Re: VGStorm Presents Manamon, a new fully featured RPG!
So, I've been in touch with Aaron (finally got off my ass and just contacted him directly), and here's the troubling news I learned.
1. He believes 158 manamon aren't enough for a metagame.
2. He says he can only justify so much time on manamon because of how much it cost in time and resources to make. This essentially means he's not interested in making teachable moves, and is probably not too interested in big overhauls to any existing manamon either. Little changes like certain moves becoming special or physical or whatever may keep happening, but those are tiny updates that frankly don't require a ton of in-depth attention.
3. If I want to go through his script and point out mistakes, he's at least semi-open to that. Given the sheer number of missing commas, the fact that I haven't been documenting them and the length of the game, this is a herculean task on my end (or anyone else's, for that matter).So I'm left in a very awkward position, which I won't elaborate fully here but which, let's just put it simply, has left me far less jazzed about this game than I used to be.
I'm telling you guys this not because I want to blast Aaron. I don't. I'm telling you guys this so that those of you hoping for feature x realize you're probably not gonna get it.
I've made some more suggestions (specific ones about specific moves and manamon), and I've asked him if he'd consider employing someone else to help him with bigger content updates like teachable moves, and I don't know where that will go. We'll just have to see, I guess.
1. This does not at all have to be true. Generation 2 in Pokémon, which had 251, had lots of viable stuff in its metagame, and keep in mind Pokémon has a lot more outright garbage than Manamon seems to. With some balance tweaks, I believe Manamon could be at least as good as gen 2 Pokémon. It wouldn't have to be an exhausting task either.
2. This part is fair enough. We can't expect something with the lifespan of Pokémon, because he's one guy. The unfortunate part is that by necessity, the game costs just as much as a Pokémon game does. That's not really anyone's fault necessarily, when you target a small market with a product that took over a year to make, you have to if you want to make it worth your time. So it's a bit of a tricky situation to really satisfy everyone in.
One way to possibly solve this is to charge a base price for the game, perhaps $30, then have the online battling portion be a subscription. That way money is still coming in to justify spending the time adding features or making balance tweaks to enrich the metagame that people are paying to be able to access. People who paid for the game at the $40 price could automatically receive a year of battle subscription, or however long $10 would end up equating to. Just a thought anyway, the bigger problem, more than number of Manamon, is if the playerbase would support such a model and a metagame. Not everyone is going to be interested in battling online.
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