Welcome back to WebUrbEx my Godot project where you explore the retro internet.
Launch
I launched the game last week. That’s pretty exciting. My friend Schnumn was going to the artist alley at MCM London so between us we organised a physical release of the game. Apparently 15 people bought game CDs so… That’s pretty good.
Downloads over on Itch aren’t looking so great, but have exceeded the amount of times I downloaded the game to test that the version I uploaded.
ADHD
I can’t remember when the last time i updated this was but originally my talking point was always that the game was going to release in december 2025. We’ve overshot that by quite a bit, and a lot of the things I wanted to have done are also… not done. I started pursuing medication for my ADHD in summer 2025, and it was only by the start of May that I actually received them due to a lot of unintentional delays in the prescription process. So far they’ve been making quite a big difference to my ability to sit down and do a task, to sleep, and to not make as many impulsive decisions, but obviously time will tell. I feel like I’ve entered a new era of having energy for work and social activities and I’m planning on using this to get more done.
Marketing
Ok so the digital launch hasn’t reached particularly far but what can I do to develop on that?
I often used to joke about being old and… well, when you’re young you can do that but… now I’m a bit older I think that’s stupid.
Essentially when I started working on adverts for the game I started writing a “what’s up fellow kids” script for fun, i was just being miserable about terms I genuinely knew and used daily, and decided to stop making that joke
Instead, choosing to engage with things that happened since I was a teenager as someone who can adapt with the times, I made a VTuber avatar
That’s right y’all I’m going to try and be relevant. This started out as a plan to make a “create-a-character” tool for use in 3D games btw, I just kinda pivoted when I realised I could use it for both those and for making a vtuber.
I have plans on making an advert for the game and an advert for the mod tools. And by plans I mean I’ve recorded both of those things and still have to edit them. I don’t think this is because of ADHD but more fear of having to listen to my own voice. Part of me wants to just re-record everything until I get a take I like.
On this note I do want to start reaching out to content creators too for future updates. but… idk I worry I look a little too small to take seriously at the moment so that’s going to be interesting.
Better Tools
When I was working on WebUrbEx’s initial release I realised that making a bunch of text files for every website was probably not the most approachable way for people to mod the game, so I wrote a tool in called the Onboard Editor (OEditor) that allowed people to set up sites (with almost all of the features available to me). I didn’t swap over to using it as my development tool as it didn’t really offer me any benefits over my current workflow and… also it’s kinda annoying to use.
Obviously this is bad for modding but it also means it’s pretty useless for me if I wanted to make something that would be annoying in notepad/vscode. It also doesn’t really hold through to the philosophy I’ve been trying to follow regarding making the process of creativity easier for myself (and others). It also doesn’t sticky on some of the settings if you change site version so that sucks. Literally shows up in my ad.
So I decided I was going to work on a better editor for EWB sites. I’m calling it BetterEditor.
So one of the biggest fiddly thing in making EWA/G sites manually is all the dates are entered manually so i need to copy, paste, and adjust dates for timezones as I work, and anything i miss is a potential error. I also keep on having to go into the windows calendar to work out what day of the week a day in February 2001 is, for example. Making EWB and BetterEditor my first thought was to try and implement dynamic time display (so that the sites store a date in UTC and then displays in in the player’s timezone) and a clock tool that allows me to set the current date and time in the editor.
As for features for end users I tried reformatting how the editor displayed site options into statements, so that the options page more or less explains what a setting changes (rather than in EWA where a lot of the style variables are named random bullshit and OEditor uses different sounding random bullshit to describe what they do).
The biggest change is that previewing the site is built into the editor. I’m co-developing EWB and BEditor alongside each other, so EWB will be set up with a developer mode from the start meaning i can basically set up the game to be the tool I use to edit the game. To this effect I’ve added in this dropdown to allow the game to automatically open BEditor when selected.
Ok but this is all about EWB, not EWA/G? Will this still be usable for editing older sites?
Probably not by default? I kinda like the idea of keeping the older tools for the older site format (but will probably rework it to make it less janky). As the mod tools should try and guide people towards the easiest
So about EWB? What design changes from EWA/G?
Let’s be honest, while EWA/G is a great old fashioned looking website maker, it looks deliberately low-budget and that sorta holds it back from representing more ambitious websites. that look is also why post-launch I’ve been feeling a bit self conscious about the aesthetics of WEX and whether it “looks like a real game” vs something made mostly by one guy relying heavily on default UI assets. I will say Godot’s default UI assets look way better than Unity’s default UI assets but… still.
For EWB i want to support a lot of visual flourishes like having pages broken down into sections that allow me to add a layout to them, akin to divs in HTML, and support things like sidebars and context-dependent display features. It’s not all about the aesthetics but it is something I want to focus on and that’s what my next post will be on.
Anyway, pop over to weburbex.neocities.org and get the game for free, or chip in a mere £5 if you want to support the development. And a big thanks to anyone who’s bought the game so far and in person.
Honestly it’s nice to get some of these thoughts out. I don’t think i’ll be passing this one around like I have with previous articles because it’s less performative and more of a detox but thanks for reading.
-Matt