I moved to a new URL! Check it out!

posts tagged with: webdev

Fresh New Look!

Fresh New Look!
It is done!

The fresh coat of paint is still drying so some things might be still broken, but overall I think this is looking pretty good.

I really wanted to get a redesign of my site going because I honestly hated the artwork on the old one. If you draw you know what I mean. Your art doesn't age well usually. When you're constantly improving at your craft over time, you notice how horrible your older work is compared to your newer. I mean it may have not looked objectively horrible, but man it was so gosh dang old I couldn't stand it anymore.

I've been drawing a whole lot more lately so I thought my new website should reflect that and look all totally hand drawn. I tried to simplify a lot of things like the shapes and colors and textures of the site. My old site was flashy and a little complicated. I liked it, but I'm feeling like much more of a simpler look now without paint brush splatters and gradients everywhere.

Still to come is some more visual polish. You might notice that the site is now left aligned instead of centered (when it at maximum browser window size.) The right side that looks totally empty right now will eventually have some cool art in it. I just have to figure out what that art is going to be.

You might also notice that the website changes based on how large your browser window is! I hope to improve my site's performance on mobile, and also hope to keep the site pretty viewable on smaller screens while also taking full advantage of how high res everyone's desktops are now. The site's width has increased from 960 pixels to 1100 pixels or so, but that changes based on your browser's width.

Image


I also went through and took a lot of my "doodle posts" and rolled them into my newly named "draws" page. Everything that was on there before is now filed under "ancient" and you definitely shouldn't look at it because old artwork is terrible and embarrassing.

Image


That's all for now! More updates to come.

New Webzone Coming Soon!

New Webzone Coming Soon!
Say goodbye to this old and busted layout for my blog.

It's probably not that busted, but it is coming up to maybe 5 years old according to my first post here ever. I've spent the last couple of days cooking up something new! I'm still going to be using the same back end, so all of the posts and everything will be preserved exactly as they are, but the front end will look totally fresh.

Image


I think one of the reasons my anxiety flies so high is when I leave things the same for too long, and my website is one of those. For some reason I've just spent a lot of time being too intimidated to gut my site and start fresh. There's something about digging into an old project... it can be scary!

Anyhoo, enough talking about it. Probably at some point tomorrow I'll be migrating all of the front end to the new hotness.

Character Sheet Updates

Character Sheet Updates
Not really sure if any portion of my followers play Pathfinder, but I'm still working on my character sheet manager anyhow! It's actually been a lot of fun to work on since web development is way easier than game development, and I get instant feedback on it from my pathfinder group every time we play.

Here's how it looks now.

Image


Added fancy icons from the Bootstrap glyphicons and did some formatting work on some of the headers to make them readable.

Image


Also added a dropdown menu with a "hamburger" button to open it. The icons make it look even cooler than it actually is.

Behind the scenes I made the sheet auto ping the server every 15 seconds so that the player session will remain active and not get garbage collected by the server.

Pathfinder Character Sheet

Pathfinder Character Sheet
Over the past two weeks I built a web based Pathfinder character sheet manager. It's all the way up to version 0.9.something which means that it's totally usable but may have a couple of new features added before it's called 1.0. Actually thinking about it now I have a really bad habit of calling things version 0.9.something forever instead of ever calling it version 1.0.

The entire source, readme, and license can be found on Github.

And now here are some cool screenshots.

Image


Image


Image


Image


I should be getting back to game dev soon! I hope?

Exciting Web Application Gifs

Exciting Web Application Gifs
I'm realizing that I find web development (to a certain extent) pretty relaxing but also still productive. It's still coding which is pretty fun, but it's waaay less intense on my brain than video game coding. I find myself able to work on web development sort of stuff for 6 or 7 hours a day which is about double of what I can do for video game programming usually.

Here's some exciting things I've added to my Pathfinder character sheet web application thing:

Image


Got a sweet health bar working to show how close you are to losing your character forever!

Image


Tracking all the skill points for making those very important D20 rolls. Also I have the ability to add custom skills for all those knowledge and perform checks.

Image


Armor tracking is important when praying to not be stabbed by a dragon's tail.

Image


And the rest of the combat goodies.

The last things I have to go are weight tracking, and the spell list. After that I might add some more features like a game master or admin interface to see all of the sheets, or possibly a basic account system to track your own character sheets. My plan is to release it to the public for people to use on their own servers (I don't want to end up hosting a billion character sheets if people are actually using this thing.)

The fact that I can work on web stuff for so long during the day I think has a huge impact. I often feel like I'm not being productive enough because of how many hours of game development I'm able to do day to day. Since I can do a lot more hours per day with web development I end the day feeling like I was way more productive even thought that might not necessarily be the case!

I should talk more about this kind of stuff in its own blog post though, probably.

Pathfinder Web Dev

Pathfinder Web Dev
Progress continues on my Pathfinder character sheet built with HTML, Javascript, php, mySQL, and css! Oh boy I love when I have to combine five totally different languages into a monstrosity. It's working out quite well though!

Image


I've built some cool systems to save and load the data on the sheet with some jQuery magic. I feel way more comfortable using jQuery than I usually do for some reason. I think something about it really clicked for me working on this for whatever reason. Maybe all my time in C# land has improved my programmer skill levels.

Image


The thing I'm most proud of right now is a generalized system for adding and removing things from a list. One of the limitations of our character sheet in PDF form is that we can't have dynamic sized lists of things. Things like our characters feats, abilities, gear, skills, and especially spells all suffer from hard limits in the PDF, but over here in the magical world of javascript I can make a list be any size by adding and removing rows on the fly!

I even worked out a system to save lists into the database and load them back out no matter what size they are. The best part is that I made it totally general case so whenever I come to a new part of the sheet that needs a dynamic list that can be saved and loaded I just have to add a submit button that's tied to the right javascript functions, and away it goes!

I think this break from game programming has been good for my brain so far.