Saturday 9 May 2015

New Incursion roguelike web site

A new web site has been put up for Incursion.  This one is very simple, and is intended to meet a middle ground of preserving older links, with featuring the newer open source releases.  And of course, giving some illustration of what potential players might expect from the game.



Hopefully players will provide some interesting screenshots, to replace my quick initial efforts.  And perhaps even some Youtube videos of gameplay, to replace the one I located.  I didn't bother going into too much detail about what a roguelike is, I don't figure it will be converting new players to the genre.

Here's a screenshot of how the web site currently looks for posterity:


It's quite interesting to get back into more detailed CSS.  In the past I've tried to remain compatible with older browsers, but there comes a time when you have to ameliorate the pain of trying to get the CSS to do all the things you wish it to do, without hobbling yourself.

Getting CSS to go the last mile, is much the same as any other programming these days.  I encounter a problem like the footer background colour ending mid-page, and the page background colour then resuming until the end of the page.  But the natural inclination is to want the footer colour to extend down to the end of the page.  So I go to StackOverflow and find a solution, which generally involves abusing some language behaviour, and the CSS then does what I want it to, but it is left a little bit messier.

I considered using JQuery UI, but honestly, it is pretty clunky looking.  The themes don't help that much, and it seemed like a case of choosing the least ugly.  Then it broke on the CSS changes I had had to make to get my footer working as described above.  Deleted.

Next was the UI framework that Bitbucket uses, which can be seen providing things like the tab strip on Incursion's downloads page.  This is called AlloyUI.  The first warning sign was an 18MB download, compared to 500KB or so at most for JQuery UI.  The next was a "readme" file which instructed me to install a custom programming language, node.js, and to run the package manager that comes with it.  Completely unreasonable feature creep for a UI framework.  Deleted.

The same web page HTML and CSS skeleton is going to be reused for the Imaginary Realities, and in fact, it was actually the draft of the new Imaginary Realities web site repurposed for Incursion.  I'm hoping I can make use of the print media type, to generate the PDF and ePub e-books.