State of Topaz: July 30th, 2008

Another few weeks, another SoT. This one is going to be a long one, so go ahead and find yourself a beverage and a good chair.

First off, a little bit of an update on the current active staff. neon has gone off to China for 3 weeks, and as of now it would appear he might not have access to the internet, so right now, as a worst case scenario, we have only myself as an active administrator for game development purposes (Zero is also an administrator, but his work goes primarily into site development and maintenance). I will be stepping up my efforts to make sure everything keeps moving along smoothly, and if neon returns, that's even better for us. Do realize, however that I am dedicating a lot of time to this project, and while ImmunityBow is a great help, there are a significant amount of things to be done still. I also have a few weeks left of summer I wish to enjoy a bit before I ship off to college, so I might end up leaving some things partially unfinished when I do a major sweep of current information. Please bear with me when I do this, as the data will be examined and updated at my next available opportunity, but I'm not getting paid anything for this, and this is a lot more work than some of you may know or appreciate. I thank you in advance for your understanding.

As many of you have noticed, our Base Stats are now completely done, and at my current count, there are only 22 topics in Moveset that need additional discussion. To put that number into perspective, there are 66 topics in Moveset total. We have completed 44, exactly two thirds, of Pokemon's movesets. Thank you so much for your hard work in this endeavor, and a big thank you goes out to Ali, who was the main architect of almost all of those sets, and has thus received a position on the Topaz Staff for his efforts. Please, extend your congratulations to him on the acquisition of this position. (hey, that rhymes!)

Now that movesets are almost done, we move on to the really difficult part of this information: TM discussion and Egg Move discussion. There is currently an active topic for our TM discussion list located here; please contribute to this, as our old TM list is quite old and in desperate need of updating. After this has been finalized, I will be recruiting a small core of individuals to help manufacture both Egg Moves and TM lists for specific Pokemon, which will be handed out as individual assignments in order to split the workload. (Obviously I will be working on a few of these myself) If you are interested in being part of this core of individuals, please PM me as soon as possible with your declaration of interest, to which I will get back to you with an answer and a possible assignment with all available speed.

Our eDex is coming along nicely: It's not completely ready for public eye yet, but I bet you guys will really like it when it's actually complete.

With the amount of information that we have gathered, I imagine there are many people who are itching to see Topaz Pokemon in action. Since the game is going to be a lengthy process to complete, we are going to go ahead and try to implement different methods in which Topaz Pokemon can be used in the meantime:

As hinted a while ago, Orange Islands Text RPG, whom we are affiliated with (http://orangeislands.net/index/) was likely going to be implementing Topaz Pokemon into their text adventure, continuing the legacy left behind by the old TTRPG. I will be talking to the administrators of that project within the next day or so, seeing what sort of progress has been made on that front.

Another idea that has been kicking around is implementation of Topaz Pokemon into a current Pokemon D/P style simulator, if only so that people may get an idea of what kind of movesets and such they would like to use when the full game would be released. Currently ShoddyBattle would seem to be our best option, considering that it is open source and thus the code for the project is available, but if you have knowledge of any other possible D/P style simulators and how to implement new code/sprites/moves/etc., I would ask that you contact me as soon as possible. I would be willing to learn whatever it is I could to assist in such an endeavor, so please do not feel that if you have knowledge of this you would be stuck programming it all by yourself.

Of course, the big picture here is that we want this implemented into a real game, but we are in desperate need of a programmer (read: we don't have one). If you have ANY knowledge of creating games in any program format, your help would be greatly appreciated, and although we have stated the game will not be an emulator/ROM hack, if push comes to shove and we are faced with no other options, we might choose to exercise this option.

If you have any other suggestions in which Topaz can be implemented/want your own project to include some Topaz information, please PM me. We are wary of releasing too much information, since it has taken years to develop, but would be glad to help out certain projects if the trade off is beneficial to us.

Graphics have been coming along very smoothly, and we are seeing a lot of fresh updates to pre-existing sprites that are looking absolutely amazing. I would like to extend my gratitude to our resident spriters for the work they have done, and hope to see even more awesome stuff from them in the future. For all prospective spriters: We still need you! Sprites for items, trainers, etc. Submit your work, and if it's of a good enough quality, you might find yourself in our staff and on our credits (which, by the by, have not been updated in almost 2 years, so the credits site on the home page is sorely out of date; kind of ignore that)

Our script has been commented on and seems to be quite sorely out of date, so if you wish to do any sort of scriptwriting, I encourage you to look at the currently posted information regarding the story (which is again, sorely out of date) and submit some sample writing to me, so that I can perhaps get you to work working on getting that done.

If you wish to have your site affiliated with Topaz, please send me a PM with the name of your site so that I can look around. We're very likely to affiliate with even mildly active forums and websites, so I encourage and await your reply.

Woo, that was pretty tl;dr. I imagine there's something I'm forgetting: If I think of it, I'll be sure to edit it in, but for now, this has been Piro, wishing you a good rest of your summer, and I'll see you around the forums.