Well… That make about 8 weeks I didn’t published a newsletter. The longest time span since the beggining of it. I may have glanced over a few things this time, so it likely won’t be as good quality as usual, but it should still be usefull.
It’s just I have many side project (like many people).
Also, this one is the longest running one I consistently work on, put aside my work on reverse engineering EOS and it’s file format, which ended up making numerous project.
Finally… This one is long… Don’t be surprised if it’s a bit laggy.
MysteryMail 2 (Branching Chaos) finished and published
The second edition of MysteryMail has finished, been streamed and the stream has been published on YouTube.
This edition used 2 branch, with the same initial cutscene, but with the following development being independent (and simultaneous).
Alpha news… good ones and other ones I had to share !
Alpha's development is getting slower lately, and for a reason: yes-life caught up, and a big chunk of good things in my life appeared, I'm less into the mood to develop Alpha, more in the mood to live my life with everything I love, this project no longer being my main drive in my life
Everything is perfectly fine though, I still have news to share with you!
First things first, I completed a feature called Memory Battles and added a new item: the Dream Catcher. You can have a rematch against special bosses with it in the Bag. Special interactions with it include Old Ruins, you can visit them through a cutscene in Post-Game in case you want to see this beautiful place once again 👀
Then I added “Mission levels” for rewards. Upon graduating from the Guild, you will gain a higher amount of Explorer Points and a way bigger amount of Explorer Points once you clear the Scizor post-Darkrai story arc.
Along with this addition I started to consider something with Wigglytuff post-Darkrai and with the dynamic Explorer Points reward, I wanted to also consider dynamic Reward Money reward. For every 5 legendary Pokémon you recruit, the amount of the team's share for mission rewards is increased by 5% and capped at 50% once you recruit every single legendary Pokémon and special species (Future Trio for instance). Wigglytuff also rewards you with Premier Gifts every 2 legendary recruitments and… Perfect Apples. Yup.
A gameplay addition I've shared for a while: the Mysteriosity feature is close from being completed! Mysteriosity 5's Terra Incognita and Mysteriosity 6's One-Shot mode are still missing since they are harder to implement (and I'm lazy ngl), but I have added the Flygon NPC which lets you switch or disable Mysteriosity for Mystery Parts and lets you know more about Mysteriosity settings.
Finally, big big shotouts to @baroness faron for the commission!!!! Regidrago and Regieleki sprites were really not that great and I jumped the gun to ask her for new sprites, and here they are! I hope you like them 👀
Check her work here: https://www.deviantart.com/hearttheglaceon
Deving Alpha once again after a 3 weeks break and a wonderful week with my closest friend
Here are two screenshots: the first one showcases dynamic Money Pouch expansion, the second one shows one a new reward system, close to Genshin's Battle Pass
I'll work on my own.
Stay tuned!
should definitively make better image embedding in this newsletter too…
And one last message from Tweeter
Seeing the numbers my last post did is heartwarming, really
I wanted you all to know the project has no ETA, I have moments when I don't work on the project too much so…
To help me with new Alpha scripted events/quests I'm looking for story writers!
DMs opened: Mond#3333
PMD: Delusion v1.2
By Argonien|Rayasa|✠ in the SkyTemple Discord server
Delusion V1.2 | Soon™
Art by @knightsthespacefox
Later
Team Stardust presents: PMD Delusion V1.2 Whats new?
A whole Special Episode with new maps and a lot of background story
Some Updated/Reworked scenes for the main story
A fleshed out overworld that's worth to explore
something that got spoilered and that I don’t know how to put in the newsletter yet.
Available in:
English
German
French
The Special Episode gets unlocked during the main Story Due to substantial changes to the inner workings of the Save system, old saves are not compatible with V1.2
Spanish is currently not supported for the special episode and lacks text so it's not recommended to play with this language. Similar situation for Italian https://hacks.skytemple.org/h/delusion
And a minor fix was later published, so this is not 1.2.01. The link is still the same.
I’ll add that there are some minor textual issue in the French translation. I’ll probably work to fix that for a potential future version. And overall try to improve the translation experience of PMD hacks (including somehow adding support for those famous narrow (unbreakable) space in SkyTemple).
