malte.im

malte.im

<< All projects

malte.im was meant as a resource for what’s currently going on in Pokémon GO. Unlike similar tools, it was purely automated and specifically meant to be used by more popular media.

This project included

  • a Discord community with more than 1,000 members
  • a website with about 1,000 daily unique visitors, with peaks at over 10,000
  • a free REST API
  • bot software, made in Dagonair

Motivation

In Pokémon GO, there’s a couple of things that are rotating in semi-frequent intervals. Like the Pokémon you can catch after defeating Raid or Team Rocket battles.

The best source to stay updated on this is LeekDuck. His most popular output are infographics that are shared around local groups, so everyone knows what’s going on.

There’s also The Silph Road, which used to have a fantastic website, but had to shut down since. They’re now providing their collected data in a Google Slides sheet.

But sources are great, but they were both sourced manually. Meaning, they’re prone to providing wrong data and take some time to reflect the latest updates. Neither provided any kind of endpoints that could be used by third party tools.

To enable third party tools to use this data, I first started out scraping both sites and updating a GitHub repo called pogoinfo. It worked, but was never the best solution.

The Silph Road shut down in May 2023, and with it fell its resource that I used the most frequently — its Team Rocket lineup list. During the time I was working on refining an exploit I found that was able to farm in-game resourced using said battles at previously unheard speed and scale. As progress stalled, I wanted to learn more about web development and was searching for a new project, leading me to build my own lineup site.

Process

At the time, I was a big fan of the neobrutalism style, with bold colors, big elements and stark outlines. It offered a nice contrast to the modern design style that all blends together. I also figured that this more cartoonish approach fits the Pokémon franchise well.

For reference, this was The Silph Road’s way to display the lineups:

Screenshot of lineups from three different Team Rocket Grunts

I think the design works well and is easy to digest. I can see people unfamiliar with how these battles work having trouble understanding what everything means, but to the target audience, everything should be clear. The only thing bothering me is that Each slot has its possible Pokémon aligned vertically.