#didnt borrow my copy. but i digress. the issues youre talking about are not crunch. they arent 'not enough time' either. its scope.

[bleuberrygliscor]

i've never understood the aversion for reuse of assets. This is probably because i spent way too long coding and know damn well not to reinvent the wheel. its an extreme waste of time and resources when youve got models already here, and animations already here.

Not to defend game freak here, because i personally have my own issues with them and how they run their teams, but alot of the criticisms about them arent really even products of crunch but are just regular game design things that no one ever seems to pick on except when its pokemon.

there are legitimate issues with the current game that i myself recognize and know were purely due to lack of actual development time (how you pop out of buildings, the camera sometimes struggling to keep you from clipping in places, getting stuck on physics objects, etc) but none of that has anything to do with the planning and scope, which is what this post is about.

what alot of folks dont recognize is that there is months of planning and work to be done before you even start coding. you need to know the base plot, the character and pokemon designs (which will revolve around the locations so you need to research that), make sure youre working for your target audience (both children and adult casual and competitive players), confirm theres no patents for things you dont own in the game (infringement is no joke). All of this BEFORE you even touch a computer to start coding.

Just skipping to the modeling section, ignoring even the difficulty of making new pokemon to fit your new region thematically and story-wise, you will need at MINIMUM 4 animations -Idle -Attack (lets be lazy and not even make two move animations between physical and status/special moves here) -Hit -Faint for every single pokemon in our, again lets be lazy here, 150 roster dex. thats 600 animations, spread across 150 models. were not even counting walking (because again were being lazy here so no out-of-ball experiences lest you add three new criteria for Starting - Movement - Stopping. an additonal fourth if you include 'running' as not a sped-up version of 'walking'). We are ALSO not counting NPC's, or the player character (which need walking, standing, defeat. again we're being lazy so no ball throwing here. lest we add even more to our pile of the ground up animations and models we must make for every game)

and all of that was JUST animation. we havent even started on route placement (must attempt to be relevant to the location it was found in, but not so difficult that its inaccessible to most players. looking at you Feebas), encounter rates (depending on the location the level must fit the player's assumed levels. cant be too high (hard on casuals and requiring forced grinding) or too low (easy on competitive players who will call this a baby game. Children cant buy things, your adult market is also important to consider), moveset balancing (must be fun for casuals but not abusively good for competitive play). again, for each of the 150 pokemon you include, you have to go through this process.

by the way we havent even touched on the Gimmick of the region, be it contests (now theres an entirely secondary condition for every move and nature in the game, as well as a second stat wheel to track), Battle augmentation (gotta make sure the hats arent TOO Overpowered, limit their use, cant go around Z-moving willy-nilly again, we learned our lesson there, as well STAB changes alot now so movesets have to be curated to not allow abuse of one pokemon in the meta)

All of this. for every pokemon you include. From scratch every time, because asset reuse is bad and we shouldnt be doing it.

my most controversial pokemon opinion is that people were cowards to complain about black and white having a whole new dex, there should 100% be less pokemon in any given game than All Of Them Forever And Ever, and if you unironically call yourself a dexiter i’ll steal your kneecaps