Behold the glory!!

Welcome to the new hottness!

What does that mean? It means the forums are integrated, the blog has comments, the site is faster, emails will actually work, there is a proper store, AND I can finally go back to working on the actual game! [there is even a spell checker for these posts! 😉 ]

Since this is a brand new site, PLEASE report ANY issues you find with the site. While I did spend a considerable amount of time testing, there is no way I can test everything. [I learned Firefox has some very different html parsing than chrome! 🙁 ]

To give you an idea of why this is such a big event for me, let’s take a small walk down memory lane.

~~~~~~~Wavy screen~~~~Wavy Screen~~~~Wavy Screen~~~~~~

We find ourselves in September, of 2013, back around SotG #84 and I send out some emails to get a quote on a new website. At this time I know Kickstarter is coming up and I want a better site for when it goes live. I get no response from any of the quotes I requested. So, as a stop gap, I make some changes to the websites homepage myself. It’s not much, but it’s better.

Fast forward to February 5th, 2014. The Kickstarter is full swing, everything is going great! We look to be on track to hit our goal so again, I send out contacts to get quotes. Yay! I get a response! This is great, look at this response:

I’m a big lover of mechs and I have to admit that working with you on this would be GREAT FUN!

And that was the last of that contact 🙁

So the Kickstarter finishes up, and once again, I send out requests for quotes. This time I expand my search to many different companies in different locations. This time, I get several responses! Some of them are insane [We only take on projects with budgets of $50k or higher] but I found one company that seemed great and really felt like they could deliver on the quality and they had a more reasonable price. I signed a contract with them and things started progressing amazing! That is until they delivered the first logo design…

The logo they delivered missed the mark. It wasn’t terrible, but there were 2 key elements that off the mark. It was red [MAYBE reddish orange] and it was clearly a rocket, not a bomb. I gave feedback to these two elements, and the business relationship started to deteriorate rapidly from there. It became very clear that this company was not looking for feedback or revisions, they wanted to just make something, anything really, and just have me deal with it. Their first design even included stolen images from other mech games and marketing quotes stolen from other sites :/ . I escalated the situation up and was able to part ways, with a full refund of my deposit. Sadly, this had burned through 2 months of time.

Fast forward again and the website is starting to really become a huge pain. Users are complaining about not receiving emails, there is not a proper store, the forums are completely sectioned off. It was bad.

Around July of 2014 I used a site called 99Designs to get an awesome new company logo and I want to base the new website design around the logo’s look. I again, find a company that I feel can deliver on what I am needing, in a reasonable price. I checked the companies references and have talked on the phone with them several times, so I sign the contract, pay the deposit, and work starts on the new site. Or so I thought.

Through the next 9 month, NINE FREAKING MONTHS, I am dealing with this company trying to get them to deliver on what the contract says. They are constantly pushing back dates, delivering terrible quality items, and just stalling in every way possible. Unfortunately, this whole ordeal turned into an expensive mistake, as not only did I lose out on all the time wasted by dealing with them, I also was unable to recover my deposit. I even persued legal action against the company, but it would have been more costly.

In May, 2015 I made the choice to bite the bullet and build the site myself. Here we are, 6 weeks later, and I am done [aside from bugs]!

So, ~18 months in waiting and frustration, we finally have a new site, a new server, and all our dreams will come true! Now excuse me while I go drink a lot of beer 🙂