Case Study

During the summer, I was thinking of various project ideas for me to take on, and one of them was a Pokemon fansite. Being an avid fan of watching Pokemon videos on Youtube and Twitch, I noticed people were running calculations to find the stats of gym leaders and their Pokemon during their challenge runs. So I stopped and thought “What if instead of calculating it manually, they just knew the stats so their calculations would be easier instead of reverse engineering based on damage?” Thus, I went to work.

Initially, the biggest obstacle was making sure that the project was feasible. Whenever there’s a problem, there’s usually an underlying reason why, and sure enough, there was a minor reason why. For some games, there was a lack of data available. However, I wasn’t going to let a lack of data stop me! After all, something was better than nothing.

As I was building, I decided that any game that I didn’t have sufficient data for, I would collect as much data as I could and put a disclaimer that it was unavailable. As most of the data is open and available to the public, I thought that the best thing I could do was hope that data would become available eventually. Maybe someone would see the issue and get inspired to go collect the data themselves.

Aside from that, another challenge I found was clearing and populating the data how I wanted it. I found that when displaying a new list of trainers wouldn’t clear the old list if the old list came first in the code. Due to a lack of support at the time, I sought an AI for help and it managed to help me get on track. Now, the code that it gave me I can do in a heartbeat. I’m not a big fan of using AI, but that’s what our class was taught if we needed help.

All in all, while the code is very lengthy and inefficient, it was the best I could do at the time with the skills I had, and even though it’s not perfect, it’s something I’m proud of.