Released Pokémon: Trick-Or-Treat

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DOWNLOAD: v0.1.4
Pokémon: Trick-Or-Treat
Made with Essentials v20.1

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Player beware! Pokémon: Trick-or-Treat is a delightfully spooky Halloween-themed Pokémon adventure set in an alt-universe town called Solum. Meet old friends and foes alike as you traverse from house to house collecting Pokémon, candy, and adventure on one of the most magical nights of the year: Halloween. Featuring 251 hand-picked fall- or spooky-themed Pokémon for you to collect, 8 pieces of extra-rare candy to find, guest apperances by a variety of gen 1 to 5 characters, and... zombies? Really, zombies? Who put zombies in this game?

Anyway...

Three plot lines intermingle in this adventure: there's the player's, where you go around collecting rare candy (and also Rare Candies) while trying to solve a mysterious sleepwalking sickness affeciting the town. Then there's the game's generic evil team plot... except there are two teams! Team Treat and Team Trick are both vying for control of the city as they
race each other to amass as much candy as they can before the end of the night. Finally, as you adventure, you'll hear updates from Fantina as she tries to throw The Best Halloween Party Ever. Will she succeed?! Come find out!

Currently the game includes up to three "gyms" of content, mostly because I wanted to get a release out in time for actual Halloween. But the game is currently being actively
developed, so stay tuned for further updates!

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• Welcome to Solum!
  • This game is set in the town--yes, town--of Solum, a place with quaint coziness, historic charm, and a bustling downtown. Though treated as the game's "region," the intent is to have the player feel like the adventure takes place at the city level, meaning smaller, tighter maps filled with interesting characters and beautiful environments. Everything should be comfortable for the player to traverse by foot; who trick-or-treats by bike?
  • The setting takes inspiration from the American northeast, Salem/Boston area, and my own childhood memories growing up celebrating Halloween. In the finished game, expect apple pie and hayrides as much as jump scares and pumpkins.
• Unique "Gyms"
  • While gym-type buildings exist in this game, they're not quite the same as gyms of games prior. First, there's no specific type theming; gyms are instead themed around particular Halloween archetypes, with mechanics to match.
  • Wander through a haunted house, solve a murder mystery, brew potions, take part in a costume contest; these are meant to be different enough from ordinary gyms to be fun and exciting, yet still fill the gym/dungeon niche.
• Gotta catch 'em all!
  • This game features 251 Pokémon that most closely fit in with the mid/late autumn theme. You'll find Skwovet busily gathering and storing food for the winter; Applins and Pumpkaboos hiding amongst the region's farmland; and a plethora of ghost-, dark-, psychic-, poison-, and fairy-type Pokémon!
  • Expect to find some from all generations: Beedrill, Murkrow, Claydol, Pachirisu, Swoobat, Pumpkaboo, Dewpider, Applin, and more!
• And more:
  • Costumes for you and for opponent trainers, made by yours truly!
  • Start the game with your very own Furfrou!
  • No need to worry about natures/IVs/EVs/etc: relevant items will be sold (for $$$) in mid-to-late game
  • Not one but TWO random enemy teams to beat up (coincidentally named "Team Trick" and "Team Treat")
  • With the full game, I'm planning on adding some new halloween-y minigame modes too (Pumpkaboo catching contest? Bobbing for Applins??) plus a "battle frontier"-esque area complete with a variety of interesting battle modes so look forward to that!

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Spoiler: Screenshots!

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Spoiler: Credits

Title fonts:
Pokemon Solid Normal by IPBP
Child Witch by Arendxstudio
Best of Treat by Rometheme
Monster Pumpkin by sancreastd

Tiles:
Magiscarf (Outdoor)
Akizakura16 (Indoor)
Kildario (Various)

Gen 4 OW Collection:
Neo-Spriteman
VanillaSunshine
PurpleZaffre & Maicerochico
AtomicReactor

Gen 5 Characters in Gen 4 OW Style:
DiegoWT

Gladion OW Sprite:
Lime029

XY/ORAS/USUM/SwSh Trainer Classes:
Kyledove

Several Gen6+ Trainer OW Sprites:
Taiga

Other trainer sprites:
Kildario

Character Selection Screen by FL

Relearning Moves from Party Menu:
IndianAnimator
eriedaberrie#1569
Kotaro
Gardenette

Misc Utilities Scripts by Kildario

For references and some images:
Bulbapedia and the Bulbapedia staff

HGSS and Platinum music:
ENLS's Pre-Looped Music Library

Generation 8 Animations Project:
StCooler - Lead
DarryBD99
WolfPP
ardicoozer
riddlemeree
Reborn team - Resource Pack
BellBlitzKing - Pokemon Sound Effects Pack:
Gen 1 to Gen 7 - All Attacks SFX

