Shall we be honest? This game started life as a set of notes as I tried to pick apart a fabulously inefficient and tangled mess of another game. Darkness Falls was basically built on a list of "why the f*** didn't they....s". Seriously, back when they'd started writing it no-one had known how to do SQL joins; I found recursive code that was hitting the database HUNDREDS OF TIMES to build one query. Magnificent, in a faintly insane way. By the time I got anywhere near understanding how they'd cobbld together their game, I had pages of notes on how to do it better. So I did. And the result served as a college project and it served as a calling card into the wonderful world of software development, where I discovered that the wonderful world of software development is a hotbed of minor public school laddery.
(Allow me to tell you about the time the office I was working in was visited by a trans-gendered developer. Who was followed to the toilet by my colleagues to see which one she went in. Yah, software development is that kind of world. Last time I looked they were bemoaning the lack of women and global majority people getting into it, and blaming the schools. Criticise not the speck in your neighbour's eye... as someone smarter than me once said.)
Or another time when the sysop freely admitted that he was trying to pressure his girlfriend into letting him have an open relationship. While his girlfriend was having treatment for cancer, and he was taking huge amounts of time off to "support" her. Class act!
Anyway, I have put that world behind me, although not before making a lot of money so cheers software people! You were almost entirely soul-dead public schoolboy tossers, but you were lucrative public schoolboy tossers, so cheers!
And then Zend (please hurry up and get a (corporate!) grave, I need something to dance on) made PHP backwards-noncompatible, so pretty near everything written in PHP 5.x broke in PHP 7.x
Darkeness Falls the game was written in PHP 5.6
And here's the weirdness. Darkness Falls was about a small bunch of misfits given a curse but also the opportunity to save the world. Yes they were (pranic) vampires, but that meant they were the only people strong enough to push back the larger far more dangerous demons pushing at the edge of this world. The world needed its outsiders to save its ass.
Darkness Falls was intended from the outset to be Queer. Inclusive. It had positive gay characters from the start. Gender was optional on the character create page from day one. There was no gender check on the marriage page. Gender and sexuality were irrelevant.
So why the almighty **** did it attract so many maga types? What was that all about? Did the oppressor view itself as the plucky outsider? As I type that there's a horrible... yes, yes that particular subset of the white dominant class, that refusenik of human complexity, with everyone in their place, only one religion and only two genders, does seem to regard themselves as the plucky outsider. Defending freedom by taking it away. Incredible.
I suppose there was a clue in the Sisterhood - there were factions you could join, and there were titles, and in the Order you were master and grand master, the usual genre clichés; in the Sisterhood you were Sacred Mother and High Priestess. I got death threats from male players refusing to have female titles. People rage quit. Men, men rage quit. Buh bye lads. Arse slam door etc.
You're probably wondering what this has to do with anything. It has to do with the game fell over in.... when was PHP 7 released? Stone me, 2015. I was able to keep a discrete server running 5.6 for a while, but that fell over some years later.
As an aside I read on Wikipedia that 50% of websites are running PHP 7, which hasn't been security supported for a couple of years, and 13% are running PHP 5 which hasn't been security supported for half a decade. PHP8.0 is already out of support. Zend seem to consider long term support to be something you measure in weeks. Seriously god rot PHP. God rot it. NEVER EVER USE PHP FOR ANYTHING SECURE OR MISSION CRITICAL. Anyway...
DF would require a full rewrite, from scratch. I'd have to relearn a language I despise, again almost from scratch, I have no guarantee that it would be supported even for the couple of years it would take me to finish the project; and for what? To attract more magas? To almighty hell with that.
To almighty hell with that.
I'm sorry DF, I will always be grateful to you for how you changed my life, but the past belongs in the past.
Ged xx