Today's post is not about nails. Don't be alarmed, I'm fine, nothing bad happened. I might have mentioned it, but I'm also a pixel artist that started out with the Pokémon style, and one of the things in my bucket list, so to speak, is to create my own fan region. I have been working on a template for presentations of each creature, working in a different way than I'm used to just to have the flexibility of switching things up in each one. What do I mean by that? Well, let me show you:
Excuse the distortion effects, I'm not gonna give you the base, come on. But I have the ability to switch easily colours around to suit the mood of the fakemon and such. You can see that in the left side there are two hexagons. Those are meant for the types of the fakemon. I wanted to revamp a couple of types because I felt they were incomplete or too skewed. And that made me do the same with another one and... add four new types. And decide that I didn't want to combine "Normal" with anything else so it's out of the question, why would you be normal when you can have a cool element?
Let me show you the icons I made for them:
As you can see, I also made an icon for normal. Even though I don't plan on making any Normal type Fakemon, I don't plan on fully gutting it, the attacks can, and honestly, should stay. I'm not a game designer, but this gives them the chance to be slightly stronger than a typed attack, as there will be no STAB for them!
The icons, in order, depict these types:
- Normal
- Fire
- Fighting
- Water
- Air (instead of Flying)
- Plant
- Poison
- Electric
- Ground
- Psychic
- Rock
- Ice
- Bug
- Dragon
- Ghost
- Shade (instead of Dark)
- Metal (instead of Steel)
- Fairy
- Sound
- Polymer
- Oneiric
- Edible
Air and Metal felt more general than Flying and Steel. The latter just irked me, specially with official pokémon that are NOT steel but another metal. Get your facts straight, come on. Flying feels more like a characteristic, and not an element. Also, its relationship with Normal makes me uncomfortable, it's unable (aside from Tornadus) to be on its own and, honestly, what. Air allows me to slap the type to elementals that are not flying and in general reduce confusion.
And these sparked the internal discussion of "well, Dark is also a characteristic... and in Japanese it's Evil type..." and I couldn't find a perfect solution as a replacement. So instead, I merged both of them into Shade. Shady kinda represents both of them. I would have kept Dark if I had a Light type, but decided against it. This would honestly take the place of Fairy, which it kinda does in a way, but Fairy allows me to go for more mythological inspirations if I want.
And for the new types, I feel like Sound doesn't even require an explanation at this point, specially after eliminating Normal as a pokémon type, which was, honestly, one of the last niches of normalcy.
Polymer is a type that's based on materials. We have rock and metal, so why not a pokémon that's made of plastic. Polymer is the type of compounds plastics are, and calling it polymer also allows me to go for other kind of polymers that are not considered plastic if the inspiration strikes. So technically, I could made a protein pokémon that's polymer, as... proteins are, indeed, proteins. Wait, I'm cooking there...
The last two types were born from splitting original types. I came to the conclusion that Psychic for a long time has been a literal compilation of everything mystical. Brain power (the main Psychic), myths before Fairy, manipulating sleep (Oneiric), space and cosmos (Cosmic), and I'm not even looking at a list, I could pinpoint probably more ways to split Psychic.
And Edible comes from a place of, honestly, spite. Around half of the pure Fairy types introduced after the creation of the type have been some sort of food-based creature. Also there are others in other types that either resemble or are inspired by foods, too, so it's not like it's new. My line in the sand is that the creature should not be fully eaten or get any kind of exogenous process to become the food. So Slowpoke tails don't count, people eat them but they're not meant to. But if a lizard creature sheds and those sheds are a treat, this one would count.
And that's it, that's my explanation on how I'm planning to move forward with this silly little project of mine. I haven't fully fledged the type interactions but I can tell you that game design is my passion, derogatory, so I might revamp also the status effects and more. You know me, I cannot take it easy.
I don't want to make promises but I may strive for Fakémon Friday posts, while keeping the Nail Sundays, and leaving Wednesdays for other kinds of posts like this one. It's not a promise or expectation, just an idea that I could explore and ask for feedback.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
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