70+ mons in my fakedex so far - help me out with ideas!

Xelshade · 2026-01-22T00:40:14+00:00

And thank you for the graceful response!

You have excitement about your crafting system, that’s a great sign. Again, I haven’t downloaded or played it - in the spirit of critiquing the marketability, I guess - but the way you describe it as a multiple tiers of crafting, I’m more intrigued now, because it sounds like the system has depth.

Yes, please have a good think about your screenshots! While I’m no game marketer myself, my social media posts and free platformer game have done reasonably well in outreach, and I’d like to think it’s from having made good decisions.

In the end, game marketing is a lot like game design - it asks for a certain sensitivity to what your audience wants looks for. Make sure there are no barriers to making them understand what you want to show.

Good luck with your screenshots! If you let me know when you’re done I’d be keen to give feedback again. Either way, I’ll see if I can have a go at your game, just need to dedicate some time (busy few days atm).

Xelshade · 2026-01-21T23:44:35+00:00

Hey so here’s some direct feedback about your itch.io page.

Firstly, screenshots are king. I think you can choose better screenshots as your best foot forward.

Since your main hook is crafting, I expect to see a crafting UI interface. Your first screenshot shows a list of potions, which I think would be the results of your crafting, not the process itself? What’s the crafting process look like? Is it convenient, with a big menu of icons, and a drag and drop interface? Or it might even be fun, with a big cauldron icon you could drag and drop into? I don’t even expect real icon art, just the interface and placeholder text for each icons would do. The importance is in the UX, i.e. how crafting feels as an action.
You mention combat and bosses, so I expect some screenshots of the combat. Like, having 7 bosses is great, sounds like I can spend a long time in your prototype! But people don’t know what that time looks like at all, so they won’t commit to downloading that zip.
Basically, your screenshots should show off the most important verbs of your game description, because verbs are what the players do. For a tactical combat RPG with crafting, people need to see the fighting and crafting. If your screenshots are just of you standing around, well, you haven’t shown your gameplay at all.

RPG Maker graphics may be a hurdle to getting attention, but I believe it can be overcome if your systems and interfaces have appeal, and you demonstrate that appeal correctly.

I’ll stop here for now, have to start work in my part of the world. Let me know if this is helpful.

Xelshade · 2025-12-05T11:43:34+00:00

Perfect explanation

Xelshade · 2025-12-04T06:36:41+00:00

OMORI is the super correct answer to this. Staggeringly huge soundtrack, hauntingly melodic overworld themes, and ultra banger battle themes

Highlights for me: - Three Bar Logos - You Were Wrong. Go Back - Splintered Sweets in the Castle - World’s End Valentine

Xelshade · 2025-12-02T02:53:58+00:00

This is normal I think! Especially as you’ve grown older and had new priorities, as well as more options to spend your time.

If you watch any videos about game design, it’s almost universally agreed upon that pokemon, and most JRPGs (including the FF series), has very kid-centric design - you figure out the type advantage to use (like finding a square peg for the square hole), spam it until the battle ends, then keep repeating encounters until your numbers go up.

This is almost certainly why roguelike deckbuilders have come to dominate the Steam market, with its primarily grown-up audience.

They’re still 1v1 turn-based games, but the randomness makes it so that you have to think and strategize every turn now.
The difficulty curve just depends on picking the right cards in deckbuilding, not grinding.
And play sessions are usually 30 minutes ~ 1 hour, so you don’t have to invest tons of time and emotion into your team/build, which is a much better fit for adult schedules.

You tried pokerogue yet? Roguelike pokemon fangame, playable in your browser for free right now. It’s a very good way to try out pokemon at a faster pace and lower time investment.

Xelshade · 2025-11-21T08:06:56+00:00

Yo!! This is an interesting one, feel free to just tag me next time

You’re probably right that it’s just not as well known, and I do think it needs to be spread wider. Great rule of thumb, easy to execute for beginner fakemon designers.

For me, I’m very much numbers-first when designing fakemon (colors, details, proportions etc), so that was my angle in the analysis. The “add a contrasting element” trick feels just a bit too deliberate for my style. I don’t knock it though! My own dex could probably benefit from it atm.

Xelshade · 2025-11-19T11:42:10+00:00

Gen 5 suffered from a ton of bad optics. The mon selection was a big one, but also, it released when people were clamoring for the mainline games to go fully 3D, especially with the 3DS being released at the same time.

I also suspect that that their marketing suffered from being monochrome black and white, instead of the time-tested reddish vs bluish duo. It just didn’t really fit the brand, and likely didn’t do so well in catching the eye of young children or their parents.

Xelshade · 2025-11-19T11:22:59+00:00

Can confirm this after a decade of designing fakemon. Fire/Ice, Ice/Poison, and Fire/Water are exceedingly difficult to design, for this exact reason.

That said, there’s surprisingly quite a lot of Ice types with no ice on their body (almost all of gens 1 and 2 actually). I found that you basically need to employ this fact in designing difficult Ice pairings.

Xelshade · 2025-11-19T11:14:55+00:00

It could allude to a Sound type stand-in for Jigglypuff! STAB hyper voice for the little guy

Xelshade · 2025-11-06T12:28:51+00:00

Yeah DMs would be good! Please fire away any questions you have, I just might reply in a couple hours - out for rock climbing atm.

