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PKMN

The purpose of this document is to outline the project goals and user requirements. Not everything described here needs to be implemented, and you may also add new features you don't find here. However, it is recommended to add the core mechanics first, and minor details later to polish the finished project.

Intro

PKMN is intended to be a turn-based CLI fighting game based on the original pokemon franchise. The scope of the project is narrowed down to a 1vs1 encounter between the player and an AI. Before the game starts, the user should be able to pick a pokemon and select the level of difficulty.

reference image

Concept

Models

For reasons of consistency, this game will use the same terminology as the original game that you should keep in mind when you create these structures.

Move

A move in pokemon is a general term that describes in-battle actions which can either change

  • one's hp
  • the enemy's hp
  • one's status
  • then enemy's status
  • a combination of any of those, but never more than 2 at the same time

There're a few more things one could consider, but for this project these parameters should suffice. In addition to that, each move has a accuracy between 30% and 100%. Stronger moves are less likely to succeed, and vice versa.

Pokemon

  • name
  • level (between 1 and 100)
  • hp (short for hit points [1])
  • status (poison, sleep, etc.)
  • moveset (collection of all moves, at most 4)

In the early stages, pokemon don't know many moves. To replicate that, choose at random

  • 1 move if level<5
  • 2 moves if level<10
  • 3 moves if level<20
  • else 4

An important method of this struct will be select_move which will take a user input and invoke the selected move.

UI

One of the major challenges while developing this game will be the fact that it's not trivial to draw images in a terminal. For the sake of simplicity, convert the original sprites [2] into ASCII characters based on density. Because of space limitations (small ASCII images generally look like a ball of characters), use ANSI escape codes to color each "pixel" accordingly [3].

Animations

While not mandatory, it would be interesting to explore how to embed animations into the game. Here are a few ideas from which you can draw inspiration:

  • when the battle starts, fade in both characters
  • the healthbar could change its state slowly rather than instantly
  • the pokemon could move a little up and down when they take damage
  • add text from the original game to annotate the players actions (e.g. It's super effective! when a pokemon receives critical damage)

Fight Mechanism

Because this will be a turn-based fighting game, there will be a main event loop that terminates when one of the two pokemon's life points were reduced to zero. Because the player can initially set the level of difficulty, the following parameters should be taken into account:

  • add a transition to indicate the start of a battle [4]
  • difference in level between both pokemons
  • setting a stronger move set
  • likelihood in with which moves succeed
  • how much health an enemy can restore with a berry (if any)

System Requirements

The game will be developed with os-independent dependencies in C++17. For starters work without any external dependencies. This is not a hard rule, and may change in the future if deemed necessary.

References