Someone’s bringing Pokemon to Dota 2 and he needs help

With the Dota 2 workshop tools recently being launched in its alpha phase, people have been coming up with their own custom maps and modes. One of the more interesting ones is called Dotamon, which is, as the name suggests, a custom map with Pokemon in the Dota2 world!

(See: The 5 Warcraft 3 custom maps that need to be in Dota 2)

Dotamon was first shared on Reddit where its creator, user Sma11P1ays, explained how the custom game works.

The game will have two teams each with five players and two phases: the catching and training phase, and the five on five battle. During the first phase, players will be given fifteen to twenty minutes to find, catch, and train Dotamon on any of the eight zones across the map. Each player can have a maximum of three Dotamon and can only have one active Dotamon at a time.

Once the second phase kicks in, players will gather in the center of the map where the final five on five battle will occur. Players can also store their Dotamon in compendiums and queue for five-on-five or three-on-three battles without having to go through the catch phase. You can read about Dotamon’s gameplay and mechanics in detail here.

So can you play this game now? Not yet, as the mod is still in development. All 151 Dotamon are usable in the game while the terrain and the scripting work is sitting at 95 percent complete. What it needs to launch in the Dota 2 workshop right now are Dotamon abilities. Each Dotamon will have four active and one passive skill, all of which needing code and particles—and considering the number of Dotamon in the game, this will take a lot of work. Because of this, Sma11P1ays is inviting everyone to contribute custom models and codes that he could use in-game. You can even give it your very own custom name.

The game makes use of original pokemon names and skills, but makes use of in-game Dota 2 models such as couriers and summoned units instead of customized 3D Pokemon models. However, this doesn’t seem to be something permanent, as Sma11P1ays plans to eventually “take Dotamon away from the Pokemon context and into the Dota world”.

Dota 2 is undoubtedly popular in Asia, but Pokemon doesn’t seem to be fading in popularity either. In fact, there’s been a recent petition to have Chinese language support for Pokemon. While Dotamon is not exactly a replacement for a localized Pokemon version, it could be a possible alternative, were there to be contributors willing to help Dotamon to support other Asian languages, such as Chinese.

More about the petition for Pokemon Chinese language support:

(via Reddit, image sources: 1, 2, 3)