Released Pokémon Sacred Phoenix

Amras Anárion · Jan 1, 2024

Happy New Year and good health in 2024

We kick off this new cycle with a Sacred Phoenix feature under the sign of friendship. The Shiny Leaves of HGSS will be present in Keltios, rewarding you for traveling through Keltios with your Walking Pokémon bathed in love.

At the same time, talking regularly to your "follow me" will reward you with items they can find, the same as with the Pick Up ability.

Dharakjoo · Jan 4, 2024

I can't wait to want to see Chapter 1. ^w^

safr · Jan 5, 2024

Amras Anárion said:
Happy New Year and good health in 2024
We kick off this new cycle with a Sacred Phoenix feature under the sign of friendship. The Shiny Leaves of HGSS will be present in Keltios, rewarding you for traveling through Keltios with your Walking Pokémon bathed in love.
At the same time, talking regularly to your "follow me" will reward you with items they can find, the same as with the Pick Up ability.

Happy new year

Amras Anárion · Jan 19, 2024

Field effects in the style of Pokémon Reborn are coming soon to Sacred Phoenix. One of the oldest Ideals to become a Truth, making it the first French fan-game to implement them.

My system was conceived as a whole encompassing terrain, climates and battle auras, all three influences having been balanced together. This video focuses on the climate system and its influence: no less than 15 weather conditions will be present in my fangame, some of which are amplifiable or cumulative.
It's also an opportunity to show off Mega-Dragonite ant its mastery of storms.

safr said:
Happy new year

Happy new year to you too!

Dharakjoo said:
I can't wait to want to see Chapter 1. ^w^

I've almost finished coding the field effects, which means the next release won't be long in coming (less than a week, that's for sure).

Amras Anárion · Jan 27, 2024

News dev diary entry:

I am announcing a new entry for the developer diary. It's been 7 months since I last wrote anything on it, preferring instead short and raw Youtube videos showing the latest coded features, announced for those who follow my channel, my Discord or my Twitter.

Developer diaries #11 - January 2024

Entry 10

Half a year has passed since the last entry in this journal. The reason for this is that I’ve been throwing all my energies into tasks that are not tangible from the public’s point of view: the creation of databases and the coding of features planned since the birth of the project.
As a result, there have been no public updates in all this time, and it was pointless to keep players waiting for the fangame, given that my roadmap made any new release impossible for a long time.

Many Ideals realized behind the scenes

And things happened! To avoid making a long text, I will make a list of all the new features:
– Move database completed.
– Progress on the Pokémon database, with almost 210 forms coded. Missing creatures will be coded as the need arises.
– Fully functional Shadow and Light Pokémons.
– New item database, including HD mugshot system
– Integration of Sacred Mega Evolution (possible thanks to the new item database).
– New database for wild encounters, with dynamic operation according to season, time and weather + random double battles.
– Integration of Alpha Pokémons (which have a one-in-128 chance of appearing randomly)
– Integration of the first regional forms, Mega-Evolutions and Fakemons of Keltios, some of which can be obtained as early as Route 1. (The public demo of February 2023 has none of this!)
– Integration of the first Pokémons from the last two generations (around thirty are planned). New abilities and moves are also included.
– Mapping of almost the entire exterior of Eleanor + macro-mapping of the next 4 Shires (all their maps are schematized in OW and geolocated on the worldmap thanks to a hand-crafted database).
– Thanks to Altarax, forging crafting is now functional, and the option menu has been improved.
– Translation of the Game design document about friendship (including some game design adjustments).
– And the latest addition: Pokémon Reborn-style Field Effects (including a weather system with 15 weather conditions in addition to terrains) are now fully coded, including a 90-page game design document written (and translated) for the occasion.

For all the details, I refer you to the official changelog.

A break in recruitment

After a fairly successful recruitment campaign launched last spring, I realized that it was difficult to keep new recruits motivated, for one simple reason: from their point of view, they don’t see any progress on the fangame. This nuance is important and legitimizes their feelings, since there have been no public updates to Sacred Phoenix for 11 months. This gives them the illusion that nothing is moving forward, and that their contributions will end up without a destiny.

In truth, all my energy in 2023 has been devoted to coding and creating databases, which is a non-tangible aspect of fangame development. Now that this is largely achieved, I will finally be able to focus on progressing the scenario, that is to say tangible content from the point of view of the players (and team members).

