u/KawaiiFoxPlays

ok

alright

Fun fact: I chronically underestimate how much work graphic design takes. I've gotta stop doing that.

I've noticed people are showcasing their maps like this now, and to be honest, I hope it becomes the norm (or a trend at the very least). It gives a little more context to the maps, as well as adding some flair and providing a visual identity beyond mapping style. I couldn't really think of a good name for this town alone, so brownie points to you if you know where I stole its name from. (Also, I've included just the map on the second picture just in case.)

This is basically my first time doing a serious map with Gen 4 tiles, and it's honestly pretty different to Gen 3 (or even Gen 5). When it comes to layering, Gen 4 tiles are a little more finnicky to work with than Gen 3 (especially with the trees slightly sticking out one tile in each direction), but it looks just as beautiful once you finally get it down. That being said, maybe it's the tileset, but I think this is my most official-looking map to date. Yeah, it's great to have your own style, but there's something so satisfying about having a map look like it comes straight out of an official game. The area between the Gym and the northernmost house could probably use a little something (an NPC or two, maybe?), and I'm not sure how well the path type I used works with the rest of the town, but overall, I'd say I'm pretty satisfied with the current state of the map.

What do you think of it? What kind of Gym do you think is in store for unwitting challengers?

It's a relatively niche topic, so for some background information, Danganronpa is a visual novel series about a group of teenagers (each with their own unique talent) trapped in a high school, with the only means of escape being to get away with the murder of one of their classmates. Over the years, it's gained a relatively big following, especially so during recent years. The series' formula lends itself to being repeated, leading to the popularisation of fanganronpas (or fangans for short), fanworks which aim to emulate the "killing game" structure with new casts of characters. Over the years, there's been a lot of them, to varying degrees of quality and success, and hopefully I've done a good job at capturing a snippet of these works and the fandom behind them.

I added a little game over scene as well (see the second image). The gradient on the outline is a bit of my own touch, but I think it worked out well.

Hopefully this doesn't break Rule 1. A lot of my characters have their talents decided, but a fair few of them also don't. To be honest, it feels like I've hit a wall, so a few fresh pairs of eyes would definitely be welcome with how my cast is doing talent-wise. I feel like my cast's talents kind of cover certain areas like sports or music, but don't tackle them directly, which I don't think works too well (I don't know how else to explain it).

The ones in blue and with an asterisk at the end are the ones I'm not sure on at all and am actively workshopping, so feedback on their talents is extra appreciated. If you have any thoughts on any of the other characters' talents, please let me know as well, since very few of them are 100% set in stone and I won't complain at the opportunity for more feedback.

I had a dream about this new season of the Pokemon anime where the main character had these Pokemon on their team. I might clean up the sketches if I get the chance to in the next few days.

The bird one was some sort of genie galah? I remember thinking its design was cool but I didn’t remember the name, I just remembered that it had a massive tassel for a tail and that it was either Flying/Fairy or Flying/Psychic.

Crappybara was basically like the Pikachu of the new series that was so hilariously pathetic that it wrapped around to endearing. According to its Pokedex entry, it burrows in the ground and tries to lure unsuspecting trainers in with the orange that looks like a Poke Ball on its tail but when they pick it up, it gets scared and runs away. Everyone was comparing it and its evolution to that one meme with Cheems and the buff Doge, but I didn’t get to see the evolution to confirm.

There was also this regional form of Squirtle as well, which was blue-grey and had storm clouds for a tail and also a halo for some reason??? I distinctly remember it was Water/Bug-type, but I had no idea why. Everyone thought it was evil but it was just really depressed and intimidated by the concept of battling. I couldn’t be bothered drawing it so I made a bad edit of it, but it probably would break Rule 3 so I cropped it out of the post. Might redraw it sometime soon.

Fireball is this really funny series of shorts released only on Japan's Disney Channel with robots, fast-paced comedy, and a fair few anime tropes. If you want to watch it (which you totally should), you definitely shouldn't go to the Internet Archive because all four seasons definitely aren't there in both the Japanese and English dubs.

The nature tiles are ripped from Polished Crystal (with a few edits), and credit for the houses goes to TrainerDX. I tried to give the map a bit of a Gen 2.5 type of feel, with a few custom tiles that don't really follow the limits of the GBC hardware. Will probably replace a few more tiles where I can to give it more of a unique feel.

This is a remake of a map I made around six weeks back as a mockup for a concept of mine, a fangame set in a region based on Macedonia. It's just a mapping project for now and probably won't be a full game. This little town, based on Ohrid, is where you start off. It isn't a peninsula like it kinda looks like, but is actually situated in the middle of two lakes. There's a little Gym (or equivalent) that'll probably be early-game but not the first, as well as a Pokémon Centre (I headcanon the Marts are inside of them (is it really a headcanon if it's your own work?)). The player's house is to the southeast next to the ledge.

I was thinking about potentially extending the bridge in the southwest to a little area relevant in the early-game a la Slumbering Weald in SwSh, but figured it'd be too much with the little cave at the south as well. I tried to use ledges to give the map a sense of elevation without making it seem too busy or untraversable, but I don't think it gets the concept through very well. I particularly like how I used one of each of the four "corner pieces" (if you can call them that) of the one-tile-tall trees around the map, it gives the map a nice little cohesiveness. Anyways, yeah that's basically all I have to say.

