Video Game / Create-a-Pokémon

The Create-A-Pokemon Project (or CAP Project for short) is a process and metagame on Smogon. During the process, the competitive community comes together to create a Pokemon with a distinct, specific role in a custom metagame. Afterwards, the Pokémon is made playable on Pokemon Showdown!, Smogon's official battle simulator, where it is further playtested, analyzed, and nerfed/buffed (if needed).

Starting from Generation IV, The CAP Project has created 30 fully-evolved custom competitive Pokemon:

• 11 in Generation IV
• 6 in Generation V
• 5 in Generation VI
• 6 in Generation VII
• 5 in Generation VIII

In addition to the fully-evolved Pokemon, The CAP Project contains a sub-project dedicated to designing pre-evolutions for these custom Pokemon.

A popular spinoff, Pokémon Battle-By-Post (BBP) was formed to keep the forum alive between the release of Gen. V games and until the Gen. V metagame stabilized.

All CAPs so far can be found here.

Create-A-Pokémon gives examples of:

• The Artifact:
  • Revenankh still retains Air Lock (exclusive to Rayquaza) as its ability rather than Cloud Nine (which functions the same but it's more accessible) despite the fact that CAP now forbids giving any exclusive ability for any Legendary or Mythical Pokémon.
  • Custom abilities and moves have been banned since partway through Gen. V, while several Gen. IV CAP Pokemon (Syclant, Fidgit, Stratagem, Colossoil) have custom abilities or moves.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Most Create-A-Pokémon Pokémon have fluff that makes them predators of Delibird. Even the shrimp and snail.
  • It's not even exclusive to the main forum. The Training mode of Battle CAPacity pits you against a sack that shows multiple signs of containing a Delibird. You're training against that thing.
• Competitive Balance: All of the CAP Pokémon are made with the concurrent Pokémon metagame in mind, and hence, they attempt to fit in.
• Dark Horse Victory:
  • The designers for most of Generation VIII's CAPs^note Quanyails (Astrolotl), Gravity Monkey (Chromera), Unsee (Venomicon), and NoahIOTJ (Saharaja) had never won a primary design poll prior to making their winning submissions.
  • The designs for the Hemogoblin line were created by BlorengeRhymes, who had never won an art poll before. This also makes them the first artist to design an entire three-stage evolutionary line for CAP after the overhaul in CAP design process.^note The first artist who had design an entire three-stage evolutionary line for CAP was Elagune for the Pyroak line, but, as noted below, it was during a time when CAP was less stringent.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Some of the Gen. IV CAPs have custom abilities and moves, while the first three - Syclant, Revenankh and Pyroak - were created just for Rule of Fun. Starting in Gen. V, CAPs not only are permitted to only have official moves and Abilities, they have a more meticulous design process meant to test how certain attributes would affect how the CAP would function in competitive play.
• Fighting Game: A fan-made game using the CAP characters (and submissions CAP 6 from Wyverii and CAP 7 from DougJustDoug) called Battle CAPacity.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • CAPs do not always turn out the way the process hopes they do. The most notable example is Krilowatt, which, rather than fulfilling its point of being a utility counter, instead abused its ability Magic Guard to spam fast, recoil-less-Life-Orb-boosted attacks from its bizarrely expansive movepool. It even had the raw bulk to be virtually unkillable — and it was the last straw before the CAP Pokémon received a massive nerfing.
  • Voodoom is a subversion — it turned out to be nigh-incompatible with its intended partner Togekiss, but it worked very well with Zapdos. As its point was to inspect how offensive pairs worked, it is considered one of the more successful CAPs, despite failing the proposed concept.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • Several CAP Pokémon before movepool revisions were far more potent than the standard Mon, leading to teams made entirely out of CAP Pokémon that could do very well in the metagame. Additionally, the revisions for the first three CAP Pokémon were this as well: people were trying to buff up Syclant, Revenankh, and Pyroak. The results? Syclant generally averted this trope (thanks to Scizor still being more effective than it, although Syclant gained an interesting niche as a suicidal Spikes lead), but Revenankh turned out to be nigh-impossible to kill due to the increased bulk it gained, and Pyroak turned from a Master of None into a Dragon-Dance-spamming Game-Breaker.
  • Necturna dodged a bullet transitioning into Generation VI. The move re-learner allows Pokémon to relearn Gen. VI event and egg moves. Necturna would be able to have access to Sketch more than once, breaking its concept. Instead, Necturna still has access to only one Sketch move, provided by one of either two explanations; Sketch is no longer in Necturna's egg movepool, thus forcing it to be kept from a Generation V transferred Necturna, or that the Sketched move counts as the egg move, and hence Sketch can't be relearned until Necturna forgets the Sketched move.
• Grandfather Clause: Even though CAP now doesn't allow any more custom elements to be made, older CAP Pokémon such as Syclant and Strategem retain their custom Secret Arts.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: The Gen IV and V CAP Pokémon had a tendency to be in the Field egg group as to avoid egg move legality issues, no matter how non-mammalian the design was. Come Gen. VI, though, egg moves can be passed on through both genders, thus allowing new CAP Pokémon to have more reasonable egg groups.
• Game Mod: The Create-a-Pokémon Project is a game mod for the Pokémon franchise.
• Model Sheet: Some CAP Pokemon have one, for the purposes of creating a 3D model.
• Nerf: Movepool revisions were this for Syclant through Krilowatt.
• Original Character: All of them.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Almost all CAP pre-evolutions tend to be cute.
• Running Gag: Up until Generation V, Delibird tended to be a popular punching bag for CAP Pokémon.
• So Last Season: CAP Pokémon released in old generations are not updated with moves from future generations, barring one Sketched move from Necturna. This usually leaves newer CAP Pokémon as more relevant to the metagame, but retroactive changes can cause old CAP Pokémon’s roles to shift. Then in Gen. VII, this stance was altered and a bunch of older CAP Pokémon did receive movepool and ability updates.
• Sophisticated as Hell: One moderator's post answers the permissibility of the move Doom Desire for a concept as current policy states while he ends the post with "Dems be da rules, folks."
• Spin-Off: The Create-a-Pokémon Project was a popular-enough Game Mod to acquire its own spinoff games.
  • Battle CAPacity places CAPs, as well as a few unused CAP designs, in a Fighting Game.
  • Pokemon Battle-By-Post uses CAPs as a battling Play-by-Post Game.
  • A group of people, back during Generation IV, attempted to make a ROM hack of Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen with CAPs in it, although it quickly became an Orphaned Series.

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