News

Deadlines are awesome, aren't they? Well it's January 11th, and roleplaying is officially open on the Roleplay boards. If you haven't made your character(s) yet, hop to it. Roleplaying has officially ceased on the old phpBB forum.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in Hatchling Central. Otherwise, just have fun because I'm going to be working on all of the shiny extra features now. ;) Thanks for being patient with me and for keeping on top of bugs! You've all been a great help.

Character creation is now open! Feel free to create your characters. There are still plenty of character fields that will be added later on down the road, so if you have any suggestions as to what sort of things you'd like to see listed on a character's profile, let me know!

Also, the first In Character sphere is up: Fronima. I'm slowly going to be adding the other spheres over the next couple of days.

Currently working on:

• Special request trades / multiple trades. If your character has more than two trades, please be patient. That functionality is coming soon.
• Character avatar uploads.

As I've been working on Shadowlack, I've been keeping track of my progress via a handy project management system. Consequently, I can tell you that we're currently sitting at 84% for this phase of the project. We should hit the 90s this weekend (provided I'm not too hungover from all the Christmas parties). What does this mean? This phase of the project has been surrounding the core functionality of Shadowlack, that is, making sure that we can get our asses roleplaying again. ;)

The hard deadline for when roleplaying will open again on the site is: January 11th, 2011 (1/11/11). It's quite likely that I'll have things finished before then, but that's the coolest looking date in the next little while. At that point the old Shadowlack forum will completely close down and we will assume operations over here.

After that, the server is going to be upgraded. I'm not entirely sure on the timeline there, as it might even end up in February. We're taking a video gaming rig that we have here and putting its super-duper processor into our server, as well as salvaging a few other parts. Probably only a day of downtime, if that.

Phase I: Core Functionality

• Nearly complete!

Phase II: The Bells and Whistles

• Appointing new staff members
• Final site design
• Polls
• Groups
• Friends
• Buzz Board
• User invitations
• Character relations
• Want another feature added? Suggest it! It can be done!

Phase III: The Home Stretch

• Improve user friendliness
• More art!!111one
• Plot and scheme like there is no tomorrow
• Advertise, damnit

There you have it. It'll be sometime in Phase III that public registrations will open again. Still no ETA. And now for...

New Things of the Now!

• Character Census (this will be a sweet page to watch as people start creating characters)
• Playable Races DB (still populating it with data and formatting)
• Trade Catalogue (will be prettified during Phase II)
• And a bunch of admin back end things that I don't need to bore you with.

I made a few small changes, but they're pretty significant in regards to gender and users.

• Gender no longer appears on the account registration form.
• Gender is now a fully editable text field on your account.

It still won't show up on your profile yet, as I'm organizing the layout of data there... but feel free to go in and enter in whatever you want. :) I know that on Shadowlack, we're really all over the place in regards to demographics. We have a substantial LGBT community, and a fair amount of people who are much more fluid when it comes to things like gender.

So in the spirit of keeping this a welcoming and open community, have at 'er.