Hello! I’m Stuart Holland. I’m a game developer and a huge Pokémon fan! This blog covers some of the crazier aspects of the data behind the core Pokémon games that I’ve run into.

Making any sense of this blog requires you know at least a little about Pokémon.

By “core Pokémon games,” I mean the RPG titles developed by Game Freak, starting back with Red and Blue (or Red and Green) and all the way up to Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

These are my copies of the core Pokémon games, minus Red & Blue, which I have stored away somewhere so safe that even I don’t know where they are. Also a plush Rowlet.

A hobby project that I’ve been working on for some time now is an application for tracking and training competitive Pokémon teams (imaginatively called PokémonCompDB). PokémonCompDB needs to understand the basic rules of how the Pokémon games work so that it can do its job. While developing this application, I’ve discovered that the designers at Game Freak are amazing. And crazy.

There are so many gloriously specific edge cases that I never noticed while actually playing these games, but they all help to make them feel alive. Only when I was trying to coerce all of this data into some kind of representation that was actually consistent did I realize where all of the outliers were. And once I’d run into enough crazy outliers, I figured other people might be entertained by reading about what I’ve found.

No experience with competitive Pokémon battling is required to follow this blog, though it may help on some occasions. And while I’m not going to go into much detail about what competitive Pokémon is, the folks at Smogon are a good source if you’re interested in finding out more about it.

I’ll try to keep the programming know-how requirements to a minimum as well, but there may be a few code snippets!