Hey all, we’re back to general monthly updates instead of only caring about Porydex all the time. Well, for this one month, at least. Who knows what next month will bring?

Not much of note happened in porydex.com development world, other than finishing up the last major piece of the Advanced Pokémon Search page: searching by type resistances/immunities! And for games with Abilities, there’s an option to factor Abilities into the results. AKA, if you’re looking for all Pokémon that resist Ground-type attacks, and the “Include Abilities” option is selected, the results will include all Pokémon with Levitate.

I’ve been SUPER excited about this planned search feature for years. In theory, it should be a huge help for competitive teambuilding. Have 5 Pokémon and suddenly realize you need a Fire resist to round out the team? Porydex is here to help.

The back-end code secretly supports type matchup searches of literally any level of complexity, not just the “<1x” supported by the GUI. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really think of any way to present that complexity to end users in a GUI unless the GUI was messy beyond belief and full of dozens of options. At this point, I’m considering implementing a full fledged Scryfall-esque text-based advanced search syntax, so I could do dumb searches like “dmg:fire>1 (dmg:water<=0.5 or dmg:water>2)”

Anyway, the other main additions to that advanced search page this month: 1) I added a “None of these” option to the search-by-type section, and 2) I added a “None of these” option to the search-by-egg-group section. Mainly because I realized it would be easy enough to do so, and I figured maybe someone someday might want it.

But all of that was largely in the first week of the month, and I’ve barely touched Porydex since then! Mainly because I keep procrastinating on the “next” “task” I had “assigned” myself: adding the last few games worth of Pokémon color data into my database.

I don’t know why I wanted to do it. Because I already had some color data, and I’m obsessively compelled to collect the rest? I don’t even do anything with it! The games don’t even do anything with it anymore! Color used to be an in-game Pokédex search option, but that doesn’t even exist anymore! There’s no reason for me to be doing this tedious work of copying and formatting color data!

And thus, I haven’t been doing it. I’ve been putting it off indefinitely. To be honest, this feels exactly like when my 2023 heavy duty Porydex development period crashed and burned because I was overwhelmed trying to handle all the stuff about icons.

So, with that in mind, forget colors. I hereby abandon that Porydex dev task. Maybe I’ll come back to it in the future, but for now it’s just going away.

Anyway, enough about Porydex. What else have I been doing all month then?

What Else I’ve Been Doing

I’ve been gaming! Late last year I started playing Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition, and I finally finished it earlier this month. That game was pretty fun!

It was also the first JRPG I’ve ever played outside Pokémon (other than the first few hours of Final Fantasy 3 DS), and wow was there a learning curve for me. Basically the entire first 20 hours of gameplay, as new mechanics and tutorials were still being unlocked, I was stuck in a constant state of “omg how does any of this work? is this what actually good modern games are like?? oh god there are so many fully animated cutscenes and full voice acting and side quests, what is the Pokémon series even DOING“

Anyway I got acclimated to it eventually and it was a blast. Fun game with a really wild story.

Now I’m playing Cassette Beasts, an indie monster-catching-and-battling we-swear-it’s-not-just-a-Pokémon-clone Pokémon clone. I’m about halfway through it, and gosh I love the soundtrack. Top tier music at every step so far.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but playing these cool fun games recently has given me some renewed desire to get back into game development. Remember when I got into game development with Unity, and then a few months later Unity almost destroyed itself with the whole “runtime fee” fiasco? Yeah, that kind of killed my enthusiasm for the hobby before it even went anywhere.

But it seems like Unity is still alive, and I kinda have a hankering to tinker around making something game-like. So I might do that in the near future.

Oops, this post was mostly about Porydex anyway lol