Hello everyone! It's me, Sleepy, of the Azurite Dev Team. I know we've been in a bit of a dry spell for updates so this update is going to basically cover a lot of things people have been asking about for some time. So I'll just get right into this and start with where we stand.
Currently Azurite has basically all of its new Pokémon complete and in game. We have almost all of our new move ideas programmed and many of our side features that we have or have not shown are in the game as well. We are currently waiting on an upcoming update to Pokémon Essentials which will or will not set us back quite a bit but also give us a lot more control over the ideas we have implemented and will implement. This update is in beta as we speak, and we have aready begun to see how we can properly transfer. I feel this is important to mention because this will set us back a tiny bit but also make the game way cooler. The updates to the battle system in Essentials v18 seem to be massive and it may take us a little time to implement our own existing changes into this new system (but not that much time because we are already using essentials). It will be totally worth it.
On top of this, we are also still looking for trainer sprite artists as well as tile sprite artists. While we have both of these things on the team, these are the major hurdles remaining that would be a massive help to getting this game out sooner rather than later. If you or someone you know is capable of working on sprites in our style, which is to say a Gen 5 Battle style and a Gen 4 overworld style, then please apply or direct them to apply. If easier, you can also just join our discord server directly and tell us that you'd be interested in applying. DM me (Sleepy) and I can get you set up with some information on how applying can work.
A few other commonly asked questions I can answer here in this update. We cannot promise all Pokémon will appear in this game upon release. We've focused our efforts on our already ambitious current Pokédex with over 150 new Pokémon on top of our crystals, new megas and more. All of these sprites are sprited AND animated, which was a huge undertaking and is still in the polishing and finalizing stage. If we are able to find free use animations of newer Pokémon they may appear, but beyond that we may have to wait until after release to add additional content to the game. Ideally we would eventually have all the existing Pokémon added into the game, but we will not let an incomplete dex prevent us from releasing this game as soon as we can. The degree of polish we have is simply too high to delay that much longer on just overpopulating the game.
People often ask us for a release date, and unfortunately at this time I must repeat that we will not set a date in stone until we are CERTAIN we will finish it by then. This is a completely personal project, no matter how hard we work to make it look official. All of the dev team has jobs, school, and lives of their own. We are not working on this full time, and we are not sacrificing ourselves to complete this game. People on the dev team will come and go, and that is just the way it is. So until we are positive on a specific date of release that won't get delayed and the game will be complete, we simply cannot say a date. However, I can say the game in terms of assets and functionality is more than halfway done and a lot of our current objectives will be waiting for v18 to release and implementing ourselves into that newer engine.
As far as suggestions go (and Vivid, our community bot) we are currently waiting for a member of our team to move into their new house and set up a server rack (which we just learned is happening within the next month or two!). Once that's set up and they can get Vivid online again, we will scrape up ALL the suggestions in the discords suggestion channel using the !suggest header and review them. Please note that we have finalized our Pokédex, so new Pokémon suggestions won't be happening and have not been able to be submitted for some time. Every move, ability, mon improvement suggestion can be reviewed and if we deem it necessary will need to be properly implemented, play tested, and balanced to the best of our ability. New megas and crystal suggestions will also be subject to the same, so keep that all in mind. But do know we will review all the suggestions we can!
I also wanted to talk about how old Pokémon have changed and what this means. We have not only retyped all old Pokémon who fit the new types (which can be seen on the 'new types' page on this website) but we've also rebalanced quite a bit in terms of stats and abilities. We didn't go overboard per se, but many mons who were missing that little bit of extra power here or there were rewarded in an attempt to allow more and more pokemon to enter a common meta. The abilities we've added have expanded immensely on this, making many Pokémon more unique and possibly more technical in use. There could be a lot of interested synergy and we're excited for everyone to eventually see. The new moves added, and the way we're adjusting movepools will make for some interesting combinations.
Finally, discussing the use of the twitter moving forward. We will be trying to begin to post more often. We will showcase many things, including past mons who have these new abilities and types, reshowcasing new reveals and many other little things. We will also do our best to retweet and showcase fan art so if you ever do make any, be sure to tag us or tell us somehow! We are very excited to see what people make of a lot of the things you will see in this game. The fan art and such so far has been awesome! We hope that the new little bits of content can keep many people discussing and excited for Azurite as we prepare bigger and better things for road to release. So to wrap up, sorry about lack of updates. I know a lot of people very much look forward to this game as much as we look forward to releasing it. Azurite will never die and as I've said in the past, I'd finish it myself if I had to. But I don't. All the images and work in this post has been from our amazing team of spriters, animators, musicians and such. I want to thank everyone for their contributions to this project. When we have a release date set, I promise you will be getting some of the coolest most exciting reveals possible. That's where we build the hype. For now you will get slow trickles as we try very hard to keep all the coolest stuff under wraps. But the wait will be worth it! So thank you everyone for your support so far, and we look forward to Azurites release!
