Hey everyone!

My blog is officially up and running! I’m using the WordPress infrastructure, but the frontend is a custom theme. This is kinda my first “real” web development experience. Well… it was my first time touching PHP, anyway. It’s been an adventure!

I owe a lot to this incredibly handy WordPress Theme tutorial. If you want a quick-and-painless runthrough of the WordPress API, this is your link. This stuff is the Johnson’s baby shampoo of tutorials.

A few nifty things I learned along the way:

• If you’re making a custom theme for WordPress for the first time, I’d strongly recommend starting with an existing one, stripping it to the bare bones and adding your code. My theme worked locally, but the php wouldn’t execute when I uploaded it. Finally, out of desperation I tried placing it over an existing theme. Worked like a charm. Gooo figure.
• CSS Sliding doors are awesome! This is what all the buttons on my site are made out of.
• Similarly awesome, 960 Grid System is a CSS framework that’s easy-to-use and FREE! Oh baby. I am never again leaving home without it.
• It seems best to test your stuff in Mozilla first, because if you can get it working on Firefox, you can get it working anywhere! Well, except IE I guess… are people still using that thing?

So anyway, the focus of this blog is game development! Posts will be anything from showcasing things I’m learning or working on, to linking to cool game-dev content, to just collecting and writing out my thoughts on topics.

Right now, I’m practicing the basics of pixel art! I started with a character I sketched out a little while ago. I started off using this very excellent tutorial by Derek Yu, and I highly recommend it.

We’ll see what happens! I don’t know if I’d ever have the patience to make a whole game in pixel art, and clearly I still have lots to learn. It was fun, though! Something about the process feel strangely scientific, much different from regular art. I kinda like that.