Why I Made This Site

At the time of CPG's creation, I had been playing Crystal for about 11 months. In the process of wanting to max out all of my Pokémon's stat experience for Stadium 2, I realized how scattered the information on the subject was for actual gameplay. It was easy to find summaries of how stat experience worked in formula, but I struggled to decide what the best method would be for training up my stat experience legitimately and without the use of glitches in my actual game. After weighing options from GameFAQs, the Smogon forums, and other similar sites, I decided to grind on wild Unown in the Ruins of Alph for the chance of a shiny and easy math. For a lot of franchises, this was a normal experience, but Pokémon? The series is so well documented, it was weird to recognize that something I wanted to do in-game wasn't easily explained the instant I typed anything into Google. This itched at me for a while. I couldn't stop thinking about how many more game mechanics were buried in old forum threads, and how little the general Pokémon fan seemed to know about generations 1 and 2 aside from their glitch and arbitrary code execution potential.

I am an autistic person, and I am the stubborn kind of autistic person. My interests are very focused, and very, very passionate. As a result, it genuinely burdened me that more people didn't understand why I love generations 1 and 2 so much, and that even if they were trying to learn more about it, they might not know where to start. It's hard to use the likes of Serebii or Bulbapedia if you aren't even sure what you're looking for in the first place! I also just really, really wanted to catalogue information about something I love so much. My first Crystal playthrough was so powerful for me that it felt akin to a religious experience, but that playthrough was coming to an end aside from excessive amounts of full odds shiny hunting, and if I wanted to continue the passionate burn I had for it, I would need to direct my attention elsewhere. All things considered, a fansite seemed like a great idea. I knew that my passion for Crystal could get me through any coding challenge. With a little bit of support from my excited friends, I moved ahead with creating CPG.

Back when I first signed up for Neocities and opened Notepad++ for the first time on December 14th, 2021 to make the first version of CPG's homepage, I barely knew anything about HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. I had a basic understanding of HTML's opening and closing tags because of my time spent on internet forums when I was a young kid in the late 2000s and I remembered the tiniest fragments of JS from being assigned to do Codecademy lessons when I was in high school, but nothing else. Frankly, I was clueless and had no business trying to run a fansite this complicated from scratch with my knowledge at the time, but as my friends know, once I have my eyes set on something, I don't usually give up - and my eyes were practically glued to the screen as I furiously Googled and looked through w3schools until I had a shoddily coded, but functional, homepage. Nowadays, most of that original code is gone and has been replaced with something easier to edit and realistically re-use on every page, but it was the best I knew how to do back then.

Fast forward 10 months or so later to the day I am writing this, October 9th 2022, and CPG has come a decent ways into the future. I didn't expect to be enjoying coding so many JavaScript tools and calculators instead of just solely writing static articles, but there are numerous on the sidebars now. There are more visitors to the site than ever, and people have thanked me personally for the tools I've made. I am generally happy with what I've created here. However, last night while planning various things for CPG, I realized that the site's one year anniversary of being created is in a couple of months. Almost instantly, I felt a sense of dread. I thought about all the plans I had for it when I signed up for Neocities with all of the possibilities for content on my mind, and how I still haven't met all those goals by the end of the first year. There is so much that I want to do that's just incomplete or not even started. It felt like everyone who was visiting to the site could see into my brain and realize how much I want to make, but haven't made yet. It was embarrassing, somehow. I sat on these feelings for a while. They're what inspired me to write this article. Was CPG worth it? Was I being lazy and just not putting in the effort?

Well, no. I wasn't being lazy. As a disabled person with both mental and physical illness, it hasn't always been possible for me to work on CPG, even when I really want to. Sometimes I am too sick to sit up at my computer for long periods of time, or the brainfog is too bad for me to stare at a wall of HTML/CSS/JS and understand it. Despite that, I've still made content and continue to do so without giving up, and content I'm proud of, at that. Besides, there's been so many other benefits than just meeting old goals from 2021. My continued efforts to research and make content for CPG has led me to meeting so many kind people and has brought joy and focus to what otherwise has been a difficult year for me. Even when I don't feel well enough to work for weeks or even months at a time, I always know that CPG is there for me to pour my heart into when I feel better again. It's stability during a life that rarely feels stable. The programming skills I've been learning to support the things I want to make is pretty cool, too. I've unlocked a passionate interest in the indie web that I didn't know I had within me. I've also been able to make things that I always wanted but didn't exist, like the stat experience tracker. Stuff like that is incredibly fulfilling. CPG is fulfilling in general. I don't think I've ever kept up with a singular project this long before.

No matter what challenges are presented to me as I continue to work on CPG, it's always worth it. For the people I've assisted and the joy I get from creating it, my new love for programming, and most of all, my love for the classic Pokémon games. Every time I work on CPG, my first playthrough and my first team are on my mind, encouraging me to keep going. I usually code with my cherished Quagsire plushie named after my in-game shiny Quagsire under my arm as my cheerleader. I absolutely fell head over heels for Crystal when I first played it, and it is important to me that my love for it goes public instead of only being limited to me, no matter how long it takes to truly get everything I want to make out there. I want more people to understand my love for generations 1 and 2, or at the very least, be helped in their Pokémon endeavors by something I've created here. That is why I made CPG, and will continue to do so. Hopefully, one day, all of the ideas I had in December 2021 are realized, and then some.