Well, it’s finally open to the public. This is the site that I have been working on since I started working at GarageGames way back in September. It is a great idea, and I think we’ve done a great job on it, so do me a favor and check it out! While you’re there you can check out my profile and the profiles of the other people who worked on the site: Sean Sullivan, Nate Feyma, and Rick Overman. Of course, everyone at GarageGames gave valuable ideas and feedback, as well as everyone involved in the closed beta. But now it is up to all gamers to really make this site work, so let’s get to it!

Well, I have moved to Oregon and am now hard at work at GarageGames. We are working on some great stuff, which will become public very soon. These guys are great and it is a blast to work here.

On a side note, Overlord development may stall for a bit, but pretty soon it will take a giant leap forward, so stay tuned!

As I have been struggling to redefine the underlying structure of my Overlord software, I find myself ‘borrowing’ more and more concepts from Ruby on Rails. I am not stealing the code behind these ideas, I am simply following in their footsteps, so to speak. I found many of their methods and solutions to be quite useful, and have written my own versions of several, like render() and flash(), and am following the Rails MVC pattern fairly closely. Unfortunately, writting all of this new structure is taking time, even though I feel it will be worth it in the end. At times I feel it might be easier to start over from scratch and write the whole thing with Rails, but then I remember why I can’t. It can’t be distributed and used on 90% of all webservers like PHP can. Ah well, perhaps Ruby on Rails will gain enough momentum to become ’standard’ software on webservers…

In the meantime, here’s a little peak at some of the design tweaks I have been working on along with the code upgrade.

Now that there are no major bugs left in Overlord, I have a bit more time to spend on other projects, like creating a map for Warcraft III and starting, or rather restarting, my RPG inventory project. The point of the project is to create a simple interface for keeping track of an inventory of items for a table-top RPG group, although I suppose it could be used for other things as well. I had a partially working version writtin in PHP and using a lot of AJAX stuff, but it wasn’t working great, so I stopped developing it. Now, I am planning to develop this new version with Ruby on Rails, mostly as an experiment to see how easy it is to develop with Rails instead of PHP.

I plan to post my progress at regular intervals and comment on the differences between developing with PHP and with Rails. Hopefully, someone will find it useful.

As I work on the Overlord source code, I find myself starting on one new feature, getting it mostly done, and then starting on another new feature. This cycle usually repeats itself until I have quite a few not-quite-done features, which then takes a while to work out all the bugs and get it ready to be released. This is part of the reason it took so long to get version 1.0 out the door. I really should have left the bug tracker out and released it earlier, then put in the whole bug tracker (the new version I am working on, not the woefully inadequate version in v1.0) in a later release.

So, in an effort to prevent feature creep from slowing down any future versions of Overlord, or any other projects I might work on in the future, I am going to muster every bit of self-discipline I have and finish a feature before I add a new one. So, expect Overlord 1.0.2 in the near future with the search box and new bug tracker. After that, I will add one new feature at a time, starting with an updated task tracker, then moving on to RSS feeds.

I have updated this website to use Wordpress 2.0 as the site engine, allowing me to post random ramblings about random topics and making it easier to update my portfolio and such. I have made a custom theme based on the default theme that resembles the old look of this site. I will consider putting it up for download if anyone expresses interest in it.