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I kind of hate everything about your Pokemon analysis and criticism, but I appreciate your efforts and concision.

but whos gonna pet the player??

Using IRL textures onto polygonal animals is so funny 😭 And the music does sound like minecraft

Nice video! 😊 Git is such a great tool! Once you get a hang of it, I can really recommend ‘git bisect’ for bug hunting

Van you please say how you made the talking system

I think the main problem with the color system is that it's too abstract and lacks any personality. I like that every monster can be of every element, but when it's just a color it has no personality, if you tell me there is a grass/water/fire snake i can imagine different cool things, but just different shades of snake? that becomes soulless. I would also say that these colors will send me to always look at the chart, having elements with names and intuitive relationships reduces the need. Another thing that may be boring (or intended design) is that you have 8 colors but for every given color only 2 are relevant and all others are neutral

The overall idea, art direction, and sound design are great but there are alarming design fallacies being committed. You’re analyzing mechanics individually and not as interconnecting systems and at the macroscopic level of how it affects the overall design of the game and the gameplay experience. Short comings like that is what makes copy cat games fall flat.

if this game isn't free i am unsubscribe-ing

you're project is super interesting, it really have an artistic vibe, I would love to test it to see how it feels when playing it :)

I like your art style

I saw "Flowey" and had a whole heart attack 💀

Great chiptune-esque music

You definitely could have difficulty selection that is more than just scaling stats. Rather like easy mode heals after a battle, hard doesnt, easy gives you hints. Hard is permadeath etc give options. Have you seen mechwarrior difficulty options where you select 4 or 12 options and that makes it medium difficultly picking all 12 is the Hardest of hardest options

Did he just say the pokemon type chart is too complicated? 😅 Oh man that's hilarious

having an entire wheel of 8 types each with literallly just one weakness and one strength feels wastefull, type interactions wont happen often either reducing the number of types or increasing the number of interactions between types would help in making things simpler you made them less interesting, the more types you have the more interactions you should have, and this isnt a line but a curve, it is exponential; otherwise you'll rarely get interactions one way to help this and keep to simplicity is to have types resist themselves and be mutually strong to their opposing/complimentary color that way each type has 4 (technically 8) interactions with other types that are easy to remember

Love River

THIS LOOKS AWESOMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Im always kinda baffled by the whole type chart struggle, as it is completely intuitive to me for 90% of the match ups. And so i mostly figure out when i do forget.

interesting devlog with some neat thoughts on gamedesign, though i would be cautious sticking with unity, even if it makes sense for you. The company behind unity is publicly traded, and although they did make a few steps back into the right direction, the writing is on the wall, making business with that company is at your own risk, and they will stab you in the back sooner or later

I like this, a short more arcadey creature collector. That's something I would love to see get explored a lot more, definitely interested in where this game is going.

Amazing concept tho healing even after losing and able to play the same battle doesn't make sense

I literally died when I saw Flowey. This art style is peak! It's so simplistic, and yet it's distinct enough to stand out!

I can tell if that was gameplay or a sort of visual made for the video. If that is your game, I do like the unique style but it needs to be... spiced up a bit. Keep the pure colors on a black background love that, but make it less flat. The way it looks now is giving Baba is You which implies a puzzle game, not a creature collector. Every character should have four sprites, and maybe even not have it locked to the grid, the style is just a bit too flowey for the gridlock not to look clunky. Give the battles some perspective, it doesnt have to have a back sprite but I mean if youre going to re-use the overworld sprite for the battle sprite (I think you should) then if youre going to have a follower, you'd have a back sprite. Just make the enemy smaller, use a back sprite for yours, and boom, dimensionality. I would also add a lot of flare to attacks. Try to learn how particle systems work. Some flashy effects with bloom would look *amazing* in this style. I'd also have multiple animations, if for variety's sake if nothing else, idk if you are going to have a physical/special split given your focus on simplicity, but I would encourage you to have more variety than a half-hearted strike. Though I would keep all animations creature agnostic, just moving the graphic around. 9:10 like looking at that see how the player can turn to face different directions? That would help if you also carried that over. You dont have to take my advice of course but those are my immediate thoughts looking at the game. I do love the visual style, just think it needs a little bit more dimensionality.

