Today was a day for work on Pharmacium, and still is. For those that don't know what Pharmacium is, well, it's basically a quiz game for Pharmacology students that connects to a database maintained by professors. I built it in Flash for my junior project, but it needs more content to keep it interesting as a study tool.
The artist from the project has moved on, which could be a problem... it's not that I'm a bad artist so much as I am a slow one. Essentially, there comes a point when one must except they can not be "the best there is at what they do" if they try to do too many things at the same time. As one of my professors puts it, to make great games you really need to be a "Jack of all trades, and a master of one". I had to choose something to drop to "jack class" to make room for improvement, and art took the hit(I kept my design and programming and get better every day). Still, I'm a passable artist given enough time, and I know people who are very proficient in 2D art which I may be able to outsource to.
The most unfortunate part of Pharmacium's development story is when we(myself and the client) started to stock the database; we found a bug inside of Drupal (an open source data management system I was recommended). Yes the bug is actually IN Drupal, but open source is known to have such pitfalls ;) The bug prevents the database search from working if more than 9 entries match a category, probably caused by a counting variable being set to a form that locks it to a single integer or something along those lines.
Anyhow, I had to leave the project hanging while I was leading the Maximum Chaos programming team, but now that the major coding is over I can go back to fixing Pharmacium.
So here is the hard part, as amazing as my programming skills have become (I'm not bragging, seriously, it actually amazes me because 3 years ago I never dreamed of reaching such a high level... if you are starting out and feel this way, keep pushing, in 3 years you could be amazing too)... okay enough inspirational tangents... so as good as I am at front end stuff, the back end... well I just haven't ever really done much with it before. It might have been better if I had written my own data system, but I cut corners to "save time" (ha ha, backfired). To get to the point, I didn't write Drupal, I don't know a heck of a lot about how these systems are made, and now I have to some how fix it... yeah...
There is some good new though, since I had to let the problem sit for 4 months, a lot of patches have come out for Drupal and I am crossing my fingers one of them fixes the problem we encountered, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Today I have been uploading all the new patches into the server and now I must reconfigure the permissions again to allow my flash front end to talk to it. Then it's on to either reading the database code and trying to find that bad variable, or finding one of the brilliant back end programmers who spends their free time playing with Drupal to do it for me :)
Wow, I droned on a lot more on this post than I expected, but it's a good activity while waiting for uploads... beats random facebook games anyhow. Cheers!
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