And I'll be honest here. I'm sorry to say what I said but I felt it had to be said. I don't want to discourage you from trying (and god knows I've been easily discouraged in the past with some of my many projects) but I highly recommend that you carefully consider where your talents lie, and expand them. On a site like LoK, small groups are about the biggest you can expect, so you want to be pretty good at either art or coding, because each one occupies a major chunk of game construction. If you want to be in a highly specialized field, like game design, you're looking for a big studio to hire you along with half a dozen artists and coders to make the things you design come to life, not to team up with between one and a handful of people on an entire game. Now, I don't know your talents. You might be more of an artist, or you might be more of a coder. Me, I'm a writer, lore builder, and basic programmer, with lots of experience at certain scripting languages but no more than basic OOP knowledge. The most artistic that I usually get is taking a premade tile set and turning it into a map that looks somewhat decent. Lately I've started designing screens, which is a lot more intensive, but without the encouragement and feedback of the much more talented artists on the BS Revival project, I wouldn't have advanced beyond basic boxes and text. When it comes to human work, I suck. Animal art also. The best I can expect to do in both areas is trace over a google photo. If I was on my own to build a game, I would focus on engine creation because it's relatively easy to plug in new art once it's available, and I'd try to attract an artist to pretty everything up. Very few people have the drive and the talent to do a game all on their own. GoRepeat is one of those people and thus I don't like to say anything negative about his work even though I see his games as fairly generic, run-of-the-mill flash games. They're finished, and they're of acceptable quality.
The other issue I have is with your stated goal. "A game to rival Pussymon" sounds grand, until you actually think about what you're comparing to. Pussymon has virtually no engine, no gameplay, very little story until the last few chapters, no originality until it departs from the world of pokemon, and basically nothing going for it. Except for one thing. Character design. Without character designs that you wanted to keep looking at, pussymon would have plunged into the dirt with the first chapter or two and never grown to become something in its own right. Even so, at its last update, I wouldn't call it a grand game. The chapters are very short, and only by playing the entire game with all installments will the story even make sense. But they are starting to become a more interesting game as they add new elements to it. I played each chapter once I think, and have not gone back. Pussymon stands entirely upon its character design so to emulate it, and then lack that art aspect, leaves you with nothing.
I personally try to hold myself to a high standard. I don't want to be run-of-the-mill common, ordinary game design that people play once or twice and forget about. I want to stand out in some way, to make my creations memorable. I want to develop a loyal fan base who will keep coming back to the games I help make because they satisfy something. It's a hard goal to follow, and only time will tell if I can achieve it. But it starts by knowing something about the expectations of the product. When I come to a game that promises to be a pokemon porn parody, I expect certain things. 1) pokemon or pokemon-like creatures that I can collect and/or battle with, 2) original elements that make it a parody and not just a remake, and 3) graphics that look like porn. Now, that could be all there is to it, though I was also hoping for a bit more originality and not just "hey lets make pokemon sexy...because no one else is". If you're okay with being just okay, figure out the expectations of your audience fulfill those expectations reasonably well. It will probably be a play-once game that people soon forget. Fulfill the expectations well and they'll walk away satisfied, and might come back. Exceed expectations and they'll walk away wowed and will definitely return. I encourage you to spend some time thinking about the expectations this game's audience might have (there could be more points that I didn't list) and how to fulfill them. I'm not suggesting that you build a game for just one person, by any means, but try to understand your audience and fulfill their needs. It's the same for writing a novel, creating a film, or painting a picture. If you meet some person's primal need for something, then you've achieved your goal and you have a desired product. The more people who are satisfied with it, and the better satisfied they are, the more popular your product will be.
Now, I've already gone on for a while but I wanted to add one last thing. If you need some pointers on improving your skills, in either art or coding, I'd like to help, but my skills are limited in both areas. Although he and I have very different opinions in a lot of areas, the user
AcetheSuperVillain might be the person to get you started. He produces some decent art quickly and does his own flash coding. You can find some of his work
here though it is not perhaps his best stuff. If, on the other hand, you need a brainstorming buddy, feel free to hit me up. I can't commit to joining your team because I've got a lot going on right now but I can help you flesh out the world, figure out the game mechanics to apply, or whatever. And I'd be happy to share my ideas for a more original world with the same basic concept as pokemon.
I'm not mad. I'm only forty and eighty percent crazy, and that's split between two personalities, which makes me almost half sane.