Generation 8 Pack for Essentials v20.1

• Battler Sprites:
  • Gen 1-5 Pokemon Sprites - veekun
  • Gen 6 Pokemon Sprites - All Contributors To Smogon X/Y Sprite Project
  • Gen 7 Pokemon Sprites - All Contributors To Smogon Sun/Moon Sprite Project
  • Gen 8 Pokemon Sprites - All Contributors To Smogon Sword/Shield Sprite Project
• Overworld Sprites
  • Gen 6+ Berry Tree Overworlds - Anarlaurendil
  • Gen 6 Pokemon Overworlds - princess-pheonix, LunarDusk, Wolfang62, TintjeMadelintje101, piphybuilder88
  • Gen 7 Pokemon Overworlds - Larry Turbo, princess-pheonix
  • Gen 8 Pokemon Overworlds - SageDeoxys, Wolfang62, LarryTurbo, tammyclaydon
  • Gen 1-5 Pokemon Overworlds - MissingLukey, help-14, Kymoyonian, cSc-A7X, 2and2makes5, Pokegirl4ever, Fernandojl, Silver-Skies, TyranitarDark, Getsuei-H, Kid1513, Milomilotic11, Kyt666, kdiamo11, Chocosrawlooid, Syledude, Gallanty, Gizamimi-Pichu, 2and2makes5, Zyon17,LarryTurbo, spritesstealer, LarryTurbo
• Icon Sprites
  • Gen 1-6 Pokemon Icon Sprites - Alaguesia
  • Gen 7 Pokemon Icon Sprites - Marin, MapleBranchWing, Contributors to the DS Styled Gen 7+ Repository
  • Gen 8 Icon Sprites - Larry Turbo, Leparagon
• Cry Credits:
  • Gen 1-6 Pokemon Cries - Rhyden
  • Gen 7 Pokemon Cries - Marin, Rhyden
  • Gen 8 Pokemon Cries - Zeak6464
• Script Credits:
  • Golisopod User, Luka S.J.
• Compilation of Resources:
  • Golisopod User, UberDunsparce

Patch for Essentials 20.1 by Maruno

"Pokémon Essentials" was created by:
Flameguru
Poccil (Peter O.)
Maruno

With contributions from:
AvatarMonkeyKirby<s>Marin
Boushy<s>MiDas Mike
Brother1440<s>Near Fantastica
FL.<s>PinkMan
Genzai Kawakami<s>Popper
Golisopod User<s>Rataime
help-14<s>Savordez
IceGod64<s>SoundSpawn
Jacob O. Wobbrock<s>the__end
KitsuneKouta<s>Venom12
Lisa Anthony<s>Wachunga
Luka S.J.<s>
and everyone else who helped out

"mkxp-z" by:
Roza
Based on "mkxp" by Ancurio et al.

"RPG Maker XP" by:
Enterbrain

Pokémon is owned by:
The Pokémon Company
Nintendo
Affiliated with Game Freak

 

[Kildario]

Minor update to 0.1.1:

• Fixed egg event crashing
• Added headbutt trees to the Red Forest map
• Fixed Deerling spawning with Spring coats
• Other various bugfixes

 

[Kildario]

Updated to 0.1.2:

• Can now relearn levelup moves via the menu screen akin to Legends: Arceus
• Added new nursery sidequest; completing it allows you to exchange heart scales for egg moves
• Added a Furfrou haircutter in the West End (can do Heart, Star, and Diamond trims)
• Furfrou trims no longer timed
• Also to incentivise people to keep Furfrou in their party, each trim gives access to one move not normally in Furfrou's moveset (similar to how Rotom's forms work, minus the type change)
  • Heart Trim: Heart Stamp
  • Star Trim: Spark
  • Diamond Trim: Accelerock
• These are, of course, subject to change in the future

Fixes:

• Gym leaders should now give the correct badges
• Corrected several tiling errors
• Various other bugfixes

 

[Aladdin]

In the game.ini file, remove the "v0.1.2" from the Pokemon Essentials title or else the game shows an error and doesn't load, I guess it's because it can't load the string of special characters, anyways the game is good!

 

[Kildario]

Thanks for the feedback! The game launches just fine for me without modifying the game.ini file, though, so unfortunately I'm not exactly sure what the issue is. But thanks for the notice, I'll keep this in mind in the future!

