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.)

Welcome to the Damselmon blog!

Now, what's a Damselmon, you may ask? Well, Damselmon is a Pokémon fangame/parody created by some friends and myself in which the player finds themselves in a world where you capture pretty ladies instead of fantastic animals. While you could argue that this isn't really any weirder than Pokémon is to begin with, I won't deny that the game is aimed at people with an interest in bondage. On the other hand, it's not made for a cheap thrill either; we want to deliver a high-quality game that people can really get engrossed in. As such, this is some of what you can expect:

• A world with familiar mechanics from the Pokémon games, yet also tuned to the obvious differences introduced by the presence of the "damsels"
• A rich story that goes deep into the structure of this world and its inhabitants
• Balanced gameplay that mimics the original Pokémon games as closely as possible while introducing new elements
• Lots of high-quality artwork depicting the ladies of your fancy in bondage! (Well, hopefully...)

I'm not exactly a programming expert, especially when it comes to something as complicated as an RPG, so I was quite pleased to find a very useful tool called Pokémon Essentials. It is essentially a large suite of scripts and resources for RPG Maker XP tuned for Pokémon fangames (i.e. exactly the kind of thing we're making.) So far, this has proven to work quite well, though with a little bit of slowdown and some missing features that have yet to be added by Pokémon Essentials' creators.

The main thing that's rather troubling is the amount of artwork that needs to be created. In addition to original character designs for players, NPCs, trainers to fight as well as new map sprites to create original environments, the actual damsels require what might be the most work. In addition to each damsel having a front and back sprite like the Pokémon they replace, there is the obvious bondage game mechanic (which actually affects gameplay--but I'll explain that in another post!). My co-creators and I eventually decided that if the damsels were drawn in specific positions, they could utilise one "bound" drawing with various restraints and gags layered over top, limiting the amount of work... but that still doubles the amount of damsel drawings, and there are over 100 potential damsels for use in the game. Will we implement them all? We'll try our hardest--and stay tuned for some polls to see who you'd like to see the most!

But the important thing is that none of us working on the game are exactly talented artists. Myself, I could do a decent amount of map sprites and such, as they're small enough to avoid the major imperfections when I draw something full-size, but all the battle sprites will require more talented people. Are you interested in drawing for Damselmon? If so, we'd be very grateful! Just leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!