DISCLAIMER: Poképon is a project I started like 2 years ago, as a mean to learn Java. Currently, it is in Alpha stage, which means it is playable, but it has some bugs and it lacks a lot of stuff. THE GAME The game itself is a Pokémon-like battle simulator, inspired by Pokémon Showdown, with a client-server structure and multiplayer-only gameplay. Battling is done by connecting to a Poképon server and challenging other players with either a random team or a pre-built one. The game package contains the client, the teambuilder and the server - which means you can not only connect to the official Poképon server, but also host your own on your computer. DOWNLOADING AND PLAYING In order to play, you need to have Java 1.7 or later. If you don't have it, you can download it for free here. The latest version of Poképon can be downloaded from here. Since the game is under development, the latest build changes quite frequently, but it's quite rare that a release breaks the previous one, so you shouldn't be concerned with always having the most updated one: every time I publish a release which forces you to update the game, I publish a post on the home page. The game hasn't a built-in updater, so you need to download the full game each time, but this is not so bad, as it's like 15MB in size. Poképon runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD and anything which can run Java. To start the game, you can follow the instructions on this page. Usually you just have to double-click the downloaded Jar file. A launcher will open: to connect to a server, you need to select Client and insert the server IP and port (you can usually leave the port to its default value 12344). The official Poképon server is pokepon.center , port 12344. (You can connect to it by inserting pokepon.center as the server IP in the Client prompt window) Then, basically follow the instructions on the paged linked before (https://github.com/silverweed/pokepon/blob/master/README.md) NOTES Poképon is free software: you can get the source code here, fork the repository, make your own changes (as long as you keep it free software - see the LICENSE file) etc.
OFFICIAL SITE
All the news, info and stuff about Poképon can be found on pokepon.center. There are a typechart and a ponydex too, so you can easily find info about a pony, a move and so on.
CONTRIBUTING
Since this is a quite big project, any contribution is much appreciated. This means mostly:
contribute with art (background music, game sprites, logos, and so on)
contribute with code (fix bugs, suggest new features, etc - for all these things, please use GitHub's pull requests and issues)
bug reporting (the client has a "open debug window" option; I suggest always checking it, so if the game crashes you can send me a stack trace - usually the most recent lines in the debug window are enough)
suggest builds (moves and abilities) for ponies which lack them: many ponies currently have a very poor movepool, so if you want you can invent new moves/abilities and ask me to implement them!