Website Introduction

From time to time, I will be sharing updates regarding our progress with the development of our website. In this devblog, I want to introduce some of the fundamentals of the website - mainly technologies, design decisions, and future plans. I'm going to try to keep my blogs as simple as possible, but some parts are naturally going to be more technical.  **Our website, 5 minutes old** What you are currently seeing when you visit https://playselene.com is a “teaser” version of our full website. We’ve built this website to have a well-organized way to share our vision and progress. The initial plan was to have just a landing page, which would only require some frontend development to make it functional and pleasing to the eye. However, during the development phase, we thought how cool it would be to have a dev blog - something many game developers decide to publish during the development phase of the game and even after release.  **Turns out, driving on a highway is an amazing time for creativity.** Django was my immediate choice when I needed to choose a framework. Why? For two main reasons: Python is one of my favorite languages - it enables rapid development with high readability. It also provides countless useful libraries to speed up development. Django was written with three words in mind: Fast, Secure, Scalable. Once we’ve decided to go on that route, we had to refactor almost every single thing in our frontend website to turn in into a Django-compatible format. However, once we did that, everything became much clearer and better organized. Things are now built in a modular way; thus, the website is fast and provides us with a solid foundation to extend in the future. A common approach in recent years has been designing the website for mobile devices first, and later adapting it for laptops and desktops. While we haven’t taken that approach (due to the nature of the website - it will mostly be used by people on computers who also play the game), We’ve still taken mobile compatibility very seriously. We are fully responsive, meaning every single page on our website is and will keep looking great on every device from old iPhones to 4k Smart-TVs. <iframe width="1280" height="720" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_6hyUg2jm6g" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> **Showing our website responsiveness in every resolution** The key features we intend to have on our website initially are: - Show the main features of our game - Forum - Rankings - Account Management For the forum, we previously had a great experience with XenForo. Thus we intend to use it for Selene. We feel like most users are already very familiar with XenForo, and those who are not will easily learn to use its intuitive interface. We intend to open the forum once we reach the closed alpha stage in order to allow our testers to easily report any bugs and give them an easy platform to write suggestions and reports. For rankings, we wish to enable plenty of different ranking tables (Jobs, Fame, Guilds, etc.) and allow each and every player to see their current ranking within Selene. Account management is the most “complex” system out of the three, as we want to enable various interactions between the website and the game itself. Because of our All-in-one account feature, you won’t need more than one account per person. In no situation will you have to log out of your account. Voting will be as easy as clicking a button. Donations will be handled automatically the moment you confirm the donation. We also intend to add a character management panel where you can manage various aspects of individual characters. # What’s next? In the near future, we intend to release a new page called “Features.” As the name indicates, this is where we will deliver more information about our game features. Currently, a partial list of game features can be found at the bottom of our home page in the shape of a rotating card deck. However, at the moment, all you can see are the title and a few words that only suggest what it includes. The planned feature page will go into more detail about the current feature cards on our homepage, along with introducing new features as well. Since our game is still in heavy development, we intend to dish out feature articles as time goes and features turn from intentions to reality.  **(WIP) Features hub - each of these cards links to an article that describes the feature.** After the Features page is ready and released, I intend to go back to working on the register flow, which is the bread and butter of every server website as it turns the website from a large trailer to a functional component people actually use on a daily basis. If you have any questions, suggestions, thoughts, or whatever, make sure to join [Selene's Discord](https://discord.playselene.com) and share those with us.