Gameplay and Pokémon

As I am now working on the third great gameplay project using Pokémon within the last year, I think this is a good time to try to explain a bit about why it is that I keep coming back to Pokémon when it comes to game design. This post was originally written almost half a year ago.

I will let it be no secret that I am a great fan of Pokémon. Meanwhile, experimenting with gameplay for a decade now, one gains a deeper insight into the inner workings of games. This has led me to think about the potential of Pokémon, which often goes beyond what really is used in the games themselves.

What are Pokémon? Removing all the unnecessary details, Pokémon is two things:

1. the idea that the monsters you face and the team you command are actually equal. Catching, training, fighting.
2. a range of these monsters. 

These pokémon take a lot of different shapes, but what seperates them can be boiled down to:

• Big or small, weak or strong. This is often linked to where in its evolutionary family it sits.
• Stat distributions. These generally fall into categories like Defensive, Aggressive and Speedy and attacky. 
• Typing within one of the 18 different types. The most interesting pokémon combine two of the 18 types, for a total of 153 possible combinations.
• A generally quite interesting artistic design.
• An idea. This might be my favourite thing about Pokémon, but is also one of the biggest weaknesses of the series.

Take a look at these two Pokémon:

Which looks strongest? No question. But let me ask you instead which invites the more interesting game mechanics?

Many of the Pokémon are designed around specific gameplay mechanics. This is amazing! However, the games generally focus on stats before design, so the Ditto, however interesting, is always outmatched by its opponent, meaning that this amazing, interesting realm of gameplay is almost always unexplored.
This poses the question: Which possible games could utitilize ideas like those that Pokémon hold in their concept in a more nuanced way than simply multiply damage by health by move strength by type matchup to see who wins?

So, here I am going to explain three different games that I have experimented with. It is not an exhaustive list, obviously. And the inspiration is quite easy to see: I really like card games (these days).



PokeHearth

Resource-based collectible card games, like Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone, offer a solution to the question of why you'd ever want a Charmander instead of a Charizard - because one is cheaper and can be used at a different point of time in the game.

The surprising thing is how incredibly easy it is to translate Pokémon into Hearthstone-type minion-cards. Of course this goes with the whole thing of bottom-up and top-down design, where, in some cases, the card designs the mechanics, and in other cases, the mechanics design the card. With a general mix of these, let's take a small sampling of Kanto Pokémon.

Thing is that I carried onwards from the Kanto Pokémon, into Johto, Hoenn, and after a month or so, further into Sinnoh and Unova. Along the way, the mechanics became more and more complex, but still, there is a good mix of bottom-up and top-down.

One thing I really started to experiment with was card generation. This is a great way to make a card simple, flexible and unique.

Looking back at the points I made about the designs of pokémon, we see that:

• Size of the pokémon fits well with ressource based card games.
• Stat distribution works too, you can have tanky or glass-cannony statlines - as well as expensive cards with weak bodies but strong effects.
• Typing is one of the weak parts, since it is only used to determine what cards can be used together and what sort of Hero Power fits with the type. Each type had a central theme at the start of the game, but as more and more cards had to be designed, this became dilluted.
• The artistic design is wonderful for inspiration with card design, and the card game format can highlight parts of the design unused in the games.
• The idea, too, can most often be respected well.

PokeBattle

This was an attempt to do more with movesets and positioning than Pokémon or PokeHearth really did. I wanted to see a tide of battle as Pokémon, unconstrained by turns, battle out against each-other. It was based around the concept of an open battlefield, with Pokémon of two teams coming from the left and the right side, meeting in the middle and fighting like a tug of war.

Each pokémon here is represented by a card, too, but these cards are much less minimalistic than in PokeHearth. Each pokémon has a cost, health and attack, sure, but also a specific active move (with a specific activator) and a passive effect. Let me just show off a few:

Here again, let's take a look at the ponts:

• Size of the pokémon fits well with ressource based card games - however, the delimination of turns makes costs more vague.
• Stat distribution should work, but it kind of does not. This leads back to a problem with the core of the idea, since the only thing that seperates a battle between two defensive pokémon, two offensive pokémon, or one defensive and one offensive pokémon, is the time it takes for combat to end. Time sort of is important, since it interacts with different speeds of pokémon, as well as mellee versus ranged pokémon. All of this leads to some quite complicated strategics, which might turn out to be more influenced by randomness than planning.
• Typing is completely unimportant.
• The artistic design is easily put to use to inform the kinds of moves the specific pokémon should use.
• The idea of the pokémon is a bit more difficult here, since all pokémon should have some sort of effect on the tug of war with their own body, which kind of limits design space of wacky ideas.

PokeTactics

This project is a bit of an outlier. It takes the form of a tactical RPG, where you move around your team of pokémon (2-4) on a hexagonal grid and use different moves to defeat the enemy team. As with the other ideas, all pokémon are equal - your own and the opponent's work the same. However, quite different is that here, the pokémon are NOT cards. Their moves are cards instead.

This solves a problem that has existed with the other ideas - the inability to train pokémon. Here, your pokémon are given names and will grow stronger as they defeat challenges together. How nice. Without going too much in depth, let's for the third time look at those points:

• Size of pokémon works great in designing challenges of different enemy teams. For instance, going up against a legendary pokémon is more difficult than a caterpie. For the player's own pokémon, they start out at a level fitting their strength, and can then be trained and evolved.
• Stat distribution works wondrously. The stat system is simplified to be points between 3-9 instead of 25-255, and with easily calculable effects of stat differences. All stats, plus some new ones, exist both in the tactics gameplay and in the management/training part of the game.
• Typing can actually be set to be important again since this game is about teams rather than single pokémon! This makes positioning very interesting, since you want to place your pokémon close to those they are strong against and far from those they are weak against. Reducing super effective to +50% effect makes the game interesting without being trivial. On top of this, the typing decides which moves the pokémon has available to them.
• However, since the moves are cards rather than the pokémon, all pokémon are basically identical apart from the above points. As it stands, there is no integration of the artistic designs or the idea behind the pokémon. Right now, Dittos cannot transform.

This has been way too many words written about pokémon. I hope it has been an interesting view into how one can take the ideas from pokémon and put them into new contexts, with some benefits and quite a few weaknesses. Let's see if I can't release a beta of PokeTactics next time. It's basically done, anyway.

Let me know if this leads to any further ideas of what one can do with the pokémon concept and if there is some way to actually score high on all five of these points.