DISCLAIMER: Expressed views on this blog are my own.
A bit ironic, if you know what I like to do with my free time. Hint: click Projects in the menu then come back to this post.
Let's see, I've been working furiously on Dark Gale to get it to minimum viable i.e. playable to anyone. I've been making great progress in getting the UI to be responsive by giving feedback when you perform an action.
One of my great feats during this time has been the guild profile page and how I managed to simplify the interface and at the same time get all the management controls onto that one page. If you looked at my past game project (the code on github) and this one, you'd be amazed and ask "why didn't he do this before?" It is just that great. So much JavaScript and less html being sent from the server. :)
Another great feat has been the fact that I've been OUTRAGEOUSLY using anonymous functions in PHP to simplify validation tasks and get rid of redundancy! My gawd it is frickin' amazing and it surprises me a lot how much code has been effectively cut with that. It is actually a sort of refactoring that's ingrained in me forever. Give me the power of anonymous functions and I go wild reducing redundant code. What I did here was create a static variable and a function to load in the validation rules, so that they could be called from anywhere I want, which is what you want effectively to reduce redundant code. I always thought about using a validation class separated from the main classes, but I hate that sort of separation as I find it meaningless. Those sort of classes are effectively static with static methods because they will never be instantiated unless you are nuts and want to waste memory instantiating a validation object, which doesn't operate on itself anyway. By the length of this paragraph, you can see this is a contentious topic on all boards. It is one of those do whatever you feel is right situation.
Another, but not so as great feat, has been the "responsive design" approach I've taken to attempt to get this thing to fit onto a mobile screen without sacrificing anything. I do know one thing though, this game will not look good on any old browsers (this includes IE 9, sorry Win XP users! USE CHROME!).
I feel so accomplished, but there's still much to do to get to that March deadline, which is definitely possible with what I've been doing. This limited public beta will definitely happen before January 14 though testers will have to deal with bugs. :P I will play the game too, soooo yeah it's gonna be a fun time.
