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Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

roganmurley.com

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Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#41

Post by hitekker »

john-radio wrote: post #18
idle_zealot wrote: post #12

> Changing a game becomes as simple as modifying a wiki I feel like an implementation of Pokemon Yellow in a reasonably modern high-level programming language would be easier to reason about and modify than a sprawling wiki written in English.

Yes, I got the sense from reading this that the author has neither spent a lot of time contributing to a wiki, nor writing software, because both tasks are scarily complex in a way that the blog entry skates over. But then I clicked "About" and I see they are in fact a staff engineer at reddit, so shows what I know.

The hubris of solving social problems with technical solutions is a pipe dream many corporate engineers fall into. I think that's because real social problems, i.e. conflicts, are handled by their managers.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#42

Post by aftbit »

kej wrote: post #15

Pierre Menard, Developer of Pokemon Yellow .

Thanks! I'd never heard of this.[1] Just shows that everything old is new again, and we really need to appreciate the Lorites[2] among us.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

2: https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Saunt_Lora%27s_Proposition

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#43

Post by araes »

snowpid wrote: post #39
jayd16 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea isn't that it generates Pokemon Yellow exactly, just that it generates a game of similar complexity. If it's not in the wiki it's not relevant. If its relevant then it should be added to the wiki.

sound is very important for the game experience

Bulbapedia could very easily contain midi transcriptions of every song in the game franchise.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#44

Post by ElCapitanMarkla »

esnard wrote: post #2

Wow, I also spent years reading those guides before playing by first ever Pokémon game. I even started to write my own guide. As a child, it was very fun. Now I'm wondering how many people share the same experience.

The Pokemon Power magazine had a very small guide for Red/Blue at the start, I must have read that 1000 times over. Just before christmas that year I was yahooing some Pokemon / Gameboy things when I stumbled upon the no$gmb and the world of emulation... I have fond memories of that emulator and the debugger.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#45

Post by araes »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #7
coffeebeqn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend who I played Red and Blue with had one of those. They were an incredible resource. Later I was almost more amazed by gameFAQs which has very detailed guides for almost any game. And at least back then it was all ASCII with no ads. A million times better than the blogspam game guides that Google returns these days

gamefaqs often still has really really good mostly text guides for PC cRPGs (with the odd exception of BG3). Maybe all the old-timey text nerds only like RTWP (which is a position I have a lot of sympathy with).

On a cursory survey of GameFaqs as it exists now, checked the top five most recent game additions. Got semi-recent to recent games. Seems very similar to 20 years ago with slight tech additions. Still very slimmed down. Minimal load.

Fate/Extra CCC, All Endings (1/2/24); Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky, Recruitment (12/28/23); Shin Megami Tensei V, Walkthrough (1/4/24); Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Strategy (12/25/23); The Sims 4, Rent Object List (12/30/23)

Oldschool Ascii: 1, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon

Text HTML w/ Menu: 2, Fate/Extra CCC, Shin Megami Tensei V

Text and Images: 1, Sims 4

Text, Images, Video: 1, Super Mario Bros. Wonder

They all seemed reasonably well written on a cursory glance. Notably, did not delve all that far into checking whether they were factual.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#46

Post by itishappy »

countWSS wrote: post #40
npinsker wrote: post #11

> Suppose we want a new version of Pokémon Yellow with a new Pokémon creature. We don’t need to change the game’s source code, we just need to edit the wiki and then press the “remake game” button. Modding a game becomes as simple as editing the wiki. Creating a game becomes as simple as writing its wiki. Is this actually at all feasible? The total amount of storage space used by the Pokémon wiki is hundreds of times…

"Its called code" Can you code a million games per day? The barrier to entry if this works out, would allow anyone to make such games by simply writing down a few pages of "mods" every hour. Or if you force ChatGPT to creatively generate some changes, it could be automated. Hundreds of games per hour? Local models trained on some custom dataset could generate these wikis in batches. Thousands of new games per hour! A…

> Can you code a million games per day?

Is there a market for thousands of custom games per hour? Games designed without clear design goals or quality control? Games where the player is the alpha tester for mechanics generated with no guarantee of consistency or even functionality?

It's like our modern mobile game landscape, but worse. I find such vision somewhat revolting, tbh.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#47

Post by spondylosaurus »

npinsker wrote: post #11

> Suppose we want a new version of Pokémon Yellow with a new Pokémon creature. We don’t need to change the game’s source code, we just need to edit the wiki and then press the “remake game” button. Modding a game becomes as simple as editing the wiki. Creating a game becomes as simple as writing its wiki. Is this actually at all feasible? The total amount of storage space used by the Pokémon wiki is hundreds of times…

The original Pokemon games (Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green in JPN) were also full of notorious programming idiosyncrasies and glitches. I'm not sure how safely you could insert new data into the game without poking the bear too much.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_glitches_(Ge...

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_battle_glitc...

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_overworld_gl...

The 1/256 glitch is a fan favorite because to this day it still fucks over people who play Gen 1 competitive PvP battles.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#48

Post by spondylosaurus »

npinsker wrote: post #30
NeoTar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it still doesn't cover many, many aspects of that game But I kinda love that as an idea. The text of the wiki defines the core ideas of what the game is, but a lot is left unspecified and to be interpreted. Pokémon legends Arceus feels a lot like what someone who had only read about the franchise may create as a game, and it's a pretty awesome addition to the series.

I agree in principle, but that's dangerously close to saying "I'd love if AI was a good game designer" -- I mean, I'd love it too, but we're very far from that, and there are even more interesting things we could do in that world. Also, if I were instructing someone to make a Pokémon game, the info on the wiki (gigantic percentage and stats tables, tilemaps, EVs and IVs) seems like generally the exact opposite of wha…

Funny you say that, because I'd actually take stat distributions and movesets and all that other data-heavy stuff to be one of the most important factors in the game!

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#49

Post by rideontime »

cljacoby wrote: post #22
npinsker wrote: post #11

> Suppose we want a new version of Pokémon Yellow with a new Pokémon creature. We don’t need to change the game’s source code, we just need to edit the wiki and then press the “remake game” button. Modding a game becomes as simple as editing the wiki. Creating a game becomes as simple as writing its wiki. Is this actually at all feasible? The total amount of storage space used by the Pokémon wiki is hundreds of times…

Was the comic Dilbert? Curious to lookup the original

Scott Adams does not know enough about programming to understand that joke.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#50

Post by roganmurley »

lobsterthief wrote: post #28
hiatus wrote: post #27

The waitlist for langengine does not allow + email addresses for some reason.

Probably a bad email validation regex since this isn’t a good strategy to prevent the same person from signing up with multiple accounts.

Yeahp, bad regex. Fixed now, thanks for flagging.
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