The Jolly Game Designer

Hello and welcome to the Powerblog. Here you will be able to find a collection of articles and musings about video game design & development from a moderately experienced, moderately talented and moderately modest designer. 

My reasons for wanting to write this blog are numerous:

• I've got some interesting theories about how to make games better that I want to share with the world
• I'm stuck doing a pretty dull job in a pretty dysfunctional design team at the moment and I need an outlet
• I'd quite like polish my writing skills
• Everyone has a blog these days and I want to fit in.
• I want to try and con you into buying games through affiliate links
• And finally, I think I need to get as much stuff written down as quickly as possible before my love of beer finally kills off the last of my brain cells

So why should you listen to what I have to say? Well no one's forcing you to stay here! That back button is there for a reason mister! Seriously though, I'm hoping that this blog will appeal to both games industry insiders as well as 'normal people', and I hope that you'll find my writing interesting and entertaining enough to make you want to hang around here so much that you'll start to stink up the place. I'm going to try to stick to writing detailed, useful articles, and stay away from pointless "here is what I saw on the internet today" type posts.

So a bit about me then. I've been working as a video game designer in the UK for about 8 years now, and in that time I've worked for 4 different studios, and worked on 9 shipped games. I'm not entirely sure if I want to remain anonymous or not, so please forgive me if I don't give you a full resume just yet. I will tell you that the metacritic average of all the games I've worked on is 66.4%. So I guess that shows I'm no Miyamoto, but that I don't suck TOO badly either. Anyway, a couple of those games were real stinkers and they badly dragged the average down, but they weren't my fault I swear!!

So stick around and perhaps you might want to nab some of my more interesting ideas? They're yours for the taking! Or maybe you might disagree with me so vehemently that you want to argue until your eyes bulge out? Give me all you've got! Or maybe you just have got nothing better to do except read blogs all day? Great! Me neither!

If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET 1.5.0 is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only a few things left to do.

Write Permissions

To be able to log in to the blog and writing posts, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data folder. If you’re blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support. You need write permissions on the App_Data folder because all posts, comments, and blog attachments are saved as XML files and placed in the App_Data folder. 

If you wish to use a database to to store your blog data, we still encourage you to enable this write access for an images you may wish to store for your blog posts.  If you are interested in using Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, VistaDB, or other databases, please see the BlogEngine wiki to get started.

Security

When you've got write permissions to the App_Data folder, you need to change the username and password. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change the username and password.  Passwords are hashed by default so if you lose your password, please see the BlogEngine wiki for information on recovery.

Configuration and Profile

Now that you have your blog secured, take a look through the settings and give your new blog a title.  BlogEngine.NET 1.4 is set up to take full advantage of of many semantic formats and technologies such as FOAF, SIOC and APML. It means that the content stored in your BlogEngine.NET installation will be fully portable and auto-discoverable.  Be sure to fill in your author profile to take better advantage of this.

Themes and Widgets

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On the web

You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you'll find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team