The past three weeks have been a particularly grueling endeavor, having been stranded in LAMP land whilst putting together the new website. Overall I think things came out OK, but I was surprised at exactly how bad the development environment is for LAMP projects. PHP is almost entirely unusable, and the combination of PHP and MySQL and the way in which they interface is both comically bad and tragically slow. Had I known how bad it was, I probably would have rolled everything in C, but I foolishly thought it must all be good because it's so common, and it would "save me time". It did quite the opposite.

But thankfully everything seems to be working reasonably well now, and after PAX I plan to turn on the user-editing features of things so I can merge the forums into the site proper, and allow people to maintain their own areas of the page as well, which I think will be a great thing for a lot of the stuff that's currently being hosted through PHPBB on the forums. So, we'll see how all that goes.

Now it's time to focus my attention back on art, as there is a bunch of art that I'd like to have done for PAX, since I am allowed to show a later build than the one that was submitted for the initial judging. In theory, it is now pretty easy for me to post screenshots to the website, too, so hopefully as I work on the art I'll be able to put up images of interest along with the project notes.

There are "three plus n" characters in the game, where the three refers to the number of non-spirit characters, and the n refers to the many spirits found floating throughout the land. Today I started the finishing work on the third of the three characters, and throughout the weekend I plan on going through and rendering out many more frames of animation for all of them, since right now I feel like the game is lacking a lot of the action sprites necessary to convey what is happening in some of the introductory places. So I feel like that's a big priority for the PAX showing.