Completed Pokémon Nightshade

luxdiablo · Mar 14, 2021

A new Ekat game always means it's a good day.

Amazing job, super excited to check this out! Congrats on releasing a game. :)

brysoonye · Mar 14, 2021

Ekat posting on the dawn of the final day? What else could lift our spirits! :) can't wait to play this on my youtube!

Ekat · Mar 14, 2021

Quick patch for the egg in Baccata Manor. It doesn't break the game, but it does turn the egg invisible if you don't have enough room in the party.

Ekat · Mar 14, 2021

Updated the game with some minor patches to v1.1! I also dealt with the compiler error that was breaking the birdhouse calls.

Ekat · Mar 15, 2021

The game has been updated to version 1.2! Fixes include:

Infinite egg bug
Egg summary screen bug
Reuse of Coil Badge
Making the Miracle and Cure Badges work from the bag and party screen
Fixing the entrance to Marowak's shop on repeat visits
Fixing the compiler error for birdhouses

Tristantine The Great · Mar 15, 2021

Man, I got several games to Let's Play, I may need to add this to the list!

Ekat · Mar 15, 2021

The game has been updated to version 1.3!

AnonAlpaca · Mar 15, 2021

HOW IS THIS GAME SO BEAUTIFUL AAAAAAAA

Ekat · Mar 16, 2021

The game is updated to version 1.4!

Dr Pisy · Mar 17, 2021

Your productions are always beautiful.
I loved this one too. Wow <3

_pheebs · Mar 18, 2021

Time for my review (and I've not even finished playing yet!!!!)

Aesthetic:
Golly gosh, the looks and aesthetic of Nightshade is amazing!
You've put honest to god effort and logic into every enviroment.
Every place I visit I've literally stopped and looked at the area and been like "wowie." because it's just so beautiful.

Gameplay:
The Gameplay is rather simple, and enjoyable.
You're given tasks to do, and during those tasks, or inbetween them story unfolds.
Very simple, very easy to get into, and very easy to jump back into after not playing for some time.

Writing/Story:
The Story again is nice and simple, you play as a Park Ranger and have to do the tasks given to you by your Boss.
The more tasks you do, the more OP badges you get, and become the most OP person ever.
The Writing is superb too, every piece of dialogue feels super natural, and very well written. Everyone feels like they have their own personality, and it's nice!

Overall:
Pokémon Nightshade is a very pleasent and beautiful experience.
All the enviroments are very pleasent on the eyes, and accompanied by a well thought out soundtrack with each piece of music extended the beauty of the envrioments.
A nice large variety of Pokémon to fight, capture, and interact with.
The HUGE selection of sidequests to do, and none seem mudane or repeatitive.

This game is a huge 10/10 and I would reccomend it to anyone!!

Ekat · Mar 18, 2021

_pheebs said:
Time for my review (and I've not even finished playing yet!!!!)

Aesthetic:
Golly gosh, the looks and aesthetic of Nightshade is amazing!
You've put honest to god effort and logic into every enviroment.
Every place I visit I've literally stopped and looked at the area and been like "wowie." because it's just so beautiful.

Gameplay:
The Gameplay is rather simple, and enjoyable.
You're given tasks to do, and during those tasks, or inbetween them story unfolds.
Very simple, very easy to get into, and very easy to jump back into after not playing for some time.

Writing/Story:
The Story again is nice and simple, you play as a Park Ranger and have to do the tasks given to you by your Boss.
The more tasks you do, the more OP badges you get, and become the most OP person ever.
The Writing is superb too, every piece of dialogue feels super natural, and very well written. Everyone feels like they have their own personality, and it's nice!

Overall:
Pokémon Nightshade is a very pleasent and beautiful experience.
All the enviroments are very pleasent on the eyes, and accompanied by a well thought out soundtrack with each piece of music extended the beauty of the envrioments.
A nice large variety of Pokémon to fight, capture, and interact with.
The HUGE selection of sidequests to do, and none seem mudane or repeatitive.

This game is a huge 10/10 and I would reccomend it to anyone!!

Thank you!

You already know this by now, Pheebs, but your works were a major inspiration to me as I was developing Nightshade. It means a lot to me that you enjoyed it so much!

_pheebs · Mar 18, 2021

Ekat said:
Thank you! You already know this by now, Pheebs, but your works were a major inspiration to me as I was developing Nightshade. It means a lot to me that you enjoyed it so much!

it's an honor to be an inspiration for a project, i'm still speechless to be honest.

Foxowl · Mar 18, 2021

I should probably give a review for Nightshade, since you did the same for Slice of Life back during the summer. Seems only fair, even if I did test this game for you.

