Just noticed that my comments got hit by some spambots two days ago. I'll have to implement a captcha on the commenting thing when I've got some time, I guess. I was kind of hoping to avoid it, but I guess not! Ah well. Really, deep down in my heart of hearts I knew this would happen.

The site is switched over. There are possibly some lingering errors but things look all right. Contrary to what I said earlier, the RSS feeds should redirect such that you don't have to worry too much about changing your feed subscriptions.

This change happened because I finally decided that Drupal, which I was using before, was just too large and required me to worry about it too much. It also took up way more space than it needed to for what I was using it for. So, being a programming nerd, I decided to write my own... sort of.

I kept hearing about Django and, while I'm not the biggest fan of Python ever, the little bits I'd seen seemed quite nice. I decided that both as a professional development move and also to clean up my cluttered, bloated site, I would rewrite it to use Django instead. This is "sort of" writing it myself because Django is more of a framework to make it really easy to write your own stuff, rather than a full blown CMS that will take care of your kitchen sink for you, like Drupal.

Anyway I've been working on this off and on for the last little while and now it's done. While I was at it I started adding other bits and pieces into the site to make sure it wasn't hard. Ironically, now that I don't have a CMS to hold my hand all the way through adding a new page, it's kind of faster for me to do so.

Anyway, now that this change is out of the way, I need to stop procrastinating on getting back on board with Gruedorf, and posting other miscellaneous things that I have to talk about.

Just a quick note: This site will be going down and then coming back up in a different form later in the next couple of days. If you follow my RSS feed, it will be changing location as well. I'll try to stick up some sort of note so that you can track down the new feed without too much trouble.

Just enabled viewing of comments for everyone, and added a login/account creation thing to the menu. You can now respond to me when I ask leading questions, and you can make fun of me for only accomplishing "drew a chair" next week.

Right now it's all captcha-free and I'd prefer to leave it that way. If things get out of hand I'll look into adding one, though.

To celebrate the reopening and rechristening of my personal website, I've decided to talk about the project that is going to dominate the site, at least at first. Geas is an RPG video game, in the style of Chrono Trigger or one of the 2d Final Fantasy games.

In June of 2004, Geas was begun as a follow up to my moderately successful VERGE competition game, Journey to Black Mountain. It was to made in two weeks, and would be grand and pretty and all those wonderful things.

Time is not kind. I had built myself up to a futile task: I just couldn't make the game that I envisioned in two weeks while working a full time job and maintaining some semblance of a life. When the deadline passed and my mash of unfinished code and placeholder artwork managed to place basically last, I decided that I wouldn't let it all go to waste. I would build it, the way I really wanted to, and not worry about the constraints placed upon the game by a two-week deadline.

The story ballooned to something around six times its starting size. The number of characters tripled, and everything became more complicated. The world grew and developed in my mind. I started finding ways to make the game more intricate and deep. I worked on it feverishly for a while, but my energy waned. After several months I put out a pretty cool tech-demo but I basically stopped working on it directly after, and put my mind to other tasks that were less daunting.

Then came the 'Gruedorf' competition. I jokingly challenged another old VERGEr, McGrue, to a race to see who could finish their ridiculously complex game first. When he accepted, I didn't let the joke fall flat; I rose to the challenge. The agreement was that we would each update at least once a week or face Eternal Shame. This worked for several more months, during which I rewrote the core functionality of the game with the benefit of hindsight and a new, more reasonable scripting lanuguage (Lua).

More time passed and I left my job to start a new company. My free time dwindled to almost nothing. The domain I was using for my personal site (northknight.com) got re-purposed to host the website of the new business. Gruedorf updates, from me, became less common and then stopped altogether. I didn't stop thinking about Geas but its enormous size and my shrinking free time finally got the better of me and, once again, development stopped.

The other day, I caught myself thinking a lot about Geas and I am now grappling with some hard decisions. Some of these decisions, when made, will drastically change Geas away from its original (insane) vision, towards something more reasonable and more likely to be completed. I am still thinking on this, and that is why this post is a long rambling story instead of information about the game which, ostensibly, it is describing.

Once I have found my bearings again, I intend to rejoin the weekly fray of Gruedorf. For now, I am still biding my time until I discern the best course. The first step, reopening this site, is now done.