Over the first hill

This week marks the end of two (or is it three?) years of building the engines that power Dark Past.

It feels kind of weird, to be honest. I’ve been so focused in a singular direction—building the systems to create and play characters—that I’ve barely looked at the overall frame of the project. And now that I can make characters, play characters, and a Storyteller can administrate everything and tell a story… I can finally take a step back and see the giant piles of other things that still need doing.

Deep breath. It’s not as bad as it sounds. We’re getting there.

What’s next? Well, for me—I’m diving into making the site look less… well, awful. When I first set up the website, I slapped together a basic homepage and shop, then dove straight into the big-boy work: the engines. And now that we’ve hit a natural pause (while we gear up to test), I took a look at the site and decided now was the time to fix it.

So I’ve started on the homepage—and quite frankly, it’s going pretty darn well. I’ve already made something I think is going to look great. Once that’s done, I’ll move on to the other pages—the shop, etc. There’s a lot to do.

It feels like the next logical step: getting the actual website squared away. Because once testing starts (very soon), people are going to need to start from scratch—sign up, create characters, test. But they can’t do that if the website doesn’t actually work. So I’m just gonna get that bit signed off. And when I say “signed off,” I just mean “done.” Since I’m building this on my own.

And let’s not pretend that was a good idea.

The sheer volume of code I’ve written for this so far already over the last 2 years kind of blows me away when I look at it, especially since I’ve had to re-start multiple times… and in a lot of places it ‘ain’t pretty… but we’re going to go with make it work then make it pretty later. Otherwise, this is never getting done.

Meanwhile, while I’m doing the front of house, David will be digging deeper and deeper into data entry. One of the biggest challenges with this game—aside from creating an entire engine to power it—is the sheer volume of data we need to produce to make the world feel alive.
I put in some dummy data during development, but now that’s got to come out—and actual content needs to go in.
Because, you know, we need more than four creatures. Especially since two of them (added for testing) were just different types of horse…

Anyway, the reason I’m even typing this is kind of lame: I need three blog posts to sit on the homepage because I’m adding the blog section at the bottom, and I hadn’t actually started writing any. So this first post is kind of a mind dump. Not that the others won’t be, I guess—I’m just setting the bar for you here.

The point of this blog will be news, announcements, and updates on the construction of this crazy project. So this sort of counts—I’m telling you where I am right now. Which doesn’t feel that far… but also feels super far.

I’m in some kind of gray area in the middle.

– James