Egelan Pokédex/Commentary

## Making a Pokédex

The Egelan Pokédex wasn’t built in a day. It also isn’t just filled with all of my favorite Pokémon - actually, of my top 6, only one is even there. Instead, completing the Dex was a multi-phase process that took several years to get just right.

First, I’ll note something that I mention in the History section of many of the Pokémon entries: The Old Dex. How old? I last edited it in February 2015. The whole region was originally different, being a place called Traribula based on Florida. It was originally planned to have 200 Pokémon, and I had around 100 when I decided to revamp the whole project, with 74 of them being new. Only 20 of the new Pokémon and 12 of the returning ones are in the final Egelan Dex, and most of those returning one were added pretty late into the new Dex, completely coincidentally to their existence in the old one. I don’t even know what schema I used for determining which Pokémon returned, but it couldn’t have been more than barebones. Traribula’s map and lore weren’t fleshed out enough to be filled out.

That all changed when the games moved to Greece. Along with the new Pokémon I decided to keep, the obvious choices for Pokémon to add at first were those based on Greek mythology. These include Houndoom (Cerberus), Dusclops (cyclops), and Hydreigon (Laernian hydra). I did also have some sets of Pokémon I just wanted to have, like making version-exclusive counterparts out of Alolan Exeggutor and Tropius and out of the Marill and Jigglypuff families.

From there, I started setting ground rules fairly quickly. I created an Excel macro to track how many Pokémon of each type I had, with the goal being keeping them mostly equal with the exception of the three least common types (Ice, Dragon, and Ghost). I decided early that no item-based evolution would be used more than once, and I made a rule that I would avoid putting in Pokémon that share both types with any of my new ones, excepting super common type combos like Normal/Flying and Water/Flying.

Progress slowed considerably because of that last rule. As noted, only 20 new Pokémon were kept in the revamp, and that’s not at all enough for a generation. My ability to add Pokémon to the Dex became limited while I was still developing more Pokémon. The other main obstacle was the region map, since Pokémon have to be found somewhere. I needed to chart out the different environments that would appear in the region in order to plan which Pokémon could be put there. This was both a boon, since it’s easier to narrow down my options by habitat, and a setback, because I could only have so many Pokémon from any particular one depending on how much area was available for it.

Once the new Pokémon were set in stone and I got late into development, I started tracking more data to make sure my distributions were even. I looked at the numbers of evolutions of each kind (non-evolving, two-stage, and three-stage, plus Mega Evolutions and the small number of branched evolutions), and how many were of each type. Accessibility of evolution is important to balancing, since evolving is the biggest single boost of power available, so I wanted to make sure that many options were available for teambuilding. It also helps with balancing the type-specializing Trial Overseers and Team Colossus members.

I also counted how many Pokémon were from each generation, because each one is a different size and I wanted them to be roughly proportional so I could represent all of them well. The only ones that are a bit short are Gen III, which is weird because it’s my favorite one, and Gen VIII, which isn’t weird at all because it came out midway through development and I also didn’t like a lot of its designs.

The other big decision I made was to expand the Pokédex from the original 200 up to 250. This actually happened in increments, as I was reluctant to do it. My debate was about the frequency and distribution of Pokémon. My intuition said that each encounter “slot” (grass, roaming, fishing, etc.) in every area should have at least three Pokémon. That’s the minimum you saw on most routes in the earlier games, when the Pokédex totals ranged between 150-250. So the other side of the coin there was that 200 seemed like it should’ve been fine, especially since Earth & Sky are designed to have sparser encounters to begin with. But some of the areas wound up barren with one or two Pokémon in every slot, which isn’t a lot of variety.

However, I also came to the conclusion that slots shouldn’t have more than three Pokémon either, to avoid the player having/feeling the need to sit around and grind for encounters instead to exploring like I want them to do. That’s been my biggest gripe with the larger Pokédexes from X/Y and beyond, and it’s also why another factor I considered in my Pokémon distribution was minimizing the number of Pokémon found only in a single area, at least among the places that aren’t also singular locations. It was a point against expansion, because there was always the question of “can I just fill those spots with existing Pokémon?”

Eventually, I decided that the answer was no, so my first expansion was to have 200 non-legendary Pokémon, for a Dex total of 213. That still didn’t quite get where I wanted, so I pushed to a total of 225, or 213 non-legendary Pokémon. This is when I made the type-evolution tables, and I soon decided that there were enough gaps to justify going straight to 250 total.

## Sartorian Expansion

Sartori was significantly easier by comparison, and not only because it's a quarter of the size. I wanted the expansion to show off the larger changes I made to the game that weren't in the Egelan Dex, like renaming the mouthful of Galarian Zen Mode Darmanitan and changing its stats to match its design better, or Galarian Corsola's type change to Ghost/Rock. This filled the slots pretty quickly, especially since one of those changes was to Sylveon's evolution method, which required the addition of three stone evolutions in Vaporeon, Flareon, and Jolteon with it. Adding Pokémon for the rest of the evolutionary stones became another major Dex determiner. I also wanted to make all regional variants of Mons in the Dex available, whether they be Egelan forms or a base Pokémon with a variant in another region. This also automatically added four regional evolutions, two of whom didn't even exist when Earth & Sky were released.

As for new additions, I only wanted to do regionals, because I don't like the idea of mid-generation Pokémon adds. From the beginning, they've been marketing material or fanservice to drive sales of whatever they're being added in, which I note in the Special Snowflake Syndrome article leads to some extreme issues. My original intention is still true, but I decided to expand my palette to include the new regional form possibilities added since the project began: regional evolutions (with further and divergent variants) and convergent evolution. This would require new Pokémon to be created, but even so, I slotted them before the legendaries in the Global Dex.

Funnily enough, the \*entire idea\* of the expansion came from one of these regionals, which was originally made as a submission for a competitive mod named Blindstrictions... by mistake, because the idea of the mod was to give only restrictions that would then be made into the Mon by the creator. I liked the Pokémon I made enough that I wanted to keep it, a Pokémon now known as Charvenant.