Collectems - What’s in a type?

written by lbunclejoe

Hey there everyone, and welcome to our development diary on Collectems. If you haven’t checked out the information about the game on its official website, I highly recommend you do so before reading over this. Since we haven’t elaborated much on our design process since first announcing the project, we figured we’d start our series of development posts by going over some of our rationale behind the typing structure of the game.

It’s no secret that Game Freak’s long-running Pokémon series is the biggest inspiration behind Collectems, but there’s something about the typing structure in those games that’s came off as a bit odd to us. One of the biggest things to that end is the fact that Pokémon types end up being a bit too specific to different kinds of species. Does it have wings? Probably Flying-type. Is it a fish? If it’s not a Water-type, it’s a weird exception. Is it an insect? Congratulations, be forced into a type with low stats and crippling weaknesses. There’s also a certain level of redundancy at times, such as the distinction between Rock and Ground.

We want the types in Collectems to focus less on what an individual creature is and more on what it can do. They should be specific enough to remain identifiable among different species, but broad enough to allow for several different interpretations of the concept. We want the interactions between different species of Collectems and their moves to be interesting and rewarding but also a bit different than what you might be used to in other RPGs. Thusly, our first three types (the ones you’re introduced to at the start of the game) are Hard, Soft, and Sharp.



At the very beginning of the project, Collectems was much more of a straight parody of Pokémon and other older Game Boy games. Hard, Soft, and Sharp were chosen as types because they’re quite literally Rock-Paper-Scissors, and while this fact was hilarious to us at the time, we’ve ultimately decided to stick with them. For one, we feel they’re some very simple physical attributes that could be shared between a wide variety of species. You’d never confuse Sharp qualities for Hard or Soft ones, and we’d like to keep this fact consistent for all other types. The interplay between them just naturally makes sense as well - there’s a reason that Rock-Paper-Scissors is as beloved and universal of a concept as it is - soft things muffle the impact of hard things, hard things easily break brittle, sharp things, and sharp things easily pierce through softness.

It’s also a nice bonus that the names can double as a simple physical description, playing up the toy-like nature in which Collectems, collecting, and battling are viewed by characters in the game world. Giving complicated lifeforms such simple classifications seems like exactly the sort of thing these folks would do. Of course, these three types are far from the only ones in the game, but we hope that this at least gives you some insight into the thought process behind our “realist” approach, rather than the “elemental” focus seen in most other RPGs.



Until next time, everyone!