by Today marks two years since Windlyn came online!
At first progress was slow. I was completely new to web management programming (beyond HTML), and it took the better part of the first year for me to even begin to figure out what I was doing. Windlyn started off as a little pocket project for me to work on between school and other extracurricular activities, and to create a fun environment for my buddy Lime, our friends, and other people to hang out in.
We've really grown a lot since the start, both as a site and a community. If you've been here from the start, thank you for your continued support! If you haven't, welcome, and we hope to see you around lots more in the future!
For now, you can take a little "trip down memory lane" with me, as they say, and see some before/after pictures.
We started off as a series of (really chaotic) sketches in a few of my class notebooks:
After we came online, the overall look of the site continued to change a lot.
Especially the forums:
Even the index:
Before:
After:
The avatars took the longest to develop, and are, I think, the most prominent changes.
Both the system itself, which underwent many, many, many redesigns for easy-to-use UI as well as function:
And the actual design of the avatars.
We ended up going through a ton of iterations of the avatar design (only some are shown above, most are on scraps of paper floating around my room), changing styles and poses to arrive at the avatars you see today! We got a lot of awesome feedback from the community during the redesigning phases, thank you for helping us develop the avatars!
We added and reworked a lot of features, just to name a few:
NPCs and Shops:
Clubs:
We've run events, added tons of new items, and there's still more to do!
As always, thank you for your support, and please stay tuned for incoming features!
Don't forget to pick up your special items from the Summer Palooza today!
