Hitting Pause on the Lorecall Platform

As of right now, I don't want to promise something I can't deliver on. I've been pulled in so many different directions lately, that my focus is split between: Mistgate, a street-racing card game, writing, and—oh yeah—my actual-real-world-paus-me-money work.

Lorecall has been, and still is, a passion of mine. I have reflected on this in the past in posts that I felt that a more structured solution to play-by-post games was necessary.

The play-by-post also spoke to my affinity toward writing, which is why I felt so compelled by the prospect of Lorecall.

When I took it upon me to build and release Lorecall, I did so somewhat naively. I was looking for a project that I could work on where I didn't necessarily need to rely on others to see my project to fruition. I had unsuccessfully attempted to start a small game development team, but that failed after the team fell apart due to creative differences, availability, and perserverance in the face of the prospect of a long-term, gruelling, project cycle.

Lorecall was a simpler effort.

I spent 8 hours a day working on web services (and still do) so it should be simple to build an online gaming community, right?

Well, yes and no. I mean I was totally off base and over committed and underestimated.

Lorecall spent the better part of a year and a half in initial development. Getting it to a point that was usable and at a bare minimum stable. It had the core components I wanted in a system: play-by-post, forums (both community and chronicle), user management, and finally a rudimentary dice rolling system.

The interface wasn't great, but it worked.

Lorecall was something I would be presenting to the world and I wanted it to be perfect.

I probably left it in alpha for too long. I vaguely remember reading some place (and, please excuse me as I butcher this quote): "if you wait to release something that is perfect, you'll never release it."

If it was buggy, or it didn't look great, or this-and-that (I could come up with hundreds of reasons) I thought: "no one will use it". I was probably right when it came to some of them, and wrong on others.

Regardless, it languished--a few of us took it for a test drive and, in general I think the test audience was positive about the site but there were things that we identified needed to be fixed or added before it was opened to a wider audience.

It was about this time that, despite my experience, I began down a path that further delayed and disrupted the development of the system.

The UI was almost impossible to work with. It was a Frankenstein's monster of different early web frameworks, and I decided that to make it easier for me to iterate on both the front end and the backend I would decouple the two pieces.

If you ever hear a software engineer say to you: "we should just rebuild it, it will be faster" you should probably just start laughing. Ultimately, rebuilding it will always take longer if you're trying to maintain backwards compatibility with something.

Despite the above, actually maybe because of it, Lorecall has a really strong backend piece now. Refactoring the code to make it more RESTful and API driven really improved the overall structure of the code and its reliability. It allowed me to write more unit tests, and to experiment with new front ends.

However, it basically added a year to re-write everything and get it back to where it already was. Not a single step closer to public consumption.

Everytime a new version of the Symfony Framework comes out, I look to upgrade, but when there are significant changes to the preferred structure and tools of a project (as in the more recent Symfony 4 release) it adds additional levels of effort to the development process.

So, I need to hit pause.

Lorecall is not dead—I'm still writing unit tests and re-working the code—but it isn't my primary focus currently. I still intend to dedicate a few hours to it a week, and gradually roll out its re-release to public.

Until then, we've got some great content here, on Lorecall's blog, that I hope will tide you over.