State of Topaz: June 5th, 2011

[ImmunityBow]

With finals among other things having come up between a lot of us, activity has been on the wane this past month, and has slowed down to a near crawl. However, I still have three full month's worth of work to account for, so let's get started, shall we?

Firstly, I am sad to announce that Silent Sentinel, formerly known as ragingprimeape, has decided to resign from his position as a Topaz moderator. He will, of course, be keeping contributor status, and will be staying with us to contribute as he feels. Currently I don't feel we require much help with regards to moderation, but if activity spikes, who knows, that might just change.

In case you've only registered a month ago or haven't checked the site in months, you may notice that we have a new member with the title programmer: Konrad. Though lately he's been swamped with exams and things he has agreed to replace Badara as our resident coder. A warm welcome to him, filling a role that has been so traditionally difficult for Topaz. If you'd like to check up on some of his activity, feel free to look at his programming checklist topic. Currently he's MIA, but with any luck he'll see this and come back to help us!

If you have checked out the site (or are checking this on the site, in which case look around) you may have noticed that we have had a site redesign. Our site crashed and zeroality took the opportunity to recode the site, the most noticeable difference (in my opinion) being that it uses our concept art instead of those of Pokemon not even in Topaz! In addition, the site is now organized in such a fashion that anyone can check out back sprites, item sprites, and other such things which have long not been very accessible to the public. Really, many thanks to zeroality for all the incredible work he put into the design, which is now very truly Topaz.

Moving on, we've had a few name shuffles recently to lessen confusion with canon Diamond/Pearl/Black/White namings. As such:
Avalanche will be renamed to Freeze Crush
Bug Bite will be renamed to Bug Burn
Time for me to go and change each instance of each. D:

On the spriting department, X-Antibody went ahead and gave Blitzfaust and Vilephist a much-needed revamp. Here they are in all their glory:



Also metagrosslord pushed out several item sprites, one of which is an item that had long worried me: Shrapnel.


In an attempt to sprite Fernando I ended up making something completely different, coming up with a mermaid sprite to add to our roster. Reliability doubled that with an almost unrecognizable edit. They're not done yet (there are a few things to be fixed on each of them, my mermaid more so), but it's nice to be seeing our trainer roster being updated and expanded a bit:


Speaking of trainer rosters, you should definitely check out some of the work being done by Reliability and Tyrannigon in this topic. There's a bit much to post here, especially since there's a lot of work still do be done, but Crys, Torri, and some revamped Orion Trainers are there to be found and worked on if you so feel inclined.

Still on the artistic side of things, many of our members have been trying their hands at concept art! Not all of these will be placed up on the site, but I'd just like to take this little bit of space to recognize some of our members for their works.
Stalwart DracoNyon's kept himself busy with an excellent Moocalf concept:

Not to be beaten, Reliability has been hard at work on some excellent arts too, and he did multiple just in case there was any dispute as to who has contributed the most lately:




Here's Silver's Dionare:

And lastly, here's Infinity's original submission, Equill clay art.


Also, the incredible Phoenixsong of OI/New Logora/other random stuff she does fame sketched us up an awesome Jirachi, to be at some point fully coloured into art we can use:


Even One-Winged-Chaos, on a rare visit, gifted us with a coloured in version of his Fernando concept:


Which leaves me as the only artist around here who hasn't done anything in the past four months... I better get to work! So don't be afraid to put up some of your fanart! Reli and I are always happy to give some constructive criticism, and a few of your pieces might even get featured in an SoT!

In a fit of epiphanic awesomeness, Tyrannigon figured out his own special way to contribute to Topaz (well kind of, Pokepoindexter did some of this early on as well) by figuring out puzzles for each of the gyms in Topaz. What we need now is proofreaders to check them out and make sure each of them works out logically. So, check them out here and take a look.

On the audio side of things, Irot's made a pretty decent comeback, composing up for us a surfing theme and a random city theme that both sound really great! If you want to take a listen, head on over to his topic, and be sure to comment! Irot often voices concerns over his music and deserves many and frequent replies.

Here's an exciting bit of news. Most of the work in the past month has been in Previous Gen Pokedex Entries, and I'm happy to announce that there are a grand total of two left to do! Clefable requires one more vote only, Zangoose needs a little more work than that but we're nearly at an extremely important milestone in the game!

That's it for public work, but there's still some things done behind the scenes to share with you all. Case in point: the script. In the contributors forum a lot of the story of Topaz has been reconstructed and fleshed out, and Reliability in particular has worked on creating a script, which is finished for the demo and quite far for the rest of the game. I can assure you that we are trying to make sure that Topaz has the great and accessible storyline that it promised to have since its inception.

Finally, where do we go from here? There are a few important things that have stagnated and need to continue for Topaz to move forward. In particular: Moveset Revamps and Pokemon datasets. So, for those who don't know or have forgot what they are:

Moveset Revamps are topics where we bring canon Pokemon up to date by giving them Topaz moves and abilities, as well as making any changes we think are appropriate (like giving Ampharos Signal Beam). Right before these stopped happening, we were on the Clefairy Line and the Slowpoke Line. These need to be done for the full game, so feel free to help out!

Pokemon datasets is the text file in the game which tells the game the data on each Pokemon. We have all of this data but it needs to be put into the text file. If you'd like to help out, just PM me and I'll send you the document link and a couple of pointers to get you started.

Whew, that was pretty long. I'm sure I've missed lots of things, but that's the general gist of what's happened at Topaz since the last SoT. Until next time!