The project begins

I started working on this idea about 2 to 3 weeks ago. I’ve always loved the Pokemon Gameboy/DS games and I’ve always wanted a Pokemon MMO. I’ve even played a Pokemon MMO (Pokemon World Online), but it was a pain to get working.  I didn’t mind the servers constantly being down or the game freezing every half an hour myself, but getting anyone else to play it with me was near impossible, as a normal human being wouldn’t be able to take it.  Even if the game didn’t have bugs, most social gamers (most people I know and most of the general population) don’t want to spend the time to download a client to play a game.  Its much easier to get someone hooked to a game by allowing them to quickly play the game for a short period of time and not have to commit.  People will also play your game for a longer term if don’t play it for several hours a day.

So back to my idea…  I want a Pokemon MMO, but a social Pokemon that people can quickly get into (a la browser based).  This doesn’t exist as far as my searching has found, at least not a decent one.  So I aim to make a social Pokemon game with time limiting factors (such as Mafia Wars’ timed energy mechanism) on the Facebook platform, as this seems to be the best approach.

Making the game in Facebook will enable the user to not have to create a new account with my site, not having to put their email address in yet another place on the internet (and lets be honest–EVERYONE has Facebook.  Everyone).  Facebook games are also much more accessible to casual gamers as they can just go to a link right off of a website they are already on 15 times a day, and the game can get basically free advertising by implementing a mechanism that posts that they are playing the game in their feed so others see the game (not automatically though, as that is soooo annoying).

This is not going to be a crappy Mafia Wars rip-off with Pokemon characters just thrown in though.  This is going to be a full fledged Pokemon game that any Pokemon lover, past or present, will immediately want to play and hopefully get hooked.  Details will be in the next post.  Stay tuned!