Gone Mon-Collecting

I kinda got distracted when I discovered that the Fig Hunter site now had the prototype for Miasmon, a game that kinda had been looking like it just wasn't going to happen. The prototype/beta games that Pseudolonewolf makes are worth playing into the ground, and Miasmon is basically a much more refined version of Beast Signer but with significantly more interesting worldbuilding.

Below, if you're more interested in pictures, are the members of my current Miasmon team who have sprites (two of them lack sprites because, well, prototype/alpha/beta).

(Yes, their names are Evil Moo, Buffster, Doommuffin, and Crysbug*.)

Anyway, the worldbuilding for Miasmon that I find interesting is a simple explanation that Pseudolonewolf has used several times as an explanation for random encounters in JRPG-type games: There's a "miasma" (an old word meaning "bad air," which was used in olden times as an explanation for illness-bad air made people sick, because people couldn't come up with better explanations for too many diseases) which is essentially leftover essence of creation from when the gods made the world(s) that the game(s) are set in, and there are just places where monsters will manifest in response to one's thoughts; the monsters then generally must be dissipated through combat. (This has the effect of radically reducing the body counts in such games, especially with respect to level grinding, which was intentional on Pseudolonewolf's part because, despite making a lot of JRPG-style games, he doesn't actually like violence/combat.)

In Miasmon, people have learned how to scan, clone, and control these monsters through advanced technomagic. (Which means that the sport-fighting problem inherent in Pokemon is also gone.)

Fun stuff.

*"Evil Moo" is a reference to Monster Rancher, one of the more underrated mon series from the original mon series boom. (Speaking entirely of the anime, which was much better than it had any right to be. Although Medabots was much better, though that's neither here nor there.) The other names aren't really references to anything in particular, though I'll note that, as far as I can tell, Buffster's species/evo-line that is loosely based on ants is exclusively male. Huh.

It's also got a kind of clever-in-the-bad-puns-sense naming theme: It starts as "Worker," an anthropomorphic ant wearing attire appropriate to a construction worker, and then evolves into a much larger insect-ish creature named a "Forman." Get it?

(If you don't get it... "Formicidae" is the family of insects that ants are in, and a foreman exists higher in the hierarchy than workers. ...Not among ants, they don't have foremen, among humans.)

-Signing off.