Monday, August 24, 2009

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

New Site Layout

My website will soon have a completely different look. It is already completed for the most part now sitting in iWeb waiting for me to upload it but I am still holding it off until I am completely satisfied with it. So on this note I have decided to delve deep into my memories to talk about my hobby of web site creation that goes back to even before I started game creation.

I remember when I 1st started out with my only tools being html and my Dreamcast on a dial-up connection. A website that completely blew me away when I was just starting out was Lisa Echidna ArtWorX. After seeing this site, my dream of expressing my self through drawing shifted to a new media, websites. I too wanted to create what I had just seen. Lisa helped me out when I was just starting letting me know the html needed to have music play in the background of my site too and her green on black theme was a direct inspiration for my very 1st website.

I started out with Tripod, which was fine back then. Set the ads to pop-up ads since the Dreamcast was unaffected by them and all was good. With the death of the Dreamcast I then upgraded to a computer. So aside from ads now being a lot more intrusive now, Tripod were now also introducing a lot more restrictions to try and get people to sign up with their new paid for hosting. This would begin a stupidly long search for the ultimate free webhost.

My search would bring me to a search engine called Tropical Anime. This would also bring me to my next major inspiration and motivation for web design. What I found was Mad-Sky.com. The web hostess by the name of Sawwa granted me the free hosting that I had always needed but the story goes further than that. Sawwa had the most beautiful web designs that she even changed periodically. It is of little wonder she is such an inspiration to my own web designs. Back when she was my host would have to be the prime of by web designing as she really was the best hostess you could imagine. She was more than that even, she was a great friend I would exchange huge emails with. It was silly how long our emails were but it was always fun. These were great times. I can't remember if I complimented her much on her website but I should have if I didn't. As a inspiration to my designs it was such an honour whenever she complimented me on my site, which I do remember her doing on more than one occasion.

The saddest part, is that these two great people who inspired me with their amazing talents and websites, the people responsible for my site being here now to this day and all of my past sites are no longer a presence on the web themselves. Perhaps even worse than this is how they both faded away around the same time in the early 2000s. Some small traces can still be found on the net from way back like Lisa's old Tripod site frozen in time for example. Sawwa, on the other hand has almost vanished entirely from web existence. It just doesn't seem right, as I feel they both deserve so much praise and acknowledgement for what they did. This is exactly why I took the time to type out all of this as I want them to never be forgotten.

In the off chance either Lisa or Sawwa stumble across this or someone who is still in contact with them does, I would love to hear from them.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Update on latest game

Powerslam will be the 1st ever Macintosh wrestling game. Visually the game will be very different to Soulless and in fact once this game finally sees the light of day I am planning to revisit Soulless changing many things along with its visual style to that of Powerslam as all my games from now on will use what will soon become my signature style. It is still early days for the game despite how much work has gone into it and how long development has been so far though so this will not happen for some time yet.