In early 2016 I worked on an hybrid TI-BASIC RPG called Pokéwalrus intended to include 150 different walruses to capture in 3 vs 1 battles, giving you the ability to use them in battle parties. Unfortunately my interest in calc programming waned shortly after that and then past life issues took their toll on my health. However, starting in 2020 I started either reviving or giving major updates to calculator projects that had not been updated for years and/or were abandoned. This time around it's Pokéwalrus turn to get revived, although as a Celtic CE-enhanced TI-BASIC game instead of using grosged's Sprites library. Here comes First Fantasy II: Pokéwalrus (the original FFII project was renamed to First Fantasy Zero).



So far the overworld map is done, but you cannot enter any dungeon (I still need to do maps for them). The intro is also done and is essentially an hommage to the NES and Famicom Final Fantasy games, but the story setting is set around 1000 years after Darkblasters. There are already 46 playable characters in the game, out of 300. Battles are not done but the presentation is mostly done (although slow for the initial loading) and you can see battle commands and although they are separate from battles right now, attack move animations are done, although like in the NES Final Fantasy you'll notice while playing that many attacks are merely recolored versions of their originals. Nonetheless they show some Celtic non-sprite graphical capabilities. If Celtic CE ever allows the user to scroll only a portion of the screen then I might add an earthquake attack move to spice things up, but there are so many amazing things Roccolox Programs added to it already so Roccolox++ (yes I know Karma doesn't work on forums). I also obviously need to add dungeon maps to the mix (the overworld is 130x100).

It's essentially a more open-world, 3 vs 3 version of Pokémon with no human involved (other than for creating this universe in the first place by causing two apocalypses in a row) and no items. Some walruses can heal others or themselves, so like in Final Fantasy it's generally a good idea to include a walrus that has healing abilities in your party. Keep in mind that the game will be very large due to the map data and the large amount of sprite data, though. There will probably be a version with far fewer playable characters for those who prefers a smaller file size experience.

After much hassle and debugging, battles are now done (hopefully things won't break with thousands of bugs) and you can now acquire the ability to "capture" your opponents. You can see a few of the attack/healing moves in action and yes, Alex (no, not the Alex you are thinking of) is weak against dark spells (Drain in this case).



Special thanks to Roccolox Programming for making this TI-BASIC-enhancing library. I especially like how you get some sort of Catalog Help in the TI-OS status bar for Celtic commands and the fast rectangle/circle routines.

The next thing to add (I think) will be the walriipedia that lists all playable characters in your inventory but I don't know if I'll show all sprites by default. I'll probably cache most character names in a string variable and hovering over one of them for a second will load its sprite in a square like with First Fantasy 1 menus. The walriipedia will also show the amount of walrium orbs you got from completing dungeons.

The Pokédex, or rather the Walriipedia, has now been implemented. The screenshot doesn't show it but this is where you can assign characters to your battle party. There's also a new custom font now:



The game is 517 KB large so far, which probably makes it the second largest file size for a TI-84 Plus CE game outside of that 2D racer where the entire track uses over 2 MB worth of pre-rendered images.

No animated screenshot but I finally got all dungeon maps done and linked the first three with the overworld. Same with linking 81 playable characters to the overworld.



Regarding battles, I still need to figure out why enemies still attack out-of-combat allies, it's almost like if it was ignoring the conditional.

I also got rid of the Walriipedia cursor flickering. EDIT: Also all 15 dungeons are linked to the world map now (and vice-versa). I still need to assign playable characters to each of them, though (probably 12 per dungeon instead of 9). All sprites except the final boss are also made.

this looks really cool. It inspired me to try out celtic ce

Thanks! Keep in mind that in order to keep map loadiing to a minimum I had to limit each map to 8-10 tiles as to avoid constantly storing large strings of data into str vars.

I also finished ghost interaction events, giving you a new character per ghost. Switches also work and you can complete dungeons (although still with no enemy opponents ).



I think the game is around 550 KB large now, so a bit larger than an actual Pokémon GB ROM.

two questions: have you put a beta version of this on the internet yet or are you waiting to publish it until its all finished? Second, are you storing the map data in matrixes?

