like every other game dev born after 1985 i’ve had thoughts of making my own Pokemon-like and the main roadblock for me has been: how do i come up with a typing system that doesn’t just mimic Pokemon’s? and the answer is you don’t come up with a system. maybe there’s types but they’re completely ad-hoc - you could even have one-off types just for one specific mon or move if you want. the flexibility is dizzying; you can add dozens or hundreds of new types whenever. sound type, radiation type, magic type. go wild! you begin to run into combinatorial explosion. strengths and weaknesses grow more nonsensical as you start skipping over most of your ever-growing type chart anytime you add a new one. after all, who cares whether food-type mons are weak or strong versus electricity? they just need to be weak against munch-type attacks, and maybe mold-type too. to make full use of the increasingly-specific types you’ve been coming up with, some of your mons end up with 5 or 10 types. your spidershark monster is, at the very least, a spider, shark, swim, beast, and bug type. overlaps happen; redundancies crop up. music type, nuclear type, mystic type. have you done those before? don’t worry about it. 3 years into development you cannot imagine having ever hated anyone as much as you hate yourself
this is not a cautionary tale. i think everyone should do this
