar to the gameboy game with Arle (Or what’s her name. The girl form Puyo Puyo). That game was really interesting. You fought in three on three battles which included the trainers, and you monsters were more like magical familiars more then raised pets. But I also continue to believe that the best monster raising game is in fact not a monster rising game at all. The game? SaGa Frontier. There are just so many moves and stuff to get, and building up is damn fun. I dislike the unstable transformations, but monster rising in that game is still the bomb. I would have liked to make a monster rising game with similar features to those two games, and maybe with additional things like needing to summon monsters and manage mana like a trading card game or something.

TROGDORMON