I was planning to wait until version 1.0 to release it and probably add updates later but I would say it is 80% complete right now. I use string variables to store maps as they take less space overall. What I need to do for the most part is fixing many bugs, implement final dungeon events, assign enemy parties to all dungeons, add a visual cue to let the player know if the currently visited dungeon was completed or not and other things I might have forgotten.

nice! I can't wait

This looks awesome as always, DJ. I'm always impressed by how large your games are and you're just like "Oh here's another little RPG with a complex battle system, huge map, and hours of gameplay" as if anyone could do it. Your games look amazing in color <3

Thanks! I did a lot of progress yesterday and today and all characters have been assigned to a dungeon for fighting against, all dungeons except the final one have their events completed and I fixed half of the bugs I ran into since I began working on this. However, one kept coming back and was difficult to fix to the point where I decided to just align your allies in battle the same way enemies are aligned. This means I'll have to fix the positioning of single-target enemy attack animations. Here is a preview of the game as it is now in screenshot form:



I also added an earthquake magic animation and earth class thanks to a Celtic update implementing partial screen shifting.

lol, I just realized that you're the person who created "first fantasy" for the ce and cse. I remember playing that game on my calculator when I was like 10 years old.

I'm so hyped to play this game. Thanks for releasing it so soon!

Oh right I forgot to make a post for the first release. I'M happy to announce that First Fantasy: Pokéwalrus - Brown Version is now released!


https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/2372

There are 15 dungeons, a large overworld map, 20 different attack moves, 2 healing spells, 300 playable characters spanning 10 elemental classes and open-world exploration. Brown version is the initial release and more will come in the near future hopefully.

Requires Celtic CE library:
https://github.com/RoccoLoxPrograms/CelticCE/releases

i didnt realize that it was quite this big! 600kb! thats as big as a gameboy rom on my calculator.

which of the 8xp programs contains the map drawing routine? I'm just curious about how you draw your sprite maps from data strings.

for some reason(this might be intentional) the game will randomly turn off my screen and I have to hit the on button to turn it on. I was walking through the aqua dungeon and it just turned off. Also, you know that Celtic ce allows you to create app vars to store data in, which I believe would allow you to store games save slots in an archived format.

Hmm that is weird. Are you sure your battery level is high enough? Otherwise it could be a Celtic issue. As for archiving the save file, I might add this feature but it will be optional, because the game will defragment every 6 minutes or so (if not more often) due to the game's autosaving feature. Do you have a shell installed such as Cesium?

EDIT: The Turquoise Version is underway

-Added credits screen
-Fixed first dungeon being marked as incomplete in your save file if you beat the final boss
-Fixed final dungeon entrance disappearing after beating the final boss, reloading your game then exiting the final dungeon (entirely related to the above bug)
-Fixed two overworld map design issues allowing you to walk on a solid tree in each of the two affected areas.
-Moved the selection numbers down when you select a party member to use the Cure magic on so that it has less chances of overlapping on walruses and being hard to read.
-Selection numbers no longer erases a bunch of lines of pixels when closed but rather only erases what's behind them
-Changed Walriichu's class to Electric instead of Holy
-Fixed title screen year being 2999
-Fixed fire enemies being strong against ice
-Fixed bug causing holy and water walruses to be nearly immune against life and cure spells respectively (although Cure still seems to produce a poor healing output on some walruses, but at least it's no longer 4 life points like in Brown Version)

Ya, I have Cesium. It's not really a problem because I just have to hit the on button and it turns back on to the game. i've never encountered that problem before. Also sorry for the double post. Not sure what happened there.

No new screenshots but here are some of the changes I made for Turquoise version:
-Fire and electric walruses are now weak against water.
-You can now see your win rate in Walriipedia, so don't lose too many battles.
-In the options you can now choose to keep the save file almost always archived at the cost of more defragmenting. If you keep it in RAM then it slightly speeds up loading times after the title screen, menu or battles, but if the calculator crashes for any reason then you will most likely lose that save file in a RAM clear.
-The final game's messages (such as "The End") now shows up on a custom screen like the rest of the game instead of using basic homescreen text fonts.