So for any of you who came here from the Nuzlocke Forums, you probably know that I've had this Pokemon fangame concept in the works called Pokemon Destiny: Tantalum Chapter. (Believe me, it went through a LOT of name changes in its several years of development hecc.) It's set in the Kanto region about two decades after the events of Gen 1, the storyline revolves around the Pokemon Meltan and Melmetal, which serves as a second starter Pokemon to the player and has an evil team centered around it, the concept involves time travel with Proto/Neo/Apocalypse forms of Pokemon (Proto and Neo forms being a common trend in fakemon in the months leading up to Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's release), and it was supposed to start on this year's Pokemon Day. Unfortunately (or perhaps providentially) a series of unfortunate events 'coincided,' leading to a physical and mental health breakdown on my part and my subsequently leaving the Nuzlocke Forums for the sake of my own stability, so the project never officially began.

And honestly, given the big reveal of Pokemon Legends Z-A on the very day that the project was intended to start on, that's probably for the best. And the reason might surprise you. In my original plans for Pokemon Destiny, one of the important NPCs was to be the 'ghost girl' from Lumiose City in Pokemon XY, whose origins and motivations would be explored over the course of the plot, with her serving sort of as a rival to the player and her mystery tying in to the overarching plot of the 'game.' However, with a new official game coming out set entirely in Lumiose City and most likely calling back to the city's past, it is entirely possible that the Lumiose ghost girl will return, perhaps even at a point where she's still alive, which would pretty much kill my entire character arc for her as completely non-canonical. So it's kind of a blessing in disguise that the project was put on ice for the time being.

Unfortunately this means that Pokemon Destiny is going to have to stay on ice until at least sometime after Z-A comes out, and even then, if the Lumiose ghost girl appears in Z-A (as she almost certainly will in some manner), her story arc in Destiny is likely to have to change, get cut, be replaced, or be rewritten completely. So this project that's already spent years in development hecc is going to have to wait at least a couple years longer before I'm able to do anything serious with it.

Oof.

So what am I going to focus on instead? Well, currently my major focus is on my Sonic SatAM fanfiction Sonic Burst: Rise of Ashura, as well as working on a rewrite of my Pokemon Mystery Dungeon inspired Let's Go Eevee nuzlocke, Secrets of Aetherai: Ori's Gift. The latter will be titled Ori's Gift Remix, and will premiere on my upcoming website (God willing) once I'm in a stable enough position in terms of health and finances to get that website off the ground. But in terms of fangame concepts, I have several ideas, but two concepts in particular currently stand out to me.

The first one is something I'd meant to be supplementary to the Pokemon Destiny universe, which is a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game with life sim elements similar to those of Disney Dreamlight Valley and other cozy games. I mention DDLV in particular because it contains adventure game elements, and Pokemon Ultra Mystery Dungeon: Rifts of Creation is, like the actual PMD games, heavily focused on story. (Fans have long held that the PMD games generally have better stories than mainline Pokemon games, which admittedly isn't the biggest bar to set.) Rifts of Creation would have the player traversing throughout a fragmented universe to gather resources to build up a Pokemon Sanctuary, recruit mons to their team, build and decorate houses for their teammates with purchased and/or crafted furniture, run sidequests for their teammates, and eventually manage to put the broken world back together with the help of legendary Pokemon.

The 'Sanctuary' concept evolved from the 'Paradise' of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, which is usually considered the weakest PMD game but works well as an introduction to the series for younger or more casual players. Which was exactly the role it filled for me, as I first got into the Pokemon series at the tail end of the DS era and Gates was legitimately the first PMD game I ever played as well as the first 3DS Pokemon game I ever played. For that, it still holds a special place in my heart, so admittedly I may be biased.

The plotline of Rifts of Creation, however, evolved from my consideration of where the PMD series could really go after Super Mystery Dungeon gave it an entire world map with all the continents already laid out. The introduction of Ultra Beasts in Gen 7 (and later Paradox Pokemon in Gen 9) gave me the idea of the player traversing throughout dimensions, which led to the concept of a post-apocalyptic world where reality itself had been shattered into multiple pocket dimensions, each of them centered around a certain biome type and possibly a powerful boss Pokemon at the end. Hoopa would play a prominent role in Rifts of Creation, being a companion NPC and the means of transportation between these different pocket dimensions.

Rifts of Creation would also feature a sizable number of fakemon, originally those from Pokemon Destiny: Tantalum Chapter (the concept of which was intended at the time to release before that of Rifts of Creation), and probably a few more. I'm already working on new special forms for Dialga and Palkia because those are two mons whose designs could've stood to be a lot better (especially the Origin Forms, which... I find it difficult to believe that any head at Game Freak ever approved those designs), and it makes sense that the Creation Trio would be important to the plot of Rifts of Creation because it's literally about time and space being undone.

(It should be noted that I was originally inspired to redesign Dialga and Palkia by an UmbreonLibris video doing the same thing, and while I like his design concepts of basing them off of animals that live a long time and that travel great distances, I think his execution of the concepts was disjointed and tried to merge too many unrelated design elements, resulting in the final products not really showing a cohesive theme and being visually all over the place. But that's getting off the subject.)

I don't know at what time I'll be far enough along with Rifts of Creation to actually start posting it (God willing), but it probably won't be until I've got my website up and running (once again, God willing). And that won't happen until after my health and finances get stable enough that I can justify pouring the time and money into getting that site set up. Thankfully my overall health seems to be improving over the past few weeks, and I've been able to get more things done, so it shouldn't be too long... but as the Archie Sonic comics liked to say, you never know what the future will bring.

While I do have other Pokemon fangame concepts I'd like to spend time on (including a new region adjacent to the Orre region that is barely even a gleam in my eye at this point, just a rough idea of the location and a couple boxart legendary concepts), my second project is something I've actually brought up before in status updates, but never elaborated on: my longest blog article yet will be the first part of my series regarding a concept I had for a Sonic Burst RPG, adapting elements from Sonic Chronicles, the Mario RPGs, and the Undertale/Deltarune series, as well as a concept from a certain other indie game, but I won't go into details on that one quite yet as that would be spoilers.

Now, before any of y'all start getting excited, a few caveats. While the Sonic Burst RPG is admittedly the most likely to see the light as an actual game at some point by virtue of being a fangame of a property whose owners have not declared war on fangames, the likelihood of my concepts working out in practice given the scope of my ideas and the difficulty with implementing them in a not-for-profit fangame produced as a passion project during the (theoretical) staff's spare time... not gonna lie, it's not great. If any actual playable game ever comes out of my concepts, it will most likely involve a complete rebranding and storyline conversion into an original IP so that this game can be bought and sold without legal issues. And while I'm not going to discount that as an actual possibility some time in the future, for the time being, the Sonic Burst RPG concept will most likely remain exactly that: a concept. But it's a concept that's grabbed my mind and won't let go, so I realized I had to get it down in writing and share it with my readers.

My initial plan was to post the first part of this concept shortly after completing Episode Four of the fan fiction, but given how many projects I'm currently balancing, it may take a bit longer before Episode One of the RPG concept is complete enough to start breaking into pieces. I'm close enough to the end that it should be ready sometime within the month, God willing, but no promises. This is a pretty big thing for me, and I really want to make sure I do it right.

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And with that all out of the way, here's a preview of an upcoming article (Spoiler warning for the DuckTales reboot):