Your very own Damselmon adventure is about to begin...

Daniel, as sketched by Kehhaja

This is Daniel. He's one of four player avatars you can choose from in Damselmon (two male, two female.) If you choose to play as him, you can of course rename him to whatever you like.
However, the avatars you didn't choose will go on to be actual characters you will encounter throughou the game. This isn't a new feature to Pokémon, per say--but we plan to make these characters a little deeper by giving them actual personalities and motivations. After playing Black and White (I was a little late on that ship), I promptly mandated that the frequency of your encounters with these people should be sharply reduced and/or made largely non-compulsory. Personally, I believe there are few things more irritating in a video game than being forced to stop and click through a bunch of dialogue that doesn't really tell you anything new. Additionally, one rather important feature of RPGs is talking to people you meet, so it really isn't a big design stretch to simply have these characters hanging around the places you visit and giving you some advice if you choose to ask for it.
There is something to be said for the steadfast consistency that pervades Pokémon (and indeed most Nintendo franchises), but this isn't Pokémon, it's Damselmon. In other words, I don't have many reservations about breaking tradition in the interest of improving the overall design of the game in little ways. Of course, I hope the dialogue I write for these characters will be interesting enough that players actually will want to see more of it. In the original games, the NPCs tended to range from bland (Brendan/May in RSE) to actively and enragingly annoying (Barry from Diamond and Pearl comes to mind--or as he's known in my save file, "DICFART")

Anyway, that's a little introduction to how we're approaching the writing and design of the game. Next time, I hope to elaborate on how capturing and training damsels will work... but it would be nice to have some visual support for that post (wink wink, nudge nudge.)