The game I have been working on for a few months has now been packaged and lauched in its first incarnation! The instructions for download, files, etc, are all located on it's new site at hexslayer.com.

New Website

I decided to launch the game at its own URL, as a lot of the things that I put onto mortalpowers.com wouldn't relate to people interested in the game. I have developed my own blog software in the past, and used Wordpress and other options, and read a lot about some of the newer options. For this project, I decided to use Drupal, as my research has revealed it to be an extremely powerful (and albeit complex) system. I'm trying to stick with only the core modules, and major modules for the system (xmlsitemap, images, uploads) for maintainability purposes. If I adopt some unknown module it will be harder to stay up to date with security/other patches, and I might risk losing those modules if/when I upgrade to Drupal 7.

So far, drupal has been a very interesting and decent piece of software. For the type of CMS I was looking for, it is meeting all of my needs. My goal was to be able to create pages, posts, comments, and upload files and images, and to have a decent looking theme. Feel free to take a look at the HexSLayer site and let me know if I have met these goals.

The site is also on Github. One of my goals is to continue doing things in as open a manner as possible so that if someone else wants to contribute back to me, or learn from what I have done, they can.

Debian Packages

I have spent most of the evening re-learning Debian packaging (I use Ubuntu), and figuring out how to include the packaging component with the normal source code in a way that won't make it more difficult to compile/package for other environments. The solution I found was to create a packaging folder with scripts to generate packages/distributions for each of the platforms/environments I support. This seems to be working well, but I only have the Debian .deb file so far. The package includes nice features like menu and .desktop entries, which makes the game easier to launch and remember, rather than having a raw folder of .pyc files somewhere in your home directory.