Messan: A lap dog; small pet dog

Bottle: I hope I don't have to actually define this

Messan in a Bottle!

Okay I kind of broke the meme there, but you get my point. For several months now I've had an insatiable desire to program, but no projects to work on. Finally I said "screw it, I'm going to make my own Pokemon/Minecraft-like game!" A few days later, here I am, with the bones of a game up and running. I've been working very intently on this project, often putting in about 6 hours a day, and am getting very close to actually adding in content and making the game fun. When will it be done? Dunno, but I plan on at least making it nice to look at by the end of February, when I go to GDC in California and will use this as a portfolio piece. Yes, what will be talked about here today isn't in the game yet for the most part, but almost every single feature is either implemented, working, and ready to be expanded upon, so I know these are not only possible: they're already in action or are really easy and will be soon!

Pretty much my game revolves around two major genres:

Sandbox: The player goes around the 2.5D world, cutting down trees, farming, building a home, and otherwise building and tearing down. The world in most dimensions expands seemingly infinitely in each direction, and is greatly customizable. It isn't completely procedurally generated, however, and each world will have a set of buildings and towns that you can count on being there, even if you do have to search for them a little. Still not sure how involved of a story I'll be able to integrate with this style, but at least the journeys and other shenanigans both in-town and not should be enjoyable :)

Mon Series: While the most popular example of this genre would be Pokemon, it is a type of game that revolves around catching, training, and most often battling monster-like creatures referred to as "mons". My favorite game of all time, Pokemon Emerald, of course left a huge impression on me, and I would like to make something that instills a similar feeling in myself and others. In this world, the "mons" will be called "messans." Although only a few of the creatures are dogs, the idea of people taxiing small animals in purses and bags, namely dogs, is what I'm going for. Also, mainly for the sake of a name pun, magic bottles will be the capture mechanism for this series. They'll shrink down and suck in the creatures, corking them up in little glass homes. With pokemon, you never got to see inside your pokeball and smile at your little friends, so I like this idea a lot. Another plan for these little guys is actual genotypes, or DNA. When you breed these messans, you'll be doing so using actual biology, allowing you to almost manually customize your mons, which will be especially fun when every mon has between 8 and 27 color variations! (yep, no shinies this time, but actual differences!)

How will I merge these types of games? Well, for the most part they will be separate, but nevertheless connected. I imagine growing a whole ton of a certain type of flower to try and attract a special mon, or diving into the ocean to search for bubbles in the water to find underwater creatures, or even going to space in a rocketship to land on asteroids and search for special space mons (don't count on that last one though). Also I plan on making food into healing items for mons and making your own boxes to hold as many messan-jars as you want, allowing one to become a self-sufficient person in the middle of nowhere.

Finally, the technical details:

Graphics are in the style of the Gameboy Color, limiting color palettes but making them cool (and easier to design)!

2-Player-1-Keyboard support. Not many games do this, but I decided to just for fun. Two people can both play from the same computer, allowing you to play with friends or family without having to mess with all that server stuff, if you choose.

SNES sounds and music.

Customizable 8 button controls per player. While it is normally a struggle to get a lot of functionality in with this few of buttons, it has a few benefits, and I've come up with a setup that should work quite comfortably even with the limitations.

Programmed in C#, so works natively on Windows, and is fast and efficient. The game currently takes up almost no memory or processing speed, so you should be able to play it no matter how crappy your computer is, as long as it's new enough to have a newer version of Windows.

Sound good? Not so much? Tell me what you think in the comments, and see you soon for an entry on starting the video game making process.