I gotta say, the idea intrigues me. Not so much the story...

How will the game be played? Is it a first person, third person, top-down? Will it be turn based movement, side-scroller, 2d, 3d?

I'm asking these questions because I did some poking around your site and it seems like the only real thing you're taking into consideration (again, just from what I could find) is the story. Yeah, you have a couple of sprites out there, but not much info about the game and to me it seems pretty vague what kind of game it will be.

You said it had a pokemon style mechanic, but that could be added into nearly any game if you work at it.

Theory and design are great, but I think you should take more time thinking about the fun of the game and not the complexity.

I think you should take a step back, be less philosophical about the whole thing and really boil the game down to what you want. You want a darker pokemon with zombies and monsters instead of electric giraffes and water ponies. So from there, plan out how you want a typical interaction to play out in the game. How does the player view the character? How does a battle start? How does the player control their monster? How does the player catch a monster? If you can define all of this and make it fun then you're good.

Just my thoughts on it, but I think you're trying to build up a game around a story that is based off a mechanic from a different game that you liked. Confusing, isn't it? Well because of that, I don't see it as that strong. Its an interesting idea, but to me the story is really the weak part.

Not trying to be harsh, just giving you my opinion on your game idea.

@Got_Rhythm - Sorry, I wasn't trying to come off as harsh or anything.

I guess I come at stuff like the story a little differently than others. When the story feels weaker (in this case because you basically have the opening only on your site), I look at the game play supporting it. In this case, I just didn't know enough about the game play to see if the story fit at all. From my first read of the plot, it felt more like an anime script than some major plot points for a game.

To me, now that you've got more info on your site, the story becomes easier to grasp because I know the world you've created and I have an idea of how the player interacts with their undead monsters so it gives me context for the story. Kind of like if one were to read a great novel minus all of the adjectives or descriptions of nouns in the story.

But yeah, I think its an interesting idea.. One thing you might like to take into consideration is having the player explore and learn aspects of the story through game play instead of feeding them content to progress the story.

When looking over the story plot stuff from your first post, it feels like the player isn't in control at all with the exception of the tutorial fight. You might want to consider giving the player options of where to go in game play but have NPC's gentlely nudge the player to a preferred solution to continue the games story. It'll help flesh out the world as well as help the player become more invested in the world. Or even make the player flip through pages of their mini-necronomicon while casting spells, trying to find one that will save the Alex character while she's dying; adding tension and interactivity to the scene.

So yeah, I like it.