I'll even ~~shamelessly steal~~ borrow your Jam game review format and apply it back at you. Look at my laziness! Marty would truly be proud.

Aesthetic

I mean, what can I say? It's a very pretty game, and probably my favorite work you've done with tilesets. You've got the vibe of a small mountain town down, and every park area is perfect. I'm a sucker for mountainous areas and Nightshade delivers with it. The palettes are great, and I love how the green and brown fits through everything.

Hyacinth Town in particular also has a very neat aesthetic, with those brick houses you made being used as well as the flower petal overlay. It's so cute! The "ghost areas" like Baccata Manor and Lily Memorial Gardens have a spooky feel but not too scary, which fits the tone of the game. The hospital on the other hand is more scary, but it just amps up the tension you're feeling in the game by then. The caves are also nice. They're caves, and there's not a whole lot to say. I think my favorite areas in the game were Emerald Bluffs and Emerald Lake, for sure. It feels like a more sunny, exposed area as opposed to the forestry covering the rest of the park, the birdhouses are introduced which is a very cool mechanic, you've got the weather station which is part of the lore surrounding Emerald Lake's conditions, it's all great. I kind of wish Emerald Lake's flooding was used a bit more in the game, or at least shown in some form besides as a roadblock, since it sounded neat, but I understand the time constraints and it was still conveyed interestingly.

There's a lot of ghosts. Your overworld sprites and trainer sprites are good too, and the Drifblim Girl is proper spooky. Buried Alive is a funny nod.

Music choices are also pretty nice, although some of the songs for each overworld map having a different audio quality due to the youtube videos you downloaded them from was slightly weird (the most notable being the "park song" in the Entrance compared to the Forest music, etc. Not too big of a deal.

The Gameplay

It's fairly balanced. I'd say the only time battles require a little more effort than usual is towards the end, with a bit of a level jump with those last few bosses. It's still manageable (although my experience was a bit questionable due to a bug I'll mention).

I really like the use of triple battles-- you definitely made it a core mechanic of the game and the situations it was used in (Combee attacks, Drifblims, and some of the boss battles) were varied enough to make it interesting. Having Masquerain be a team member (my core team member, really) was a good idea, since it gets a lot of good moves for triple battles like Air Cutter and Air Slash. Masquerain is OP, but I have no issues with this.

The Kricketune quest is very fun, and I enjoyed training it up to exact my REVENGE on that pitiful trainer.

The main gameplay loop, with the quests, is pretty fun! Most of the quests are simple and each adds a bit of neat lore and character to the park and the parkgoers, which I liked a lot. You also had a lot of recurring quests, which was a great way to make the game feel coherent all the way through, like the smell lady and the scared lady. I had fun making her say gabagool for everything. One could probably find a better five-word meme.

The Serenity Scope is a bit finicky-- I still think making it a toggle instead of a timer could be nice, but it works fine in the game. It's really only for a few of the quests like the mining ones where you have to have it on at all times to find all the spots. It's a neat mechanic otherwise, though. The mining quests, while adding more stuff to do in the world, are a little useless imo, and the plotline never gets fully resolved with the archaeology lady (unless I missed something). I liked doing it on Emerald Lake but I'm not sure there needed to be two of them.

The badges are also a great reward mechanic imo and are a good incentive to keep getting park points.

The Writing

Ah yes, the writing. The most important part of your games.

I know you have mixed feelings on this game, but the writing is still fantastic. You create this world of Cypress Park and populate it with just as much charm as usual. The day-to-day shenanigans of Marty, Giselle's lust for power, Hearse's funeral plans-- it's all hilarious and delivered well. You set up a lot of plot points well before you introduce them properly, which is very neat, and the actual main story itself, revolving around Giselle, Boss, and Yew is compelling. It takes a bit to get going but once it does you just need to find out what's really going on behind the scenes. I can't say the twist at the end is the biggest surprise but I don't think that's the intention.

The theme of found family is always present in your writing and this might be one of the most found-family found-family games you've made. It's really nice to see Marty and Giselle care for each other, even if they bicker and banter often (side note: the stand in place for one minute quest is amazing). And Giselle and Boss have a nice father-daughter relationship, where even if he can be uptight and strict, everything he does is for her. At the same time, Giselle also needs her freedom, and by the end I think she's got it. (After all, she's the new mega-overlord evil empress of the park.)

Ghosts. Lots of them. Yeah.

Anyway, the game is written well, which is what makes the world so fun to explore.

Bugs

I thought this game was about ghost types? Why am I talking about bugs?

