Pokermon PR Palooza - Joker Bundle

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PR includes all of the Jokers that I've tested to-date which haven't already been added to the base game:

Bunnelby/Diggersby
Wailmer/Wailord
Deerling/Sawsbuck
Kecleon
Shelmet/Accelgor
Sawk/Throh
Furfrou
Falinks
Wimpod/Golisopod
Wo-Chien/Ting-Lu/Chien-Pao/Chi-Yu
Morpeko

Notes:
All of the Jokers I made are testable via the challenges I made for them. I gave my challenges custom colors in the menu to distinguish them.

Had to modify pokespriteload.lua to get Treasures of Ruin legendaries to load, due to the inconsistency with naming in the national dex order (e.g. wochien vs. wo_chien).

Bunnelby sometimes glitches out, resulting in cases where a "blank card" is added to the deck and deck being written as something like 53/52 cards. Something to do with discarding more than five cards at once, as I've also seen this happen with Houndour/Houndoom. Bunnelby's evolution condition is interesting, but it's way too difficult and risky for a common.

Kecleon doesn't currently have its forms individually specified in the code, so they don't all show up when you click on it. My codebase wasn't up-to-date with the latest means of grabbing the atlas, so I just hardcoded it for the time being. I'm sure there's a more streamlined way to do it with the various utility methods.

Wailmer/Wailord is a simple idea that's rather difficult to simply explain. It's a joker themed around playing big poker hands, to reflect Wailmer's size. The bigger the hand, the bigger the value. But once you play a bigger hand, you are locked into a hand of at least that size. Wailord's evolution condition is designed to encourage starting small, since building it up too quickly will make it difficult to reliably gain EXP. At the same time, playing only High Card will earn EXP too slowly.

The numbers for Sawk and Throh were difficult to work out given the design of their ability. They can be built up to stockpile Chips/Mult, and then some of the stockpile can be consumed for additional hands/discards. This would naturally have the consequence of allowing the player to stockpile virtually infinite hands/discards for the endgame if the numbers are too big, so I added a hard limit of three uses per round. Sawk's hand gaining seemed more useful than Throh's in general, so I made the exchange 5 hands for 1 hand in comparison to 3 discards for a discard. Due to how it's programmed, increasing their power with energy also increases the cost of using their volatile abilities.

Escavalier and Accelgor provide a means of gaining a blind's skip tag without skipping. It took a lot of code analysis and experimentation to figure out how to do that without causing weird glitches. Hopefully that section of the code can prove useful for other Jokers.

Uncertain about the specific numbers for Falinks, but I really liked the idea of a Joker that becomes Eternal for the duration of the blind, forcing players to accept both the upside and downside once they accept the blind. Falinks's No Retreat was a perfect fit for the concept.

Furfrou is my favorite Joker to use of the ones I've made next to Falinks. Each ante it tasks you with a different goal based on the random trim it gets, upping a continually increasing mult. There may be better ideas for some of the trims than what I have, but I do like the existing variety.

Wimpod was designed to be another Magikarp-esque Joker that's difficult to evolve but becomes very powerful if you can. I liked the idea of the Joker running away as a reference to Wimp Out, if you use all but one hand and/or discard. The Needle specifically kills it, so I added a clause that requires you to play at least 2 hands for it to trigger its effect. Golisopod still has Wimpod's downside to reflect Emergency Exit, but it merely debuffs instead of deleting itself. Golisopod doesn't have the same protection against The Needle as a result.

Originally the Treasures of Ruin did not make themselves Eternal. I found that being able to passively whittle down your deck and then remove them made them too good even for Legendaries, and it clashed against the flavor I was going for. It's meant to tap into the legend of the Pokemon and punish the player for greed. They're meant to "ruin" the deck if left unchecked. The challenge of starting with all four as eternals is an interesting test of how dangerous they can be if you get them right from the start.

I tested out several ideas related to Morpeko to see which felt the most interesting to play. To fit with the Lightning/Dark dichotomy and its ability in the base game, it felt organic for it to be a joker that switches between a form that grants money and a form that grants XMult. I considered having it switch every ante, but I thought that would make its power side too unreliable since you couldn't depend on it for any given ante without skipping. Instead, I had the idea to have it switch forms after each played hand, allowing it to switch between providing money and power each hand. This creates a dynamic where you want to avoid winning in 2 hands to gain more money, and you need to set up your hands properly to maximize the value of the dark side. I had Morpeko scale passively each time you beat an ante, allowing it to become moderately stronger over time and representing how it gets increasingly hungrier and needs to eat more to satiate itself. Since it provides both scaling and economy, I wanted it to feel like it does both decently well but not either exceptionally well. Visually I wanted the form to change after scoring/gaining money, but it seems to trigger a bit early.