Make sure to read our previous Dev Log for an overview of the project
Hey all, sorry for the long wait! We’ve been hard at work on Garticmon and have a few new things to show you! We hit a bit of a lull in the second half of last year as some team members became busy, but we’ve picked up a few new members and are progressing faster than ever before!
Maps, Maps, Maps
We have made a ton of progress on maps, with most of the content for the demo already mapped. We are ready to announce that the demo will contain the beginning of the game up through the first gym, plus some side quests!
Who’s that Garticmon?
We have so many Garticmon sprites that we can’t wait to share, but we want to let you discover most of them on your own. Have a taste of some of Ross and Giwi’s designs in crisp pixels. If you want to take a swing at drawing what you guess the silhouettes are hiding, make sure to tag us!
Team Token is Trouble, Make It Double
The festivities are a blast until Team Token crashes in. You’ll need to choose a Garticmon and team up with Slimemantha to help stop Team Token!
More Prettier
We’ve put a lot of effort into making the game feel polished and fresh. Check out our new title screen, main menu, and trainer sprites!
It’s Always a Party with Your Favorite Garticmon
We’ve revamped the party and summary screens to fit our themes and provide more modern features.
Chill Beats with Bingly Too
When you’re playing the demo you may come across this Bingly’s home. You could confront it, but how about we just hang out?
What’s Next?
We have a bunch cooking and are working on bringing everything together. Our biggest area of focus now is scripting out story events and NPC interactions. We hope to have the demo released to the public sometime this year!
We are thrilled to share our first dev log for Garticmon, an in-development Pokémon mod for GBA, which has been a labor of love for our dedicated development team. After encountering a few hurdles and having to restart the project a couple of times, we are now making solid progress and are ready to showcase our efforts!
In this blog post, we will take you behind the scenes and provide an overview of what we have accomplished so far. We’ll delve into the challenges we faced, the improvements we have made, and what you can expect from the upcoming demo release. Without further ado, let’s jump right in!
Introduction to Garticmon
Since this is our first blog, let me give a quick summary of Garticmon:
The Garticmon project spawned from RubberRoss’s Gartic Phone streams which involved a bunch of artists drawing Pokémon-inspired designs based on silhouettes. These designs created a lot of excitement and a desire to see them brought to life in a real game. The community rose to the challenge and is working with Ross and the artists to create a GBA game based on Pokémon Emerald. This game will feature not only an entirely new dex based on the designs from the streams but also a story involving the OCs of many of the artists involved in Ross’s streams!
Timeline
As a team of volunteers, we’re not able to commit to deadlines and it’s hard to predict how much time we’ll have to spend on Garticmon. However, what we can announce is that we’re working towards a demo which will give a taste of the final game. I’d love to tell you all that it will be releasing soon, but I’d rather surprise than disappoint. Keep checking in to see our progress.
What’s Done
Completed Dex: We’ve finalized the list of the hundreds of Garticmon which will be included in the game, along with their types, stats, and moves.
Major Plot: Our writers have put together the complete plot at a high level as well as many details and side quests. We can’t wait for you all to explore it!
Sprites for Demo: The vast majority of the sprite work has been completed for the Garticmon and overworld which will appear in the demo
More of our progress will be highlighted below.
Starting Town
We have a nearly complete starting town playable! The town may share its name with Pallet Town, but it has much more to see and do!
Updated Battle Engine
Even though this will be a GBA game, the battle engine has been updated to Gen 8 standards including physical/special split, Fairy-type, and new moves and abilities! We’ve also made some quality-of-life improvements, including a shortcut to throw a ball.
Music and Cries
We have many of the cries complete for the Garticmon which will be in the demo. We have talented sound designers creating unique, fitting cries pushing the limits of GBA hardware!
We also have several original songs composed and playing on real hardware, you can check out a couple of them below (recorded from a DS)! We have put in a bunch of work putting together instrument samples and tweaking the music engine to get the best possible sound. We’ll likely write a post about all of that work in the future!
Character Portraits
We’re working to bring our story and characters to life and the tiny overworld sprites don’t do justice to the wonderful OCs filling our world. To that end, we’ve upgraded the dialogue system to include sizable portraits for major characters! The portraits will even update to reflect how the character is feeling!
Wrap-up
We’ll have more updates to share in about a month! We’re working on the next route and town, filling in events, and a fancy title screen!
Garticmon Blog 