LogFAQs > #943745515

Metalsonic66 posted...

Just make it randomized without huge changes to their appearances

Pretty much. It'd take some tweaking to make sure all of the variations were compatible with each other, but you'd just have to come up with a small handful of variations for each variable site and randomly select one when the pokemon is generated. Four sites with half a dozen variants each would give 1296 possible combinations, and that's very doable. Five would bump it up to 7776. That certainly wouldn't guarantee that any given pokemon you catch would be totally unique, but finding a twin would be unusual enough to be a remarkable coincidence, which is all that would really be needed to achieve the goal of such a system.

Honestly, a lot of potential variants for a given Pokemon have probably already been created in the form of rejected concept art (the stuff that just didn't make the final cut, not the stuff that's in the garbage because it belongs there). These designs go through so many revisions and tweaks before reaching their final forms that one could very easily populate a pool of variant appearances just by adapting those prototypes. It'd still take a non-trivial amount of work to do this for several hundred Pokemon (even if legendaries and other special ones were left out, since I think that makes sense), but it's not nearly as bad as you might think.