Developments

Having gotten most of the important bits of SoCoder2 into place, I started work on a couple of themes for the thing.

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This required a certain number of tweaks to the site, so that I could minimise the amount of art/editing required in order to make a new theme.
I spent most of the morning looking into CSS Variables, which seem to be mostly supported in all modern browsers, except of course for IE/Edge.. Because... Well.. Microsoft!!

I'll jump that hurdle later. I have a plan for fixing it in mind, but for now, the theme's .css script is fairly manageable. Everything artsy is compressed into a single spritesheet, all except the background texture, and the css file itself is more or less controlled!

Basically, it's a MUCH smaller amount of work that needs doing, compared to the old original Socoder which was a sprawling mess.
One of the last themes I made for Socoder1, "Smoke" currently stands at 35 files, totalling 250Kb.
The new version of the same theme, which looks amazingly similar, is just 5 files, totalling 126Kb. And one of those is just a temporary 61kb PaintShop Pro file with extra layers and such, so I can edit the spritesheet a little quicker.
Without that, it's 65Kb, which is almost 1/4 the original theme's size.
Add to that the fact that the .css file has gone from 25kb, all the way down to 4Kb, and you can see that everything on the site has become much more streamlined and should hopefully be easier to tweak in the future. *fingers crossed*



Today I'll likely be spending most of the day creating some more themes. Or rather, re-creating some old themes, so that folk don't lose their favourite themes when switching to the new site.

If you'd like to try your hand at designing a theme, you can find out more from the Socoder topic here.

Meanwhile...

This week's game's coming along rather nicely.
I got game-mechanic one working well enough, yesterday. The large blocks and buttons work nicely, and that's good enough for me!
Today will be getting game-mechanic two into place, which involves adding enemies, making them somewhat intelligent enough to make the game taxing, whilst also making them slightly docile, so that the game isn't too hard.
With all of mechanic one going on, you don't really want to worry about mechanic two too much..

Daily Doodle : Doodling

Platdude bought a new input device for his computer, which is meant to be better for art.
He preferred the mouse.

Misc..

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