About

Pokéflex is a barebones informational android app written in Kotlin and using Compose.

Inspiration

Android app development is something that no one on the team had done before, and this event was the excuse opportunity that we were looking for to begin. Despite this, there wasn't a concrete idea in mind, really - it needed to be simple, so we could finish on time, and interesting, because lacking motivation halfway through would kill the project. We deliberated for a while and ended up wanting to create a Pokédex of sort (A pokédex is a wikipedia dedicated to gathering information on Pokémon. The name comes from the ambitious goals we had for the project; Phase I was what we're presenting here today, and Phase II would have included a 3DS partner to allow save data to be loaded and represented.

Functionality

Pokéflex allows users to browse through a vast list of Pokémon names and types at a glance, organized by the community and game-led national dex (Pokémon dex number is equivalent to a unique ID).

Technical Details

Pokéflex makes use of a few different technologies:

• Android Studio: allowed us to create and test the app efficiently.
• Jetpack Compose: made the process of styling the app much easier
• JSON: allowed storing the data for the Pokédex, making it possible to give each card its name, type, and image.
• Pokéapi: gave us the data we scraped for the project.

Challenges

At first, we attempted traditional Android development, which uses XML for styling; it made everything rather confusing and difficult to work with. As a result, we couldn't get the app running properly. On Day 2, we decided to restart from scratch to recreate what we had in Compose (which you can see on the main branch). This was quite the setback, and because one of our members ended up competing in the University of Central Florida's Collegiate Cyber Defense Club Cybersecurity Challenge (HPCC 2) on Day 2 as well, we fell behind on what we intended to do. In the end, we were able to at least complete most of Phase I.

Accomplishments

None of us have ever developed an Android app or worked in Kotlin, we were like fish out of water. Not only did we learn and manage to create an Android app that doesn't crash, we did this with the entire team participating in their first hackathon. All things considered, we're pretty proud of what we accomplished at this event, and had a lot of fun, too.

Takeaway

We learned how to develop an app with Android Studio; how to utilize Jetpack Compose; and code in Kotlin. When working on future projects, we will be able to apply these. Also, we learned how to properly pace ourselves when coding and the importance of taking a break once in a while. The hackathon was a great experience.

What's Next for Pokéflex

We'd like to implement Phase II to create a homebrew 3DS app that transfers data from your Pokémon saves to the app via the NFC transponder that the 3DS houses for Amiibo usage.

Built With

• android-studio
• jetpack-compose
• json
• kotlin
• python