this game is not colorblind-friendly, and i think the simplistic style of each character only having one colour makes them more forgettable imo. i feel like having multi-coloured characters would be more interesting

first song is earthbound, second song is pokemon dppt; all amazing

Pals as vector graphics and the color wheel as a type chart are genius! I love that! But why two shades of green? Why eight colors in total? I also think it's brilliant that each pal can have any color. But how do you make sure that colors are strategic and not random?

Oh oh you're making a monster collection game? Enjoy getting sued by nintendo

As SOON as I saw the artstyle I said "Princess Remedy!??" Hm. But maybe it is... _too_ much Princess Remedy..? It kinda feels like a copy of the style (And some characters) more than an inspiration, specially if it's gonna be on Steam

Big game design principle; never base a mechanic purely on colour (unless it can be reduced to a 3 colour pallet or relies heavily on brightness) since it will make the game inaccessible for a large number of people with visual impairments. Since your system is based on an eight pointed wheel, you could easily create a symbol that reflects the type as a dot or square on a circle or hexagon or even a dice/braille like pip grid. The benefit of this is then you can bring in dual typed creatures just by layering two symbols on top of each other, and you could even add a ninth normal/aether/null type by just having the center filled. I would actually suggest triangles or arrows pointing clockwise, thinking about it, since it helps solidify the effectivness direction Once you have that in place, you could change your creatures sprites into black and white alphas and tint them in-engine, allowing the player to set their own type-colours in the settings (or pick from a set of predefined ones). If you go for dual types you could use the R and G channels as mattes, and the B as Brightness. Also, just to make the type wheel more interesting, you could have types both deal and take 2x damage from their polar opposite type (maybe this only applies to the primary type, in which case you need the symbols to identify primary/secondary)

I get the impression that this is simplifying game design for the sake of it, which is fine and a fun excersize. Rather than compare and contrast to what pokemon is doing and what youre not i think it may be better to view the game from the angle of whats fun; sanding off all the rough edges of Pokemon probably wont leave you with a fun game. I like creature collectors, i look forward to updates.

The art style and general design ethos of this sounds pretty similar to Familiars io. I'd check that out for some studying.

in-universe do they actually not have species names for each picopal? if so how do people refer to a specific picopal when there's no visual context? when someone says "snakey" is the listener just supposed to assume they're talking about that yellow snake picopal and not any other snake-like picopal? what if someone names their picopal Jeffery? in that case it could be ANY! do they not have any kind of documentation or consistent knowledge about each species?

What is your game outside of its relationship to pokemon? Whatever that is, LEAN INTO IT.

I agree a lot of the Pokemons game design is convoluted and outdated (especially the battles). I feel though that a lot of your stripping down to the bare game mechanics is also getting rid of most of the immersive fantasy of pokemon which is to me the core appeal whereas the core game mechanics have always been kinda meh. Getting rid of elemental types for example really makes the monsters much less appealing to me. I'd structure it more as an (easy) souls-like where pokecenters act as bonfires where you can recharge your healing flask (limted amount of heals). The challenge of routes would be one of resource management and choosing your battles wisely. I would revamp the battle system. I would de-emphasize the type system as it often trivializes battles. Instead I would add an additional component such as limited positioning or pokemon resources such as "energy". Maybe attacks could work like a "card game" such as in Clash Royale where each turn you would have to chose from a random selection of attacks of your "attack deck". What should stay the same would be the fantasy of you tiny human exploring and mastering a fantastical world while collecting and bonding with its fantastical inhabitants.

Nintendo getting their patents ready for this

Why isn't orange on the favorite colors option

Brilliant to see how you took the pico 8 limitations into this game. I really like how the sprites came out of that!

