Developer diaries #2 - January 2022

Entry 2

After nearly a month of delay due to increased ambitions (Pokédex interface and difficulty menu among others), Pokémon Sacred Phoenix has finally been presented to the English communities of Pokecommunity and Relic Castle.

Personally, I was expecting to generate some hype, but it didn’t happen. The balance is not negative either. There were about 410 downloads in 72 hours and about 30 people who joined the official Discord. There was even a small video of a Youtuber presenting each new fangame that appeared.

This contact with the English community allowed me to exchange with them and to see three weak points on the project.


Areas for improvement

A too short demo

This is the first point that came up. Despite a long list of real features (it’s not fancy, it’s really coded, tested and functional), there is too little playable content to be highlighted.
As a result, players just don’t want to play it and prefer to wait for more content. But the project needs an initial impulse to get known and therefore recruited.
The (very) positive point is that they recognize the potential of the fangame.

The language barrier

Since its inception in November 2018, the Discord has only had a French audience. By inviting English speakers to it, they felt like they were facing a language barrier, despite the fact that the main rooms were translated into their language. To have a higher proportion of English messages, English speakers have to come and participate... but it’s difficult when they see that 95% of the messages posted here have been French for the last 3 and a half years. It’s a vicious circle.
We also find this same problem on the official site and the forum, but due to the lack of a Webmaster, it is not our priority.

Minimum system requirements too high

Secondly, a third problem appeared: unlike Pokémon Essentials, the game engine used (PSDK) requires to run on a dedicated graphics card. If it runs on a CPU graphics chipset, almost no images are displayed (including maps), making the game unplayable. About 10% of the players are affected. Even though this is a small number, it is not well received, as gamers expect any computer to be able to run a 2D game, especially when Essentials is running on their machine.
There’s no way to fix this unless Pokémon Sacred Phoenix were to migrate to Godot or Pokémon Essentials. But with 1.6 MB of custom scripts to migrate and make compatible, it’s mission impossible if no coder is recruited. This brings us back to another vicious circle: recruitment.


A need for recruitment

Projects of equivalent age and ambition usually gather around 15-20 people. Sacred Phoenix has only 4 active members for almost 2 years. This generates bottlenecks, especially in pixel art.

However, the project needs to be known to be able to recruit. And to get known, it is necessary to know how to communicate, something difficult for an amateur project.
It’s sad to say, but communication alone represents 50% of the success of a video game, even if the video game is of poor quality. That’s how Pokémon Phoenix Rising was able to generate as much hype as Pokémon Uranium, even though their demo was only 6 hours long: thanks to a perfectly mastered communication and a team of about 15 people.
Fortunately, nothing is set in stone and communication can improve. It will just take time without outside help.


This month’s goals

After focusing on coding for 3 months, I’m going back to my pixel artist hat to finish what is required for Tintignac and Chapter 1. This will bring the game time from 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Without new recruitment, we can’t expect any new content for another 6 months.

Remember that since Sacred Phoenix takes place in an ancient era, this requires a lot of graphical reworks.
• The tilesets in the first place. Pokémon’s public tilesets all correspond to a modern universe and are therefore unusable as soon as it concerns human constructions.
• Menus that must be in a graphic style that matches the atmosphere of the game.
• The characters of the game. Impossible to reuse the official art of Pokémon because of the difference of era. So, they all have to be created from scratch, including the generic NPCs like the Youngster or the Fisherman.
I also have some pixel art from Fakemons waiting for validation. They should be revealed on Deviantart soon.

The coding of the crafting menu, a central gameplay element, will also be expected. The coding of the interface of the Time Flute, theoretically unlocked at the end of Chapter 1, will also have a good probability of being realized.

Some hope?

A month ago, a coder expressed his wish to reorganize the project and help us communicate better. He hasn’t had a chance to get into action yet, but he should in the next few days.
This is perhaps the meeting that will help the project to take off and overcome its weak points.