Helix Chamber

FileMaker Pro screenshot of a Pokémon data sheet for Camerupt.

FileMaker Pro data sheet for Route 101 encounters in Ruby and Sapphire.

FileMaker Pro data sheet for overworld NPC sprites in Pokemon.

FileMaker Pro data sheet for a Pokemon battle card, with 3 pokemon sprites and their moves and items.

The FileMaker Pro (fp4/fp5) database files are how GF organized various game data in a digestible format. They kept track of just about everything using these - learnsets, encounter tables, NPCs, and even battle e-cards.

The havesomefun Crystal collection has a mix of documents with various authors (seemingly not just from a single workstation like the R&D disk backups), so maybe the doc with the old Kris design didn't get backed up in this archive, or they actually were but got corrupted and lost all their data.

Forgot to follow up on this: the document with the old Kris design is NOT in the teraleak it seems. There are some 0-byte (corrupted?) cwkj files with bakemoji names, but I haven't successfully unjumbled the filenames as they seem to have been transcoded too many times to return anything readable.

As for what I've been working on it's mostly Banjo-Kazooie prerelease magazine documentation which has shined some new lights on its development: tcrf.net/Prerelease:B...

The gen 3 stuff came and went so fast. I left everything alone after I got stuck on the CWKJ files (have a solution now). Other than that I was examining the database files and trying to untangle the bakemoji file names. The community has covered all the graphics and likely much more at this point

Once again, apologies for the continuous radio silence. I don't work on Pokémon research unless I actually want to. Recently, efforts in my spare time have been aimed at prerelease content on TCRF for other games.

A second look at these photos:
-Calendars say Dec 1994
-The dev console in the front has what seems to be a prototype of Bushi Seiryuuden (released 97!) with a different GUI layout
-The graphics station (Nishida sitting there) has an interesting printout...
-Morimoto (?) is holding a GB dev cart...

one of my favorite games is "spot the power macintosh in the 90s Japanese gamedev studio photo" and I'm 90 percent positive the computer on the upper right is a Power Mac 7100

Game Freak's developer offices

Staff photo of Game Freak, featuring Satoshi Tajiri, Junichi Masada, Shigeki Morimoto, Koji Nishino, and others holding the company's works.

The Satoshi Tajiri interview goes into his design philosophy and has some photos from Game Freak's developer offices at the time.

デサインの現場 [Designers' Workshop] Vol. 12 No. 74 (February 1995)

デサインの現場 [Designers' Workshop] Vol. 12 No. 74 (February 1995)

デサインの現場 [Designers' Workshop] Vol. 12 No. 74 (February 1995)

デサインの現場 [Designers' Workshop] Vol. 12 No. 74 (February 1995) has been scanned and archived. Lots of good interviews, including with Satoshi Tajiri, plus a feature on SEGA and Virtua Fighter. Enjoy!
archive.org/details/Desi...

Sorry for the extremely late response. I got sick for a few weeks! I followed you.

Of course, the various HC members still contribute to the Pokémon research community at large. The people making content for HC specifically have simply not had the time, motivation, or inspiration (until, in fact, the teraleak bolstered our spirits and curiosity...)

While I am doing as best one can to fulfill past obligations and finish things I started, please do not expect activity on the level of where HC was in 2018-2020. Due to several circumstances, HC is managed solo now, and requires time, effort, etc which must take the minority share at present.

The mostly Mac-based software suite represented in the teraleak for Gen 3 so far:
-Clarisworks (WP/Draw)
-Microsoft Office (Excel/Word)
-Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator
-FileMaker Pro 5
-The in-house map editor ("ME")
-StuffIt (bundled with Mac OS, for .sit archives)

Pokemon gigaleak folder open in Windows Explorer showing several gibberish files with shortened names and some English file names.

Unfortunately, upon review of all the CWK files in Crystal, there's little to no hope. However, there are ~15 CWK files in the PRJ folder that have 0 bytes. If we can reverse the mojibake (from Mac encoding?), we can learn these file names, with the possibility of one having been the Kris mockup.

It seems to mostly depend on ease of use. One imagines that the low quality screenshot here is a photo capture because they didn't *need* to expend the effort to produce a high quality picture to illustrate their concept when the game environment already exists.

There was some content added to the Ruins of Alph in Crystal which the document seen above does cover. Here is a quick gist of it:

www.psypokes.com/gsc/unown.php

Pokemon Crystal error screen mockup made in ClarisWorks for Mac.

Pokemon Crystal Unown document featuring Unown characters superimposed onto a photograph.

Document header "A Legend Of Suikun" with a photo of old Japanese towers, probably in Kyoto.

Mockup game screen of Suicune encounter with text superimposed onto the text box.

Most of these are scenario documents for Crystal content, written by Masuda. Some of them have game mockups and some have real pictures. There are some flowcharts as well for the Suicune storyline/encounters.

Got into the ClarisWorks/AppleWorks files in havesomefun finally. Can now confirm that the Crystal development pic shows 4 different documents in ClarisWorks (including flowchart in their Draw program). Haven't found the ones pictured yet but a lot of troubleshooting has been needed.