Who's that Pokemon?!

Context

I have turned the well-known segment from the Pokémon episodes into a game. You can play the game with multiple players, and whoever guesses the Pokémon the fastest wins!

I was learning how to build a real-time application, which turned out to be a cool project. This involved techniques for establishing an open connection between the client and the server. This allows you to send real-time data in both directions simultaneously.

This was a project I carried out on my own. I created the design and developed the actual game. I only used an external dataset containing all the Pokémon.

Concept

I recreated the well-known segment from Pokemon episodes called ‘Who's that Pokemon?!’ In this game, you have to guess which Pokemon is being depicted. 

You can play this with several people at the same time. You all appear in a chat room where you try to guess correctly. The person who guesses correctly gets a point. 

For the design, I chose to recreate the nostalgic theme. It uses a consistent design with classically recognisable elements. For example, it features the recognisable sound clip for guessing each Pokémon. Users in the chat room are viewed as 'trainers' and use the different types of Poké Balls that exist as a avatar. 

Development

To ensure that you can play this with several people at the same time, you need a server for everyone to connect to. The Express framework was chosen for this purpose. It allows you to quickly set up a simple server. 

Instead of a framework, a templating engine was chosen. This is because a framework is more suited to a very complex application, whereas here we are primarily dealing with a chat room where data is loaded dynamically.

The data used is retrieved from the official Pokémon API. The data is fetched on the server and sent to the various clients, ensuring it remains consistent. 

Solution

Ultimately, a fully functional game has been created that takes you back to the world of Pokémon. Through its various elements, the game takes you on a journey back to those iconic Pokémon memories. The game is a technically sound real-time application and utilises various data interactions between the clients, the server and the API.