Webmastering

The previous post was a ploy to get users to come to this site from the World of Warcraft official forums. It worked better than I was expecting, according to the statistics log I will post sometime. Though it was an actual article, you may note my closing comments are about Stencyl in hopes that prying eyes will look at them.

Tee hee!

For those of you who know about the World of Warcraft scene and how huge it is, you may be interested to know that it was recently featured in the main newspaper for the state of Minnesota, the Star Tribune. The Star Tribune gave WoW a rather glowing review, talking about its good features (social interaction, leadership, etc) and explaining to the general population just what World of Warcraft is all about. I thought it was cool enough to scan in and show all of you the article. Perhaps linking to this is a good way to explain WoW to your parents or significant other?

Here’s the article. Click for full size.

Update: you can also see this article on the Star Tribune website.

In other news, Stencyl has been going well - we have recently finished a lot of new and cool features. For those of you who don’t know, Stencyl is a platform for retro tile-based game creation. Ever wanted to make a platformer, action title, shoot em’ up, hack and slash RPG, strategy game or something else? Stencyl lets you create all of these kind of games and more without any programming or scripting and instead, uses a Trigger system much like the one found in Warcraft III.

After you have finished creating your game, share it with others on StencylSpot, our digital distribution system. You can also download other Games and play them with a single click of a button. If you’d like to find out more about this project, please visit Stencyl’s About page.

Stencyl is currently under private development but will open its doors to the public in April.

Hope you like the article!

Everyone seems to enjoy speaking about themselves, so I figure I will jump on this bandwagon and tell you a little about myself. Perhaps I will talk more about real life in a future post, but for now, I would like to share the history of my internet life.

I am currently known as metziel (previously whitenights, Vitrix, meridius, or abael) and I am Stencyl’s server administrator, webmaster, and lead web programmer. I work here on Stencyl because of Eliwood, who I have known for about 5 years (?) now. Eliwood and I have known each other since the days of Warcraft III map-making, or as I prefer to call it, “the good ol’ days.” Eliwood was one of my main inspirations to pick up programming, and helped me along in those early days, programming for a very minor WC3 site. When Eliwood disappeared from the WC3 scene to work on projects for The Gaming Universe, namely GUReporter, I too quickly left WC3 and went to try to learn more about programming.

One of my main projects after that was a relatively minor World of Warcraft fansite, where I have programmed a number of small hacks as well as a full site to help them out. That site has been going downhill recently, because of time constraints on all the staff members. I need to thank the administrators there, however, since they are very cool people and have helped me grow as a site administrator and shown me what it is like to work hard on something you love. They also have given me a number of solid server recommendations, and it is because of their recommendation that Stencyl runs on the server it does today.

I got involved with Stencyl because of my connection to Eliwood back from WC3 and GUReporter. Eliwood basically sent me an email saying “hey, talk to me on MSN” and I said something like “sounds cool.” After he told me about the project, I said “sounds cool,” and offered to host Stencyl properly, on a dedicated server. I don’t know if that was his original intent behind inviting me, but here we are. I am also the primary coder behind Stencyl’s web resources, though you see very little of my work right now.

Outside of Stencyl, I enjoy soccer (and indoor soccer), the TV shows Heroes and 24, being 16 and doing all that entails, and of course, I love my dog Titan (picture coming soon.)

I’m always busy, either working on Stencyl, schoolwork, or coding tasks for my school. Literally, I don’t think I get a moment’s rest. If I do, I know it’s because I’m doing something wrong =)

In the future, I look forward to Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and anything else that Blizzard Entertainment creates. Of course, I am also 100% behind Stencyl for the future.

I recently finished what I know to be the initial work for setting up StencylBlogs. Tell me if you see any issues.

Comments are disabled on all blogs because I decided I wanted to consolidate discussion into the forums instead of having to monkey around with both WordPress comments and forum discussions; if this is an unpopular decision, I can always reverse it.

Update (Feb 21): Decision reversed. I will keep my blog as no-comments, since I don’t see the need.