How Developers Can Get in on the Pokémon Go Craze

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of Pokémon Go. This mobile app uses GPS to combine the virtual world and the real world. Back in the day, I logged many hours playing Pokémon on an old Nintendo Game Boy. Now, Pokémon Go has gotten me outside hunting for Pokémon because I want to “catch’em all”!

I must not be the only nostalgic Pokémon gamer out there. I see lots of people gathered in the parks and at spots like the weird monument located in the center of my neighborhood, surely taking advantage of a PokéStop, filling up their inventory with Poké Balls and capturing more Pokémon around the area.

So yeah, people are going crazy about Pokémon Go—from the young to the old, from old-school Pokémon players like me to newbies that didn’t even know what a Pokémon was. It’s a fun game that’s simple to play and gets people moving.

Want a piece of the pie?

Pokémon Go has quickly become one of the most downloaded and played mobile games in history. There are great opportunities for those who want to take advantage of that fever, and some people are already doing it: selling snacks in the parks, restaurants giving Pokémon players free stuff depending on their level, selling Pokémon-shaped items, etc.

And we developers can also show our love to Pokémon Go by creating helpful sites and apps to assist players. Why don’t we share some ways to contribute to the Pokémon Go community? I’ll start! Here’s an idea…

Create a Pokémon trainer locator

It can be an app or a website. It can contain a map displaying some helpful information provided by users. Here are some specifications:

• It should not depend on the actual Pokémon Go app (keep it legal).
• Users will create their own user and provide some info: Team, Player Icon, Player Name, etc.
• Since GPS will be mostly enabled, we will require it to know the current location of all Pokémon players registered in the app.
• Players (trainers) can see their own team trainers.
• Players can request help from their teammates to control a Gym by setting a point in the UI map.
• Players can alert other players “There’s a Pikachu here.”
• Add your own details and features…

This should be a relatively simple implementation for web developers. Here are some tools you can use:

Google Maps API—Required to display the map and to get the location of the player. 
Webclipse—Since it could be either a site or an app, you will need JavaScript. For superior JavaScript support, I choose Webclipse. It has outstanding content assist, a debugger, CodeLive with Live Preview and many more cool features a web developer needs. 

If you like this idea, why don’t you give it a go? I think you will have fun developing it and you might also want to add your own features to it. Let me know if you want some testing 😉 I would love to see some cool tools like this.

Share your own ideas

If you have some ideas you want to share, contact us @Webclipse on twitter or via the Webclipse forum. And, if you’re not already subscribing to our blogs, why not do it today?