Yesterday I worked for 18 hours straight on improvements to the website. My plan has been to integrate a forums into the main site, and give people who bought the game a special status on said forum. Also, I would also use the forum for beta testers to report on their game experiences and to distribute advanced copies to people who pre-order the game.
I already have a forum using the Simple Machines Forums platform. The software that works best with WordPress (the management system for this site) is called bbPress 2.1. There is unfortunately no direct way to export from SMF to bbPress. I had to take a winding route, going from SMF to phpBB3, to bbPress 1.0.2. then attempt to upgrade it to bbPress 2.1. Each step took hours, requiring old versions of the software and multiple attempts, and due to some changes in MySQL in past years, I had to redo sections of PHP and SQL. However, the final piece of software called bbConverter, failed to import any of the topics onto this site. I’m leaving that step for another day.
I’m a bit obsessive when really into a project. I’m comfortable building websites, It’s what I used to do before I dropped everything to make this game.
Over the summer I was nearly tempted by a soulless corporate job working on the website for a media company. They were clueless about the internet and threw gobs of cash at developers (not me) for cosmetic changes to their site. I was there to help a filmmaker friend who was roped into being the web manager despite not knowing how to script. I was in line to take over her job when I realized how much I freaking hated it. The worst part was I lost two months of development time on Against the Wall in its early stages. I woke up in July realizing what had happened and that my dream was going to pass me by. I quit, which inspired my friend to quit in turn.
Enough of that. Today I’m redoing one of the game’s city areas. I was unhappy with my first pass at this section of the game, and am giving it another go. Will be modeling and listening to music for the rest of the day. That’s it for now.
I am happy to hear that you put the time and effort to go about doing things right way as opposed to taking the easy way out. That’s how I function as well when it comes to all the web work I do.
I think this mentality is paying off for you when it comes to this game. You really have something special here. Keep up the good work.