Welcome back to WebUrbEx my Godot project where you explore the retro internet.

My week has been painful and it has been entirely my decision to make it that way.

This is Horde of the Abyssal Lord. An adventure game made entirely using EWA pages and determination. It uses 333 pages and 33 images (interesting but coincidental), allowing the player to explore a small pocket dimension, gaining knowledge (easy to implement) and inventory items (requires a whole extra copy of the entire map and new pages for each room to trigger when using them). It features beautiful mspaint graphics, that I had to go back to remake because mspaint didn’t add shapes beyond circle and rectangle until windows 7, and purple descriptions that hopefully make up for this shortcoming.

This is not an ideal toolset for making a game. Even at the time of the site’s supposed release (late january 2001). Flash browser games have been around since the late 90s, and browser cookies and JS have been around even longer. By all accounts someone working in this era should have better tools. But EWA doesn’t have those tools, and neither does WebUrbEx. That’s something that has been somewhat lower down the priority list before now.

So… why make a game this way? 1) Because a character working with the version of EWA available at that time in the story would have to so let’s suppose they did, and 2) it’s a really good stess test of how complicated and big websites can get in EWA/WEX. As you might have noticed, I’m a game dev, so designing a game is a pretty fitting “at scale” project for me.

I’ve just realised I’ve explained most of this on the last post but finishing it all I kinda wanted to just get everything out of my system because… wow this was a slog of copypasting, find-and-replacing and slightly tweaking things. I don’t think I’d have gotten through it using the tools I’d been using for everything else so I dragged it into vscode and even used word for some shenanigans here and there. Both to keep track of things and to lean into the idea that the Mr Andrews character is an older character, I formatted the pages with c10, c20, c30, c40, c45, etc. prefixes not dissimilar to the line numbering convetions in Basic. You’ve gotta think about these things when designing in character, but also… it just seemed like the best way to do it.

So to put this all behind me, here is a demo version of WEX including Horde of the Abyssal Lord both as a playtest (feel free to comment any bugs down below), a way for some of my friends to check it out, and as a way to just purge all the tedium of working on it.

Anyway after all that I deserve a break, going back to a different kind of hell doing pure writing stuff for Tabletop Story.

but first

QoL is handy

After the overhaul last update I’ve been procrastinating adding in the navigation features I did the whole thing for, but trying to bring things up to scratch for testing Abyssal Lord I started working on that. I now have working Back and Forward buttons, allowing each tab to go back and forth in its history as needed. This was because I put some unfair deaths in the game and figured it’d be a lot easier to let people undo those than rely on the websites’ link to the start.

On top of that I added in the ability to open links in a new tab using ctrl clicking. A browser feature I don’t think I think about all that often but not having it makes you realise how useful it is.

Honestly I’m kind of surprised I only added 2 features. I feel like I did way more work than that, but admittedly most of that was probably bugfixing. So… 2 new features, and the backend is less scuffed. I’m happy with that. Also it’s really hard to find an image showing either of these features off as it’s more down to action than features.

Oh and this isn’t something I’ve done, more something I’m planning to, but I’ve discovered the limitations of how Morrigan Search ranks its results by throwing 300 odd pages at it from the same site. Good stress test, I need to fix everything so that it doesn’t spam up the results with random pages, only the relevant ones.

Future plans

I’ve been speaking to a friend about getting a Neocities site up for WEX and we’ve come to an agreement. Looking forward to having that up in time for the initial launch.

I’m becoming more open to sharing test builds of WEX so expect one to accompany an update whenever there’s new features to show off. Like I said there’s a build out now so check it out. I hope you understand when I say the fact that everything looks a little bit bad is deliberate. It’s a vulnerability I was trying to avoid until I was more happy I’d made a website big enough to be worth diving into, but getting more eyes on the interface seems more important.

I don’t think I have anything else to say

As always, be a respectful tourist.

-Matt