In the meantime, I’m taking a break from recruiting (although any spontaneous applications will still be gladly accepted) and will relaunch a campaign when I’m really in a tangible creation phase. I may even ask for an RPG Maker mapper, something I never thought I’d delegate.

This month’s goals

First thing I’m announcing: a fangame update will be released tomorrow! It is both shadow and light, because so much has changed:
– All the features listed above are now in game.
– … but there’s still no additional scenario (apart from the beginning of an interior in Kerdus Manor).

That said, things are going to speed up from now on! I’ve got all the scripts I need to finish Chapter 1, and the wild encounter zones are all done for the first three routes. In concrete terms, all I need is the artwork for the score book (even if it means using a placeholder) and a few tiles for the Tintignac interiors, but a second update with real additional content is likely to arrive in less than a month’s time.

We look forward to seeing you at Keltios. Now that the tree has taken root, it can grow!

My old entries have been published on my Deviantart journal. For those who want to read them, this is where you will find them.
https://www.deviantart.com/anarlaurendil/journal/

Concerning the latest videos, here they are:

https://www.sacredphoenix.fr/res/Images/Prez/Icones-32px/643-Icone%20Reshiram%2032px.png

Shiny Leaf and Leaf Crown from HGSS

Combinable weathers (Field Effects)

Pledge moves (Field Effects)

And finally, the big news:

Tomorrow I'm releasing a Sacred Phoenix update containing all these new gameplay features.
Yes, things will finally move after 11 months without a public update.

safr · Jan 27, 2024

Amras Anárion · Jan 28, 2024

An update for Sacred Phoenix (0.4.0.6) has just been released.
As said in the devs' diary in the previous news, this update is paradoxical in that it doesn't yet include any story content, but adds many extra features, the most memorable being Field Effects and dynamic wild encounters that pave the way for first Fakemons and regional forms.
In any case, this is a milestone that will allow me to finally concentrate on the scenario.

In other words, the pace of updates will accelerate drastically. The next update may arrive within 2 weeks.

You can download it below with the changelog, and good news: saves from an old game are now compatible (but your creatures' moveset and Pokédex will be reset due to a change in structure, so be warned).

Download link: https://www.sacredphoenix.fr/res/Telechargements/Fan-game/Sacred_Phoenix.7z
(Alpha 0.4.0.6, about 30 minutes of gameplay)

Changelog: Current development cycle: "Yggdrasil's Roots

https://www.sacredphoenix.fr/res/Telechargements/PDF/FAQ/Changelog Sacred Phoenix_EN.pdf

Dharakjoo · Jan 29, 2024

Amras Anárion said:
An update for Sacred Phoenix (0.4.0.6) has just been released.
As said in the devs' diary in the previous news, this update is paradoxical in that it doesn't yet include any story content, but adds many extra features, the most memorable being Field Effects and dynamic wild encounters that pave the way for first Fakemons and regional forms.
In any case, this is a milestone that will allow me to finally concentrate on the scenario.
In other words, the pace of updates will accelerate drastically. The next update may arrive within 2 weeks.

You can download it below with the changelog, and good news: saves from an old game are now compatible (but your creatures' moveset and Pokédex will be reset due to a change in structure, so be warned).

Download link: https://www.sacredphoenix.fr/res/Telechargements/Fan-game/Sacred_Phoenix.7z
(Alpha 0.4.0.6, about 30 minutes of gameplay)

Changelog: Current development cycle: "Yggdrasil's Roots
https://www.sacredphoenix.fr/res/Telechargements/PDF/FAQ/Changelog Sacred Phoenix_EN.pdf

I-I see... I guess we have to wait the story content then. Oh, thanks for the warning Amras. 0_0

hoshe · Mar 5, 2024

Amras Anárion said:
I reveal to you today the ninth entry of my development diary. Since it's about 8 minutes of reading, I put it under the spoiler.
You will discover what the current obstacles to development are and what our objectives are. This month's entry focuses on coding, the main bottleneck.

Developer diaries #9 - January 2022

Entry 9

Three months have passed since the last entry. This is due to a slowing down of the development, itself due to several factors. But like the waves of the ocean, the progress is made in pulses: little progress until mid-December, but then it’s back to work with a great progress on the coding! This will be the theme of this ninth journal!

Pharaonic coding ambitions

Around mid-September, I started a huge project: redoing the database of all Pokémon moves from scratch. This step was necessary if I wanted to implement new data (the native PSDK one didn’t allow me to do so). It was also the perfect opportunity to add all the attacks added by Sacred Phoenix, never coded except for a handful of Shadow-type.

