PokéTunes

Overview

Type a Pokémon’s name and PokéTunes hands you back a real Spotify playlist built from what that creature is: its type, its stats, its lore. Fire types should sound like distorted guitars and heavy drums. Water types should feel like late-night R&B. There is also a Spirit Pokémon mode that reads your listening history and tells you which Pokémon you are, musically speaking.

Live Site ↗

Highlights

• All 1,025 of them. Autocomplete across the whole National Pokédex, with each lookup pulling stats, types, legendary status and flavor text.
• Eighteen types, eighteen sounds. Fire is rock and metal, Electric is synthwave, Psychic is dream pop and shoegaze, Ghost is darkwave and post-punk, Fairy is hyperpop. Speed and Attack push the tempo and energy. Legendaries skew cinematic.
• Your Spirit Pokémon. Sign in with Spotify and your top fifty tracks collapse into a five-dimension taste profile, matched against every Pokémon’s.
• Share cards drawn in the browser. Landscape for link previews, portrait for Stories, no server in the loop.

How It’s Built

React and TypeScript on the front, Deno edge functions behind it. The frontend pulls Pokémon data straight from PokéAPI and caches it for a day. An edge function turns the type mapping into Spotify search queries and returns a deduplicated playlist. The look is dark neon: Orbitron and Exo 2, with accents that shift to the selected Pokémon’s type.

What I Learned

Spotify keeps individual developers on a short leash. A development-mode app only works for a handful of allowlisted accounts, so the features that need a sign-in (Spirit Pokémon, Save to Spotify) are switched off for the public. Lesson: when you build on someone else’s API, prototype the auth flow first and learn the access tiers before sinking time into features that depend on them. And a genre mapping that looks right on paper is only right once it returns good tracks from live search. That took several passes.

Status

Live at poketunes.com. Playlist generation works for everyone. Spirit Pokémon waits on Spotify’s approval.