Remember Porydex, my Pokémon dex + competitive battling stats website? It still exists, and I’m still working on it—though the progress is slow and chaotic. Here’s a general update on where the whole thing is at.
The 9th generation games, Scarlet/Violet, haven’t made their way onto the public “www.porydex.com” website yet, but nearly all their important data has been added to the internal development database—which you can check out on the website’s GitHub repository, if you’re so inclined. According to my Porydex Database Tracking spreadsheet (see my December 2023 Update for more details), at this point I’m just missing various sprites/icons and things like base experience and evolution data.
The whole “icons” thing is a big part of why progress has been so slow for this big gen 9 update. Pokémon icons no longer really exist in gen 9; instead, menus and the box get fully detailed sprites. Honestly, it’s probably about time! But that, combined with the whole “not every Pokémon appears in every game anymore” Dexit deal, is bad for Porydex’s reliance on every generation having an icon for every Pokémon. (Which, to be fair, mainly only came into play on the stats pages for National Dex formats, where I had to mix the gen 8 menu icons with gen 7 menu icons, which was yucky and sad.)
And then there’s the version icons, which is an entirely self-created problem. Porydex, being a knockoff and unofficial successor to the veekun Pokédex website, just straight up copied veekun.com’s homemade version icons from its birth, with plans to replace them as soon as possible… which, naturally turned out to be “8 years later.” Oops. But, figuring out how to replace them has been a real headache!
For a while I wanted to stick to the ethos of using as many official assets as possible, and thus, using the version icons from Pokémon Home (which only go back as far as gen 6’s X/Y). And for earlier games, uh… the DS/3DS home screen icons? No, that’s terrible.
But then I had the bright idea to make icons using the menu/box sprite of each game’s box art mascot, on a background of that game’s color. Like this:
I tried so hard to get this concept to work, y’all. I spent so many days aligning pixels in MS Paint and looking up background color codes, trying to get everything to look perfect in the blind hope that, when it was done, it would be an excellent replacement for veekun’s icons.
But the problems became too numerous and too insurmountable. Like the lack of a complete set of Pokémon icons in a single style. I could use the XY-through-USUM-sized icons up through gen 7, or I could use the SwSh-sized and fill in the blanks with the XY style, and then for S/V and beyond I could… use Pokémon Showdown’s homemade XY-sized icons for Koraidon/Miraidon? And hope they continue in either the XY style or the SwSH style indefinitely? Yeah right; that’s a recipe for disaster.
Meanwhile, I was simultaneously deciding that Porydex’s reliance on “icons per generation” needed to be replaced with a reliance on “icons per version,” so I could properly display something like a Legends Arceus page with Legends Arceus icons instead of SwSh icons. Naturally, this just led me to further icon-themed overwhelm.
And that’s how the great Porydex gen 9 transition fell apart for six months: through lots, and lots, and LOTS of icons.
Anyway, this weekend I finally figured out a fully future-proof solution to the problem of version icons:
So now I’m working toward being able to code that into the website. But first, I need to get the website working again in the first place. In my November 2023 Update, I talked about how I was converting the data for ability/item/move descriptions to be version-based instead of generation-based. Which I finished, back in December… in terms of the mere data. Updating the website to use the updated form of the data? Never happened. It got lost in the endless vortex of the icon wars.
So yeah, Porydex is a bit of a mess right now on every level. I need to rewrite large chunks of website code to be compatible with the already-rewritten database, to even get the website pages working again, before I can even think about redoing the version icons. And after that, I’ll still have to resolve the entire Pokémon icons debacle. Oh, and I just realized I haven’t even talked about the Pokémon 3D model images from PkParaíso, also used by Pokémon Showdown, which don’t exist for gen 9!
But I’ll do it. I’ll do it all. Because Porydex is my precious baby, my literal childhood dream project that I’ll never give up on as long as I still enjoy Pokémon in general. Which is to say, probably forever.
So I’ll do it.
And then Legends: Z-A will come out in probably 8 months, and I’ll have to do it all over again. 🥲
🫠