Home > Root > Log book > Situation February 2026
Situation February 2026
Friday 13 February 2026, by
All the versions of this article: [English] [français]
Since mid-november, a happy event has led me to stop having any possibility to work on programming the engine of my adventure game, which had before that advanced a bit.
If you follow this blog, I had started to program a PHP front/backend to create rooms and links between them, in order to interactively build a little universe in which the visitor can wander. The idea was to do a smaller-scale project than DiaVN, which would allow me to reach the finish line before the birth of the baby.
Well, I did shoot myself in the foot in several ways:
- first I decided to write my program using Literate Programming (because why not?), which then took me twice the time as if I had coded it normally
- one of my goals was visitor interaction, so this means spam management, security, etc.
- instead of having a simple backend protected by a .htaccess I wanted to have a modern backend with a login form where you can edit content in place. This has lots of consequences in terms of security and led to a lot of extra development work.
Long story short this did not move forward fast enough, and now the baby is her and it is too late, at least for now, to finish this programming (which is about 60% ready). I am stuck on security and the management interface.
(when will I manage to finish something? you might ask. You are right. DiaVN is not finished, this is not finished... Nothing gets finished with me. Well, ain’t I a free-software loser.)
But maybe I’m not, once again, doing this right. I’m not facing the reality of my very small available time. Instead of trying to program everything myself like a caveperson, why don’t I reuse something existing - and moreover, something I already have in place on my website? I mean the very fine CMS Spip.
| Functionality | My development | Spip |
|---|---|---|
| Create rooms | Editorial backend not done | We can just use articles for this |
| Edit a room from the frontend by clicking a button | same | Spip does that |
| Create a new link & room from an existing room | Backend in progress | Can’t be done exactly but can be approximated by creating a new Article, then linking it to the existing Article |
| Allow the visitor to suggest ideas (with antispam + notification when idea validated) | Ready | Forums spip + plugin nospam (? for visitor notification) |
| Create a new link | Backend missing | Manual link creation in articles |
| Display a picture or a gif, play a music | Frontend incomplete | Need to create a Skeleton for the game |
| Change the page’s background color and calculate the text color from it | Works | Maybe with plug-in Champ Extras ? |
| The "bug" parallel universe | Implemented | ??? not sure how to do this, but idea can be abandoned |
| Security | handmade, so risky | externalized to Spip team |
| Game-specific URLs | implemented | need to figure out how to use separate URLs for the blog and the game |
It appears from the above that Spip already does a lot, and I might win a lot of time by using it and only developing the front-end game skeleton. So, why not consider this seriously, even if this means that yet another development project from Mathieu gets abandoned? This would allow me to optimize my time (or lack thereof) and get started with the game and not get stuck on the engine.
And maybe later in the future, if there is still an internet and if the old projects on which my work derives still exist (for example Dia, AS or SDCC which have old-people teams or maintained by retired people...), I might find time again to program.
And right now, the first priority should be to spend more time with our baby who needs a happy and cheerful parent, not one who keeps regretting to not have enough time for his creative life.