Glad you like the game! :)

 

[Kildario]

Happy Halloween everyone! Little update for y'all today for the holiday:

Updated to 0.1.3:

• Added new costume party variants for the three starter Pokémon included in this regional dex! Currently you get to choose one by speaking to an NPC near the murder mystery gym. They each come with a special move they don't normally learn (check spoiler below) but otherwise are identical to the normal starters, just with fun costumes :) I haven't made costumed versions of the evolutions yet so I don't recommend evolving them if you want to keep the costumes (though you can evolve them if you want!)
  
  Spoiler: Starter Special Moves

  Treecko: Night Daze
  Fennekin: Eerie Spell
  Squirtle: Anchor Shot
• I want to eventually replace most of the common items in the game with candy/spookier versions and started that with this update, so you should see some new candies/chocolates/cookies floating about.
• I changed the few trade evos in the regional dex to no longer evolve via trade. The plain trade evos now evolve when leveling (~lvl40 I believe) and the "trade with item" evos now evolve when leveled while holding said item (akin to Gligar -> Gliscor or Sneasel -> Weavile.) Not all the trade evo items are in the game yet so you can't actually do all these evolutions in the current build, but the code is there. Spoilers for full list:
  
  Spoiler: Trade Evos

  Gengar: Level to 40
  Dusknoir: Level holding Reaper Cloth
  Huntail: Level holding Deepseatooth
  Gorebyss: Level holding Deepseascale
  Aromatisse: Level holding Sachet
  Trevenant: Level to 40
  Gourgeist: Level to 40
• Since I think I've got the regional dex fully decided, I removed the files associated with Pokémon not included in the regional dex. This means a slightly smaller download size and people on lower end machines might notice slightly faster load times.
• I've also removed some excess items that I don't plan on incorporating, though the impact here is more or less negligable.
• The female player has a properly Furfrou'd backsprite now!!

Also for anyone wondering what's coming next, I have a few more things I'd like to do with this first section (one or two more story battles, some trainer rebalancing, redesigning Team Trick/Treat members, orchard minigames) then I'm going to get started working on the next section (~3 "badges") and a general spookier UI update, so stay tuned!

 

[Night_Fury]

This is a fun game. I'm really enjoying it. Thank you so much for giving the Pumpkaboo/Gourgeist line some love. Not many fangames have them and it's my favorite ghost type.

Quick note: after saving the old lady's Snubull and going back to talk to her, the dialogue finishes she turns around and just stands there leaving me unable to do anything. Thankfully I saved and can come back to her later, but any possible fix for this would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Kildario]

You're welcome, glad you're enjoying it!

Pumpkaboo is legitimately one of my favorite Pokémon, so glad to see another fan! In fact, this project started because I was brainstorming ideas with a friend for what a game with a Pumpkaboo starter might look like. I ended up not making Pumpkaboo the starter but no way I wasn't going to include it :)

As for the old lady and her Snubbull: Thanks for reminding me! I had actually noticed and did fix her event but never got around to posting the fixed version. It's back on my to-do list, should have it up within a day or so!

 

[Kildario]

Updated to 0.1.4:

• Made new sprites for the members of Team Treat and Team Trick! They no longer look like generic Rich Boys, Ladies, and Team Rocket Grunts. Hurray!
• All Team Treat members (and the one lone Team Trick fight included so far) have been retooled to better fit their costume themes. For those who want a quick summary:
  
  Spoiler: Team Revision Summary

  Team Treat M: angelic/fairy-themed, uses Pokémon like Flabébé and Togetic
  Team Treat F: bubblegum princess, uses Jigglypuff and Hatenna and the like
  Team Trick M: hellfire/devilish, likes Houndour, Growlithe, Nickit
  Team Trick F: candy and witchy, expect Applins and Murkrow galore
• The Headbutt Master's Squirtle should no longer cause the game to crash
• Fixed the Stolen Snubbull event; the nursery lady should now properly enter her house and continue the event
• Redid door event for old rod dude's house, hopefully this fixes the weird "stuck-on-door" errors

 

[TheGamingPaladin]

i am really digging the dedication to the theme here, i love Halloween and always have, but it's sadly overlooked and underrated, we all need to keep the spirit of halloween alive however we can.

 

[DeviLuce666]

I discovered a bug where I entered a building in the first town, the house next to the group of friends talking at the table, and got stuck. The game music keeps playing and the NPC girl keeps on running but whatever keys I press I can't do anything.

Edit: Had to restart the game from scratch because it happens randomly when entering any building

Edit 2: As long as you save before entering & after leaving every building I haven't encountered the glitch anymore.

 

[Kildario]

I discovered a bug where I entered a building in the first town, the house next to the group of friends talking at the table, and got stuck. The game music keeps playing and the NPC girl keeps on running but whatever keys I press I can't do anything.

