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Welcome to the site!

Published on May 22, 2025

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Hello! Welcome to my website but with a slightly new coat of paint.

Prior to this my website was just a single page with some links to socials/games and some information about me. I wanted to update it because I’m working on a number of things now and I wanted it to be easier to follow these things and also spew information about them out into the void without being tied to a particular social media platform.

Future plans for the site #

In the efforts of further distancing myself from social media (which has proven itself to be a basket not to put all your eggs inside), I’d like for this site to become somewhat of a hub for things I make. Ideally it would also operate on a ‘push’ (sending things out) in addition to the current ‘pull’ (visiting the site or querying an RSS feed).

To this end, these are the things I’m going to be adding (in no particular order):

  • Mailing list: So you can subscribe to email updates for posts/games/tools.
  • Comments on posts and games: I’m probably going to use something like remark42 for this.
  • URL shortener: It’ll be nice to be able to shorten URLs my own way. Shlink is probably what I’ll use.

In terms of posts on the site, I will try to update it every so often, but no promises! It will for sure be updated every time I release a game or demo.

What I’m doing now #

What I’m working on at the moment is a full Steam release for my game ‘The Charity Shop’. The version on Itch.io was created in around 2 months for a game jam, and I was happy with how complete it turned out, so I’m applying a layer of polish and releasing it on Steam.

I need do the following things:

  • Add controller/Steam Deck support
  • Add other Steam things like achievements and cloud saves
  • Add UI scaling
  • Rejig a few confusing areas and levels
  • Add a bit more ’lore’ stuff
  • Round over a few sharp corners people found in the Itch.io version

I’m aiming for a summer release.

After that, I will be going full steam ahead with ‘Vignettes: The Dream City’, creating an enhanced demo and full release aimed at 2026 in all likelihood.

More detail about the site #

For those so inclined, here’s a bit of technical information about this site and how it’s built.

The site is built with Hugo, using styling I made myself. It should be responsive on mobile and wider screens too (let me know if I made any mistakes).

Most of the content on the site (apart from the posts you’re reading, which are Markdown files) is built from YAML data files using Hugo content adapters. For instance, the games are defined like this:

 1- name: 'The Charity Shop'
 2  date: '2025-02-28'
 3  timeframe: '2025'
 4  homePage: true
 5  cardPicture: img/games/tcs/001.jpg
 6  headerPicture: img/games/tcs/005.jpg
 7  logoPicture: img/games/tcs/shop_logo_sign.png
 8  faviconPath: img/favicon/tcs/
 9  links:
10    - name: Steam (Wishlist)
11      icon: img/logo/steam.svg
12      link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3548550/The_Charity_Shop/
13    - name: Itch.io
14      icon: img/logo/itchio-textless-white.svg
15      link: https://figglewatts.itch.io/the-charity-shop
16  content: |
17    *The Charity Shop* is an atmospheric, surreal, first-person adventure game where you must use your camera to capture the essence of a life lived. To this end, you have been delivered before The Charity Shop, the place where people donate unwanted belongings—each carrying an imprint of the time they once shared.
18
19    It was developed for a game jam in 2025, being released in February. I am now working on a full version for a Steam release.

All of this information gets turned into a page on the site under /games. I wanted to do it this way because I don’t like web development much and I work a lot with YAML in my day job, so I can add new content to the site just by working with YAML (which is easy!).

The site gets built on my CI/CD server (which is running Concourse), and deployed via an NGINX container image and Helm to a Kubernetes cluster.

It could of course be done a lot simpler than this (on a random web server box, or static from S3 storage or something), but I had these hosting platforms available to me for other things I’m involved with, and it’s very quick for me to do as I already have a lot of the tooling around doing this set up and ready to go.

That’s pretty much it—catch you next time. Check out the RSS feeds if you want to stay up to date, otherwise there’ll be a mailing list soon.

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