This is a story about Misty, a ditto, Team Rocket, and one crazy detective.
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The idea for this situation mostly came from this comic sequence by Merunyaa.
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It’s nice to finally get back to making stories like these after almost a year. I had a lot of fun figuring out the details of Team Rocket’s elaborate scheme in this one. And then the side-effects. The subtle clues that would get left behind from this situation. And how would Misty stumble into all this? How would I explain to the viewer what’s even happening or why? In retrospect I might have worried a little too much about this and tried a little too hard to spell things out.
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Another thing that helped get me motivated was figuring out the look of the factory tileset. Sure I, er… “borrowed” the tiles from Terranigma. But how do you make graphics from a completely different game fit-in next to Pokemon graphics?? How do I make the 3 factories in my story look different from each other if they’re all using the same set of tiles? These questions drove me to near-addiction while I juggled palettes and Photoshop gradient-maps. A full day of this had built up a lot of creative momentum that carried me through creating all the maps afterwards. And by that point, all I had to do was make the characters do stuff in those maps.
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For the title screen I tried to imitate the style of old pulp detective movie posters. Writing a “premise blurb” at the top is actually a pretty good idea. It puts the story’s description right on the cover.
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… and I then tried to put these images into a collage with a bit of “mystery smoke” in front of them. I considered making the haze pink, but dark blue contrasted so amazingly well with the bright magenta lettering I couldn’t pass it up. Besides, the dark tones help make the “actor” text easier to read as well.
Created by: Liesday
Created by: Merunyaa
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Yes… actors. An old-timey movie poster is all about the movie stars. I just picked some famous names. I considered adding a third one for Officer Jenny but I didn’t want to shrink the text down even more to fit the “rating” and content-label in the corner. It’s only funny when you can read it. And I always insist on having content labels on all of my stuff. Gotta let people know what they’re in for. I’m not trying to show poke-porn to people who don’t want to see it. That would be rude… and would probably spoil your family’s Thanksgiving.
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Not much to say about the music. Nearly all of it came from Pokemon. Yes, even that snazzy jazzy tune. Apparently it was used in the anime. As for the sexy-time music, that’s an old standby I’ve used for years. It’s just a random old midi file a downloaded from somewhere a long time ago, but I have no idea where it came from.