CS50 2D - Lecture 7 - Pokémon

Hello world, this is CS 52D lecture 7, the final final lecture of the course, and today we'll be looking at a game that's a big part of my childhood and sort of a culmination of some of the ideas and some new ideas with which we've been talking about in this course,

and that is Pokemon stylized with this slide here by a game that I grew up playing in particular Pokemon Crystal for the Game Boy.

And here's a screenshot of what Pokemon looked like the very first Pokemon game that I ever played, which was Pokemon Red, and I remember the very first time sort of being able to play this on a handheld device back in the day like Game Boy

and thinking just how incredible it was that you could go around while you're out, you know, on the playground in school or whatnot, and then you are playing as this character in this world going around and catching these creatures called Pokemon showing here.

This is a weeping Bell versus a Geo dude. There were 151 original Pokemon and that was a big deal. Again, a huge franchise just like Mario and Zelda.

It spawned countless different various products including an anime, including trading cards, all sorts of things, huge part of my childhood, huge part of I think many folks' childhood.

They evolved over the years, much like the Pokemon themselves do. This is gold and silver and crystal, which was the one that I spent probably the most time playing after Red, and then they got to the Game Boy Advance where you had titles like Fire Red, Leaf Green, and then.

There were games for the DS where they incorporated the dual screen where they this is a Pokemon Black excerpt here where they have all the moves here that your Pokemon can use in battle were now shown all at once on the bottom and then you still have the same sort of combat screen up top

and then here's another example of Pokemon X and Y for sorry this is black and then X and Y is this version here which is their first 4A into 3D and now they've gone in.

Spawned a bunch of new games that I can't even keep up with on the Switch and so forth, but the same core formula is the same where you have a Pokemon here shown even though it's in 3D, you still have the same dialogue, you still have the same sort of view of the front and back,

and though they now have more dynamic camera movements and the like, the underlying turn-based battle structure has largely stayed the same, and we'll be taking a look at that today in addition to various other aspects that make the game work.

So some of the topics we'll be looking at in addition to turn-based systems which I've just alluded to, we've been looking at state machines thus far, and state machines are a great way to model behavior as it changes throughout time, be that for your game or be that for your entities in the game.