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I'm rebuilding Pokémon Platinum in HD-2D

· 1 min read

so. i started rebuilding Pokémon Platinum in Unity, with the HD-2D look from Octopath Traveler. sprites on a lit 3D world, depth of field, real shadows, the lot.

the first commit was on 8 November. it's now 10 November and there are 134 of them.

the one rule

it has to be faithful. gameplay, movement and timings should all match the real game. the only things allowed to be different are the look and some modern quality-of-life stuff.

how it works

  • a script system runs the game's events. there's a coverage tool that checks all 2,778 of them, and 2,428 get to the end.
  • the game logic is plain C# on a fixed 60 Hz tick, with no Unity in it. that includes a battle engine with a self-test that simulates 300 battles.
  • trainers spot you down their line of sight, do the "!" bubble, walk over, and pay out prize money when they lose. lose yourself and you black out to the last Pokémon Center.
  • the HD-2D part is HDRP: time-of-day lighting, weather, projected sprite shadows and height maps so the ground has some relief.

a lot of the building was done with Claude Code driving the Unity Editor over MCP.

things that broke

  • the original only updates 30 times a second, and i was running everything at 60. water and flowers were animating at double speed until that got spotted.
  • Unity dropped the last frame of the door animations, so doors stopped opening at 77 degrees instead of 90.
  • the height maps did nothing for a while. HDRP reads the height in centimetres from a different property, and every material was sitting at the 2 cm default.
  • the player's mum walked off into the void.
  • NPCs showed up twice in every Pokémon Center.

where it's at

you can start a new game, pick a starter, win the rival battle, go home and get the Running Shoes from mum. that stretch runs start to finish without softlocking.

there is still no audio at all. no abilities or held items in battle, no double battles, no Pokédex.

the small print

this is a fan project just for me. it isn't affiliated with Nintendo, Game Freak or The Pokémon Company, and i'm not releasing it.

the write-up is in the portfolio.