Before any coding, I had to establish the game design around the Pokémon attacks and ask myself all the right questions:
– How to define an attack and in what format?
– What are the possible categories, types, and side effects?
– Since I’ve divided the Status attacks into 3 subcategories (Buff, Debuff and Terrain), which ones will be in which subcategory?
– How many methods will it take to define all the existing moves?
– What are the possible attack ranges?
– What tags will I use and what are their effects?
– For the added data (Mana, Breath, elemental damage on the field...), what values should I assign?
– And of course, what rebalancing and modifications to make to all this? ...something already started 3 years ago! A perfect opportunity to take a critical look at all the existing moves and revise the ones that need it, while establishing harmonized changes to my own mechanics.

This will be done in Word format (not Excel), as it allows me a more advanced layout and the use of a color code to mark my changes compared to the vanilla mechanisms of Pokémon:
– Red = dexited move
– Dark red = nerfed element
– Blue = modification without significant impact on power
– Green = improved element
That’s about half of all the moves that will be rebalanced. This can range from a minor change (like a very slightly adjusted power) to a more profound overhaul by integrating my Fields Effects for example (but that’s another topic!).

The second major advantage of having such a list, sorted by type and then category, is that it gives me a clean and organized view of all existing moves. It’s a great help to me to establish the movepool of my Fakemons (or to revise those of the already existing creatures), because the official list established by date of addition (and thus by generation) has a clearly random arrangement ... not to mention that it doesn’t refer to my new attacks, nor exclude the ones I’ve decided to dexit (about 160 out of the 900 existing official ones).

An excerpt of shadow-type attacks: some are new, others have been balanced

From Ideal to Truth

Now I have to write down all these ideas. So, I start by writing the list of attacks and all the characteristics that will be called by the code (type, power, accuracy, list of tags...)
I start at the beginning of October and I manage to maintain a cruising rhythm by referencing 40 new moves per day. But when I got to the 4th generation ones, my motivation started to wane. At the end of October, I was at 400 referenced attacks; then I stagnated around 500-600 until the beginning of December, adding only 10 or 20 on the rare days when I had courage.

Around December 10th was a tipping point: Eysselia took the lead and decided to give me a deadline to finish this damn list of abilities. Even though the deadline itself was not met (I would have finished the game design document 3 days late), it allowed me to go full steam ahead and finish the 300 missing moves in 10 days, even allowing me the luxury of including the brand-new Gen 9’s attacks!

But we still had to transform the game design into concrete code! Let’s go for a long copy-paste session from the Word to the Ruby script, abusing the [Ctrl] + [H] and regexes to semi-automate the formatting as much as possible! Don’t forget to create methods to extract the desired data and then test the code to hunt for bugs. (A Class migration is very delicate to manage!) This took me about ten more days.

Putting it into practice in code. The majority of flags are managed by independent lists.

When the Field Effects invite themselves to the party ...

Today, this key step is almost finished. I just have to check that the attack’s methods (the “FunctionCode” in Essentials jargon) – completely renamed – are all existing in the new code. And that’s when I realized that some vanilla mechanics have never been coded in the game, even though some of them date back to Gen 6.
So, I went back to work on another important project that I had planned since the birth of the fangame: the Field Effects. Luckily, the game design on this feature was written in large part during the month of October, when my motivation was wavering for the referencing of moves. Thus, I wouldn’t have wasted my time and already have a base on which to start my coding!
Estimated time to code this feature and reach this additional goal: 15 days.

The other coding projects

Once this major Ideal has become a Truth, I will have to resume my main objectives that I left in September, namely to code the crafting system (yes, more coding!) and to finish the scenario, the Event-Making and the mapping of the second town of the game.
Don’t forget that I am the only person with coding skills in the team. All of these tasks rest solely on my shoulders, which undoubtedly makes programming the bottleneck of the project.
At least, I tell myself that all the code is already ready and will significantly facilitate my migration to another game engine such as Godot or Essentials. The raw data is already formatted, I would only have to create the methods so that the game uses mine and not the ones native to the framework.

A word about savegame compatibility

Such a profound change in the data structure unfortunately makes old saves incompatible, as there are too many conflicts to solve. Furthermore, coding “compatibility patches” significantly impairs the readability of the code and the performance of the game (especially when they are routines called in combat).
So, I took the opportunity of this reset to remove all the lines of code that are dedicated to old savegames compatibility. It’s also the perfect opportunity to modify the Pokémon data structure. As the data structure will be swollen with about a hundred of new data (I plan to manage a large history of actions and achievements of your magical creatures), it is important to cut the dead branches and to trim the thick ones. I’m just hoping to have time to restructure everything I want about Pokémon so that there is no future save incompatibilities (at least as long as I stay on PSDK).