PMD Retold chapter 22 and 23
By Yakkomon in the SkyTemple Discord server, more than 10 minutes ago
PMD: Whisper of Wisdom will feature a different “player insertion”. The player will not be physically in the game, but being some kind of “voice” that the main characters can listen to! Your decisions will affect the pacing of the story progression.
Explorers of Hell and Heaven 2.0 and 2.1 released
Remainder with the differences between Hell and Heavens: Heavens feature the base game story, while Hell changes the dialogue, which contains insults, mention to death and this kind of stuff (should find a better description for those).
The 16 july on Babou’s guild by Babou
The latest big update for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Hell & Heaven is here! Feel free to check out the trailer on YouTube and Twitter and feel free to share it! The changelog is in the download link. It is VERY HIGHLY recommended to restart your adventure to get the most out of the new features present! @everyone
the 24 august, on the SkyTemple’s Discord Guild, by Babou
Hey everyone! I'm finally here to announce the release date of 2.1 of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon : Explorers of Heaven : Tuesday August 30th, expect these new features:
Mega Evolutions
3 new dungeons : Luminose Island, Paradise Garden & Infinite Land
2 new starters: Mienfoo & Deerling
New items
Easy and Hard Mode
Master Player Challenge
The 4 gems
And many other things!
I hope you are hype! It's coming in 1 week! If you want to interact with the community, participate in the Master Player challenge, keep up to date with future news, or test Explorers of Hell, feel free to join our discord: https://discord.gg/6QbPHYZDtg
And on the 30/08/2022, the 2.1 updates released (there some minor update in the mean times too. But this newsletter is already long enought.
On SkyTemple’s discord Guild, by Babou
Your patience has been rewarded: Here comes Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Heaven update 2.1! Lots of new features and changes, I hope you'll like this update! Feel free to participate to the Master Player challenge on my server to be among the first to enter the legend! :MiiCool:
Thanks to all beta testers for their hard work, especially @Mond (Explorers of Alpha), without him this update would not be the same at all. Good luck and good game everyone!
After all this time, the adventure you know and love is back! Travel far and dive deep in PMD: Explorers of the Unknown v0.3! The update is available to download and play right now! Go find the game here: https://skytemple.org/unknown. Additionally, don't forget to join the Discord server! https://discord.gg/CckA8Y5bRw
One day, a human wakes up in the middle of nowhere, having turned into a Pokémon.
Not too long after, they stumble upon Team Basil, a friendly exploration team.
What marvelous adventures await our recruited hero?
Find out in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of the Unknown!
I really need to put better image handling. The file above is more than 8MiB. Server side resizing wouldn’t be a luxury…
Info on PMD: Sun Town’s Secrets
By Pazkallan in the Team Discord Discord server
Well, it's the date that I originally set for myself to make progress! If you figured the binary out, congratulations, it wasn't clever I'm sorry
Well, here's the deal! I still don't have a public demo, and I'm really not sure when I will. Instead of going on an apology and saying everything that 2022 has put in my way, though, I figured I would tell you a bit of the development process. After all, the trailer I made for the direct way back when was pretty vague, and you guys could use some details. Some baseline spoilers ahead, so I will put the rest of this post in spoiler tags.
So… who is the main character? This has changed a few times in development (causing me to scrap a lot of scenes honestly) but as of now I think I have it settled. The base EoS main character and partner… are not the main characters, actually. Instead, I tried something a bit creative.
The main character is a Zoroark! The personality test, instead of determining what pokemon you become, now determines what pokemon the Zoroark uses as an illusion to blend in with the people of Treasure Town and Sun Town. The illusion animation, animated by JaiFain, was the spoilered animation I showed in January. Why would they need to blend in, one might ask? Well, that's where I can get into the actual main premise of this hack, and I can't believe I haven't said anything on this yet. Sorry about that!
This Zoroark was born into a scheme of sorts. They are a denizen of the mysterious Sun Town, of course. Many of the pokemon that reside there are also Zoroark, blending in for a reason that I won't spoil just yet. Every now and then, a select few residents are chosen to go out to the world at large and stir up some small-scale tourism. It seems like a nice way to share their town with others and make some on the side, so what could be the problem?
