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Launch checklist

Everything here is copy-paste. The order matters: 1 and 2 gate everything else, and 3–5 are worth nothing until the project is installable.

Release mechanics (tagging, the registry publish, troubleshooting) live in publishing.md. This file is the distribution half.

1. Merge and tag · ~10 min · blocks everything below

Nothing is installable until the module rename is on main, and nothing is listed anywhere until a v* tag exists. go install …@latest resolves through main, so it fails today with "module declares its path as: pokearena".

  • Merge the module-rename PR.
  • Actions → Release → Run workflow, version: 0.1.0, no leading v.

One-shot, and deliberately so: the MCP Registry refuses to re-publish a version number. See publishing.md §1.

2. Repo description · 1 min · highest read-count of anything you own

Settings → the ⚙ beside About. Paste:

An MCP server that lets LLM agents play Pokémon battles.

That is the shape that works for this category — category, audience, verb, famous thing, no adjectives. Compare lmwilki/civ6-mcp (151★): "An MCP server that lets LLM agents play Civilization VI."

Website field: https://github.com/shaumik/PokeArena#play-in-two-commands

Topics are already good — 20 of them, including mcp, model-context-protocol, ai-agents, llm-agents, agent-benchmark. Leave them.

3. Directories · ~45 min · the slow, permanent channel

The MCP Registry publishes itself from the release workflow. These do not.

Where How Notes
punkpeye/awesome-mcp-servers Pull request Read its README header for the exact line format before opening the PR — it changes.
mcpservers.org Web form Does not take PRs.
Glama Indexes public repos automatically Claim the listing once it appears.
Smithery Connect the GitHub repo
PulseMCP Web form
Claude plugin directory Web form .claude-plugin/ already exists in the repo.

Line to submit, wherever a one-liner is asked for:

PokéArena — An MCP server that lets LLM agents play Pokémon battles. Runs entirely in-process: no server, no API key, no setup. Also a reproducible benchmark, with variance-controlled mirror matches on a deterministic engine.

4. A demo people can see · ~1 hr

demo.svg is already at the top of the README — a real session, animated. Beyond that:

  • GitHub Pages is already enabled on this repo and unused. A static replay viewer — feed it a run's JSONL trace, step through the turns — would be the single most shareable thing here, and it needs no backend.
  • The battle video (README § Watch: two agents battle) is real footage and sits too far down. If Pages ships, link it from the hero instead.

5. Post it once, somewhere with an audience · ~2 hr · highest variance

Registries trickle. This is what produces the first hundred stars.

Lead with the transcript, not the architecture. The thing that makes people look is an agent got its team rejected and fixed it in one pass — not the distributed session tier.

Show HN

Title (76 chars, under the 80 limit):

Show HN: PokéArena – an MCP server that lets LLM agents play Pokémon battles

First comment:

I wanted an environment where I could prove an agent's win rate was the agent and not the dice, so I wrote the battle engine rather than wrapping Pokémon Showdown. Because the RNG stream is ours and seeded, every match is a mirror match on an identical seed — same team, both sides — so the only free variable left is the policy.

It installs in two commands and needs nothing running: the battle happens inside the MCP server, on a dataset compiled into the binary. Three tool calls reach the first move.

The part I'd most like feedback on is the team-building surface. An agent writing a team from memory gets it wrong in ways that are specific and fixable, so a rejection returns every problem at once with the legal alternatives, plus warnings for teams that are legal and still bad. A 22-turn battle costs 26 tool calls end to end.

Honest limits are in the README, including one that cost me a metric: deeper expectimax search plays worse on this format, so per-move regret against it is not a valid measure and was cut.

r/LocalLLaMA

Title: I built a Pokémon battle environment for agents — no server, runs in-process, and every match is reproducible

Open with the demo SVG, then the transcript. This audience cares about runs locally, no API key, so lead with that and mention the Ollama contestant support in cmd/bench.

X / Bluesky

Your agent can now lose at Pokémon.

go install github.com/shaumik/PokeArena/cmd/pokearena-mcp@latest

6v6, fog of war, own deterministic engine. No server, no key, no clone. Three tool calls to the first move — and the same seed replays the same battle.

Attach docs/demo.svg rendered to a video or a screen recording; the SVG animates on GitHub but most social embeds want a real video file.

6. Triage the issue list · ~30 min

Fifteen open issues against a handful of stars reads as abandoned, whatever the truth is. Several are already done and just need closing — see the audit in the session notes, particularly the EV spread work (engine.MaxEVPerStat, TeamPick.EVs) and the wait()/act() semantics, which changed when act started returning the next view.

What this does not fix

Stars, forks and citations come from other people over time. Everything above buys you the chance at them; none of it manufactures them. Do 1 and 2 today — they are twelve minutes and they unblock the rest.