9) Ostinato 2.0

So what happened was this: Ostinato used to be hosted through a free service called Google Sites, which may and/or may not still exist in some form depending on when you're reading this, but after a certain point, I was told that the service would be changing in ways that made it no longer viable for Ostinato's purposes. I'd always had all the actual information on the site backed up in .txt files, so I wasn't concerned about losing anything, but I'd need to find a new way to keep it up online. With some advice from a friend of a friend, and after overcoming some hurdles that are probably not very interesting to read about, I somehow managed to get a new version of the site started, which is presumably what you're on right now. Hosting it is no longer free, but this version does let me do things that I couldn't before. I had to learn HTML, CSS, and a little PHP, but between dabbling in HTML before and making a number of "things" in Game Maker, I had enough general knowledge that it was pretty easy to work out this time around—that is, with the help of W3Schools.

At any rate, I could've just copied and pasted everything directly from the old site, but since I had to go through it all anyway, I took the opportunity to... I don't want to say "overhaul," since that implies I was changing the base game mechanics or something like that; no, it was just a lot of little details, like how on the old site I used to generalize by saying "he or she," but nowadays it's better to use "they," so I swapped that out everywhere (and believe me, "everywhere" is a lot). The old site had certain limitations when it came to folder structure, but here I can do whatever I want, so I reorganized some stuff, trying to keep the URLs as short and clean as possible. The main thing, in my mind, is that on this new site, I can now store character stats in separate object files to be called up anywhere, which means that, if I want to change a certain stat on a character, I don't have to go and find every spot where the stat is mentioned on the site—I can just change it once in the object file, and it'll automatically change everywhere. This is especially useful for the new-at-the-time fusion mechanic, as I can have the site automatically add together stats for fusions, so I don't have to worry that I might've gotten the math wrong.

At the time of writing, I've just finally finished going through every last character sheet from the old site and getting them up on the new one, and fusion sheets are one set of things that I still need to do, since I didn't yet have those on the old one. I also still need to make sheets for all the Bug Fables enemies and bosses, and there are some other Paper Mario-inspired indie games cropping up that I'm sure will eventually get the same treatment. There will always be more to do, even after I'm long gone, but that's the nature of a tabletop RPG. It's not a bad thing: I enjoy messing with all this (obviously =P ), so I don't want to run out. But it does seem like by this point I can perhaps claim to have accomplished something. Self-praise is, ah, distinctly outside my wheelhouse, but the new site makes me happy. I can only hope that Arpeggio may make others happy too.