Don’t worry, we’re not posting articles anymore because we’re migrating our website to WordPress. Google is slowly giving up on the external publishing and hosting features on their Blogger platform. This is quite a sudden decision on their part, and it seems that all they want is to gain control over all the blogs they’re hosting and save a few bucks.
Even if we see the advantage of letting Google take care of the server, I can see a lot more advantages in hosting it ourselves. Of course scalability is their main advantage, I can still remember this server, down on its knees when I released Portal: Prelude back in 2008, but still, this was only for a few days. The problem with this approach is that we’re losing all control and giving it back to Google. It prevents us from building our site the way we want, optimizing it for our needs and adding pages as we see it.
There will be a Bonuses/extras section on the website (it’s not a secret, there’s a disabled link on the left), plus one or two other things when the campaign will be released. We want to be able to build little dynamic systems and stuff. Of course, migrating the website to WordPress isn’t quite a piece of cake. Sure it can import everything from Blogger but it isn’t compatible with what we developed in the background and our design… soooo… it slows us down. Yeah, yet another excuse.
As for the anecdote, we’ve been in touch with people from Valve in the last few weeks. We told them about our problems with the game, the bugs we’re facing and the issues with the VPK system. For the moment, our campaign can’t be launched from a lobby, and it’s apparently something they’re aware of and trying to fix. Unfortunately as I said in our twitter channel, they can’t help us with any of our other issues (such as the few models making the game crash). I guess they fear an overwhelming increase in people asking for help, and we can understand their choice. I hope they’ll change their mind once we’ll send them an early build of what we did :D (dreaming is still free).