I’m still alive, I’ve just been busy with mundane PhD writeup things too boring to blog about. Although I’ve been called out for posting back on my GameDev journal rather than here. I could rightly claim the stuff I posted over there wasn’t particularly relevant to this website, but it’s mainly that I felt blogging over there wasn’t so much a form of procrastination as posting here. In retrospect, that’s totally illogical, but thinking straight is a scarce commodity for me at the moment.

Relevant to this journal: according to my web host’s automatic billing scheme it’s the one year anniversary of the site. I’ve paid to keep this site running for another year, so I’ll be continuing to share my scattered thoughts with the rest of the world for a little while longer. But there are changes in the pipeline! Once I’ve finished my PhD studies, which I’m hoping will be the end of August, I’ll be putting some new projects into action.

First off and most importantly, I’m putting the first steps into an indie game business into action. I’ve already started with jotting down the beginnings of a business plan as a distraction break from PhD write-up. Up till now I’ve not thought myself ready and I’m still not fully certain, but I doubt I’ll ever be more ready unless I take the plunge. The exact form and function of the business is still very much up in the air, and I won’t be doing anything too rash until I’ve got a plan that passes a basic sanity test, but I feel it’s now or never and the lessons I learn even from a failed first business will be invaluable in the future.

Secondly, I still haven’t forgotten my pledge to start a webcomic this year. I’ve let my drawing lessons lapse a bit over the last few weeks due to PhD work and my tendency to injure my drawing hand (why do minor burns take so long to heal?), but I’m going to get back into this big time once I’m free of study obligations. The exact nature of the webcomic is also up in the air and the amount of time I can invest in it will have to be heavily tempered by my indie business plans, but I’ll start something up before the end of 2008 guaranteed. Expect the first notice of its existence to be posted here sometime in November or December.

Thirdly, I’ll be revamping this site. It’s been pretty stagnant in form for the last few months. I need to devote a weekend to working on improvements, but that’s something I’ve been putting off until after my PhD’s completion which keeps dragging on much longer than I expected. I also need to put thought into which direction to take the journal in terms of content. Most weblogs out there are focused on a particulr subject, but I’ve been rambling on about everything that interests me, which is nearly everything. I dabble in game development, programming, drawing, vector art, small business fundamentals, composing music and who knows what else. Consequently I’m not particularly good at any one of them, so I’m not sure if my postings here have value over a specialist experts blog on a particular subject.

I’m thinking it might be a good idea to convert the focus of this journal into more into a series of articles about my journey into areas I’m unfamiliar with, such as starting my own small business or creating a webcomic. I’m not sure whether this may be instructive as I’m fully expecting to unwittingly be making a ton of mistakes along the way, but it should be enlightening, informative, or at least better than an empty weblog.

All of this will need to wait until September though, as I’ve got a dissertation to finish.

Sorry for the lack of posts here. I haven?t had a lot to post lately. However since I should be using this journal more I?ll make an effort to do more post-worthy things.

I?m currently trialling out a piece of Mac software called ?MacJournal? to see how it goes. It?s basically a word processor for journals, with organisational abilities like folders and tags. It?s pretty lean but it?s the sort of thing I need for organising small articles and other documents. I also have a paid copy of VoodooPad, a personal wiki software, but that?s more useful for my own reference notes and less so for complete documents.

MacJournal also has the capability to interface with WordPress blogs, or at least it claims to - this post is my first test to see how well the system works. If this seems to go smoothly, I?ll start typing up more of these things off-line rather than in the WordPress editor. And I?ll strongly consider buying a licence to MacJournal in a few days time.

Edit: Additional

Well, looking at the entry above it seems like it gets through smoothly enough, but something is eating up my apostrophes. I’ll have to see what I can do to fix that next time…

I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what I’d like to do after I finish up my PhD study. I still don’t know what I’d like to do immediately, but there’s still a large part of me that wants to do the whole indie developer thing. I don’t know if I could do this full time, and I certainly don’t think I could straight out of uni, but it’s something I don’t think I should dismiss. At the very least it’d be a good hobby, and with a modest effort it could easily be a decent source of income.

I’ve deviated a lot off my original plan that I wrote a few years back for how to get there (according to the original plan, I’d have been selling games two years ago), and now I’m in the final throes of my PhD I don’t have the time for anything major. But I can still work towards the goal in my spare time, albeit slowly.

First on my list is to resurrect the original purpose of this journal - to get some experience in managing a website. I’ve been letting this site stagnate for a bit too long, defeating the original purpose. So it’s time to reinvent the site and make it look a bit like one I’d need if I were launching the commercial version.