Most pokemon who take the journey to Sun Town never return. Thus, you as the Zoroark are chosen to be sent out next to the bustling city of Treasure Town. What mysteries could you unravel, and what conspiracies could you reveal? Will you choose to adhere to your own society's values, or will you attempt to flip the organization on its head? Using a series of branching paths with a series of endings that I can only describe as being inspired by Undertale, the player will explore both towns and discover just how far everyone is willing to go… for a little power.
As always, thank you for still waiting around after all this time of me not saying anything and not having anything to show. I sincerely hope I will have a demo by the end of the year, classes and life events permitting. I'll keep chipping away! Ironically, even if I have the server as Team Discern, this project is still just me working on it, which I may want to change after a playable product is released. Who knows, though? I'll just have to see when the time comes.
Hope you enjoy those details too. Yoom-yah and a toast to 2023 being a better year in advance,
Paz
Yah! Finally some basic spoiler with just a few lines of CSS. Notice how the images aren’t spoilered. I’ll probably have to fix that someday…
Finally made an intro cutscene and demo trailer for my hack, all recorded in game using DeSmuME (Phanpy and Munchlax are demo heros and partners, randomized for the cutscene), Eventually need to get rid of some placeholder assets too.
a part of my (work in progress) hack. can't figure out how to move scenes without those visual oddities, but no matter. as long as they don't break anything, i'm cool with it. and chatot teleporting at the end fits so well with the energy of the hack, i'm going to leave it
don't mind the thumbnail on the video. i just stuck that in because i didn't like the thumbnails youtube showed me
Some major fixes for sprites and replays in this one. It also provides better sprite testing controls. These changes were deemed necessary to push out before the big one related to string assets, so that update will be for next time. https://github.com/audinowho/PMDODump/releases/tag/v0.5.20
for 0.6.0
Version 0.6.0 Released
Since the last major release, not much has changed on the player-side, but a lot has changed on the editor-side:
The updater can be updated. If you haven't redownloaded the updater since 0.5.4, it is highly recommended to do so now.
Modding system has been made more robust, with testing buttons in editors, multi-mod loading, and data identified by names instead of numbers.
Controller buttons are recognized!
A number of tweaks to gameplay and move effects for balancing.
Many crash and save-corruption bugs fixed; much thanks to our linux users!
The process of migrating tutorials is now underway. Look forward to a new site to host all the data!
later
Version 0.6.1 Released
Fixes regressions found in the editor from using string assets. Also adds a few new options for cutscene creation.
Version 0.6.2 Released
This update adds dependency and load order! Also fixed an issue with the updater that kept old data from previous versions. Please update PMDOSetup. Additionally, a mod change has been implemented, so @Modder will need to reserialize their mods.
PMD Halcyon
By Palika in the SkyTemple Discord server
Figured I should do something more formal in here, this is the last time I will post about it…
I have been working for nearly the past 2 years on a PMD fangame called Halcyon with an original story line that aims to recapture the vibes that explorers had. Its goal is to be PMD2 2 I guess you could say. It is a mod for PMDO, so you need to have PMDO to play it.
Currently I have a 2 chapter demo that is jam packed for only being two chapters right now. I've spent a lot of time on it and would like to see if people are interested in trying it so they can give feedback on it.
Current features:
35 Starters and partners to choose from (some such as tepig and popplio are not present due to missing sprites from the community repo.)
2 entire chapters of brand new story.
a dojo system that currently includes a basic maze and a scripted tutorial
Completely original maps. Assets are mostly reused from PMD1 and PMD2, but some assets are new.
Robust partner speaking in overworld (in dungeon still to be done)
Dynamic town NPCs based on story progression and plenty of characters to meet. I've put a lot of time into making each character unique and fun to talk to!
There's still a lot more to be done and a more public demo is being planned once chapter 3 and more polish is added. But I would greatly appreciate anyone who is interested to give this demo a try and let me know what you think or if you find any bugs!
Screenshots and videos:
And a few others I did not include for brevety
Please, give it a try! You can find any link you may need for it in the PMDO discord! And if you have any questions or anything you can ping me here or DM me. You can also DM me for a link to the PMDO discord if you need it.
Installation instruction by Palika in the PMDO server
PMD Halcyon: Chapter 2 Demo is now ready to be playtested.
