Hello everyone. Welcome to the new website! This is the first dev-log on here explaining why I made this website and the process of making it.
The story of the website starts way back in 2017, when Phases was still in its early stages of development. After I posted Update 3 to Project Phases, I created a Twitter account. I did this because Update 4 was taking a long time, and I wanted to make sure I could keep people updated without having to make a video; in my mind, Twitter was the best way to do this. I started posting smaller updates there, mostly about small new features as they were added. It worked, and it still works very well. The big problem for me however was the character limit. It was getting hard to fit lots of information into the 140-character limit. I tried to improve this problem by adding animated gifs showing off the feature to minimize the amount of words needed to describe the feature. Sadly, as the game got more and more complex, so did the new additions. I had to use more words to describe how everything works and how it fits into the game. It made it hard to tweet everything I wanted to, since I was worried I wouldn’t do the newest features justice. That is when the idea of the website came about.
The basic idea was somewhere I could further explain my reasoning behind new features without a character limit. Somewhere where I can add many pictures, use as many words as I want and explain the process and problems I had adding these new mechanics. The idea sat in my head for months while I thought of other things I could do. I realized I could also use a website to voice my opinions on games, development issues or just general topics. After I played Tales of Berseria, I just wanted to tell people my thoughts on the game; so, the website was born.
I had a few options for making the website. First, using a website creator like Wix, Squarespace or WordPress (as in wordpress.com, not wordpress.org). This would mean my website would be free, easy to setup and hosted for me. Something about it though just felt off, I think it was the URL. I just didn’t feel the website was mine if it was “soltairus.wixsite.com” or “soltairus.wordpress.com”. So, this led me to option two, which was using Xara Web Designer. Xara Web Designer is a piece of software made by Sony but was acquired by MAGIX in 2016. I got it through the VEGAS Pro: Discover Creative Freedom Humble Bundle. I bought the bundle primarily for Sony Vegas 14, but got lots of other software along with it. I learned to use the software, and even make a mock-up website. However, I completely overlooked web hosting. I didn’t want to spend much money on the website if I didn’t have to. I did lots of research on different web hosting services, how much they cost, their pros and cons until I stumbled upon GitHub’s web hosting service. GitHub’s Pages is a free web hosting site that runs within the GitHub repository ecosystem. The only thing is that my URL would be “soltairus.github.io”, but I was weirdly okay with this. GitHub is a respected and widely used service in the world of development, so having my name next to it didn’t seem bad at all. I also have full control over my website, unlike the other services, where I would have to work through their UI.
After I was set on my web hosting service, I went back to making my site and quickly realized that Xara wasn’t going to cut it for my website. Xara is much more focused on making visual websites like for restaurants than informational, blog-type sites like I was doing. My next attempt was with WordPress.org. WordPress.org is the open-source software used to make more blog style sites. It has much better control over content management and seemed perfect for my needs. However, I then hit a wall again with the web hosting problem. GitHub Pages only supports static pages (HTML and CSS) that could be uploaded to its repository system, and WordPress does not count. My only option if I were to use GitHub Pages is to make an HTML website. I didn’t give up on WordPress though, I tried to use a WordPress to HTML converter and get the website that way. To my dismay, that didn’t work as I wanted it to.
For some reason, this whole time I’m going through options I wanted to avoid writing a website myself with HTML. The problem was that I didn’t really want to learn a whole new coding language and was rather intimidated by it. If there was a problem, I had to fix it; no software or customer support could help me. I had also tried to learn HTML before but failed every time. What I failed to realize was the difference between now and then. This time I have a goal, something I want to make and a purpose for making it. I bit the bullet and learned HTML, and it was the best decision I could have made. Thanks to the awesome tutorials by Traversy Media, I was able to learn HTML and CSS and build the foundation of the website in a few weeks. Not only do I have complete control over my website, I now know how to make very basic web pages. It’s something I really didn’t think I would get out of this whole experience.
From there, I just had to write up all the articles for the website. This took a surprisingly long amount of time. I had to write articles for every update from the past, a review, a first impressions and this dev-log along with building the Project Phases tab and making templates for all the other posts. It was a lot more work than I thought it was going to be, but in the end, I am so happy I did it this way.
I can rightfully say that I made this website, I put in the effort and that just feels great.
I hope you enjoy the website, I plan to update as frequently as I can. Please note this whole operation is a one-man job. So, if you see any typos or errors of any kind, please contact me in some way so I can get on with fixing it. I will try to keep my articles as grammatically correct as possible. This website is also a very big work in progress. I plan to keep learning about new things to add and working to make the website better.
Whenever I update the website, I will post something on Twitter so you can check it out. At some point, I hope to get some sort of notification system, but that is the least of my worries right now.
Time to get back to working on the game.
Thanks for reading,
Andy