I’ve been doing some thinking lately about what I’d like to do after I finish up my PhD study. I still don’t know what I’d like to do immediately, but there’s still a large part of me that wants to do the whole indie developer thing. I don’t know if I could do this full time, and I certainly don’t think I could straight out of uni, but it’s something I don’t think I should dismiss. At the very least it’d be a good hobby, and with a modest effort it could easily be a decent source of income.

I’ve deviated a lot off my original plan that I wrote a few years back for how to get there (according to the original plan, I’d have been selling games two years ago), and now I’m in the final throes of my PhD I don’t have the time for anything major. But I can still work towards the goal in my spare time, albeit slowly.

First on my list is to resurrect the original purpose of this journal - to get some experience in managing a website. I’ve been letting this site stagnate for a bit too long, defeating the original purpose. So it’s time to reinvent the site and make it look a bit like one I’d need if I were launching the commercial version.

To start, I’ve made a new theme to replace the light, airy minimalist one that was here. This one is loosely modelled off the look of my GameDev journal, although I won’t go as far as making the headers all Comic Sans to emulate the comic book look. I’m debating whether I should put an image as the background; sometimes I find them distracting, but a nice pattern can work well if it’s carefully chosen. I might also play around with the colours a bit once I’ve seen the site in action. I also need to see if this font works well for blogs - I’m not sure how Trebuchet MS handles large blocks of text at smaller sizes.

I’ve also retired the poll I’ve had up for ages: building blocks had been winning for quite a while (probably the game developer influence there!). I’ll try cycling them around a bit more often.

Any suggestions for the site look? Any layout bugs I’ve missed?