You won’t read it, but the changelog I’ve written is comically long.
It’s past midnight and getting into the early morning as I write this, so I’ll keep this rather short. This short devlog is primarily meant as a perosnal landmark to signal when the website’s principal update was finalized and deployed. Outside of marking this site’s big update, there’s not much for my tired mind to explain, outside of some nuts and nooks with the details. I’m too tired to adlib some fantastic prose, so I’ll keep this devlog rather frank for tonight.
What & Why Was This Update?#
This has been an implementation I’ve been planning ever since I started coding this website with Hugo. I chose Hugo because I wanted to emulate another worldbuilding project called Vekllei which also used Hugo. But outside of that, I didn’t have a firm vision for what the website should be, or what it’d look like. So, browsing the Hugo themes for inspiration, I encountered the Blowfish theme, and immediately was struck with an idea.
The Blowfish example website has an animated background that I really wanted to impliment for this site. When I first saw it, it reminded me of video game websites that showcase their game or a trailer in the background of the landing page. The two examples I took express inspiration from were of War Thunder and Nikke: Goddess of Victory — both of which had a cinematic video running behind their logo or download button.
I seen a golden opportunity to implement something similar when I seen the Blowfish theme. And frankly, I thought it’d be easier to implement than the parallax partials that’s on MillMint. I have no idea how Hobart and Ben R.R. were able to take the Monochrome theme and go balls to the wall on the MillMint website. In any case, my objective was to integrate a looping video in this website’s index.
Haven’t actually got around to doing it until now. I first deployed this website in July, but honestly felt too intimidated to go digging around in the theme’s add spaghetti of GO and HTML. Not to say that it’s all a mess (Coração did such a fine job making everything abstract and modular), but I never learned GO nor knew how Hugo handled it bundled with HTML. So, I just deployed the website with the original theme and sat on my idea — my collegiate studies didn’t help either.
It wasn’t until this past weekend, once Midterms had passed and I was a little bummed out, that I picked up the video implementation again. It took two days (I started after I finished editing the project teaser video ) but I eventually added the features that I want in this site, chief among them the looping video in the index page.
What’s Next?#
So what’s next after this big update?
The first, immediate thing is that I’ve got to prepare some other tertiary stuff around Wars in Reverie. I’m preparing this updated website to be as a part of a broader publicity campaign. I’ve finished the teaser video two days ago, and just finished this site today, so the last bit of logistics I’d want to do is to repurpose the RockiCwiffFyre Discord Server to be a Wars in Reverie community server. RCF hasn’t seen much activity, and the products NopeNop! and I have planned under RCF are only relevant to Blocksworld. I’d think those sorts of productions can be handled in a groupchat, rather than a whole Discord server, so I’m planning to just usurp the RCF server as a broader push to get Wars in Reverie out there.
I know that calling this a “publicity campaign” is blowing a whole lot of pressurized smoke up your ass, but it’s the best I can do with how busy I am with college studies and a couple other side-projects. If anything, I’ve been holding back Wars in Reverie because I consider this project to be in a viable state to be showcased yet. Not until I finalized enough content for the project, like the teaser video and this website update.
Bringing this back to this website — there’s still other longer-term goals I’d want this website to reach. Like MillMint, I’d also like to integrate a wikipedia-style section into this site (or a factbook as called on the MillMint site).
That’s the next big goal for me, but something I’ll do further into the future; I just don’t think it’s a big priority yet. Right now there’s not enough website content that deserves whole-ass wikipedia entries, lest all those articles will be legalese, corpo-speak, and word salads without any visual references.
But this update as it is, it gives me assurance for the project. The website can stand alone now, without me having to add context when sharing it to people. It has a good landing page that immediately gives visitors an impression, and has some content to pique their interest. I can rest assured that people visiting this site can look around, learn a little bit about the project, actually enjoy it.