To start, I’ve made a new theme to replace the light, airy minimalist one that was here. This one is loosely modelled off the look of my GameDev journal, although I won’t go as far as making the headers all Comic Sans to emulate the comic book look. I’m debating whether I should put an image as the background; sometimes I find them distracting, but a nice pattern can work well if it’s carefully chosen. I might also play around with the colours a bit once I’ve seen the site in action. I also need to see if this font works well for blogs - I’m not sure how Trebuchet MS handles large blocks of text at smaller sizes.

I’ve also retired the poll I’ve had up for ages: building blocks had been winning for quite a while (probably the game developer influence there!). I’ll try cycling them around a bit more often.

Any suggestions for the site look? Any layout bugs I’ve missed?

I was getting a bit sick of the brown theme, so I whipped up another one in tints of blue. I’ll give this one a go until I settle on a look I think is right.

This may be the last tandem entry at both my GameDev.net journal and trazoi.net. I’m not going to be stopping either; I’ve just resubscribed for another year at GDNet and I’m keen on expanding my own site in the near future; but I think it’s time to give each it’s own flavour. Plus I’m getting sick of having to cut and paste everything.

For now I’ll start dedicating the GDNet journal towards GDNet related topics, such as contests (Four Elements, MAGIC, etc.) and anything I feel specifically relevant to the community there. I’ll also post regular summaries of what I’m up to from a game development perspective, but at a lower frequency than at my own site at trazoi.net. I can then start branching out trazoi.net towards other topics less related to game development if I wish.

I also need to spend some time into jazzing up this site at trazoi.net, since it’s been languishing for a while. I’m a bit sick of the brown CSS theme, and there’s a few more widgets I want to try out in the sidebar. I also need to clean up the games section and add a few articles in here.

---

On the game development front, I’ve been spinning my wheels for a bit, sadly. Without my MacBook Pro I tried spending a bit of time sketching out on paper where I need to go with Flash development but I didn’t really get to any useful conclusions.

I spend most of my useful time playing around with Inkscape again, this time with my new larger Intuous tablet. I’d forgotten how much I like it. I’m not sure exactly why it is, but working with vectors in Inkscape seems a lot more intuitive to me than with Illustrator. It might just be my lack of familiarity with Illustrator, but my present attempts to work with it have been a bundle of frustration. I suspect the interface has something to do with this though, as I haven’t felt the same way with my attempts to draw things in Flash.

I suspect even once I’ve gone up to speed with Illustrator I’ll still be using Inkscape as a development tool alongside it. The main downside to Inkscape at the moment is the Mac OS X port doesn’t run as nicely under X11 than the Windows version which is native. I think there’s an attempt to port Inkscape across to native Mac OS X, so I’ll check what they’re up to once I get my laptop back.

After trialling out Joomla! and Drupal over on their test pages and reading through miles of documentation and comments on various CMS systems, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably best if I just use WordPress for my site.

My reasoning is that I just don’t need the full power of a total CMS system. All I really require is some blogging software to post progress, with some static pages for things like articles and game pages (possibly with commenting). WordPress will easily allow me to do all that.

Furthermore, there’s the whole time issue. If I have to choose between spending my time managing a website, or actually doing something worthy to post about on the website, I’d choose the later. From the looks of the more advanced CMS systems I reckon it would take me weeks to get them properly set up, and that’s time I can’t really afford right now.

I’ll start crafting the new site on the weekend. My current inclination is to make the journal itself the front page (since that’s what a regular visitor will be wanting to see), so the location of this journal may change.

For the next couple of days I will duplicate journal entries at both my trazoi.net journal and over at GameDev.net. On the weekend I’m going to try and expand my website, and there’s a fair to middling chance I might accidentally lose the contents of my WordPress blog; not a big loss seeing how it’s new, but worthy of mention. I’ll try best to keep the database intact but due to my unfamiliarity with WordPress there’s always the risk of data loss.

I’ve starting making plans for the changes I need to implement with the site. After reading through a lot on WordPress I’m thinking it might be best to base the whole site through the WordPress system. Given the journal is going to be the thing that changes the most it would be best to signify updates on the main page, and since I’d like the main page and the journal to look similar it appears to make sense to just use for the WordPress the whole thing. I’ve had a look at a few people’s web sites done in WordPress; Dan Marchart a.k.a. “Obscure” has a nice one over at www.obscure.co.uk; and I think it will do most of what I want it to, making it a heck of a lot easier to manage the site.

The main annoyance is that I’ve installed WordPress into a subdirectory, the journal URL, as that’s what I originally thought I would be using WordPress for. So I’ll need to shift the URLs around to the root directory without making too much of a mess. There’s a danger I might break something while doing this, so I’ll give you fair warning that things may go awry. There’s also a chance I’ll break any links here; if possible I’ll try to keep the main journal here at the journal subdirectory, showing updates on the main page. However what I actually end up doing depends on a combination of my final ideas for the site structure.