Exactly as another comment said, it sounds like you don't want to play Pokémon. Or rather there's only a single aspect of Pokémon you enjoy. - The Pokémon Center are here so you can adjust the difficulty to your own preference. Instead of having hardcoded boring difficulty setting, Pokémon just provides you with option. That's player-made challenges flourish so much in that environment. You can choose not to train too much and not to rely on Pokémon Centers, and totally tailor the difficulty to your preference: do you want challenging battles? You can have it. do you want to just breeze through and focus on the collection aspect? Or just enjoy the story and exploration? So can you. - The intricate type system is such a strength of Pokémon games. Discovering and memorizing type affinities, and especially how they combine in double typing is a puzzle game of its own and so rewarding because it feels like your knowledge as a player is being tested/rewarded. Memorization isn't a weakness. I would argue that your type system is actually 100% memorization, since you have to remember in which direction the color wheel goes, and be sure that there isn't another hue between your color and the other color, e.g.: is this the right green? - Each type only having a single weakness and resistence is IMO pretty boring. What is fun about Pokémon is that not all types are equal. Some are pretty shitty, but if you like a Pokémon with that type are you going to use it despite that type because you like it? There is compromise, there is sacrifice, there is decision making. In your game it sounds like you can have any Pal in any type you want, so you can basically have your cake and eat it too which is IMO less interesting. Some of my favourite Pokémons are pretty weak and have shitty typing, and I love struggling my way through the games with them and feel like "we made it". Figuring out your type coverage, or that all of your Pokémons, despite having different types, share a common weakness is also a fun challenge to work around. This is not a dig at your game. A lot of players play Pokémon very differently, and your game sounds tailored to your own way of playing Pokémon which seems very battle focused. I'm just sharing food for thought.

Love the idea, definitely want to see more! Just gain a subscriber

looks very promessing!

Lots of neat ideas in this project, I'm excited to see where it goes! One thing that sticks out to me is (to be blunt about it) the lack of flavor/story so far - is that just a prototype thing, or is the full game going to be this gameplay-centric? A lot of the reason people stuck with Pokemon despite the subpar gameplay was the charm of the game's world. Also, about the permadeath idea: I think a good compromise could be to show a death counter (either at the end of the game or on the pause screen, or both) and add an option for permadeath deep in the settings, just to let hardcore players do Nuzlockes more easily without inconveniencing casual players.

i think the color wheel idea is still assuming alot on the player

I'm not sure the type system you proposed in this video will really adress your issues with pokemon's type chart. Even with the overall complexity being reduced, memorizing the interactions won't necessarily be easier, considering how abstract the types are right now. Pokemon's weakness and resistances may feel arbitrary on a first look, but remembering each of them tends to be a non-issue, thanks to how carefully they are introduced in campaing (gyms are basically a type chart tutorial, if you think about it) and how thematically well-defined each type is. Even if the interactions aren't always self-explanatory, the strong identity of each type ensures it's easy to come up with your own explanations on why they work the way they do, i.e. "psychic type is weak to bug, dark and ghosts because humans are afraid of these things". With your color/personality-based system, the type chart may be easier to grasp when looked at, but in fact harder to remember without the visual aid, considering the increased level of abstraction we'll be dealing with. I, personally, would find remembering the position of each color on the pie less intuitive than coming up with rationalizations for pokemon's type chart.

On the name input screen at 0:30, the column for G and Q is offset a few pixels to the right. And the last column for J and T is too far right.

As for Game Maker: Every time you close a room view, the grid resets to the default. You can change the default in the game settings. I love the art style!

Wow great video man ❤

I can't say for certain whether or not I like all of these ideas yet, but I've always wanted to see more pokemon-esque games (was really happy to see a game like pal world succeed), so I'll definitely check this out when its released. :-)

Flowey has gotta be buff

whats the music please? thanks; nice video

This deserves 30k views, very cool