Sorry for the four month pause between SoTs, hopefully the next one will be up some time in February. Along with a new year comes some change to the staff.

MewLoverEX's activity has been on the wane and she feels that she hasn't been able to help out as much as she before, and so, Reliability will be taking her place as moderator. As many of you probably know, Reliability has done an amazing job of not only spriting backsprites for us but seeing the whole process through to what's close to the end. Reliability has also taken responsibility for revamping the game's script, and with everything he's done Ragingprimeape and I felt he'd be a great moderator. MewLoverEX will be retaining Contributor status, of course.

I have also sent an email to Badara requesting his files, which he hopefully we receive and send. Otherwise, we're left a little high and dry without a programmer, once more. I can perhaps prod Leithality into helping once in a while but he has never played a Pokemon game and so while he was helping out he was feeling a little lost. If any of you know any programmers versed in Ruby or Perl (Ruby is a derivative of Perl) then if you could point them this way that would be amazing. Leithality picked Ruby up in just a few days (he mainly uses C++ and Java) so even people versed in those might work out. I'll keep you updated on Badara's status, if I get anything.

On a less bleak note, there has been a lot of good work happening on Topaz in the past 4 months.

Firstly, I like to introduce you to the Backsprite Repository. Search for all the ones with no sprite. Count them on your thumbs (no fingers necessary!) There are exactly TWO sprites missing there! Arowana has something approaching a pretty decent placeholder, and I'm sure Vilephist will work out well too. You can take a look at some of the grueling process work here, as well as suggest improvements to the final two backsprites. A round of applause to Reliability, and all those who helped out! And here are a few of them, because breaking up text with images is nice and all that.


Also rather exciting is the work one of our new members Tyrannigon64 has been doing in terms of icon sprites. He's been making some pretty quality stuff, most of which you can see in his album: http://www.pokemontopaz.net/forums/album.php?albumid=6

Also, the new Kraklaw sprite (and backsprite!) by X-Antibody has been fully officialized, along with oykawoo's concept art. Most of you have already seen this, but for those who live and die by SoTs, here they are:


They are now up on the site sprite page
and concept art page for your viewing pleasure.

Also in the graphics department, the Backsprite Shinification Process has been started by Quinn, and he's already whizzed through a bunch of them, so if you'd like to recolour the backsprites to fit the front sprite shinies, then here's your chance.

AND, while we're still talking about graphics we got some progress on Move Animations. 2-3 down, many to go! Of course, we're deferring this to the full game, but hey, if you get past all the little frustrations, making move animations is fun and pretty good time killer. I advise people to try it out!

To finish off the graphics section, Betatmw, one of our less active members, made us some nice new item sprites back in November. The best of the bunch are:
Jagged Herb
and
Solar Ball

The results from the renaming topic are in and Skobeloff Town and Triumph Spire are the winners! I fixed the site to account for the names as much as I could. I'm going to look towards changing the mouseover sometime too, if I can figure it out.

It has been decided that we will be revamping the Pokemon League since Caldera/Kirant is such a huge region. Instead of having 8 gym leaders we will be having 12, 6 on Caldera and 6 on Kirant (as opposed to 8 on Caldera). The reasoning for this is that there is a very large section of the game in Kirant before you return to Caldera, which requires us to squish in too many gym leaders at the beginning, having a 7 city-long break, and then finally fight Gerad, who would have to be substantially stronger than Mandy, who was the 5th gym leader. Under the new system, Hanzo will be scrapped, and Mandy will be demoted to extra (Ranger in the Eastlong and Westlog forests). Furthermore, Normal, Poison, Dragon, Light, Dark and Rock gym leaders have been added. Normal will be at Kalypso (4th gym leader) and will be named Jane (Plain Jane etc.) Poison will be at Gallea and will be named Bella (for Belladona, a type of Poison. Also Twilight being poison, I guess.) Light will be at Portwind, and will feature Tristan, who will later on face you in the E4, with stronger Pokemon. Dragon will be at Sedcini, led by Wolfe. Rock will be at Enechestra, led by Crys, and Dark will be at Aquapolis, led by Layla (who is demoted from E4. Her name is Arabic for night, by the way, or so behindthename tells me.) Taking Layla's place will be a new Ghost-type E4.

Audio-wise, Irot_Rebod has made a comeback with an excellent flashback theme for the opening of the game, as well as a wonderfully Caribbean-styled theme for Kalypso City! Check them out here! Not one to be one-upped, STT made some remixes, with an excellent new version of Dynamo Gardens and Colossus City among others. Check them out here.

Pokedex Entries have had a little bit of progress, with some ideas contributed and such. However, we need votes or ideas that inspire people to vote to finish them off instead of endlessly discussing! Case in point, since August, only Togetic, Muk, Dunsparce, Primeape, Jirachi and Smearlge were finished.

As for the Text RPG on Orange Islands, I'm afraid that it was decided by the Orange Islands that they do not want to host the TRPG anymore, mainly because our Pokemon simply don't mesh well with theirs and they already have tons of great original Pokemon for their own site. That puts the Topaz TRPG on indefinite hiatus.

And that about sums up most (but not all, there's a bunch of plot stuff that happened too, not that you heard it from me) of what's happened in the past 4 months. Got questions? Ask them here .