June 27

Hi all, hope you're doing okay and stuff!

I'm keeping Patreon un-paused this month; I'm making some decent progress at the moment so it feels like a good time, also thought it was important to inform you all in case e.g. anyone needs to unpledge or anything.

Some brief updates on Deserted Chateau below.

UI/UX wireframes

For some of the more complex pages of the site, I'm experimenting with using UX wireframe design tools to help me plan out the appearance. I realised ADHD often makes me kind of freeze when doing bigger pages, since I haven't got the page laid out in my head yet; perhaps wireframes will help. 

I'm using Figma, which does the job so far; after all I only need some very simple functionality. Example WIP here: https://i.imgur.com/Z5Y0NIZ.png, trying to lay out the page for moderators/myself to look at user reports and decide on them.

Moderation & Reports

I've made some half-decent progress this week on the reporting and moderation structure for the site; at the moment I'm deciding how to collate reports of the same thing (e.g. if 1 artwork gets 100 reports, it shouldn't flood the reports area). Once that's decided I can implement the report details and report pages areas properly, they're done in a kind of WIP form at the moment for testing.

The forms and procedures to deal with reports are done; there also will need to be pages for moderators to modify user details or artwork details, and database tables to record those modifications for logging purposes.

Gallery improvements

One of the elusive problems with the gallery code for Deserted Chateau (that decides how to lay out galleries of images) is that in certain browser window sizes and for given galleries, it can sometimes display an image a bit too large. It doesn't impact the gallery structure or anything, but displaying an image above the thumbnail's image size can cause a bit of pixelation which isn't desirable.

I've been tinkering with some of the constants in the gallery code that aim to set the base "height" for each gallery row, and also the thresholds at which it decides whether to put an image in a row or leave it for the next row, to try and solve this problem. There's slight improvement, but I think actually fixing that behaviour means changing how the row calculations are done, to account for rows with few images or particularly wide/tall images.

Streaming

I will probably try streaming Deserted Chateau's development again this week or next week, gonna think about how to structure the stream a bit more. It'll be on Twitch per usual at https://twitch.tv/antsstyle, will see how it goes. It makes sense I think for me to have a specific list of things I want to implement while streaming, since problem solving and trying to e.g. figure out structural decisions doesn't make for interesting viewing.