From the archive
Between 2005 and 2012, White Phoenix (Rod Lockwood) used Pokémon Dungeon as the home for a set of ambitious fan projects. He kept his working files in a shared folder on the site. Most of them were spreadsheets that were never finished, but the research inside them has been rescued and turned into the pages below.
What survives
- Gift, trade & prize Pokémon in Red to Crystal: every one-time Pokémon in the Game Boy games, with trade nicknames and Game Corner prices.
- Which attack types hit everything?: his 2008 type coverage study, updated for every generation.
- The Present glitch in Gold & Silver: why Delibird’s move ignored levels and stats.
- Glossary of Pokémon terms: his dictionary of the jargon in old battle guides.
- Pokémonworld Who’s Who: a writer’s guide to the characters of the games, with his own invented history and an alphabet for the Pokémon world.
- Tips and cheats for every Pokémon RPG: his collection of glitches, events and tricks from Red and Blue to Battle Revolution.
- Imakuni?: his article on the card game’s strangest character.
The projects
White Phoenix broke his plans into eight major projects that leaned on fifteen smaller ones, from an Item Dex and a Move Dex to type statistics and Pokémon taxonomy. The five he most wanted to release through Pokémon Dungeon were these.
| Project | What it was for |
|---|---|
| Trainer’s Assistant | A battle planner for every game and venue, from link battles and the Stadium games to Wi-Fi tournaments, with team ratings, move evaluations and calculators. Its team rater was based on KholdStare’s Pokémon Competitive Battling Guide. |
| Coordinator’s Assistant | The same idea for Contests, the Pokéathlon and the other non-battle events. |
| Pokémon CardDex Plus | An index of every trading card with an inventory system, his own rankings and suggested prices. |
| Pokémon Timelines | Separate timelines for the games, the cards, the anime and the manga, and a fifth for the events they all agree on. |
| Pokémon for the PC | A plan to remake the main series as one computer game, region by region. |
The Moves Evaluations were to be released as a side note, and a set of Game Planners (to-do lists, inventories and Pokédex checklists for each game) were made for his own playthroughs. Fellow Pokémon Dungeon member Ametrine planned to use the data for the site’s anime-style battling system.
Evaluating every move
The Moves Evaluator tried to put a single value on every move from Blue to Pearl and from Stadium to Battle Revolution, so that any two could be compared. To keep it fair, every move was rated under the same imaginary battle: two level 50 Pokémon with 150 HP and equal stats, no held items, abilities, natures or STAB, five Pokémon on each team, and an opponent whose own attack did 30 damage a turn, so that every battle lasted five turns. Side effects scored points for or against the user, multi-hit and multi-turn moves were averaged out, and time-of-day moves were weighted by the length of morning, day and night.
To test his ideas about side effects he ran surveys on the GHPF, Veekun and Psypoke forums in 2009, asking members to rate effects such as “always hits, even during Fly or Dig” against their plainer versions on a scale from −10 to 10.
Pricing trading cards
White Phoenix sold cards online, and the CardDex Plus was to use the pricing system he had worked out for that. He weighed five things that never change once a card is printed (its rarity, how it was obtained, how useful it is in play, its artwork and whether it was reprinted), then adjusted for condition:
Value = Original price × Rarity × Rank × (1 + Years since release ÷ 10) × Condition
The original price of a booster card is the price of the pack divided by the cards in it. Promos count the whole cost of whatever had to be bought to get them (“No, they were not free”). His rarity weights ran from 5 for limited edition cards and 1 for rares down to 0.5 for uncommons, 0.25 for commons and 0.1 for basic Energy. Usefulness mattered too: a non-holo card isn’t as pretty, but it is more useful to play with, while the jumbo Legendary Birds and the Ancient Mew can’t be played at all.
Pokémon for the PC
The PC remake was planned as modules, one per region, each built on the most complete version of its games and all of them running on the newest game mechanics:
| Module | Based on | Gadget | Starters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kanto (the base game) | Yellow | Town Map | 4 (including Pikachu) |
| Johto | Crystal | Pokégear | 3 |
| Orre 1 | Colosseum | P⋆DA | 3 |
| Hoenn | Emerald | PokéNav | 3 |
| Orre 2 | XD: Gale of Darkness | P⋆DA | 3 |
| Sinnoh | Platinum | Pokétch | 3 |
| Unova | Gray (still a rumour at the time) | C-Gear | 3 |
Every module would print Pokédex entries, certificates and card lists, and most would include the Pokémon Trading Card Game. He also planned improved graphics and music for the first two generations, Pokémon that follow you, and a Sims-style ranch you could build yourself in place of My Pokémon Ranch.
Four timelines
For the Timelines project White Phoenix treated the games, the cards, the anime and the manga as four separate histories, with the Japanese version always taking priority, and dated events in “years ago” from each series’ starting point: Red and Green, the Base Set, the first anime season and the first volume of Pokémon Adventures. He also set out some ground rules for his Pokémon world: there is no intelligent life beyond its own planet, its Library of Alexandria was never destroyed, so there was no Dark Age, and its people once lived through an agrarian period that made them unusually aware of ecology.
Thanks
White Phoenix credited these people for advice, knowledge or taking part in his surveys: Ametrine, Blupoh, DNA, Dusknoir44, Eevee, EspeonEscape, EvilPenguin, FloppyBelly, Hotmedal, Shiny Moogle, SkyBlitz and YoMamaTheCableGuy. Superunknown supplied base-stat data and a list of under-used attacks.
White Phoenix (Rod Lockwood) shared these projects with the Pokémon Dungeon team in 2012. The spreadsheets themselves are not reproduced here; only the research and writing they contained.