Let me tell you right now, this whole "web design" gig is not as easy as it sounds. Oh sure, writing the code can be done quickly and effortlessly. Some small dashes of CSS, a little sprinkling of PHP. But the moment you want a decent looking web page, with images and backgrounds and gradients and overlays and...more stuff? Dear lawd, someone should have told me earlier what that would entail. I've spent the past 3 weeks getting to grips with my image software (mostly GIMP, a little bit of Inkscape as well) just so I can get a decent website design done. And, well, I've finally had some success. It's not perfect, and it could certainly do with some work, but it's progress and it is good enough that I've been able to start work on re-coding the game itself for the new template.
For those unaware, I've been working on a simple browser based strategy game for the past few months in between bouts of job hunting, Originally, it was a project to keep my game development mindset practiced and warmed up, as well as to teach me PHP and MySQL but it's evolved into a full fledged game over the course of development. There's been two rounds of beta testing with some friends of mine playing the game and helping me make it less buggy, more balanced and provide more tactical options for players to take advantage of. That's proven the most difficult part of developing the game, alongside learning HTML5's canvas so I can make an interactive starmap for players to deploy their armies through.
Well, with development accelerating now that the new template is complete, I aim to have the game up and running for a month long private beta around about mid-to-late May. Once that is done, it will be going public for people to play (for free, naturally). Until then, you will have to put up with rather sporadic updates on my blog and my Twitter as I focus almost entirely on educating myself and rewriting about 90% of the game's code to account for the previous language being rendered mostly obsolete. I'll see about posting some small scale updates, maybe exploring the backstory and game mechanics of the three different factions in the game to keep people up to date as I continue my work.
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| Isn't it purty |
Well, with development accelerating now that the new template is complete, I aim to have the game up and running for a month long private beta around about mid-to-late May. Once that is done, it will be going public for people to play (for free, naturally). Until then, you will have to put up with rather sporadic updates on my blog and my Twitter as I focus almost entirely on educating myself and rewriting about 90% of the game's code to account for the previous language being rendered mostly obsolete. I'll see about posting some small scale updates, maybe exploring the backstory and game mechanics of the three different factions in the game to keep people up to date as I continue my work.







