Since this is the official thread I'll post this here. From Siliconera:
- new setting is “separated very far from the previous lands”;
- Isshu hosts a completely original fauna from the previous games;
- Isshu hosts a completely original fauna from the previous games;
- many of the old genres of Pokémon had to be recreated;
- debated whether they needed a new mouse-type Pokémon;
- for brainstorming ideas, everyone took trips to the zoo and the aquarium;
- goal was to base all the Pokémon off of reality;
- the newcomers to the team brought fresh ideas, but only after they were pushed to shed their previous notions of what Pokémon looked like;
- all ideas had to pass through Sugimori, who drew the ideas in his style and then determining if they could be Pokémon-ified or not;
- Masuda had a board with all the designs together, and he started looking at color balance to see if there were too many with Pokémon the same color.
Edit:
HMs are known: Cut, Fly, Surf, Strength, Waterfall and Dive.
