Viewing dex entry for Guzzlord
Gloopster the Garchomp in all his glory

Inspiration

During last summer, me and Perry were doing an internship that involved making Discord bots to teach people how to code in Python. One of the ideas for a bot was a Pokemon bot. We ended up not making that bot during the internship, but the idea was always in our minds afterwards. Thus, we decided to make it for this hackathon!

What it does

This bot is almost like an emulator of this link here, AKA the teambuilder for Pokemon Showdown. You can make a team with any Pokemon that you want, with any moves and any abilities and any item, but at the end of the day you can check what formats it's valid in. In Pokemon Showdown, a format basically limits what you can use. For example, Pokemon that are too strong (overused) cannot be used in formats outside of OU (overused), and in most formats you can only give a Pokemon moves and abilities that it can learn in an actual game. However, the bot doesn't support actually battling with those teams yet, so you'd have to export the team you build with the bot and use it on the actual Pokemon Showdown site.

How we built it

We built it using Python and the discord.py API. We also used the official Pokemon Showdown API, and the command-line utility for team validation and exporting found here.

Challenges we ran into

It was really difficult trying to get the command-line stuff to work for team validation and exporting. We got it to work eventually, but we're still not that confident because of how many vulnerabilities there are involving letting someone random input things into your terminal.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Just finishing this was a big accomplishment! It was a daunting task, but we finished what we planned and even managed to add in some extra features involving the API.

What we learned

We got really familiar with using APIs, discord.py, and just working with json files more.

What's next for Pokémon Showdown Teambuilder Discord Bot

Adding the ability to be able to battle others on Discord! We may not do this though, because it would technically be driving away users from the official site. Maybe if this bot becomes actually affiliated with the site...