Pikabot RL

Pokemon is one of the most famous media franchises, spanning across different mediums such as video games, anime, movies, and manga for over 25 years. The Pokemon video games are adventure-based, turn-based strategy games where battles take place between Pokemon trainers. In each turn, players choose between four moves or maneuver their Pokemon while keeping track of the most optimal moves and strategies to win. This formula has remained mostly unchanged since the beginning of the franchise. The idea for this project was to build a bot that can learn to play Pokemon, specifically to battle other trainers. The bot would learn the different mechanics of the game, from choosing the optimal moves each turn to making long-term strategies to win matches.

The easiest platform to develop such a bot is Pokemon Showdown, an online platform that is lightweight, free to play, and very accessible for this purpose. Previous work has also been done on similar projects, specifically with the Poke-env environment, which provides easy access to all the data needed, eliminating much of the technical implementation required for a classic Pokemon game.