Re: VGStorm Presents Manamon, a new fully featured RPG!
A few things here:
1. Manamon's map system was already basically built, in Paladin of the Sky. Manamon's inventory system was likewise already built, in Paladin of the Sky. Inputting the math to handle moves and how much damage they do would've taken a bit of time, but not months. Working out the story arc itself would've taken a bit of time, but not months. Making maps for every area...get my drift? A year and a half was what this game took, but that doesn't mean a year and a half of straight development. We can't expect that from someone of Aaron's age. I believe he's at the age where he'd either be coming out of high school or just a couple of years into college. Might be wrong there, but that might be a busy time. So okay, the game took a year and a half from the day it was started till the day it finished, but it probably didn't take a year and half's worth of actual work.
2. This is really, really huge. Please
don't ever say Manamon has the same budget or scope as a 3DS game. There's one very important, very time-consuming and frankly very costly element of game design that we blind developers don't have to play with. Graphics. Unless Manamon is fully graphical as well and it's just not stated somewhere, Aaron had to design the math, the underlying code, the maps, the manamon and the mini-games. That's still a fair lot of work. But it's nowhere near on par with a 3DS game.
3. The first-generation pokemon metagame wasn't awesome, but it wasn't terrible either. There were several good competitive options for a lot of pokemon, and that's simply not true of manamon, really. Not to anywhere near the same extent. Certain types are woefully under-represented by both moves and manamon. Certain manamon are utterly helpless against certain types (just look at that Bayowoof example if you need one). And okay, pokemon had stuff like Lick being the mo
st powerful ghost move and all ghosts also being ghost-poison and thus weak to psychic. But pokemon also let you put Ice Beam or Bubble Beam on a meowth, Self-destruct on a Cloyster or Snorlax, Thunder Wave on a Starmie and Body Slam on a Ninetales. It gave you tons of flexibility, which made an otherwise terrible metagame into a passable one. Manamon's metagame, at present, doesn't exist. This point is made purely to support further what I said about 158 manamon not being enough for a metagame. They're more than enough if you give them teachable moves.
4. I know enough about coding to know that dedicated programming would allow items that taught specific moves to be created in less than two weeks, and I don't mean solid work here. If any of you folks know BGT well enough, and can either intuite the way Aaron's got his game laid out or could teach me the best way to work with it, I'd be happy to learn and thus put my money where my mouth is, so to
speak. I have, as I said, asked Aaron if he'd ever consider getting help from one or more programmers who might be able to add features he himself might approve of but which he doesn't feel he has the time or resources to code himself.
No, this game should not be free. No, Aaron did not at any point say that updates were something we should expect. But when you do pay forty bucks American for a game, you do hope for it to receive attention at least for awhile. The teachable moves thing, in particular, would blow his metagame wide open, and the time spent on doing this would very likely encourage even more people to buy the game. Speaking personally, I would review this game at about a 6.5/10 currently. Give me a fair selection of teachable moves and a few updated manamon, and I'd easily jack that to an 8.5, despite some writing issues.
What it seems like, at this point, is that Aaron has a notion of how much work he thinks he can afford to put into the pro
ject vs. the return he expects for said work. So I'm suggesting that people with resources (and I'm putting myself among them) pool together to see if we can't help him make Manamon into an even better game than it already is.
Doing this will make him more respected as an audiogame developer. It will look more complete if he ever uses this as any sort of portfolio-type demonstration. It will not only flesh out the game, but might very well increase his cash flow. And sure, it comes at the cost of some extra work (on doing it himself, or on vetting the work of others), but the benefits are just too numerous. The _expression_ "shooting a gift horse in the mouth" comes to mind.
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