There's no option for "I think they're all weak and annoying" :/ Misty can die in a beautiful roaring great fire, and I will toast marshmallows on it.

Yes really, we have a bunch of team members who are not EU timezone. It's just preferred - but for pixel artists we are so far beyond being that kind of picky. If you are interested, you should talk to us on IRC.

Me, me! I grew up in Brisbane. I live in the UK now.

The choice you make here may or may not influence your future PU career. Think carefully.

Did you ever realise how utterly ridiculous some of the building designs are?

I refer you to strawberry-laser-ufo pokemon center apparently of Celadon City:



Apologies to IRC dwellers, who have already seen this.

I think travelling as a pair will be fairly well developed, with a system for shared xp (maybe 70% per pokemon defeated). We may even implement double battle skills which can only be trained while playing as team of two players.

With apologies for borrowing slightly from ffxi, we could also have a system where you could chain wins against wild pokemon so that as long as you don't leave the grass/cave/water, you get a boost in xp for every pokemon you defeat. Chain could work like:

Defeat pokemon 1 (unlimited turns): 100% xp (normal)
Defeat pokemon 2 (6 turns or less): 110% xp
Defeat pokemon 3 (4 turns or less): 120% xp
Defeat pokemon 4 (3 turns or less): 130% xp
Defeat pokemon 5+ (3 turns or less): 140% xp

i.e. Every pokemon defeated after number 6, as long as it takes 3 turns or less, gives 140% xp

Applying this to double battles, you would need to defeat both opponent pokemon in:

Pokemon 1&2: unlimited turns : 70% xp (normal for double battle)
Pokemon 3&4: 8 turns : 80% xp
Pokemon 5&6: 6 turns : 90% xp
Pokemon 7&8: 5 turns : 100% xp
Pokemon 9&10+: 5 turns : 110% xp

So PU will be an open world game. You will be able to take your level 5 charmander and walk for 2 hours along various roads until you reach The Plains of Death, and if you so choose, you will be able to encounter level 50 pokemon, and you will be owned for your trouble. All this is well and good (if you wander that far, you kinda deserve what's coming to you).

However.

I think there should be certain (small) islands, caves, hidden valleys etc. which must be unlocked or inaccessible in some way to players who either aren't the right level or haven't completed some kind of quest. Having everything open from day 1 takes away from the feeling of progress and prestige. The reason you can get away with almost full open world roaming in 3D mmos is because the monsters will literally see you and kill you before you can get very far into areas that are too high a level for you. Perhaps if we have large patches of grass which a player must cross, this would simulate such a situation (repels don't work if you haven't got a high level pokemon, as in the official games). This would be in addition to special unlockable areas.

I also think there should be some kind of warning when you walk into or near (maybe within 2 tiles) of a patch of grass which contains pokemon higher than 10 levels above your highest pokemon. Something like "You feel a little uneasy..." in the chat window, visible only to yourself. Then when the pokemon are more than 15 levels above, "You feel a strong urge to turn back...". For 20 levels+, "You feel a sense of immediate danger, as if something terrible might happen at any moment...".

The maps look fine for general routes with no points of interest,  but I'm afraid that stair tile in map 2 is definitely wrong.