This is Evan Starr, game director for Pokémon Ethereal Gates, here to let you know that, yes, we’re still working on the game, we’re progressing, we’re not dead, and you’ve got a lot to look forward to. Our next developer update will be coming this August, and we’ll have some fun goodies then to show off!
But in today’s developer blog, I actually want to shed some light not on the future, but on the past. For on today’s date, TEN years ago, I started the project that would eventually become Pokémon Ethereal Gates. So I’d like to take some time to smile back on the history of the project, and where we’ve been.
I got into Pokémon Fan Game development through making Pokémon sprite splices (such as the one seen above) on Pokémon Fan Universe forums, a forum that has been, unfortunately, gone for 9 years. I had been on the forum for a few months and had been inspired by the eventual developer of Pokémon Gaia (and person way too young to be on that forum at the time), Spherical Ice, who had made a project called the “Xowka Region” where he was crowd sourcing designs to create a fan Pokédex for a fan region.
So I...more or less copied the idea. And on April 12, 2008, The Emort Region was born! It quickly became the fastest growing thread on PFU forums, and within weeks there were nearly 100 designs submitted. Several people joined who offered their assistance in turning the Emort Region into a ROM hack, and I found myself beginning to draft out a story and a more in-depth region map! It was during that first summer in 2008 that Mark, or SirAquakip, joined the team.
Look, I can even spot some super old versions of familiar friends, Kittorch, Moston, and [what would be] Avinch! They’ve certainly changed with the times...We even had a steel type eevee evolution. The other two starters, pictured left, were a lizard, Chamelica, and a tadpole, Fitsu.
After PFU shut down, the project shifted over to PokéCommunity and Serebiiforums. It did not take off in either of those locations. The shutdown of PFU meant most of the team left, including Mark. If you want to see me scrambling and make fun of 14 year old me attempting to make a fangame from barely anything, here’s a link to the old PC thread: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=169808
Some friends I knew offline decided to help me out with spriting and story, and with them I opened up a forum just for development on the game. In some crazy twist of fate, Mark was able to find us and we fueled enough productivity in 2010 utilizing our forums, deviantart, and good old fashioned Google Talk to shift gears entirely from ROM hacking to RPG Maker XP.
We were finally able to produce our first game demo, POKEMON HELIO VERSION, which came out on New Years Day in 2011, nearly 3 years after the project began.
Mark was totally at the helm of spriting for Helio Version, and his consistent art style shone through--here are the previously shown Pokemon in the Helio release style--oh and I also threw in Ottum and the new starter Pireel, which replaced Fitsu. The above are the pre-release sprites, the below are the re-made sprites which made it to the game itself.
Mark has probably made several thousand Pokemon sprites during the last (nearly) 10 years.
[Fun Aside about Pokemon Helio Version...Mark and I had the game all ready for release but the day before we had lost the past month’s worth of work and had to completely scramble to put it all together. You’ll find that the demo itself and the trailer are two completely different looking games.]
The Helio Version demo went over so well that we decided to take things in an entirely new direction. Hah. We completely rebranded under the name Pokemon Imperial Sky, and kept making the game with the same story from Helio Version.
This trailer happened in November 2011.
Then we scrapped that and totally started over, this time with a more Australian outback setting:
By this point we’re at about October 2012. You can see within here the seeds that eventually became Pokemon Ethereal Gates.
And here are some sprites and concept art from the 2012-2013 Imperial Sky era.
A lot of it, as you can see, carried over. In 2013 we put our minds to the test to rebrand one more time, as we realized the name “Imperial Sky” actually made no sense at all, for we had no empires in the sky or anything of the sort in the Climate-based evil team we had set up. We rebranded as “Ethereal Gates”. We got ourselves some more team members. We set out to put our all into this project.
By around this time of year in 2015, we were ready to unveil ourselves as Ethereal Gates to the world, and we set up an admittedly large social media presence to start showing off what we’d been working on for, at that point, 7 years.
We were insanely proud of the work that went into that demo, but the nearly years that have followed have tested our resolve. We’ve redesigned, rewritten, and have all-but-rebranded because we keep striving to do better. Each time we hit the reset button it’s because we’ve grown wiser and smarter and have improved our skills. But for us, we think it’s finally time we follow through on a full game. That’s why we’re not doing another demo. We’re going to produce the full game this time so that we don’t get caught in the trap that history has clearly laid out for us. And we’ve never been in a better position to do so.
I’m speaking from a personal place, and because I’ve now officially been in some form working on Pokemon Fan Games for 10 full years, I want to say thank you for it all. Thank you to those who inspired me to keep spriting in my early years even when it was admittedly terrible, thank you to the team members long past who kept the dream going even in the periods of intense laziness, to those who submitted early designs to the Emort Region, to Pokemon Fan Universe Forums, to anyone who played Helio Version, to the fans of Ethereal Gates and each piece of fan art or encouraging praise, to the absolutely incredibly talented members of my Perihelion Productions team, each of whom I am incredibly glad to work beside and call my friends, and to the fangame community as a whole--who I never really discovered until a few years ago, and have never felt more at home in.