The game was mostly bug free when I tested, honestly. A bit here and there of course, but it's very polished for a six hour game with this much content. You're very thorough.

Funniest bug was all of my pokemon hating me in the last section of the game. RNG battles, baby! (Obviously fixed now)

The Squad

Overall
It's a very fun game, and another great game by you for a Jam! Thanks for making it, I had a blast testing and just playing Pokemon Nightshade

Final Note
If you have played Nightshade and enjoyed it, and are currently reading this review and have not played Ekat and Michael's Pokemon Ashen Frost, change that soon. Please and thank you :)

Ekat · Mar 19, 2021

The game is updated to version 1.5! The most important thing this update does is fix a set of stairs in Lily Memorial Garden that would otherwise softlock the player. Sideways stairs... my mortal nemesis.

Joroma · Mar 19, 2021

Another amazing game by an amazing developer! I had so much fun over a total of 9 hours (there is a reason for this) with some speedup. I do feel bad that you are the first person I will be using this format on, but here goes:

This game is insanely beautiful. The tilesets and characters were perfect. I wish I was this good! The whole atmosphere is very immersive; you did amazingly well with creating the mood that you wanted and fitting the creepy-but-calm theme. Don't even get me started with the music choices! There isn't any serious overall feedback I have here, because I aspire to be this good!

Some very minor notes:
Battles don't have the best animations and some sprite locations are a bit high. Battles weren't the main focus, though, so it didn't take away from the experience.
Some of the shadows on dark doorways look strange (I don't know if it's possible because I don't know how shadows work, but I can't stress enough how minor this is)
Yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about because this game looks beautiful

A great category, once again. I like the quest system a lot, and I like the variety of encounters. I'm a little surprised there wasn't a Pokédex since there are so many cool Pokémon, but it doesn't bother me much. I like the trade system, as well, and I had fun exploring the world. I never got anything out of the Nickit trader because he never sold anything, so I'd make it clearer what the player needed to do to get those offers. I thought the encounter rate was a little high, even with the black badge. I never used the white badge, but I can't imagine how high the encounter rate would be with it on. I also thought the progression of the story was good, but I would like confirmation before moving onto the next day, as I completely skipped a couple things that I wanted to do before moving on. I liked all the little secrets you put in and I did every quest that I knew about. I also liked all the little minigames, boss/triple battles, and badge system. One thing I would suggest is blocking off the factory until you go there with Hearse, because I kept thinking the puzzle was broken since I went there early. I would also suggest changing something about the opacity badge, since I spent more than two hours looking around for what to do next (yeah, my bad). I don't know what it actually looked like because I found it by clicking randomly, but you could either have it mentioned by the woman when she gives the swinub, make it glow since the power is dying, simply change the color, or have it pop up as a task/give it to the player immediately. It's definitely my fault as a player, but making it a bit more obvious probably wouldn't hurt for those stupid players out there. Other than this, a minor inconvenience was catching rare drifloon that would just self-destruct, so it was hard to complete the quest. Overall, pretty clean gameplay and nice, fun progression. I had a lot of fun and am excited to play more in the future!

Very good writing! The writing was clean, the plot was exciting, the characterization was excellent, and the dialogue was realistic. I love the theme and you did very well in conveying what you were trying to convey. No particular part was confusing to me at all, and I could understand the motives of the characters, for the most part (There weren't really high stakes for Yew needing immortality at that moment, Hearse was a little underdeveloped and kinda strange for wanting an event in a cemetery, especially since he turns out to be kinda good). Other than that, the immortality and the mentor-becomes-evil were a little cliché, which isn't that big of a deal. Also, the first interaction with Hearse seemed to have a lack of confrontation on Hearse's behalf before jumping directly into a battle, which seemed strange at the time. Overall, very impressive writing.

Here are a couple typos:
At the cemetery with Hearse (first time), "Even if you did have the permits, which I know you don't, you cannot have your funeral here"
With Hearse, throughout, "gotta'" and similar words don't use apostrophes (not a big deal, obviously)
The area with nickit, where nickit spells its name wrong and says "wears" instead of "wares"

When teaming up. I don't really know how you'd go about fixing it, though.
When adding a member to your party and items get moved around. I think I even duped an exp. share?
When trying to acquire a badge a second time and receiving it instead of another, despite dialogue saying that you can't have a duplicate. I got two shiny badges and no virus badge (don't know if they stacked)

When using high horsepower on this here sandslash. Didn't seem to happen with any other battle.

