SuperEffective.gg

Dear Pokemon trainers around the world,

1st of March of 2022 marks a new beginning for me in the world of Pokémon, which I love since 1998 when I started playing Red/Blue & Gold/Silver.

I never stopped playing Pokémon games ever since I felt what I felt when playing Gold and Silver and every Pokémon I saw was new to me. I remember breeding Jynx and Mr. Mime (without knowing what I was doing) and discovering Smoochum for the first time!

The truth is that I didn't have other games back then more than Megadrive's Sonic The Hedgehog, and the typical Mario games for Game Boy, so after discovering Pokémon it quickly became my new favorite game series. After that, I started loving Nintendo games more and more. I am a big The Legend of Zelda fan as well.

Background

Gaming is an important aspect of my life and one of my dreams has always been becoming a game developer. I've always tried to learn it on my own using Adobe Flash, but didn't succeed. Back in the 2005s when I finished my High School and had to decide which career to take, there was no much opportunities for me to learn game development in Mallorca (there was basically no academic courses or private schools for that), so I started learning software development.

Right now I am a Tech Lead and Senior Software Engineer with more than 12 years of experience, half of them living abroad in Germany. I can say I am a full-stack web developer (frontend and backend services, aka. UI and server), but I have developed more the backend part in the last years. With this project, SuperEffective.gg (which I will name SuperEffective from now on) I want to bring two of the things I enjoy the most together: Pokémon games and software development.

Why in english?

Now you might be wondering why is this blog and this site in english and not spanish, if I am a spanish native? Well, I had this dilemma for a couple of days before writing this first post, and the reasons are simple: the projects I've been working on until know have been in english and oriented to english speakers. It will be also a lot of effort to maintain a bilingual site and If I do it only in spanish I will be missing a big part of the people that already follow me on my twitter accounts. If I mix languages I will make search engines unhappy and people would be confused as well.

So I'd stay with english for now, so sorry for the native english speakers of I do mistakes (which for sure I will do very often).

The early stages

Going back to the development part, for a long time I've been trying to have a site with a Pokédex, news and other tools, but I never had the time required to build it. I also remember having talks with Paul and @moving from PokeJungle to develop a Pokédex for their site some years ago, but I found out that it is a tremendous task that needs a lot of investigation, data population, normalization, fixing, etc.

I will publish an article soon on how has been the road until now and the technical challenges I've faced.

It's SuperEffective!

Now, after some years with lots of accumulated beta projects and other successful ones like Living Dex, I feel I've found a break-trough to bring all of them to the next level and joining them under the same project: SuperEffective.

SuperEffective comes after one of the most iconic phrases of Pokémon: "It's super effective!". The logo represents a Pokémon battle.

The .gg part in the web domain means "good game" and it's becoming a recurring extension for fan websites related to gaming.

Contents of the site

Some of the sections that I plan to have for SuperEffective are:

• Pokémon News: latest relevant news of main and GO series games, rumors, investigation articles, strategies, etc.
• DevLog: There will be a section in the site that will be more technical, where I will be talking about the latest changes in the site, releases, web and game development, etc.
• The Living Dex HOME organizer, which I already mentioned earlier. It will be re-converted into a Pokédex tracker and you will be able to mark Pokémon as caught or not, if they are shiny etc. for every game individually, not only for HOME.
• Pokédex: It was also part of the Living Dex project, but now I am working on bringing multiple Pokédexes like in the real games, for example, to check the Pokémon that appear in Legends Arceus, the Crown of Tundra Pokédex, etc.
• Tier List Maker: I always wanted to have an easier tool to generate lists of Pokemon, because every time I go to tiermaker.com It's not easy to find what I want, it is slow, and it is not Pokemon-specific with a dedicated look and feel, so I decided to create my own. I already have a prototype already working and I only need to glue the pieces with SuperEffective in order to integrate it.
• Showdown Team Parser and Generator (KoffingJS): I developed this project some years ago and I'd love to integrate it in SuperEffective, so you have an alternate UI to generate your Pokémon teams for Showdown and share them with others like pokepast.es.
• Trainer Card Creator: This is just an idea for now, but after finishing the previous ones this will be my next thing. I can only tell you that the possibilities are almost endless :).

There will be a main section for all utilities called "PokéGear" to honor the device introduced in Gold and Silver, which was created by Siplh Co.

I'd also love to build a community that share the same love for these games. Let's see, I am curious to see all your reactions and feedback about this project.

I am giving all my love to this project and I hope that you enjoy it using it the same way I enjoy creating it.

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-- Dedicated to all Pokémon fans, especialmente a mis amigos hispanohablantes de 🇪🇸 y LATAM.

by Javier

aka. @javikolog aka. @route1rodent