Since I started working on Iridium Moons, I immediately knew I wanted to make it a fake retro setting that looks like it might have been created in the 80s, with a tone and feel of space movies that were coming out during that time, which in turn were visually referencing earlier movies from the 50s. That had me thinking about how much Kaendor is inspired by videogames from the mid 90s to mid 2000s, and how I’m a huge fan of recent indy-games going for a look that emulates the old Quake engine. (Which I still think is the best looking engine to this day.)
This had me considering to set up an archive with Iridum Moon setting information in the style of ASCII text files, which you still would run into occasionally for homebrew material in the early 2000s. Which in turn had me also remember old sites like Sorcerer’s Place or Mimir.net. Which turn out to still be around in all their classic glory!
Letting my ADHD take the reins, I went looking for options to make and host sites in that old style. And as it turns out, Neocities is already a thing. It’s actually been around since 2013, but somehow I never heard of it or recall running into any site hosted there. I don’t know how Geocities actually worked back in the day (it’s been defunct since 2009), but Neocities is just a joy to work with. The main interface is basically a folder view of all your pages and files, and it allows you to directly open and edit any of the HTML and CSS files in the browser. No need to upload the new updated version of the file with ftp to see how things look after every single change. Just click on save and refresh the website you have open in a second tab. You can even have multiple files open in editing mode at the same time in multiple tabs, which makes trying out new changes on the fly so much faster and easier than I remember it.
And it’s just so much fun!
I used to think it more than a bit silly that people are again or still making their own RPG magazines with scissors and a photocopier and bind them with a stapler. But I think this is exactly the same thing, just for my generation. It’s just a joy to fiddle around with it and see the results appearing on screen.
Just look at this horrible beauty!
