The series is finally finished

With this quiz, Cities in the Pokémon Galar Region on a Map (and its counterparts in other languages), my series of Map Quizzes featuring the regions from the mainline Pokémon games is finished. What a journey it's been! I learnt a lot while making all of these quizzes, both in quizmaking and in the general use of Inkscape and SVGs, and I had fun doing it. I hope everyone who took the quizzes enjoyed them as I much as I did creating them! In this blog entry I will talk about how I created the quizzes, give some (hopefully) interesting insights and trivia, and talk about what I will do from now on. Buckle up, this is going to be a long post.

How we got here

Let's start with a little bit of history, shall we?
I first thought about making a quiz on Pokémon some time in May. I love the games, and they have played a big role in my childhood, although I stopped playing after Black and White, since I didn't (and still don't) own a 3DS. But I didn't want to just make a quiz, I wanted a cool quiz. So I came up with this idea that nobody seemed to have used for a quiz yet: a Click Map Quiz where you have to guess the name of the cities. I needed to create the SVG map myself, but that was part of the fun: had there been readymade SVGs of every Pokémon region, I wouldn't have used them (or rather, I might have used them for Unova and Kalos!).

The first quiz, where you could guess the cities in the Kanto region, was created on May 18, although I submitted it only on May 28. JetPunk's policy on copyright is quite strict (understandably so!), and what I was planning to publish was, in my opinion, in the grey area; sure, I was making the SVG myself, and I wouldn't make any money out of it, but since Nintendo tends to act not too kindly in situations like this, I took the safe route and sent a message to the Quizmaster, asking if my quiz would be allowed on the site, and while I waited I kept myself busy making the SVG map for the second quiz, Johto.
Alas, Quizmaster never replied, so after a little over a week I decided to post the quiz anyway, alongside a version in Italian, which is my first language as well as the language I originally played the games in. Luckily, it looked like noone was going to take down my quiz (or maybe they just haven't come up on the moderators' radar yet and they will be cancelled after I post this blog, who knows), and it seemed to be well received.
One comment in particular, by baptistegorce, asked enthusiastically for a French version. And who was I to refuse? So I decided that I'd make the quizzes in the series not only in English and Italian, but also in the other languages the games were originally translated into - that is French, German, and Spanish. Since I speak a Romance language (and I studied some Spanish in middle school) this wasn't going to be too tough, but just to be sure I used a combination of DeepL, Google Translate, and my own knowledge to translate the quizzes.
After translating the Kanto quiz I posted the Johto quizzes, and the Hoenn ones right after. After those came Sinnoh, Unova and Kalos, which I unfortunately couldn't recreate completely in an SVG, Alola, and, finally, Galar, which concludes our little tour down memory lane. Now we can move onto the next section, which is...

Fun Facts and Statistics

Are you ready for some statistics? Here is a table with all the quizzes (except the Galar ones, obviously) and their respective takes at the time of writing:

As you can see, baptiste's request did wonders for the series: the French quizzes are, cumulatively, the most popular with more than 270 takes! In comparison, the 56 complessive takes of the English series are almost laughable, although I think the English quizzes are, against what the numbers say, more popular than the Italian ones (in my opinion, the Italian quiz for Hoenn shows more takes than it really has).
The quiz with the most takes is the German one for Kanto, though this is a recent development: up until a week or so ago the number one spot belonged to the French Kanto quiz.
The Alola quizzes seem to be by far the least popular ones, but I believe it's because I took a long time to publish them: more than a month passed between the Unova quizzes and the Alola ones. The wait for the Galar quizzes was even longer, so I hope they don't flop!
I was lucky enough to also get some nominations for my English quizzes: the one with the most nominations is the Kanto quiz, with 7 nominations, or 8 if you count my auto-nomination too (I tend not to nominate my own quizzes, but I was really proud of that quiz at the time).

Alright, enough with the boring statistics: now it's time for a "Fun" Facts Lightning Round!

• The size of the final SVG file for the Galar map was 1.38 Megabytes before compression. To put it into perspective, JetPunk's limit for uploading SVGs is 600 Kilobytes!
• The Galar map was also the only one in the series that had to be compressed, every other SVG was well under the limit
• It took about a month to publish the Alola quizzes because I decided to boot up an emulator and play Pokémon UltraSun before making them
• I tell myself I played UltraSun before making the quiz because I wanted to be sure about the city borders, but in reality I just really wanted to play the game!
• I didn't really know there was a "grid" feature in Inkscape when I started making these quizzes, so the Kanto map was entirely made using guides and a large amount of eyeballing it
• The Galar map SVG had ~2400 paths before compression
• Did you know that Unova has a different name in each language? This gave me a bit of a headache when trying to keep the quizzes organised
• When I made the first quizzes, Click Map Quizzes weren't officially available when making a quiz, people had to copy a featured map quiz and then edit it
• When Click Map Quizzes became officially available to everyone with the big update in June, all the quizzes in the series broke. (But thankfully I was able to fix them!)
• My personal favourite map is the Hoenn one, even though it can't be clicked, but the one I'm most proud of is the Galar one
• Before the big June update and the official SVG Guide I felt very smart since I had "reverse-engineered" how to use the "map-hidden" class attribute to make the cursors appear and disappear
• You have no idea how incredibly asymmetrical and full of abnormalities the maps in the Pokémon games are!
• The most difficult part of making quizzes after the Sinnoh ones was finding good pictures of the cursors that point at cities. I am not even joking, I had to look up gameplays on youtube!
• The Alola map may look like it's just a picture, but it's actually a collage of multiple screenshots of the individual island maps: the map with all the islands was too low res. You can see it more clearly if you zoom in on the Aether Paradise!

• Inkscape crashed 22 times while I was making the Galar map

Where to from here?

For the entirety of this blog entry I've said that the series is over, finished, done and dusted.

But, surprise surprise, it's not! I plan to continue with the maps from the Pokémon Ranger spinoff, which I really liked. I have no idea of when I will get on that though, I might continue some of my old series first, like the one on the busiest ports by continent.
Revamping and updating older quizzes in the series with CSS is also on my to-do list: every time I see how bad the city cursors look in the Johto quiz I get a bit sad, but I am always a tad scared of breaking the quiz, so I don't know if or when I will actually do it.

I also wanted to make more translations of this Cities in the Pokémon Region on a Map series, like Portuguese and Polish, but I found out that the games are actually translated in only a handful of languages, and distributed in English in the rest of the world, which sucks for the Pokémon players and aficionados, but also means that translations in the languages I cited earlier would be pointless.
Still, I would love to translate the quizzes in the remaining languages, which are Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, so if anyone reading this speaks any of these languages fluently and is interested in translating the quizzes, please comment! I trusted online tools like DeepL and Google Translate for translations up until now, but I don't feel comfortable using them to translate into languages I know so little, even if it's just a couple of sentences.

Conclusion

It's now time to end this blog entry. I would like to thank everyone reading this (congratulations on making it this far!) and everyone who took the quizzes (sorry you had to wait so long!). I hope this long rambling of mine was enjoyable and not too boring. Let me know in the comments if you have any sort of feedback or question, be it on any quiz in the series or on this blog post!

-Crem