Building an all-language Pokemon spreadsheet-ifier for species collectors

[slowqueen]

Hi E4, I’ve had this side project idea floating around in my brain for a while. It’s in the very early stages, and it will probably take me a very long time to finish, but I’d like to share progress and invite feedback even in the early days.

The problem: While information about all-language cards is accessible online, it can be difficult to find all cards for a specific Pokemon. This requires new species collectors to cross reference a billion different website tabs to create their initial spreadsheets.

The idea: What if the all-language set lists were aggregated and searchable, such that card lists could be created automatically for a given Pokemon?

Here is a link to the very early version of the website. As of posting this, I’ve only added card data up through Gym Challenge, so it really is quite early stages. I also haven’t fact-checked everything yet, so please let me know if you find mistakes.

The data: All of the data so far for this project has come from Bulbapedia, and notably I know @Quuador has done a great deal of work on the all-language information on that site. Thank you Bulbapedia and all of the contributors there! If there are errors, they are probably on my end related to the auto-parsing of the Bulbapedia articles (i.e. I had to manually input what shadowless meant, first edition, etc).

The site may contain errors at this point. Please let me know if you find any! I haven’t fact-checked all of the data in this tool yet. The set descriptions and card lists are auto-generated from full length articles and will need to be double-checked manually.

The how: This early (scrappy) version was created using Cursor, and basically copy/pasting entire Bulbapedia articles in and having it generate JSON files for the data. Ultimately there will be so much card data that it’ll make sense to host the backend somewhere like Firebase, but for now it’s just one big JSON blob.

What’s next: That’s it for now! Again, this is a side project, so I’ll probably be working on it very slowly. But I’ll keep this thread updated as I add new sets and make corrections, and please feel free to chime in with any suggestions or errors you spot.

[R0bzz]

You beat me to it haha! I’ve been building this and also incorporating species collectors from E4 as references.

I’m totally for this idea and will come back later with some more input

[slowqueen]

Nice! I’m happy to collaborate if you want to join forces! It’d be pretty easy to stick it on GitHub. IMO, the hard part is not so much the UI/layout (which definitely needs work), but actually getting all of the data added in and fact-checked reliably.

[R0bzz]

Short answer, yes I’d collaborate on this. Will jump back on later tonight and share some thoughts.

[orannge]

I have really no idea how this works, but would like to contribute in the future. If there is any small thing I could do, please let me know via PM @slowqueen. I can’t promise I can put much time and work into this, but this way I could learn more about all Starmie releases as well I hope.

[slowqueen]

Thank you @orannge that would be awesome! One small thing that could be helpful: At some point in the future, I will switch from “data entry” to “fact checking” mode. At that point, I would love to “beta test” this with species collectors. People could let me know if anything looks right or wrong to them, or provide any feedback they have. But it probably won’t be for a while.

[Ratequaza]

You might also want to get in contact with u/Right_Celebration150 who already did this for English and stated they were open for collaboration regarding other languages.

[slowqueen]

Awesome, thanks for the tip!