Carrington

I’ve been a bit tired of my old WordPress theme for a while, but it took me a while to work up the energy to install a new one. In preparation, I spent several hours yesterday and today tagging all my posts. All my posts. That was a pretty boring job, but now it’s easier to get an overview of the topics I discuss here. Though TNM is one of the most used tag so far (I’m not sure I’ll keep it, seeing how it’s also a category, and that should be enough), I think these are probably the most interesting ones:

And in the Game – these are all the posts with more or less exaggerated accounts of something I’ve experienced in a game. They’re probably my favourite type of post to write, but not all games encourage the form – a certain emergence or at the very least nonlinearity is required to make such posts interesting.

Game writing – all the posts where I discuss the art of writing for games, be it dialogue, plot, story, documentation, etc.

Co-op – wherein I discuss co-operative experiences, games that feature co-op, or the design of co-op gameplay.

Open world – another favourite topic of mine is open world games, mostly because I enjoy playing them, but also because the form poses some serious design challenges.

Level design – fairly self-explanatory, I should think: it’s about thoughts about or problems with level design, various ways to approach the discipline, etc.

Besides properly supporting post tags, this theme has several other advantages: it supports widgets, it makes better use of your monitor width and has two columns, it’s easy to customise, it uses Ajax for the comments, and I think it just looks more professional and sleek than the old one.

I’m not quite done with the update yet though. I’m having a hard time getting the built-in header image customisation to work – or rather, I’m having a hard time uploading my new header image with the built-in media uploader, and I can’t access the FTP at the moment – so for now I’ve just disabled the default header image. Due to my FTP issues, I also can’t replace the default background image for the comments or for the About box, and I can’t add the widgets I’ve found to re-implement my old Twitter box or my XBL gamercard. I also plan to add a few static pages (a short bio, a page on TNM, and perhaps a proper portfolio), and I’d like to get my custom fields (game, music) back on the front page.

But all that can wait of course – for now, let me know what you think of the new theme