I think this might be our “you are supposed not to know about Trinity” moment (iykyk)

Didn't want to let this go to waste, so I thought I might as well post this as an alternate take on the English logo. I went with a bit of a Y2K look along with the Frutiger Metro-type feel since I had a few fonts I've been meaning to use. Realistically, they'd probably want the Disney logo to be in its original typeface, but who cares, it's my logo and I'll do what I want. I added it to a few pictures as well to get a feel of how it looks in use, and I think it's pretty cool. Would love to know what you guys think!

First of all I want to say if you don't know what the Stanford Prison Experiment is, I'll look like a madman. Basically it was this experiment in 1971 run by this guy named Zimbardo that turned a floor of some building in Stanford University into a mock prison, with some participants labelled as prisoners and others as guards. It was meant to go for two weeks, but because of how much of a shitshow it was, it only lasted for six days before it got shut down. You know it took a lawyer, multiple complaints from the prisoners, and Zimbardo's wife threatening to divorce him to get him to stop? His wife still left him after this, though. Read more about it on Wikipedia or something. I don't hate the guy, in fact, I respect that he was able to put it all together, but the experiment itself is just plain bad.

My opinion's a lot more nuanced on it than pure hate, but I definitely do hate it overall. I don't get why people still talk about it at all. The entire experiment was way too unethical and completely breached integrity guidelines. The participants weren't allowed to leave until one guy kicked up a massive stink about it, and they were basically psychologically tortured in there. You could say that it was the 70s and ethics wasn't that important, but that's still like 20 years after Harlow and the monkeys and stuff and 10 years after Milgram, there were plenty of ethical advancements in between them. And Zimbardo interfered with the experiment, made himself superintendent of the hypothetical prison, and told the guards to ramp up their abuse of the prisoners. Like, not even subtly influencing their behaviour, just straight-up telling them they can go harder with it. Inserting yourself into an experiment like that and directly interfering with results is The Biggest Scientific No-No Ever and I don't get how that level of sucking oneself off and ruining the results of the experiment in the process didn't get him laughed out of Stanford.

The only things that don't make me completely hate it are that it produced important results that mirror the ethical failures of real-world prisons and that if we were to disregard every unethical experiment, we would lose a lot of scientific ground. But at the same time, involving yourself in the experiment like that kind of nullifies whatever ground you may had as an experiment, ethical or otherwise. It proves the opposite of what Zimbardo was trying to say, that people have to be harshly coaxed into even thinking about hurting others. And the worst part of it all is that you can't really redo it with ethics in mind without compromising the results. The whole point of prison is that there's no easy way out, so if you put that into an experiment, you're not really getting results as authentic as a real prison.

All of this makes me get so mad that a) this experiment was given any time when it was new and b) people are still talking about this like it deserves to be talked about for anything besides how comically unethical and unauthentic it is.

It's a lot of blank spaces, I know, but to be fair, it is still a draft. The plan is for this to be an actual game that you can play at some point (which I have actually done some work on), but the first release will only have around five characters (Mario, Pikachu, Inkling, Dedede, and Geolyte). This is just a mockup of the CSS screen, but I have actually coded a more primitive version, which you can see here. I'm prioritising characters I have more of a personal attachment to (or just generally like) over certain picks (including some Smash staples) to make the roster my own, and at the end of the day, a lot of characters I'd like to see in Smash don't have that much of a chance to get in, so a fangame like this might be their only time to shine. I still do want to make something the general community is happy with, though, so as always, feedback on who I've included and ideas on who to add are appreciated.

The extra Pokémon reps will probably be the last slots I decide on, since I have a ton of candidates in mind and I want them to fill archetypes that aren't already in the roster, but my current thoughts are Delphox, either Scolipede or Lokix, and either Jigglypuff or Scream Tail. I might remove one of the slots and replace it with another non-Pokémon character if I absolutely have to. As for the other three missing slots, I'm thinking one more of the original eight (either Fox, DK, or Samus, but probably Fox), but I've got no idea who else.

I've got two special cases at the bottom: I've reserved a slot for a fighter who'll be decided by a community ballot later on in development, as well as putting in a certain secret fighter who'll be put in at the end of the game as a bit of a joke/bonus (I've already decided who they are, but I'm holding off on revealing them until later on).

Her name's Rita, and while she tends dislike the company of humans, she's nonetheless got an optimistic outlook on life and a calmness to her presence that infects those around her. What do you think her talent is? To be honest, it isn't really that evident in her sprite, most of the details that hint towards it are relatively small and can't be conveyed well in a low fidelity.

So I've got the basics down for how my title screen is going to look like. I'm kind of going with a more Persona-esque vibe for the title screen. It looks like absolute dogshit right now, but hopefully the final product will be a little smoother and more stylish. There's a Press Start text right below the logo that'll appear in-game.

The title I'm going with for now is Pokémon Backyard. It's named after the Backyard, an open-world area in my region (very loosely) based on the Outback, as well as sort conjuring the idea of a home, which reflects a few themes and concepts in my story. The yellow and gold are placeholder colours, but I can't really find any better combination. I'm thinking of maybe having it so that the colours aren't set and can change for the purposes of wherever it's being used. I feel like the effect at the back is pretty cool, but I think it kind of compromises readability of the Pokémon part of the logo. I might redo it later so that there's more of a contrast there. Anyways, feedback is totally appreciated, so please let me know what you think!