When going down these stairs (I think you got this one already)

When standing on this table

When standing on these benches (ones next to vertical railing)

When talking to some people with continual move routes, in which they just turn in place instead of continuing the move route (don't know if this was intended but it seems like it wasn't)

My team: Ludicolo, Masquerain, Mudsdale, Kricketune, Shiny Yanmega (without shiny badge), Shiny Rapidash (with shiny badge)

Great job! This game is beautiful and fun; I aspire to make a game this good. I am truly amazed that you made this in a short time span, and will be looking for more in the future!

Ekat · Mar 20, 2021

Joroma said:
Another amazing game by an amazing developer! I had so much fun over a total of 9 hours (there is a reason for this) with some speedup. I do feel bad that you are the first person I will be using this format on, but here goes:

This game is insanely beautiful. The tilesets and characters were perfect. I wish I was this good! The whole atmosphere is very immersive; you did amazingly well with creating the mood that you wanted and fitting the creepy-but-calm theme. Don't even get me started with the music choices! There isn't any serious overall feedback I have here, because I aspire to be this good!

Some very minor notes:
Battles don't have the best animations and some sprite locations are a bit high. Battles weren't the main focus, though, so it didn't take away from the experience.
Some of the shadows on dark doorways look strange (I don't know if it's possible because I don't know how shadows work, but I can't stress enough how minor this is)
Yeah, I don't know what I'm talking about because this game looks beautiful

A great category, once again. I like the quest system a lot, and I like the variety of encounters. I'm a little surprised there wasn't a Pokédex since there are so many cool Pokémon, but it doesn't bother me much. I like the trade system, as well, and I had fun exploring the world. I never got anything out of the Nickit trader because he never sold anything, so I'd make it clearer what the player needed to do to get those offers. I thought the encounter rate was a little high, even with the black badge. I never used the white badge, but I can't imagine how high the encounter rate would be with it on. I also thought the progression of the story was good, but I would like confirmation before moving onto the next day, as I completely skipped a couple things that I wanted to do before moving on. I liked all the little secrets you put in and I did every quest that I knew about. I also liked all the little minigames, boss/triple battles, and badge system. One thing I would suggest is blocking off the factory until you go there with Hearse, because I kept thinking the puzzle was broken since I went there early. I would also suggest changing something about the opacity badge, since I spent more than two hours looking around for what to do next (yeah, my bad). I don't know what it actually looked like because I found it by clicking randomly, but you could either have it mentioned by the woman when she gives the swinub, make it glow since the power is dying, simply change the color, or have it pop up as a task/give it to the player immediately. It's definitely my fault as a player, but making it a bit more obvious probably wouldn't hurt for those stupid players out there. Other than this, a minor inconvenience was catching rare drifloon that would just self-destruct, so it was hard to complete the quest. Overall, pretty clean gameplay and nice, fun progression. I had a lot of fun and am excited to play more in the future!

Very good writing! The writing was clean, the plot was exciting, the characterization was excellent, and the dialogue was realistic. I love the theme and you did very well in conveying what you were trying to convey. No particular part was confusing to me at all, and I could understand the motives of the characters, for the most part (There weren't really high stakes for Yew needing immortality at that moment, Hearse was a little underdeveloped and kinda strange for wanting an event in a cemetery, especially since he turns out to be kinda good). Other than that, the immortality and the mentor-becomes-evil were a little cliché, which isn't that big of a deal. Also, the first interaction with Hearse seemed to have a lack of confrontation on Hearse's behalf before jumping directly into a battle, which seemed strange at the time. Overall, very impressive writing.

Here are a couple typos:
At the cemetery with Hearse (first time), "Even if you did have the permits, which I know you don't, you cannot have your funeral here"
With Hearse, throughout, "gotta'" and similar words don't use apostrophes (not a big deal, obviously)
The area with nickit, where nickit spells its name wrong and says "wears" instead of "wares"

When teaming up. I don't really know how you'd go about fixing it, though.
When adding a member to your party and items get moved around. I think I even duped an exp. share?
When trying to acquire a badge a second time and receiving it instead of another, despite dialogue saying that you can't have a duplicate. I got two shiny badges and no virus badge (don't know if they stacked)

When using high horsepower on this here sandslash. Didn't seem to happen with any other battle.
View attachment 2991
When going down these stairs (I think you got this one already)
View attachment 2992
When standing on this table
View attachment 2993
When standing on these benches (ones next to vertical railing)
View attachment 2995
When talking to some people with continual move routes, in which they just turn in place instead of continuing the move route (don't know if this was intended but it seems like it wasn't)
View attachment 2996

My team: Ludicolo, Masquerain, Mudsdale, Kricketune, Shiny Yanmega (without shiny badge), Shiny Rapidash (with shiny badge)

Great job! This game is beautiful and fun; I aspire to make a game this good. I am truly amazed that you made this in a short time span, and will be looking for more in the future!

