There’s been a couple of things I’ve done today:
In LAN site stuff, I’ve started coding the SOGC site using CodeIgniter, it’s all mostly aesthetic stuff at present, but it’s coming together slowly. I haven’t encountered any serious issues yet, and this is further than I got with Symfony at least.
We’ll see how things go soon.
I’ve been, for a long time, a tinkerer with the SOGC website. There’s never really been a single ‘version’ of the SOGC site that I’ve been wholly happy with, and admittedly I doubt there ever will be. But I’d venture so far as to say I’m nearing the point where I’m grudgingly satisfied. With the latest iteration of the site, ‘Sparda’, I’ve designed an SOGC site, and it’s got more clean code and usability than ever before, thanks to a changed philosophy of “integrating things that others have done much better than I could” over “WRITE ALL DE THINGS PROPRIETARY FTW!”
[box type="info"] Did you know? – Every single version of the SOGC website has been named after something in a video game that I was playing at one time or another during development![/box]
The previous version of the SOGC site, ‘Frosty Jensen’ was an incredible feat for me personally. It was a turning point in my approach to the SOGC, and one that many would call insane. I proposed free events by the SOGC, and threw myself into my work on the ideas that a free event would grow, and the community would support us. I applied a lot more effort to it, and developed what I consider, one of my better website design habits (stringent unified layout design).
[box type="info"] Did you know? - The current SOGC site is called ‘Sparda’ after a character in the Devil May Cry series. Whilst the previous version of the site was called ‘Frosty Jensen’ for its appearance, and in homage to the Deus Ex: Human Revolution protagonist, Adam Jensen.[/box]
I based the Frosty Jensen layout on something called the ‘960 Grid System‘ where the entirety of the site’s content fit within a 960-pixel wide column, allowing for optimum display on tablets, mobiles and any portrait style device, whilst still being effect on the common desktop screen (landscape styled). Sparda, follows that same Grid System, but with more refined, accurate spacing and layout considerations. In a way, a lot of Frosty Jensen’s layout tenets carry over as legacy parts of Sparda. Primarily the large, oversize Banner – designed to bring attention, and draw traffic to the event page itself; and the adaptive 3 column wrapper as the main content area of the site.
But I’d like to think that’s where the similarities end. Under the surface of Sparda, all the code has been written from the ground up. In fact, only the Blog, and Forum sections of the site are not original code. Coincidentally, these are the two key components of the site that I integrated with my new philosophy. Undoubtedly countless hours of time and effort have gone into these two applications – WordPress and phpBB respectively, that I had to sit down and consider what the SOGC’s members would use more. Bridging the two applications would certainly solve my issues quickly, but it was cumbersome, and actually quite a messy thing to do. So, instead the site was designed around requiring only the phpBB login for user authentication with event registrations, and forum posting. The rest of the site is now firmly integrated into Facebook, allowing for quick and easy commenting for all our participants (who probably have a Facebook account).
There’s a lot more to do on the site of course, and that’s probably something for a future update.
So the LAN was a success I think. Sure there are things to fix, things to learn, and certainly more things to do. But as LANs go, this one was alright. As my last post said, back in the saddle. It felt good to be running an event again, even though this was one smaller than I’d have liked, I think it was a good deal for a first event.
Our venue was actually supportive! Which is amazing - one mistake that I made in the past with previous venues, was a lack of communication and dialogue with our venues. I do not wish to make the same mistake again, so come Monday, I’ll be calling them and talking to them and encouraging working with them.
We’ll be ready to really raise the bar for our next event. And more importantly, raise the bar at a guaranteed level of quality. Planning has already begun, and I think the crowd’s in for a real treat next event.
Today (as it technically is the 21st) – I’ll be running an SOGC LAN again; it feels like it’s been ages since the last one, although it’s only been a little while ago. It feels right that there’s a feeling of having closed the older SOGC events in the past, and renewed the SOGC with this site design and rapid work in the last couple of weeks with the full site design release, comfortable layout, and heavily optimised workflow (more on all this in a later post).
Anyway, one can only hope that with this tabula rasa, the SOGC will grow properly and with real success. One of the things that I made a tenet of last time, was to never go with mainstream popularity; but times change, and the niche that we have for casual, quirky gaming is still there, but it isn’t growing. Thanks in part to digital distribution systems, and an ever-increasingly online landscape in games, SOGC’s had to drastically adjust itself with this rethink, and I hope it pays off.
This LAN serves as a litmus test to the abilities of myself as an organiser – having configured everything in this event, from the site, servers, network and power layout with the exception of our network switches, which I’ve left in the hands of my very capable friend, Ben. Amy’s returned to the team to help out with the entry fee handling, which I’m sincerely grateful for, and we’ve got Callum who’ll be returning next event as our server admin, as well as Matthew who’s going to be handling Admin duties as well (I think? We’re still in talks about that).
This isn’t the last hurrah for the SOGC, but it definitely feels more personally like a serious step away from the starry eyed dreams I had when I started the event 3 years ago. I’ve learnt a lot, and I’m sure there’ll be lots more to learn. And there’s absolutely nothing mastered yet. But with all the lessons learnt, maybe we’re finally ready to take a step towards being a serious event in Sydney.
Most people who’ve been involved in volunteering or generally been behind the scenes with the SOGC are probably aware of how much the attendance numbers are a concern for me. It’s always been that way, and will always be until I’m regularly hosting 200 gamer events. It’s a little bit of a vicious circle, I’ll be honest; there’s a few key reasons why we need larger numbers (existing LAN organisers need not concern themselves with this post):
