Pebble Timeline Challenge Week 8 Winner - Pokedex Challenge!

Pokemon fans are going to love the 8th winner of the Pebble Timeline Challenge, Pokedex Challenge! Have a blast catching the wild Pokemon as they appear in your timeline, and become a champion by completing the Pokedex.

Mathew Reiss, an active Pebble developer and fan, created this detailed application. Users have multiple options, such as seeing each Pokemon's height and weight, navigating to their Trainer Card, and seeing their Pokedex progress. Here are some of the features Mathew used to make his app a reality.

• Timeline to send pins to the user
• Persistent Storage to store game information and status
• Paint.NET plugin to re-color Pokemon sprites.

Below, Mathew tells us a bit about his background.

Q&A with Mathew

What is your previous experience with Pebble development?

I actually started tinkering with the Pebble SDK about a year and a half ago - right after I ordered my Pebble Steel, I fired up CloudPebble and started working my way through tutorials. I finished my first watchface before my Steel even arrived. It didn't work at first, of course, but I was able to fix things quickly once I had hardware to test on.

It's been a lot of fun developing for this platform. Every time a new feature comes out (which is often!), I try to build a simple watchface or app that utilizes it. That way, I have my own sample code to refer back to when I work on something bigger. It makes impulsive projects much easier, perhaps too easy! I also really like the simplicity of the screen resolution and color palette, since it makes development more accessible to those without years of experience in design or coding.

What is the backstory behind the Pokedex Challenge?

I've been a huge Pokemon fan since I played the original Blue version on a translucent purple Gameboy Color back in the day :P I actually worked on a game with my college roommate that turned our campus into its own Pokemon world, complete with Professors/Gym Leaders and pixelated school buildings. Pokemon-style games are such a simple but popular concept; it makes developing your own little indie game easier if you can re-use content and gameplay mechanics that have been proven time and again to work well.

I've wanted to make a Pokemon related game for Pebble for a while now, but had a hard time restricting what I wanted to do into a game appropriate for the platform. Even this timeline-based concept started out too over the top as something I could never realistically do (kudos to Yuriy Galanter for entertaining the idea of collaborating with me on it, as ludicrously difficult as it would have been). Eventually, I was able to whittle the idea down into what I felt was the core experience, and built that. Not only did that mean I actually finished the game, but I think it came out much better too.

I think things really clicked into place when I saw a notification based game for another platform called Lifeline. It was simple, it was passive, and it was really well done. It validated the idea of a passive but addicting gameplay experience. The idea of turning a standard Pokedex app into a passive game (waiting and responding to random events throughout the day rather than actively playing) appealed to me immediately.

Could you talk about the creation of Pokedex Challenge?

I was fortunate in that there were already several great Pokedex apps for SDK 2.0, so I didn't have to build everything from scratch. Once I forked the popular "Pokedex Kanto" app, the game development was really broken down into three phases. The first was building the basic JavaScript functionality to prove the game as a concept. This is where I had a lot of fun playing around with different ways of interacting with timeline pins (and which pin icons to use! I eventually settled on the Snapchat ghost as the closest one to a "monster" icon from the original games).

Next was content creation. I went through and downloaded each sprite from Bulbapedia, then converted them all to 64 color palettes using a nifty plugin I wrote for Paint.NET. I also pulled data on type and species info, which form the coloring and text of each pin, respectively. The last phase of development was adding some simple but cool UI features like animated transitions and the trainer card, and testing/debugging. LOTS of testing/debugging :) Passive gameplay is great, but it was a new concept to me and one that required more patience than usual to properly test. "Cheating" in the sense that I increased pin frequency to a Pokemon every few seconds rather than every few hours helped, but required more constant attention than testing a minor feature in active gameplay would have.

Did you face any significant challenges? If so, would you like to expand upon them?

The game concept wasn't that technically difficult, but the timeline API is still very new and so there aren't a ton of great example apps - it was a lot of "learn as you go" development for me. I'm actually hoping to make the timeline-related code open-source at some point, so others don't have to go through the same learning curve.

I also had some crucial help from the Pebble dev community - Gregoire Sage helped me with a persistent storage issue I couldn't have solved on my own (bitwise anything is above my pay grade), valorin caught a critical bug that was preventing some Android users from seeing pins (his experience from making timeline Tag was really valuable as a resource), and of course there's the many people who helped beta test and made it possible for me to catch simple mistakes in my code much faster.

What was your favorite part about making the app?

I really enjoyed pretty much all of the development process, barring a few frustrating moments here and there. If I had to pick a favorite moment, I'd say it was after my first successful run through of the full game. I caught the final Pokemon, received all the right end-of-game notifications, then kind of just sat back and was like, "woah, it's a real game now".

Any other projects that you'd like to talk about?

At this point, I'm actually taking a long overdue break from coding (even hobbies can be stressful if you overdo them!). I'll respond to bugs and make necessary updates still, and am definitely keeping an eye out to see who makes it onto the Pokedex Challenge Leaderboards, but for now I'm content to sit back and see what amazing games and apps other devs come up with.

Anything else you’d like to tell us?

Just how grateful I am to be part of this developer community! Pebble and the community do a great job making the platform feel accessible to those with little or no programming or design experience, and as a result you see a lot of great ideas come from people who might otherwise be too intimidated to dive in. It's been a blast.

1 More Month!

Time is running out! Make sure you don't miss out on awesome prizes and swag. Check out our past winners below to get inspired, and then get ready to #makeawesomehappen!

Past Winners

• Week 1: Battery+
• Week 2: FitCat
• Week 3: Leaf
• Week 4: Pushbutton
• Week 5: Flights
• Week 6: Meetup
• Week 7: Greeney's Run