This is a video demo of a simple quest being made in DreamQuest, showing you how it all works and - hopefully - how easy it is to use and so on!

Progress on my current game - still tentatively called 'DreamQuest' - is going very well! It's actually been in a private testing phase for a couple of weeks or so, and the people who are playing around with it at all seem to like it quite a bit, which is encouraging.

For those of you that don't know, it's a 'game' that essentially allows you to make your own short, simple RPG-like adventure things using an engine that I've made which is similar to that of MARDEK. It has a lot of limitations and won't allow you to make your wildest fantasies come true, BUT it can be great fun to play around with and might allow you to at least get a taste of what it's like to design games, or something.
Perhaps I should upload a gameplay video or something at some point!

I've been thinking about how I'm actually going to make money from it, though... I could go down the usual sponsorship route, but due to the way the game is set up - focused around user-created content and such - releasing it like any other Flash game doesn't really seem ideal... AND sponsorship is slow and doesn't really generate all that much money anyway.

Something that's been suggested to me a few times over the years, and which I've thought about myself quite a bit too, is KICKSTARTER! It never seemed like an option before though because it was US-only, but now that it seems to allow UK projects as well, I'm wondering whether to try using it.

But would any of you contribute to such a thing? Pay money for a game that's not been released yet, as a way of supporting and encouraging me? I wonder how much I COULD make that way. I get the feeling that MARDEK 4 thing would earn considerably more than one for this DreamQuest thing, but I wonder if I could at least make a few thousand dollar-pounds for this. It'd change the way I approach game development in general, and stuff.

If you would support a Kickstarter project for this game, or any of my games, how much might you pledge?

Oh, and this game is basically finished, by the way, and I could technically release it as it is now and it'd be adequate enough; I'm just adding additional, mostly unnecessary stuff at this point and generally increasing the quality and such. So not finishing it - my biggest and most obvious weakness! - isn't really a concern here.
I wonder how many of my other games I'd have finished if I knew that people had paid me real money to work on them? Probably all of them!

Apparently the site's been inaccessible with a 403 error for about a day. This was because the host (HostGator) manually disabled the site when the noticed that it was being too much of a drain on their server.

What I assume happened was that the chatroom got too crowded, perhaps... Maybe there was an Internal Server Error? Or more than one? When these happen, I assume that peoples' reaction is to refresh the page, which is the exact *opposite* of what you should be doing!

Those errors occur when the server's overloaded; when too many pages are being requested at once. I'm no expert at this kind of thing, but what I think happens with sites is that when you request a page, it gets added to a queue thing, and the server handles things at the top of the queue before moving onto the next one. Or something. If the queue gets too long, then the Internal Server Error occurs. Refreshing just adds more to the end of the already too-long queue, eventually causing the whole thing to, well, break.

So if you ever see Internal Server Errors, *wait a few minutes* for the queue to reduce in size or whatever, otherwise you'll just cause the site to go down, causing frustration for everyone.

I'll try to do what I can with the code to maybe prevent this kind of thing from happening, even though I had plans for today, ugh.