[EVENT] PMD: Explorer's Log

[skinstealer]

well...we've been playing a good bit, but haven't made progression. we ended up spending like 3 hours total trying to recruit a stunky to the team...only to realize that the first dungeon's stuff is completely unrecruitable. fuck. we'll get a stunky eventually, but MANNNNN it sucks to not get one so early on when they're so tantalizingly out of reach. we'll have an excuse to make one in petz someday...

we did pick up two houndooms and a houndour from going to the wrong dungeon during that 3 hour period, though. igneous, brimstone and charcoal will be hexed and detailed upon in this log soon enough! igneous is the main party member out of the three, and the other two are his siblings...


for now, though, a brief interlude- while doing poorly last night, we decided to do some petz gameplay stuff to destress, and como helped us decide on doing some stuff with our PMD guys. we were in the mood to make props and toys to essentially "play house" with our petz OCs, so after seeing that cloudburst and speckles were the ones that wanted to play that night, we set out to set up an elaborate scene with custom toys and playscene shenanigans...a game night at mt. moonview!



[image description: a petz screencap of a hilly night landscape, covered in glowing lights and cool colors. on the hill in the foreground, there are gold and silver coins, as well as apples and a big blue chest.]

so in rescue team DX (the switch remake of PMD red rescue team), they actually did up some of the friend areas with painterly backgrounds instead of an explorable area. we've never played through the remake ourselves but we do appreciate that they did something with the friend area concept instead of just ditching it like explorers does in favor of a menu. yes, the friend area feature is clunky and hard to wrangle, but it adds so much flavor and worldbuilding potential! thankfully for us, some of these higher-res graphics are pretty suitable for petz playscenes- though sadly not all. the one most well known for being home to clefairy and clefable, Mt. Moonview, works amazingly atmosphere-wise, though it does lack a lot of solid play space. still, for something like this, it'll do.

for the scene itself, i wanted it to be cloudburst going out for a midnight rendevous with speckles, the two of them sneaking away from the bandit camp to do a game night just for the two of them. they're very obviously close friends in our petz game and it makes sense for the two of them to go get some Them Time away from the rest of the members of their teams sometimes. being bandit team leaders is hard work, after all, and sometimes they need to unwind and gripe about how things are going, maybe even swapping tips and secrets over a nice game. to set this scene, we'd use the mt. moonview scene- and we'd need some toys. i just so happened to be looking through OpenGameArt to find some stuff for props for our other crew, so i was already in the mindset of processing sprites and plugging them into the game as toys. picking out some PMD sprites, resizing them, and popping them in the game was no sweat.

i chose the two coin sprites, the classic apple, and a big blue chest that i actually don't know what it's for. if anyone can tell me, let me know- it is a big sprite compared to the others, they're all scaled up by the same amount!


[image description: a screencap of cloudburst and speckles approaching the scene. speckles seems nonchalant, while cloudburst looks hesitant.]

enter our boys out for a night on the town...problem one arose while we were testing the apples. the apple toys are based on the cheese, which is a food item that can be eaten in a single bite. these also have a higher tastiness value- most petz fucking love cheese. these two, however...have food finickiness traits, and refused to eat the apples. there's two types of this that could be applicable here- namely either just fucking hating cheese flavor, or refusing to eat anything but their favorite. after @gyiyg changed the apple to have sweet flavors, cloudburst would eat it, but haven't tested with speckles yet. betsy also would not eat the apple.

still, they arrived at their little setup...i'm not sure what games they actually play, but it's cool to think about them maybe doing some stuff with dice. we asked knux if he'd be down to make us some PMD-style dice sprites for us to put in the game as props, and that may happen in the future...


[image description: cloudburst is busying himself with the apples and coins, while speckles messes with the chest.]

the chest and coins are based off of the chewy sneaker toy- a very common base for props/objects, seeing as petz will mess with them fine, but it doesn't really have any other special qualities. it's a good toy to just, slap a sprite on if you want to put something specific in the game. this morning gyiyg gave them fancy adjectives to make them their "actual colors' (aka assigning the correct color value like "yellow", so that petz can interpret them as intended), among other things, but last night they were basically just reskinned sneakers. either way, they got into messing with them quickly.


[image description: speckles plays with some coins, surrounded by a mess of items.]

it's fun thinking about speckles in his proper bipedal state, fiddling with coins in between his fingertips- i can picture it vividly, and we might even draw it at some point... canonically in our mind, he is a regular bipedal mewtwo, even if his petz incarnation has to be solidly grounded on all fours. considering cb is kind of a runt of a raikou, it does make it funny to consider speckles as the size of a person and cb is like a weird fucked up dog size, and make the two of them gamble. so many interactions come to mind...


[image description: speckles carrying around an apple, while cloudburst carries a gold coin.]

speckles did enjoy picking up and moving the apples around, even if he wouldn't eat them. cb wanted nothing to do with them. i can picture it as a sort of "look, i brought apples!" situation, where cb refuses to eat them and when speckles is asked why he wouldn't eat them, the mewtwo says he brought them for cb! and thus neither of them eat anything, choosing to gamble on empty stomachs.


[image description: cloudburst standing indignantly with a gold coin in his mouth, surrounded by similar coins.]

i think cb did good on this night, gambling-wise- not that he doesn't have a lot of money already, thanks to his tendency to scoop up rare items in the field and sell them for a high price (aka our randomizer keeps giving us bands and orbs and shit). it doesn't look like either of them brought a lot to work with- it's more about the company than the profits, when it's just the two of them.


[image description: speckles holding an apple in his mouth while cloudburst looks away, a coin in his own.]

this is just a pic of speckles and cloudburst doing different things independently, but it really looks like speckles is trying to get cb to eat an apple. they probably bickered and bickered about this, though all in good fun.


[image description: all of the toys are put away, and the two pokemon sit on the starry hill. speckles is gazing into the sky, while cloudburst looks at the ground.]

all in all, it was a lovely little gameplay session, and the prep required actually made it feel a lot more special. these kind of "playing pretend" scenes are really fun to set up, and felt meaningful to do- especially since we have all of these toys and the playscene for later interactions as well, if we want! it definitely makes us want to get off our asses and design some scenes for the environments we've randomly generated, too...

if anyone has any requests for PMD item sprites put into petz, let us know! thank you for letting me take you on a little journey.