Pathomon's Pre-Unity Development

Originally posted on itch.io (June, 2020)

This game is currently being built in Unity, but has not always been the case. Back when I was a kid I used to dabble in an engine called Verge-RPG but coding and I never got along. Fast forward to my mid 20s and I find myself taking an immunology and microbiology exam at university, during which I was having a discussion with some friends as to how much easier it would be to study if we could play a Pokemon like game with microbes and immune cells as the 151. That idea was always nagging at the back of my mind and I began to look for ways to bring it to fruition. The pokemon fan game community is huge and I found a wealth of information and resources to help me build a game in RPG Maker XP with Essentials. They're also a super helpful bunch with some very talented pixel artists (shout out to Relic Castle) I began making assets and world building. This went on for around a year and a half and as the project progressed I realised that the game would be very limited because of the tools at my disposal, I also wish to distribute the game commercially which would not be viable with that engine. 

 On top of this I also wished to learn C#, so to hit two birds with one stone I converted the project to unity and eventually I also changed the format because my programming skills suck. This game is built off of the 2D RPG Kit, big thanks to Arktentrion because their kit knocked months, if not a years, off of my project timeline. The game is aimed towards science students, medical students, or anyone who has an avid interest in their own immune system. 

As it stands it's very early in development and as of the time of this dev post I am still working to update sprites from the first RPGMXP iteration of the game as well as building on the current kit previously mentioned. The process is a little slow at the moment with exams and the COVID pandemic, but more than this I've been trying to find a visual style that is representative, yet pleasing - how many games do you know of that pull off tilesets based on the inside of the human body? (not a rhetorical question, I'm always looking for good reference material). No doubt the sprites and assets I have at the moment will go through a number of revisions before this game ever sees release.