One thing is sure: we are officially leaving the “Roots of Yggdrasil” cycle to move towards “The Branches of Knowledge”, a cycle that is characterized by significant changes on the databases. The next update will be a 0.4!

The sinking of Deviantart

It’s impossible not to mention this in our diary as it has been one of the causes of demotivation in the last few weeks.
Deviantart and its new “anti-NSFW” policy blindly assigned to an artificial intelligence has caused a significant loss of visibility to the project (from 40 to 80% of views drop!), and in turn a loss of morale on the team. Indeed, our Deviantart account alone represented more than 50% of the public visibility of Sacred Phoenix. It hurts my heart to see some of the images of our portfolio shadow-banned and crossed out with a big “mature content” for unregistered users (as much as 80% of our views), because a robot decided so, while our fangame has never published a mature artistic work.
So, we went looking for alternatives and decided to promote Sacred Phoenix in English on two new social networks: Instagram and Tumblr (in addition to Twitter where the communication is done in French). This will avoid having all our eggs in one basket.

It’s also an opportunity to improve our communication by doing more quality and less quantity, as I was already doing on PokéCommunity and Relic Castle. Before, raw images were published one by one on Deviantart. Now, our art is revealed with the colors of the project. It feels more professional.

My old entries have been published on my Deviantart journal. For those who want to read them, this is where you will find them.
https://www.deviantart.com/anarlaurendil/journal/

this is some incredible art work id love to play it some time when it gets finished

Amras Anárion · Mar 10, 2024

Introducing a major new NPC in Keltios: the bard (or bardess, depending on location).
This character has the same functions as Jack of Sword and Shield ( https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Jack_(Galar) ). Like him, who used to be found in every Pokémon center in Galar, every inn will have at least one bard offering these services, all free of charge.
And a little bonus: these minstrels will agree to challenge you to a battle in front of the inn's clientele, allowing you to earn a little money. These battles will be repeatable, with a delay of 1 to 2 days before they can be faced again.

That's one more major feature completed, offering a welcome Quality of Life to optimize your party.

In terms of progress, Tintignac is completely finished, if we disregard the scripting inside the Kerdus Manor, which remains to be done. The stores are up and running, and even the mills have a purpose. (I'll let you find out.)
All that's left to write and script is the final phase of Chapter 1 (bringing the Score book back to Fintan in his manor.), as well as scripting the initiation to the forge.

hoshe said:
this is some incredible art work id love to play it some time when it gets finished

I hope so too, as I still have 3 important elements to put in place before release:

Script the forge initiation in Kerdus Manor (+ repeatable battle with Kerdus to propose)
Script the end of Chapter 1 in Fintan Manor
Map and script events at Talonflames' Farm.

+ the finishing touch: place three Trainers on Route 2 and three more on the first half of Route 3, not forgetting to block the crossing points.

The next update will therefore have a minimum of 11 Trainers. That's quite a change from the 3 Trainers in the current demo, which has been stuck at this level for 2 or 3 years.

Amras Anárion · May 2, 2024

An update for Sacred Phoenix has been released on April 27th. Welcome to 0.4.0.7!

On the menu: triple, Horde and SOS battles... and above all... additional content!

After 2 years and 9 months in which the main quest ended at the start of Chapter 1, this one is now complete. We've also gone from 3 to 15 unique Trainers (not counting scripted wild battles) plus 2 side quests, giving you a total of 2 hours of gameplay if you do this optional content with the main story arc. Things should speed up in the future, now that 80% of the planned features have been coded.

Coming up: Gortelda, the Ivy Tower dungeon and the first Augur battle! The download link is available in the first post of this thread, as usual.

Note: the game is currently in version 0.4.0.8, a hotfix to fix some bugs having been published on April 28th.

Released Pokémon Sacred Phoenix

Amras Anárion

Trainer

Dharakjoo

Novice

safr

Elite Trainer

Amras Anárion

Trainer

Amras Anárion

Trainer

safr

Elite Trainer

Amras Anárion

Trainer

Dharakjoo

Novice

hoshe

Rookie

Amras Anárion

Trainer

Amras Anárion

Trainer