10 Years of Ezcha

Ten years ago on this day I registered the ezcha.net domain, marking the official beginning of Ezcha! That's a whole decade! I was just thirteen at the time and used Weebly to create the website, as I had no idea how they worked. Oh how time flies. I wanted to make this post as a bit of a way to celebrate the occasion. In it I will share some old games previously lost to time, some recent projects I've been working on and some future plans for the platform.

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Old Games

First off, I want to share some old games that I made years ago. I cannot say that they are of the best quality, but I thought it would be fun thing to do regardless. These two games are called Another Cubied and Creative Suite Comics. Both of them were made with GameMaker Studio.

Another Cubied

Circa November 1st, 2015

No, I'm not trying to be witty with the subtitle there, that's what it is actually called. Better than the original Cubied, but not quite as good as New Cubied. One interesting thing to note is that it has multiplayer, however it seems to be buggy and unfinished.

For more information and to download it, check out its game page available here.

Creative Suite Comics

Circa January 6th, 2016

A poorly made comic creator. You can place characters you can pose, speech bubbles, borders/lines and set a background image. It is pretty limited in functionality.

For more information and to download it, check out its game page available here.

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Recent Projects

Website Updates

Over the two months I've made some small, incremental updates to the website. I figured this would be a good opportunity to post a short changelog!

• Improved general website styling
• User profiles can now reported (yeah I somehow forgot to add this, oops)
• Optimized several pages greatly reducing load times
• The forums index now updates much quicker
• Reorganized the forums and merged a few of them together
• Added a secret developer forum
• Added new "API" and "stats" pages to the top secret game developer panel.
• Added the ability to create leaderboards within the top secret game developer panel.
• All leaderboard entries can now be browsed
• Added elapsed time formatting support to leaderboards

API Renovation

One larger change that took much more work but will likely go unnoticed by most players is the API renovation. It should now be much easier for outside developers to work with in the future. I've reorganized it, made things more consistent, changed some logic/responses and documented all of it. Most importantly, it's all been moved to https://api.ezcha.net!

Godot Plugin

In conjunction with the API revamp I also abandoned the current internal plugin for interacting with the API within the Godot game engine and made an entirely new one. I kept the new API changes in mind, gave it a useful interface and made it much more user-friendly. I plan on making this plugin available on Github and in the Godot asset library so that in the future external developers can also use it in their own games!

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Future Plans and Projects

My main goal right now is to get the game developer panel in a state where it is ready for external developers to use, so more of them can join the platform. It's almost there! The main holdup is that currently there is no way to upload games or their assets, for example, thumbnails and banners. With how things currently are I must manually upload all of that to the CDN myself, which can be a chore and a bottleneck in the process. Once I have the website updated to automatically handle and process uploads I will invite more devs to the platform and open up public applications. After all this is done I will be able to move my focus back to my own games that are larger in scope.

Other than that, I am working on a small game. I can't show much but here's a fun and unrelated gif!

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Shout-outs

One last thing! Before the end of this post I want to thank some people who have helped out the platform.

• blockerlocker
  • Contributed several music tracks and sound effects for many games on the platform, along with always providing good feedback when I need it. He has been here since the beginning.
• Max
  • Has been making news posts, along with acting as a bit as an editor for my own. He has also been working on some cool secret projects for the platform.
• Nimi
  • Recently sent me some great design mockups, inspiring a future project that we started collaborating towards. He developed the Thieves at Sea game, which blockerlocker and Voxy who are also on this list worked on quite a bit!
• Voxy
  • Made the Ezcha logo, color scheme and has updated them over the years. He has given me feedback on UI designs along with contributing some of his own. He has also been here since the early days.

Not to mention all the members of the site! Especially those who have continued to consistently visit the website, such as (but not limited to!) Yek and Con. There is also Tdit and 1ris who may just be the most active members! They are both about to reach streak milestones of 200 and 100 respectively. Don't forget to congratulate them on the forums in a few days!

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That's all I have to share today, thanks for making it to the end. If you enjoyed this post or have any feedback consider leaving a comment below!

See you later! -Dylan