Pokémon Amber is neither a clone, nor a port of a Pokémon game. It takes place 100 million years in the past, before Fossil Pokémon went extinct. After doing much research into ancient Pokémon, it is realised that we don't know the habitats of most Fossil Pokémon and there is some ambiguity in their types. What was the Pokémon world like 100 million years ago? What other Pokémon existed that have not been discovered? How have they adapted through time? These questions and more will play a key role in the development of Pokémon Amber.

Note: This game is not endorsed by Nintendo or any other Pokémon-affiliated organisation. This is just a game being developed by a fan purely for the enjoyment of others. There will be some creative liberties taken.

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I thought I would start posting progress here instead of keeping it to my signature. As of yesterday, the following screenshot was up-to-date on showing progress:

As you can see, I have a scrolling, animated tilemap with proper clipping, and working text commands. As well, I wrote routines for easily making menu and drawing rectangles. Internally, there is a token set, so words that are used frequently in the game can be represented by 1 byte and menus can be somewhat interactive.

I ended up completely rewriting the graphics today, after analysing a different approach. This made the tilemap routine take about 60% of the time previously required (so it is a lot faster) and all of the current drawing got a speed boost (as well as LCD updating). My plan is to keep it running at 6MHz and it is currently energy friendly, I hope (it makes heavy use of the halt instruction).

Things I need to do:
I need to place a player sprite on the screen as well as NPCs and other objects. These are all handled by the event handler, so once I have that finished (probably a good hour or two of focused coding), then trees (or Vines, in this game), boulders, non-player characters, doorways, warp tiles, and all of that will be in working order.

I need to make a smooth-scrolled transition as the player walks. This will definitely slow things down, but that should be fine.

I have not started on battles, Pokémon, or Items yet.

This game will probably use a lot of RAM. I am trying to keep it all in non-user RAM, but that will not be possible with the storage system. Save data will be about 1000 bytes, plus however many Pokémon I allow in the PC (it is about 50 bytes for each Pokémon). So to use the PC system, I either need to have all the boxes in RAM or, only a few at a time (like how the first two generations required you to save every time you changed boxes, it was basically archiving the data and bringing a new box to RAM).

Sprites are going to be monochrome, 24x24 and I plan for 64 pokémon total. This means 4608 bytes of sprite data, but they will all have additional information, bloating it to around 6400 bytes for Pokémon data. Because of this, I will probably have map data and most other event data stored in archived appvars, unless somebody thinks it is a better idea to keep it all in a multi-page app. If I keep it separate, it might be easier to create new games.

Here is a more current image:

Can you port it to nspire?

Can you port it to nspire?

I can try. I do need to get experience with nspire programming.

that's amazingly fast. wonderful =)
if it's supposed to be the ancient past, are you going to have any trainers?

There will be trainers, but there will be a few other important design differences. There won't be a PC, so your bag will be bigger. It will be able to carry your items and 20 Pokémon. There will be places where you can drop off your Pokémon, too, like a daycare, and in order to retrieve your Pokémon, you need to go back to the specific daycare. Internally, going to a given daycare will be the equivalent of opening up a box in your PC. In your bag, there will be two pockets for items (one of them is analogous to the items box on your PC), a pocket for apricorns (ancient version of Pokéballs), a key items pocket, and a TM/HM pocket. HMs will also work differently in Amber.


I still need to work out a good storyline .__.

Quote from: AlexisVieira on July 17, 2013, 08:22:19 am

Can you port it to nspire?

I can try. I do need to get experience with nspire programming.

It'll be great if you can do that

Quote from: AlexisVieira on July 17, 2013, 08:22:19 am

Can you port it to nspire?

But... don't you have the GameBoy Color emu and the GameBoy Advance emu for the Nspire already ?

Well, i've a nspire touchpad so the gba emulator doesn't work in this nspire. And this seems to be very cool

That is....fast
You should indeed slow it down

Xeda, this looks like an awesome project! ^^

Aren't all of her projects awesome

Very nice indeed . And slow down that walking speed lol

Will this include missingno?

Just keep in mind that when sprites are not aligned horizontally, they take longer to display. I noticed that in Axe tilemappers, where gameplay suddenly speeded up when the map was aligned, so as a result, when walking up/down, scrolling was about twice faster.