Halcyon is a story hack that aims to recreate the vibes and gameplay that PMD Explorers gave. The goal is to be like if Nintendo/Chunsoft went ahead and made another explorers game.
There are currently two chapters. Please give me any feedback you have regarding characters, writing, gameplay, QoL, anything! And if you find any bugs please let me know asap so I can get them fixed. You can either do that in discord, via DM or posting, or by making an issue on github.
Github for the mod: https://github.com/Palikadude/Halcyon
Note that the latest commits aren't always a stable version of the game. Typically I'll try to make the most current version stable for the part of the game that's been completed so far. Use the Chapter 2 Demo branch if you're not sure what to use.
Installation instructions:
Download the Halcyon mod folder from github
Extract the mod into its own folder
Place the mod folder into the MODS folder in the PMDO folder where you installed PMDO.
To play the mod, boot up PMDO and select Special Episodes from the main menu. Select Halcyon as the special episode to play.
More dungeon mod for PMDO
By Vladcik
Finally taking the time to release my mod. It has some issues, it's not the best, but it was an opportunity for me to learn.
Atm you've a dungeon oriented Power Plant from Kanto. 15 Floors, take care of the poison in the end of the dungeon. You'll be able to find some rare Pokemon in some specific Floors !
I plan to add more dungeons in the future based on the new update for modding ❤️ It works with the last version
To earn a bit to fuel my nerd hobby addictions, I'll be providing #pokemonmysterydungeon sprites and portraits! DM me here or at Cait_Sith#4447 on Discord! Probably using Paypal but im new to it so be patient pls
To clarify portrait price is for a full set. If you just want one or two it'll be cheaper.
New Community Assets
Pokémon
Animated sprites in this section are animated PNG files. If animated sprites appear to be static images, make sure that your browser supports PNG animation. (Most modern browsers should display them just fine, though.)
A completed PMD portrait of the RBY Ghost for @ryland_parker ! Thank you so much for commissioning me!
Pikmin by JaiFain
In conmemoration of finishing Pikmin 2, i did PMD portraits for the good old original 3 Pikmin. And one opinion: F*ck you Waterwraith. #pikmin #MysteryDungeon #Nintendo #pixelart
Smiley sprite by Cait Sith
lord forgive me for I have sinned
I decided to do smiley as a warmup
Crappy portraits
for some reason, it has been a trend of making crappy portraits on the MysteryMail Discord server. The channel is still open btw. I didn’t took the time to put all that in a nice looking SpriteBot, but I still downloaded them all. You can find them all (as of publishing) here. There are more than 100 of them!
Digimon’s by NeroIntruder
By NeroIntruder in the #general chat, when asked about it. Also said he was working on a Digimon hack
By NeroIntruder, in the art channel
batch 5
another day
recruitables batch 6
…do I even need to put separation…
recruitables batch 7 and the shopkeeper
…
recruitables batch 8
recruitables batch 9
recruitables batch 10
batch 11
Phillips196’s Sneasler
By Philips196 in the SkyTemple Discord server
JaiFain
i don't usually post single portraits expression, but Vesp :)
Snow Town (Frosslass Hut)
Image 1: First Layer
Image 2: Second Layer
Image 3: Preview
Taeber’s human portrait
By taeber in the SkyTemple Discord guild
tried to make a human icon in the PMD style.. don't really think it's accurate but it's not too bad
Other
UMG (still) looking for artists
Shared on twitter here. They are the group behind the the great Arceus Wish series.
We still need help!
Chapter 3 is bound to be a huge undertaking, if you're interested in volunteering to help with the art, reach out to us!
Share this tweet and the show as much as you can! We need your help!
#pokemonart #pokemonfanart #pokemon #ArtistOnTwitter #arceusswish
About this newsletter
As a remainder, you can contribute to on-going publication of this newsletter. Help would really be appreciated. More information can be found on the dedicated page.
Did I miss anything? Feel free to contact marius851000 on Discord at marius851000#2522, with an email at marius@mariusdavid.fr, on reddit with the user u/marius851000, from an ActivityPub-compatible service (Mastodon) at @marius851000@mariusdavid.fr or on matrix at @marius851000:mariusdavid.fr.