Edit: Had to restart the game from scratch because it happens randomly when entering any building

Edit 2: As long as you save before entering & after leaving every building I haven't encountered the glitch anymore.

Yeah, I am aware of this bug. I'm not 100% sure what causes it. I even stripped all the door events to their bare minimum (fade out, move player, fade in) and they still sometimes stick. A fix will be implemented as soon as I find one!

(Also late reply but this game being very seasonal means I don't have motivation to work on it until late summer/early fall haha. I'm planning on resuming progress on this by September, though!)

 

[Night_Fury]

Hey! Just wanted to say it's that time of year and I was hoping to see an update soon. In the mean time I just uploaded a short playthrough video to help get the game on people's mind. I hope you like it and that we get to see more soon.


View: https://youtu.be/2xa6Ae2cOr0

 

[Kildario]

Alright, next update is taking a bit longer to get going for a variety of reasons, but I figured I could at least break the radio silence a little and share a bit of what I've been working on.

I did start mapping out the next section. It'll be another ~3 gyms worth of places to explore when it's finished, running down the eastern side and along a bit of coast. Hopefully will feel a bit different than the suburban + forestland that the first area comprises :)

While working on this, I ran into an issue that I struggled a bit with last year: I like the look of the tileset I'm using, but larger objects (notably buildings and trees) are drawn to spill over slightly onto neighboring grid squares. They look great, but it makes it hard to tile some more complex environments, thanks to RPGMaker's 3-layer maximum. Faced with this, I COULD have altered the tiles so they sit better on the underlying grid and then fixed all the mapping and events. But instead I decided this would be a fantastic time to practice making my own tileset!

Little preview of the new tiles, it's a quick mockup of the player's starting area. Still WIP, so keep that in mind:

Spoiler: New tiles!

So that's what I've been up to, mostly. Trying to get new tiles made. The upside to this is that I can hopefully make the buildings and such look a bit more "New England" than they did previously, which should be nice. Once the tiles are done, I'm going to remap things (should go decently fast since I have the areas already designed) then fix events, then back to the new stuff. Will be playing around with the lighting a bit too; the game is currently quite bright overall and not really giving the "mid-autumn night" feel I want haha.

Going to try to communicate a bit more moving forward. Maybe weekly updates? Idk, we'll see lol.

Happy Halloween! Hope y'all are enjoying the holiday :)

 

[Kildario]

Starting our weekly updates:

I was playing around earlier this week with lighting effects, trying to see if I can get an idea of what I might want. Went through a couple of the fog tutorials on this site (thanks, Elle and Aki!) and followed their examples, muddling around with things until I got something that looked good. The following is a mockup, not an in-game example, but I think if I can get this kind of effect, it'll help sell the premise a bit:

It's roughly the same image from the last post just with an extra layer of lighting effects added on top, if you wanted to compare the two! Gonna see if I can get fogs working in-game and if I can get them to look kind of like this, will help make the game even more special I feel :)

That's about all I wanted to share this time. Still working on tiles and etc. Thanks for reading!

 

[Kildario]

Following up on the fogs, I did a quick test in-game to get them to show up. Took a bit of tweaking but look, no seams!

That's the border between the starting area and the first route, now slightly darker! Note that I did this test on the current release version of the game, hence the old tiles. Of course, the above screenshot could've been achieved via the time-of-day tint, but what I like about the fogs conceptually is they allow for more variable lighting, like this:

where I darkened the unwalkable area in the trees to make it, idk, "spookier."

Fogs interact with connected maps in a bit of a funny way as they're tiled across the map and this is somewhat of an inelegant solution to that (where I just gave the fog images a lot of empty space at the bottom so you can't see the tiling at all.) Ideally we'd just... disable the fog tiling, but I haven't figured out where that is yet. The bigger issue with using very large images is it could introduce extra game lag, so I'll be on the lookout for that as I experiment. If the fogs ruin performance too much, I can always just use the flat day tint, nbd.

So moderate success on the fogs! I also started playing around with some UI redesign, but no mockups for that yet, sorry. I keep going back and forth on whether UI elements should be sleek and modern or, like, spooky-ornate. Maybe both? Idk, we'll see if I can get something that looks good.

 

[TechSkylander1518]

How do you run this game? What software allows this to run?

https://eeveeexpo.com/how-to-play/

 

[Amano]

Just beat everything that you have so far, and it was a blast! The aesthetic is great, and I love the costumes. Pumpkaboo is a menace with his available moveset. I love him! Couldnt find many other dark or ghost types though. Not sure if I just missed them.

Only ran into one bug so far. Noctowls pokemon icon in menus is coming up as a question mark. Otherwise very smooth!

Also, will there be additional costumes to choose from at some point?