Future of Topaz

Hey everyone, long time no see!

Like most of you, Topaz has always held a special place in my heart. It was my first forum, TRPG, and online community in general, and it has always been a place that I've checked in on, even if it was just mostly lurking.

Last I can see, there was work being done on an alpha by BTG in 2017. And since then, things have gone dark with no visible game progress in just over 4 years. For all of the work that has gone into this place, it definitely deserves to see the light of day in some form. The TRPG never really took off and garnered interest in the way that was hoped. And the advertising to bring in new blood is non-existent.

I don't really have a solution in-so-far as helping to craft Topaz as what is was meant to be, other than re-focusing the project on a PokeCommunity thread and recruiting for help from there. However, I do have an alternative option for the potential to bring Topaz into a playable format, albeit with a different vision.

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Like OI and Topaz, my forums - Pokémon Turquoise - have mostly been vacated, and the community has more or less permanently relocated to a Discord server. Over the last year, I've been working to develop a Pokémon game engine that would bring a complete Pokémon game itself to a Discord server. Essentially, I am creating a text/static menu-based automated game. For more info and screenshots, please see my PokeCommunity recruitment thread:
https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=438503

So far I've created the game engine with the intention of having it host the New Logora Region and it's Pokémon. However, moving forward I'm refactoring my code to be more friendly with implementing different regions and Pokémon. I'm doing this firstly so that I can later on add some of PhoenixSong's other fan-made regions as separate playable games on my server. But secondly, so that the discord Pokémon game engine can be forked and adapted for other content creators to make their own games with.

Thus what I'm presenting is the option for Topaz to be able to A) Create a discord server, and B) Have a bot on the server that can facilitate an entire game with Caldera/Kirant, its Pokémon, and its story.

With this game engine, you'd be able to use:
-The region
-The Pokémon (front sprites, potentially back sprites as well)
-Trainer Sprites
-New Items/Abilities/Moves (Would need to be coded in)
-Story Scripts (in the form of quests or events)

Unfortunately, these are the things that wouldn't be supported:
-Overworlds/Maps (Most likely can still find some places for these to be used though. i.e. Have overworlds shown as the avatar in a bot-posted embedded message when you are battling the related character in question. Or when moving to a new place, have the bot post the rendered map so the player gets an idea of what the town/route/cave looks like)
-Any audio content (Although, you can put soundtracks on youtube and have the bot post links to the youtube videos when a player changes locations if desired. Not currently implemented, but wouldn't be hard to do)


Why am I telling you all of this right now?
As is stated in my PokeCommunity thread, I am pretty much solely working on this game engine at the moment, which is a pretty big undertaking. I don't mind doing this since it is a passion project right now and I'm learning a lot from it, but I wouldn't turn down help with code development if there was anyone who'd like to help and has experience or a willingness to learn NodeJS/Typescript. And right now I'm laser-focused on content for New Logora so it wouldn't hurt to have someone not focused on New Logora looking through the code and being able to spot stuff that needs to be made non-region specific. The region I'm implementing now doesn't have any custom types, so it would also be beneficial to have someone interested in figuring out how to implement different types in the battle simulator (I'm interfacing with Pokémon Showdown's simulator code and modifying it as needed).


Even if there isn't anyone who'd be interested in assisting with code development, I wanted to inform you guys anyways because I intend to finish this project some day or another, and when I do Topaz would be able to be implemented on a server created by you all.

If anyone would be interested in this, a few things that Topaz should strive to accomplish in the meantime would be:
- Topaz Pokémon Icon Sprites for the PC, Party, and Battle Switch-Out Menus: (I'm also in the process of creating these for Turquoise, and they're pretty easy to learn to make imo. Although, I can also create a game option that lets you switch the box format for your region so that icon sprites wouldn't be required)
- Determine a list of things to do at each game locations (should more or less already exist in some form)
- Create wild encounter lists (again, should more or less exist)
- Put storyline events into the form of quests (I have a basic format for now, but will be deep-diving this feature soon)
- Create other sidequest scenarios to fill out the game and bring other parts of region lore to the player. (optional)

Now I'm not saying that converting Topaz to a playable game on a Discord server would spell the end of any sort of work on a traditional rom. In fact, I think it could even pump new life and interest in the game. Especially since I'm trying to bring in interest from PokeCommunity to the game engine in general, which is known for having a lot of users that work on rom hacks and game development.

But yeah, that's my spiel. I'm not banking on getting any helping hands here, but I love the content of this project enough that I'd like to be able to open some potential doors in the future for it at least. Or get some discussion going on what's next for the project, if anything.

Wow Chron, this has come a long way since you were telling me about it, congrats on all this hard work! I'm still pretty deep in my project I've been working on, but I think this would be an awesome way to preserve a lot of what made Topaz so cool to see back in the day.

Oh I'm not sure how I managed to miss the original post for this! This seems like an incredibly cool remaining of the old TRPGs! I'm hoping your project is going well, I know (as, I'm sure, do must communities like this) how hard it is to keep passion projects like these afloat. I'm afraid neither Pokémon nor programming have a huge place in my spare time lately, but thank you so much for sharing - what I've seen so far seems so clever, and I hope (a couple months late) that you've found some helping hands.

Ehh, not too much in the way of helping hands has been found yet, but I've made some good progress lately on the front end and will definitely keep everyone posted here on progress as I move forward. You all can definitely expect to see more on this come 2022, been on a bit of a hiatus lately and will be resuming heavy-duty coding work after taking care of some personal matters like moving/job hunting. You are all welcome to join the Discord as well if you'd like to see updates or teasers posted directly on our server (Just click my banner below).

Honestly, the main reason for me stopping was... I was done. For the purposes of the planned demo, all the backend stuff was finished by 2017.

I just... Didn't want to also do the map design and event scripting and dialogue and...

Regardless, I'm happy to see the project continue, regardless of (number of) form(s).

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to place blame on anyone, since all of this was volunteer based to begin with. We all have our own lives to live, and it's totally fine to have to distance yourself from things if they get overwhelming. I've had to abandon many a projects, and who's to say what I'm working on now won't be abandoned in the future (though I certainly hope not lol).

In any case, I do hope to see anyone left here implement topaz with the game engine I'm working on. Heck, I might even do it if I have some time between my current region and whatever is next, but it would definitely be better to have someone else lead it in the future who doesn't have their hands tied with other projects.