pokerogue/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to PokéRogue

Thank you for taking the time to contribute, every little bit helps. This project is entirely open-source and unmonetized - community contributions are what keep it alive!

Please make sure you understand everything relevant to your changes from the Table of Contents, and absolutely feel free to reach out in the #dev-corner channel on Discord. We are here to help and the better you understand what you're working on, the easier it will be for it to find its way into the game.

📄 Table of Contents

• Development Basics
• Environment Setup
• Getting Started
• Documentation
• Testing Your Changes
• Development Save File (Unlock Everything)

🛠️ Development Basics

PokéRogue is built with Typescript, using the Phaser game framework.

If you have the motivation and experience with Typescript/Javascript (or are willing to learn) you can contribute by forking the repository and making pull requests with contributions.

💻 Environment Setup

Prerequisites

• node: >=22.14.0 - manage with pnpm | manage with fnm | manage with nvm
• pnpm: 10.x - how to install (not recommended to install via npm on Windows native) | alternate method - volta.sh
• The repository forked and cloned locally on your device

Running Locally

1. Run pnpm install from the repository root
   • if you run into any errors, reach out in the #dev-corner channel on Discord
2. Run pnpm start:dev to locally run the project at localhost:8000

🚀 Getting Started

A great way to develop an understanding of how the project works is to look at test cases (located in the test folder). Tests show you both how things are supposed to work and the expected "flow" to get from point A to point B in battles.

This is a big project and you will be confused at times - never be afraid to reach out and ask questions in #dev-corner!

Where to Look

Once you have your feet under you, check out the Issues page to see how you can help us! Most issues are bugs and are labeled with their area, such as Move, Ability, UI/UX, etc. There are also priority labels:

• P0: Completely gamebreaking (very rare)
• P1: Major - Game crash
• P2: Minor - Incorrect (but non-crashing) move/ability/interaction
• P3: No gameplay impact - typo, minor graphical error, etc.

Also under issues, you can take a look at the List of Partial / Unimplemented Moves and Abilities and the Bug Board (the latter is essentially the same as the issues page but easier to work with).

You are free to comment on any issue so that you may be assigned to it and we can avoid multiple people working on the same thing.

📚 Documentation

You can find the auto-generated documentation here.

Additionally, the docs folder contains a variety of in-depth documents and guides useful for aspiring contributors.
Notable topics include:

• Commenting your code
• Linting & Formatting
• Localization
• Enemy AI move selection

Again, if you have unanswered questions please feel free to ask!

🧪 Testing Your Changes

You've just made a change - how can you check if it works? You have two areas to hit:

1 - Manual Testing

This will likely be your first stop. After making a change, you'll want to spin the game up and make sure everything is as you expect. To do this, you will need a way to manipulate the game to produce the situation you're looking to test.

src/overrides.ts contains overrides for most values you'll need to change for testing, controlled through the overrides object. For example, here is how you could test a scenario where the player Pokemon has the ability Drought and the enemy Pokemon has the move Water Gun:

const overrides = {
  ABILITY_OVERRIDE: AbilityId.DROUGHT,
  OPP_MOVESET_OVERRIDE: MoveId.WATER_GUN,
} satisfies Partial<InstanceType<typeof DefaultOverrides>>;

Read through src/overrides.ts file to find the override that fits your needs - there are a lot of them! If the situation you're trying to test can't be created using existing overrides (or with the Dev Save), reach out in #dev-corner. You can get help testing your specific changes, and you might have found a new override that needs to be created!

2 - Automatic Testing

PokéRogue uses Vitest for automatic testing. Checking out the existing tests in the test folder is a great way to understand how this works, and to get familiar with the project as a whole.

To make sure your changes didn't break any existing test cases, run pnpm test:silent in your terminal. You can also provide an argument to the command: to run only the Dancer (ability) tests, you could write pnpm test:silent dancer.

• Note that passing all test cases does not guarantee that everything is working properly. The project does not have complete regression testing.

Most non-trivial changes (especially bug fixes) should come along with new test cases.

• To make a new test file, run pnpm test:create and follow the prompts. If the move/ability/etc. you're modifying already has tests, simply add new cases to the end of the file. As mentioned before, the easiest way to get familiar with the system and understand how to write your own tests is simply to read the existing tests, particularly ones similar to the tests you intend to write.
• Ensure that new tests:
  • Are deterministic. In other words, the test should never pass or fail when it shouldn't due to randomness. This involves primarily ensuring that abilities and moves are never randomly selected.
  • As much as possible, are unit tests. If you have made two distinct changes, they should be tested in two separate cases.
  • Test edge cases. A good strategy is to think of edge cases beforehand and create tests for them using it.todo. Once the edge case has been handled, you can remove the todo marker.

😈 Development Save File

Some issues may require you to have unlocks on your save file which go beyond normal overrides. For this reason, the repository contains a save file with everything unlocked (even ones not legitimately obtainable, like unimplemented variant shinies).

1. Start the game up locally and navigate to Menu -> Manage Data -> Import Data
2. Select everything.prsv (test/test-utils/saves/everything.prsv) and confirm.