May 20

Hi everyone!

First of all, sorry for the slow update. Between my health problems and recent unpleasant events, it’s been very difficult to motivate myself to develop Deserted Chateau in the last month or so. I’ve gotten most of my motivation back, it’s just been a bit of a setback is all.

It certainly won’t be ready for June; perhaps August-September or so I would estimate, but we’ll see. I don’t think there is a large amount of work remaining, but there’s definitely a lot of testing, debugging and other stuff that will need to be done before the site can go live. 

I've paused the Patreon for another month; I will still be trying to write my updates as usual, I’d just prefer to unpause it when I am getting more done.

Commissioner artwork fields

I’ve started implementing some extra artwork features for commissioners. It’s nothing fancy, but basically a way to separate out “artist” accounts from “commissioner” accounts; commissioners will have to add some extra fields when submitting an artwork, namely the artist who drew the work and a URL of some kind (the artist’s main social media, or similar), so that the artist is clearly and prominently credited. It will also aid in verifying if a commissioner actually did commission a particular artwork, in cases where somebody reports a submission as stolen or not being a commission.

It’ll also mean a checkbox on submissions when an account is both artist and commissioner, to signify whether a given submission was a commission or not. This will also help to prevent abuse of commissioner accounts.

AWS restructuring completed

After some deliberation, I went down the Organisations route for separating Deserted Chateau’s live and test environments. Each is now on its own AWS account, which should simplify the process of allowing people access to the test environment for transparency purposes in future and reduce the risks of doing so.

Actually doing the migration wasn’t as hard as I expected; the notes I wrote for myself on how things are set up turned out to be very useful. The main concern was accidentally breaking or missing something, but I’ve tested it all and it’s working correctly.

Inline artwork descriptions

In addition to the main description for a “submission”, each image can now have an inline description. The functionality for adding it was already there, but there were a few bugs to fix and the code to display them wasn’t implemented, both of which are now done.