Pokemon Style Game based Dev Site

I generally use my personal website as a bit of a playground to try out new things I am learning.

Now that I am actively looking for employment I knew that I needed to have some kind of portfolio site. Since I am "self-taught" when it comes to web development I know my resume and portfolio is not going to look as nice and polished as someone who just graduated from college or finished a nice boot camp. I did a good bit of looking around and there are some VERY impressive sites out there! Quite intimidating in fact. I also noticed there seemed to be kind of a pattern to them. Mostly goes like this: Hey! I am this person. I make websites. Here are a few sites I built on nice cards with hover effects and cool shadowing. And below that here is a bar chart with different tech stacks (React, Svelte, NodeJS, Angular, etc.) with some numbers next to them that quite frankly I don't understand what they mean. And again they look amazing! So I know I wanted to do something a little different.

After taking a course from Chris Course Chris Courses on making a Pokemon style game I decided that I wanted to use that as a starting point for my dev site. So I made a little world and make little monsters that will pop up and all the fun stuff.

My 5 year old often sits in my office and asked "Where am I going to be?" which gave me a great idea of adding NPC's that could could provide information - just like in the real game. So I added my 5-year-old son, my two-year-old daughter, and my wife into the world. And I added a few other little sprites in there just for fun. It occurred to me though that we have enough fighting in the world right now. So I changed the mechanics of the game so that the monsters have to boost each other up to win instead of fight. The "attacks" became "respects" and they healed instead of hurt.

There is still quite a bit of work to do on it and I squash bugs as quick as I can. My hope is that it will be taken for what it is intended to be - something a little different to highlight some creativity and positivity; but also help me get a job! 😁 Please take a minute to swing by jonellwood.dev and check it out!