pokeFetch: An interactive GUI pokedex app written in Python

Video Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaFWzQFMzHQ

Description:

A cross-platform python application for viewing Pokédex information including such as base stats and abilities. Additionally, users can maintain a set of parties where they can create their own sets of pokemon to plan out teams for using in game.

• To implement a GUI environment, I’ve used the tkinter Python library, which allows for the creation of a GUI window with widgets and labels to create a user interface.

• I have implemented a login screen so the program can keep track of which user id they should be pulling parties from. New users can register their login, which will insert them into the SQL database in the users table.

• Once the user logs in, they are presented with the information of the first Pokemon in the Pokedex – Bulbasaur – and they can then search for other Pokemon using the search box at the bottom of the screen or access a list of their parties by clicking the ‘Parties’ button below the search box. This page includes the pokemon's sprite, name, pokedex ID, types, abilities, height and weight, as well as their base stats. The user also has the option to scroll through the Pokedex in incrementing Pokedex ID order using next and previous buttons. For example, if you clicked the ‘next’ page from the Bulbasaur page, you would see Ivysaur’s page, and if you click ‘previous’ from Bulbasaur’s page, the list wraps around to the final Pokemon in the Pokedex at time of writing – Pecharunt.

• To fetch the Pokemon sprites and information, I’ve used the pyPokedex library, which implements functions for fetching information from the pokeAPI web API. This saved a lot of work maintaining a large database of Pokemon and allowed for relatively quick acquisition of the sprite photos. However, I’ve probably look to use a more efficient method to fetch multiple requests from this API, because the party summary pages are quite slow to load due to the large number of simultaneous requests.

• Users can create parties, which will be inserted into the parties table in the SQL database. These are then shown in a list on the ‘parties’ page. The user can then click on a party summary button, which will show them the Pokemon in the given party, as well as the sprites of the Pokemon in that party, their names and their type information in a list format. Each party is assigned an id number, but the user can choose to add a name to each party they create, which can be used to keep track of different parties. In the event the name is left empty, the page will simply replace this with 'Party' and the current iteration from the i variable in the loop that lays out the parties in the parties window list.

• At the side of the party list is a table that displays type coverage for the selected party, and displays strengths, weaknesses and immunities to indicate coverage, with numbers next to each type, indicating how many pokemon in the party are strong, weak or not effective against each type in the table.

• Users can delete whole parties, or also delete individual Pokemon from a given party using buttons in the GUI. This will remove the specific party from the SQL database, and from the list of parties in the users’ party page. The same can be done to create a new party, and also to add a new pokemon to an existing party.

• I used ChatGPT to quickly generate tedious aspects of the code, e.g refactoring my original summary page code to use a loop to make it more concise, as well as input sanitisation for user registration and party deletion. Often there were small bugs with this code and I had to fix these manually, but it made generating large chunks of code much quicker!