This Is Pokemon, In A Single File Coded Entirely In Batch

So you want to make a game like Pokemon? You could grab Unity or Unreal and start hacking away — but that’s for wimps. Real programmers don’t even bother with compilers. Or development environments like Visual Studio. Nope, if you want to be a hardcore coder, it’s Notepad and batch files for you!

This, of course, is insane advice. That didn’t stop Reddit user “JiskaandStyk” though.

JiskaandStyk’s “Openpoke” is a 8100-line batch file and uncompressed, comes in at a healthy 213.62KB — about a fifth of a megabyte. To run it, just save it from Pastebin, give it the extension “.bat” and double-click. You should see something similar to the lead image.

Playing the game is done entirely using written commands, so it’s a little more laborious than your typical Pokemon title, but it does work.

So, what is a batch file? In simple terms, it’s a series of plain-text commands that are executed one after the other, with basic support for standard programming control statements such as for loops and goto commands.

It’s not the easiest “language” to code in and as JiskaandStyk points out in his Reddit thread on the project, a lack of support for floating point numbers (anything with a decimal place, basically), made the project all the more harder.

Here’s the creator’s full description of his project (and justification for embarking on it in the first place):

…this is essentially the battle system from pokemon (FIGHT/BAG/POKEMON/RUN) in batch. Choose the poke in your party, their moves, and their levels, and then participate in some good old animal fights. Has the first three generations of pokemon and all the moves minus about fifteen from generation one ( http://pokemondb.net/move/generation/1 ). All pokemon have base stats/evs/ivs, and all numbers (health, damage, etc.) are calculated using gamefreak’s mechanics. (Also you need VB to run this, since batch is shit and can’t store decimals OR fractions.
I got a bit bored over the holidays and started making this. I originally didn’t mean to go this far, but at this point I’m a bit burnt out. Hope someone at least gets a kick of nostalgia from it.

Openpoke [Pastebin, via Reddit]


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