here i am again. most of you have seen me in the past month or two and are not relying on this blog to determine my existence. that's good, because i've not been good at keeping it updated. a large part of my free time has been dedicated to descent campaign tracker, which i will get to again in a minute.

christmas was a busy but enjoyable time. the more notable moments were once again being at a 38(!) people christmas celebration with amanda's extended family and driving through rather bad conditions. having four-wheel drive with amanda's car was very nice. my main present was a new chair for my computer desk, which is really cool, since i have recently been considering purchasing a new one. i haven't put it together yet, but it looks great and my parents said the one they tried in the store was really comfortable. other gifts include a radio-controlled motorcycle, the complete harry potter book series, and penguin stuffed animals, which are close to becoming a tradition.

i borrowed uncharted: drake's fortune, and uncharted 2: among thieves from grant recently. i enjoyed both games a lot, but the second one was much better. i went through the second very quickly, finishing it in three and a half days. it was a very fun game. great game play, great action, very well told story, and some great jokes. if you own a ps3, definitely give this game a try. it's safe to skip the first one since very little is dependent on it. if you liked resident evil 5, chances are you will like uncharted 2. the shooting in particular is very similar. uncharted 2 has a high emphasis on getting to cover to avoid gunfire, which is the main difference between its combat and resident evil's.

descent campaign tracker. whew it's been a ride. i started working on it last february when i took off a week to start working on it, and i thought at the time, to finish it. before that week off of work started, i really did believe i would be able to finish it in one week's time. (the first version on my personal website had only taken a couple days) finishing it didn't happen. in fact, it didn't even come close. i got a lot of work done over the next few months, but started losing interest. i ran into "scope" problems of what i wanted it to do, and had a hard time making decisions about it. plus i had to do a few code rewrites to satisfy myself. most of these were not fun, and started causing working on it to be "work." this caused a drought of working on it over the summer months. i can't recall what changed after the summer was over, but i picked it up again, and started answering some of my internal questions about "scope."

the main scope issue i was having was how many things to track. the original version had only tracked conquest. that's what i originally started designing with the second version, only with a better interface that other people could understand; this would be required since i wanted this version to be publicly usable. the first scope problem that crept in was gold. things that cost experience almost always cost gold too. it only made sense to track that as well, but my website didn't do that. this inconsistency bothered me. adding into my gold problems were my visions of what i wanted the website to be. a world map that was live updating, permission systems which allowed multiple users to access a single campaign, and dungeon and encounter tracking. all this added up to a very big project to work on.

a few months past with a lot of time and coding, and most of the main features are finished. enter december 3rd. i posted on two separate websites that descent campaign tracker was in beta testing. the majority of people had no idea that such a website had been in development. the reaction was positive. a couple people offered suggestions and reported bugs, which i fixed as soon as i could. for the rest of december, i have been working on a few miscellaneous features, including the world map feature i mentioned above, and some reports. there are currently around 40 campaigns stored and setup in the database, nearly all of them having something to do with "test" in the title. when i announced the website in the first place, i indicated that it was not ready for normal use, just for testing. so people using it have only been creating campaigns to help test, not to actually store their games.

it's actually pretty amazing to be at this point, because i'm close to launching the actual version. when that happens, i know i'll have more bugs to fix, and probably another feature or two to add. but even with that, it's awesome to be at this point. it's certainly the biggest project i've ever worked on, and it's awesome to see all of the visions i had for it becoming reality. after the dust of the launch settles and the kinks are worked out, i get to see people using it and hopefully finding it very useful. i also get to use it myself for my own campaigns, which is how this all started.

thanks for reading my journey thus far; i'll definitely be posting more about this in my next blog entry. hopefully by then i'll have officially launched the descent campaign tracker, with many positive things to report!