Thank you for all the wonderful feedback! Just to respond to a few points:

The battle anims are just default Essentials. I didn't have much time to mess around with them, given the timespan I was working in. I've been told the Reborn animations are slightly messed up in v18, so I didn't want to run the risk of importing those, either.
Are you referring to the entrances around the tower and power plant specifically, or were there others?
I don't include the dex in any of my games. To me, it seems like a pointless feature if you're not including fakemon/fakemon forms. (Even then, the most use I get out of it in the average fangame I play is that it takes up menu space.) Is there a particular reason you thought it should be included?
I wouldn't describe Yew as a mentor so much as I would, "A random old guy that Giselle doesn't want much to do with." Yew and his plans are cliché, but he serves the main function I wanted, which was exacerbating the tension between the MC and her boss. I don't think anyone looked at Yew and was surprised when he turned out to be eeeeevvvil, but that was never really my intention to begin with.
The underdevelopment is a major part of why I'm not happy with this game, unfortunately.
The encounter rates in this game are already set to be a fraction of what they are in standard Pokémon. I think you were just running into some bad rng :p
Yup, I've since fixed that! 3 years of dev work and sideways stairs still like to trip me up from time to time. Thankfully, not while I am on said stairs.
The lady not continuing her moveroute is deliberate, because of how XP treats custom moveroutes. Any time an event switches to a new page, the route gets restarted. This mean that she would start bonking into tables and objects and such. I'm sure if you got creative, you could even find a way to softlock yourself, so I decided to nix it.
I'll be sure to look into proofing bits like the Opacity Badge and Power Plant, so the player absolutely can't miss what they're supposed to do.

Thank you again!

Joroma · Mar 20, 2021

Ekat said:
Thank you for all the wonderful feedback! Just to respond to a few points:

The battle anims are just default Essentials. I didn't have much time to mess around with them, given the timespan I was working in. I've been told the Reborn animations are slightly messed up in v18, so I didn't want to run the risk of importing those, either.

Are you referring to the entrances around the tower and power plant specifically, or were there others?

I don't include the dex in any of my games. To me, it seems like a pointless feature if you're not including fakemon/fakemon forms. (Even then, the most use I get out of it in the average fangame I play is that it takes up menu space.) Is there a particular reason you thought it should be included?

I wouldn't describe Yew as a mentor so much as I would, "A random old guy that Giselle doesn't want much to do with." Yew and his plans are cliché, but he serves the main function I wanted, which was exacerbating the tension between the MC and her boss. I don't think anyone looked at Yew and was surprised when he turned out to be eeeeevvvil, but that was never really my intention to begin with.

The underdevelopment is a major part of why I'm not happy with this game, unfortunately.

The encounter rates in this game are already set to be a fraction of what they are in standard Pokémon. I think you were just running into some bad rng :p

Yup, I've since fixed that! 3 years of dev work and sideways stairs still like to trip me up from time to time. Thankfully, not while I am on said stairs.

The lady not continuing her moveroute is deliberate, because of how XP treats custom moveroutes. Any time an event switches to a new page, the route gets restarted. This mean that she would start bonking into tables and objects and such. I'm sure if you got creative, you could even find a way to softlock yourself, so I decided to nix it.

I'll be sure to look into proofing bits like the Opacity Badge and Power Plant, so the player absolutely can't miss what they're supposed to do.

Thank you again!

In regards to the animations, that's what I thought, and I don't think it's a big deal at all. The shadows were really minor and I wouldn't focus on them, but those places, yes. I wouldn't say the dex is important, but I was just surprised since there is a good selection of Pokémon in the game; it's not really the type of game for collecting Pokémon, so it's not like it scratches that itch, either. Again, not a big deal, just something I was curious about. Like I said, this is a very good game and you should be proud of it! Also, I'm just a random person with minor nitpicks that had a very good time playing, regardless of whatever junk my brain comes up.

Ekat · Mar 20, 2021

The game is updated to version 1.6!

Completed Pokémon Nightshade

luxdiablo

Berserk Inferno

brysoonye

Novice

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

Tristantine The Great

Thunderfist

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

AnonAlpaca

Why Do People Call Me A GOAT

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

Dr Pisy

Rookie

_pheebs

Demoness on the prowl!

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

_pheebs

Demoness on the prowl!

Foxowl

Professional Procrastinator/Idiot

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

Joroma

Novice

Ekat

That One Guy's GF

Joroma

Novice

Ekat

That One Guy's GF