Pokemon Go is awesome and we all want to show off when we catch rare Pokemon. Let’s build a quick hack using Python and Twilio MMS that will allow you to trick your friends into thinking that you’ve encountered legendary Pokemon.

You can continue reading to find out how to build this, or try it out now by texting an image and the name of a legendary Pokemon to:

(646) 760-3289

Getting started

Before diving into the code, you’ll first need to make sure you have the following:

Python and pip installed on your machine

A free Twilio account – sign up here

The images we will need to use including screenshots of models of the legendary Pokemon and the overlay for the Pokemon encounter screen. Create a new folder called pokemon-go-images in the directory where you want your project to live and save them there.

The dependencies we are going to use will be:

The Twilio Python library for generating TwiML to respond to incoming messages

Pillow for image manipulation

Flask as the web framework for our web application

Requests for downloading images from text messages

Open your terminal and enter these commands, preferably in the safety of a virtual environment: