Brainstorming
2024-04-28
TL;DR:
I want to maximize my pokemon’s strength via EV training, but older pokemon games don’t show you the accumulated EV points. So I’m going to make an app that tracks this. I explain how I got to this point and brainstorm the MVP a little.
I used to live and breathe pokemon. I’ve had my hands on Pokemon games that came out on the DS, and I especially enjoyed the main series - Pokemon Platinum, HeartGold/SoulSilver, B/W and B2/W2.
Over the last couple of years, I switched over to Pokemon Showdown to see what kinds of Pokemon Nintendo was cooking up in the main series. This was where I learned a little about the competitive pokemon scene - specifically, the practice of “EV training” your pokemon. Essentially, it’s a way to maximize the usefulness of a pokemon by strategically distributing effort values (EV) earned by pokemon, so that they have competitive edge.
There were phases over the years where I wanted to replay the old pokemon games. Whenever I did, I always EV trained my pokemon. I was (and still am) so obsessed with EV training, and for some inexplicable reason it feels wrong not to do it now.
Fast forward to today: I had heard about an NDS emulator that was approved on the App Store, and I made the dangerous decision to indulge in some pokemon nostalgia during finals season. Can you guess what kind of inexplicable urge kicked in???
I’m not sure if this issue still exists in the newer pokemon games, but the games I grew up playing had virtually no support for EV training. As in, there is no way for me to see how many EV points I gathered on a pokemon 💀
Keeping an accurate record of these EV points is extremely important, since every 4 EV points to a stat will contribute to +1 in that stat. For example, this means that if you have +3 EVs in a stat, you gain no stat bonuses!
Since the games I’m playing refuse to help me out with my EV-training obsession, I’m going to design an application that will do this for me.
I want to start off simple, which means I’m really only aiming for 1 core feature at the moment:
Keep track of the EV distribution on every pokemon I train
So at the moment, I think this will be a simple CRUD application.
* In order to keep the scope of the project within reason, I’ll limit myself to just Pokemon Platinum and see how it goes from there.
This will be an ongoing blog series! I’m hoping this will help me see through to the end with this project. Also I think it’ll be cool looking back at the progress afterwards.