Hello, everyone

I do have a Facebook group for this purpose, but I can probably reach more people out here by doing this. So I'll take a moment to explain what I am doing it, then how I am doing it, and finally, I'll bring everyone up to speed on how much I have done.

I liked the Pokemon Gameboy games. They were fun, and took a long time to finish. Then they just kept on getting better and better. Yellow was my favorite for a while, because my level 100 Pikachu could take out the Elite Four by itself. But then Crystal came out, and I had a new favorite.

About a year ago, I took a computer programming course in my senior year of high school. It was in the Java programming language, and I placed somewhere near the top of my class. I got bored about halfway through, and decided I needed a bigger challenge. I knew there was a way to make a graphical user interface with Java, but I had no idea how to do it. Still, I started some work on the program.

As soon as I hit a wall, I stopped. I regret stopping, but I needed the time to do my other programs for the class. Well, eventually I learned how to make a GUI, and I made some fantastic stuff for my class. Then the year was over, and I was bored.

Over the summer I tried to make a complicated program, and almost finished it. This annoyed me. I decided arbitrarily to restart the Pokemon project. I did what took me weeks to do in a matter of hours, and I was convinced to keep on going with the project. And so here I am.

So, on to what I am doing. What I am trying to do, basically, is make a version of Pokemon for the computer, with whole new story lines, and new locations. I may or may not get around to new Pokemon. Sorry about that, but I am just one person. And I am doing everything by myself.

I am programming the entire thing in Java, and I am making all of the images in Photoshop. Then I shall stick it all together, and let it free over the internet. Perhaps. I still do not know how I am going to distribute this. It has to be free, of course, but I might just only give it to people who want it.

And lastly, here is what I have so far. I have the ways to draw the map (only one right now), the characters, and the background characters. The background characters move around randomly along preassigned paths. I have a collision array set up to make sure I don't go through trees and stuff. And it all looks pretty smooth in its native resolution.

That is currently my only problem. I can resize the game, and everything still works, but it begins to get choppy. I don't know enough about buffering right now to fix that. But I will get around to it, most likely in version two of the game.

I know that this will probably take me a couple of years to finish. That's okay. I need something to fill up my spare time. And I will be very happy when I am all done.

That's all for now. I'm not going to be programming tonight, because I have been doing so nonstop for the past few weeks. I need a break. And I need a break from typing, Jeez.