So don’t be surprised if things are acting weird on Saturday. I’ll try to plan everything I need to do in advance so the process is as painless as possible, but as I’m new to the whole webmaster thing I’m sure to have a few unforeseen snags. Still, I’ve got most of Saturday planned off to get this site rolling. It seems like a good day to spend indoors, so I don’t have a repeat of that time where my brilliant plan to head to the shopping centre just as it opened to beat the crowds on a fine Saturday morning was foiled by a horde of tiny wizards.

I was a bit surprised to see that I didn’t have any comments when I checked the site first thing this morning, only to find that I’d left manual moderation on for the journal. I’ll have to experiment with what’s the best settings.

A good question is what I’m actually going to do with my fledgling site here at trazoi.net. While I am going to use this as the place to put things I want to put online, the primary use of the site is as my own test ground for web site development. Since this is my personal site I won’t mind too much about making the inevitable screw-ups while I’m learning the ropes, so when I need to make a more professional site I’ll have a greater chance of making smarter decisions first time.

That is also part of the reason why I’ve picked “trazoi.net” as the name of my site. I’m sure those of you from GameDev.net can figure out where the Tra-Zoi part comes from - but as a word I quite like the sound, and it has an advantage that it doesn’t really mean anything (except in Albanian apparently, where “trazoj” means something like confuse or agitate. Sorry if I’ve confused any Albanians!). Apart from in Albania I think it’s got potential as a name to publish my games under.

I’ve decided to go with a dot-net address because I consider that more appropriate for a personal address. If I decide to eventually go commercial and sell games on-line then I’ll start up a more formal sister site over at trazoi.com, which I’ve currently got parked. Once I put in a proper index page I’ll point the dot-com site to here for now.

Even though trazoi.net is my personal site, it is a dry run for potential commercial sites in the future, so I am going to try my best to make it look professional. So what can you expect from the site in the near future?

• Top priority is a main index page for the site so there’s actually something at the root address. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to create this; while I know my way around HTML well enough to knock something off pretty quickly it might be better to use a more WYSIWYG method to make the process of updates more clean and to easily manage sidebars and links. It might take a little while to research what’s available (and I’m open to suggestions).
• I also need to properly configure this journal. There seems to be a zillion different things you can do with WordPress, and it’s obvious it will take some tweaking to make it just right. One thing I’m definitely going to do is to try and find the right theme, maybe even making my own.
• I’ll also put copies of some of the resources I’ve got up at GameDev.net over here, such as my games “Pierre and the Fish”, “Brixtar” and my Inkscape tutorial (which I really need to continue some day soon, once I get more practice).

In the not-so-close future, I’ll be putting up more things, such as games when I complete them. I’ve also had a strong compulsion to start a web comic, and now I’ve got my own web hosting that’s one less reason not to; although there’s still the point that it would be mighty hard to balance being a postgrad student, game developer, web comic creator and staying sane. I might have to just opt for the first three.

I’ve still got a bit of time this morning to work on web stuff, so I’m off to see what good methods are out there to create my main index page. Hopefully I can get that up sometime in the next day or two.

Hello, is this thing on?

Welcome to the start of both my new journal and my new website, trazoi.net. At time of writing there is not a lot here, not even a main index page. There’s just this journal that I still haven’t properly configured yet. If you are reading this soon after the posting date there is likely to be big changes in the next couple of weeks as I play around with the site. In retrospect I probably should have waited to the weekend.

For those who don’t know me, my name is David Shaw, and I’m a Australian postgraduate student. While I may briefly touch on some of my academic studies, the main focus of my journal will be on my hobbies, prime of which is developing computer games. I have another journal on GameDev.net, where I post under the name “Trapper Zoid”. This journal can be considered an extension of the one I have at GameDev.net. At present I am uncertain as to the future of my old journal; most likely I will still keep it running with an executive summary of game development posts on this journal.

I am mainly starting a new journal here so I am regularly using my own web space. The main reason for me starting up trazoi.net is get experience in running my own web site, so it makes sense for me to be updating things over here. Additionally, since this is my own web space and not managed by another party I’m more free to do whatever I like with it. While I am fairly happy with my GameDev.net journal there are serious limitations on what I can do which now no longer apply. I also have an awful lot more web space to play with for images, music, programs and so on.

Furthermore, there have been numerous occasions where I’ve sorely wanted my own web space. The most recent example was when I hosted a short game development competition over at GameDev.net; I needed to ask for volunteers for hosting space. While I’m lucky there are many generous people out there who are willing to help me in situations about this I figured it was about time to go get hosting of my own; it’s not like it’s that expensive these days.

Thus the reason for this website, and by extension this journal. Tomorrow I’ll post some more about what I plan to do with this site. For now, I’ve got some more tweaking to do. Don’t forget to say hi though if you’re here!