PokeData App

Screenshots from the app.

About the Project

A Pokédex-like app made in Godot 4 targeting android devices. This was made as a learning exercise for Godot UI and HTTP Requests.

Features

Up-to-date data for Pokémon species and abilities provided by PokeAPI;
Sleek and responsive user interface;
Support for touch, swipe and mouse operation.

Development Tools

The prototype was made in Godot 4.2, using Android Studio to help with builds and testing. All the data currently is sourced from PokeAPI, a free and mostly up-to-date RESTful API.

Project Details

Challenges and Solutions

A lot of the problems I faced were related to memory management. Turns out, instancing a literal thousand nodes in a list, each with its own image and JSON dictionary is not great for both RAM and VRAM.

Originally, it would try to load in sections of 200 monsters at a time all at once, which meant ~600 HTTP GET requests as well as loading 200 720x720 images onto VRAM. Godot can’t handle all those requests all at once, so it freezes and crashes. Even reducing the number of requests means some images simply don’t load. To adress that, I had to make a faux Infinite Scrolling Container that only loads a few dozen pokémon at a time, requesting more if you scroll to the bottom.

For the images, I decided the search screen should use lower resolution 96x96 pixel sprites for the search screen instead of HD art. That saves on some VRAM. I left the full artwork for the individual pokédex screen of each monster. I also considered making the images not visible when the scene is stored in the stack, but while that helps the graphics card, the images stay loaded so that didn’t help.

As for RAM usage, the final search “only” consumes 600MB if you scroll and load all the 1000 pokémon, running around 200MB under normal use. It seems memory isn’t properly cleared by the garbage collector either. It was originally even heavier as requesting data such as pokemon types for each species required requesting everything else for that species (PokéAPI has no query parameters outside of limit), so I simply ignored that for now.

Future Plans

I want to further improve this project on a later date, focusing more on the performance part than the features part. ~500MB of RAM is not ideal for what’s supposed to be an alternative to searching on Google.

I need to look into caching the requests into local storage, as each pokemon is only a few hundred kilobytes in size. Caching would also help with all the times I want to display a pokémon alongside one or two datapoints like type or region or abilities, as well as make queries myself as PokéAPI doesn’t support them. Everyone else working with the api also recommended to cache all the pokémon so it should be ok.

But yes, more features would be nice. Being able to search through all the items and moves or seeing alternative forms like megas would improve the usability. I could also study how to change between light and dark themes or how to add support for other languages, which PokéAPI also has.