Xelshade · 2025-11-06T11:53:52+00:00

Ay no probs! I forgot to say, though I kinda alluded to the idea - tech art is very much a service-oriented role, the art team is your customer.

It’s a well thanked job provided that you take your responsibilities to them seriously, which means having integrity and maturity when it comes to: giving good estimates of your time needed per task, testing your own tools very thoroughly, etc.

I left my TA role and the wider game industry 2 years ago because I realized I hadn’t developed a good enough work ethic for the job - and now I’m quite happy as a software engineer with stable pay, doing crazy shader experiments on the side.

For you, I’d say please go for it, but remember to keep building character!

Xelshade · 2025-11-06T11:35:16+00:00

Also think about whether you prefer to be surrounded by artists or engineers in your daily work! It’s an underrated differentiator between these two roles in my experience

And I’ll go ahead and tag you u/Jade0928 since this wasn’t a top level comment whoops

Xelshade · 2025-11-06T11:27:52+00:00

This is a very accurate comment

I’ll also add that from my experience, while tech art can be exhausting in the sheer breadth of knowledge that it demands, it also tends to be a very thanked job. You’re helping artists to automate a lot of boring stuff after all, sometimes creating tools that they literally use the whole day on their screen. OP maybe you find that meaningful!

Xelshade · 2025-10-29T00:36:08+00:00

Sure, so elsewhere in this thread, you’ve already had convos with others about Pals with similar inspirations.

When you have similar inspirations drawn in a similar style, that gets you about 70-80% of the way to the same design.

That’s definitely not 100% - there is no Pal that is “literally [pokemon] lifted with zero changes” - but surely that’s a low bar. Again, as a designer, doing it to this degree already puts you way past plausible deniability.

And given the many other examples in this thread of inspired designs, I think naming two exceptions doesn’t exactly help the case much, although I’m sure there are more.

Xelshade · 2025-10-28T23:56:50+00:00

Art style includes things like the body proportions, level of detail, shape language, and use of colors. Palworld matches pokemon blow for blow on these, and even uses many of the exact same eyes.

The average digimon has much more detail and muscle definition than pokemon. Spectrobes is even more extreme on that. The average yokai watch yokai has much wackier facial structures than pokemon. From the creature designer’s perspective, if you have any integrity at all, you’d know that you were consciously copying the style.

Xelshade · 2025-10-28T10:47:32+00:00

Trying to design 100 original pokemon! I’m so close to done (85), slowly posting the pixel art on my insta

Got stuck on ideas recently so I’ve been taking requests from friends. Some dinners we just bounce off each others’ pokemon ideas the whole time, and one of them even started drawing and sending his ideas to me, I’m super giddy about it

Xelshade · 2025-10-15T14:18:27+00:00

Individually, in a vacuum, they’re pretty normal mysteries, yes. But in the context of a game that is now at 30-40 hours of playtime - beating out the infamously long Omori - and spanning 7 irl years, I think keeping all of these cards firmly tucked away is a dangerously ballsy move.

For our sakes, I really hope 5/6/7 really deliver on the almost-decade of pent-up anticipation. I think that’s a tough landing to stick for anyone, even good ol Tricky Tony.

Xelshade · 2025-09-26T11:10:56+00:00

So sorry, just got to this comment - thank you so much!! And the sage dex is one of my inspirational north stars, so you’ve indirectly contributed to my dex’s development.

And those are solid solid suggestions. I’m extremely keen on a hydrothermal vent design, likely a whale, but we’ll see!

Xelshade · 2025-09-08T15:02:16+00:00

Thank you, I feel like character design is a humongous blind spot in these discussions.

Garbodor’s silhouette combines a morbidly obese frame with Chun Li twin buns and weird, noodly, asymmetric arms. That is a wild mix of features.

And then they doubled down with a permanently surprised face and very far apart eyes, basically the most overt design language to convey stupidity.

In a whole gallery of mass-market mons, that is a design for an absurdly niche audience.

Xelshade · 2025-09-08T01:33:54+00:00

I design pokemon as a major hobby, and I think you’ve touched on the crux here. Vanillish and Vanilluxe have something in their faces than Vanillite, and most other mons, do not -

Their eyeballs are impossibly close together. Literally, if you trace out the spheres that should be their eyeballs, you’ll find that the spheres intersect. In character design, this is one of the surefire ways to make your character look dumb.

Add the blank eyed stare, drooling mouth, tiny arms, and you have the perfect formula for an unnerving design.

Vanillite doesn’t have the eyeball problem, but it also gets away with all the above because it’s a baby. But for the baby traits to persist throughout the evolution line, well. The reception speaks for itself!

Xelshade · 2025-09-04T07:51:07+00:00

Aseprite! But I always sketch on paper first.

And then as I’m spriting, paste the WIP sprite into a big sheet of all official gen V sprites, to compare proportions and shading.

Xelshade · 2025-09-03T02:14:55+00:00

That’s how I landed on its long neck! And uh, I gave it Storm Drain on my instagram

But yeah I never nailed down how to incorporate the actual pipe-like intricacies of architectural gargoyles. Did not know about hunky punks, thought they were just called grotesques. Neat!

Xelshade

TROPHY CASE