WestSloth Games: New website with brand-new domain!

In addition to game development hobby I have improved my web development skills by creating and developing websites for my own purposes.

Now I have taken a step towards cloud services and web backend by releasing brand-new landing page for our released games:
http://www.westsloth.com/

Page features:
- Single-page, album-style design
- Responsive, scales for all screen sizes
- Admin console with login for adding/removing/modifying games entries easily

Under the hood:
- Django web framework
- Bootstrap front-end component library
- Local MySQL database. Option to use Postgresql e.g. from Amazon RDS
- Gunicorn Python WSGI HTTP server
- NGINX web server
- Runs on single Amazon Lightsail instance (AWS EC2, in practice)
- Amazon Route 53 for domain hosting and DNS

Kuvahaun tulos haulle django logo
Basically, building simple landing page using Django was surprisingly easy: There are plenty of good tutorials available all over the web and almost all issues were solved by googling error messages. It took me approx 2 hours to get first version up and running on my PC using test server.

But then the hard part was to get same project running on VPS (AWS in my case). I tried two different Django setups: the first one was running on EC2 with Apache2 web server, and the second one was set up to Amazon Lightsail using Gunicorn and Nginx. For me the latter one was easier to get running, mainly because I had solved most of the issues when trying to get wsgi setup file to work with Apache server. :)

So, if you have issues setting up Django based apps on AWS using Gunicorn and Nginx (or Apache), I might be able to help. I have already gone the hard way with them. :)

Django project files (excluding local settings) are available on my Github:
https://github.com/jliias/westsloth-project
Please note, that this is not exactly the same version that is running on westsloth homepage. Some setup changes are required to get things running on different environments.

-Jussi

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unity3D mirror using camera and RenderTexture

Image
There are several ways to create mirror in Unity3D. Some of them require more scripting than others, but I will now present an easy way using just one extra camera and RenderTexture.  In this solution you will use RenderTexture on an object and place camera behind that object. This is easy option that does not require scripting. Alternatively you can use reflective shader, but it requires some more work. Seven small steps to create object with mirror RenderTexture: Create new Unity project. It is recommended to use latest LTS version (Long Term Support).I was using Unity 2020.1.3f1 version for this example.   Create plane object for ground and Cube for the mirror object. Scale both objects to match your needs.  Create new camera for attaching the RenderTexture. Position it inside recently created cube and adjust direction so that it is pointing out to the direction where mirror should be reflecting the image.  Create RenderTexture. Name it as you wish. No need to modify any other setti
Read more

Unity3D: Convert Seconds to hh:mm:ss Format

Image
Update 17.8.2021: Replaced obsolete Monodevelop with Visual Studio where applicable.  I have gradually started to use Unity3D for game development. So far I have been doing very small and simple test codes just to learn how certain things should be done with Unity. But now I have an example that might be of interest for other wannabe-Unity3D users, at least those who are struggling with converting seconds to HH:MM:SS format. :) So lets begin with this example. First of all, start Unity3D and create new project. This example uses the console only for outputting result, so project can be either 2D or 3D. Whichever you prefer. Create empty object to your scene ( ctrl+shift+N ), or use pulldown menu ( GameObject->Create Empty ). Select empty object and rename it e.g. to " Timer ". Add new C# script component to empty object and name it as " TimerActions " ( Add Component->New Script->write name and select Csharp as script type ): Open TimerAction
Read more

Construct 2: if-then-elseif-else statement

Image
Do you have an idea how to implement IF-THEN-ELSEIF-ELSE statement with Construct 2? At least I had to think for a while how to do it. It seems that this basic structure is not so straightforward to implement in C2. I was creating a very simple game where boxes were moving from left to right. See example below: The color of each box is chosen randomly, so it required the usage of random() function and if-then-else statement. There are probably several ways to do this, but I wanted to make this as simple as possible inside one single event and action box.  Normally I would create a if-then-elseif-else structure like this to select color for the box (pseudo-code just for an example): if randomNumber == 0       set colorOfBox = "red" else if randomNumber == 1       set colorOfBox = "yellow" else if randomNumber == 2       set colorOfBox = "green" else       set colorOfBox = "blue" end if But when using Construct 2 t
Read more