Toontown: Event Horizon

The Website Update

Posted on September 25, 2023 by The Mission Control
The Website Update

Introduction

Greetings Spacefarers!

The Event Horizon team are proud to mark the release of our brand new website with our first ever blog post!

We would like to take this time to thank you for continuing to follow the development of our game. We are a small team of just under 40 members, but we’ve been cooking up a storm! We’re working on more content than ever before and the fire has never burned brighter.

So, what’s all this about a new website?

Well, we’re so glad you asked! The new TT:EVH website is the hub for our game and it’s future updates. Lovingly put together by our staff team, we hope you’ll enjoy every part of it. And who knows what might be discovered within these pages?

The Mission Control

Designing

Toontown: Event Horizon is a story that takes place in the furthest reaches of space. And as such, we wanted our website to reflect that to any and all newcomers discovering the game for the very first time. I spent a solid month creating nearly every single asset you see here, from the patterned background to the space dust to all the toons. The first prototype took a lot of work, but fun fact, it also doubled as a class final! It was a lot of trial and error getting the best web design solidified, but once everything came together, we couldn’t be happier with the results.

The Figma design used for the website.
The Figma design used for the website.

You may have noticed that our website comes with an Artwork page. That’s because we’re proud to announce the website will also be home to many of our current and future art pieces that will make our game into what it is! As our development progresses, we will be adding content, crediting our artists, and displaying them on our website for anyone to easily access and enjoy. One of the goals we wanted to achieve was having most of our revealed art in one easy-to-find place, and the Artwork page felt like the perfect opportunity.

The Comics page is – you guessed it – where we’ll be displaying upcoming comics that will give you a glimpse into the world of Toontown: Event Horizon. These stories are only intended to be supplementary to the game where the real substance of the plot will be. So if you miss out on an issue – no worries! You’ll be able to easily find and navigate them all on the website, anyhow! As of writing we don’t have any to share, but plenty is in the works, so stay tooned!

CyberByte | Creative Lead

Putting it all together

At the end of 2022, we’ve decided we needed a new website. The old website had quite a few problems with it:

  • It was really slow. Even something as simple as opening the index page could take a few seconds.
  • It was very fragile. For code simplicity, when working on the old website, I decided to run our Discord bot inside the website. However, the library I used turned out to be rather glitchy and broke practically every month, so I had to monkey-patch fixes for it fairly often.
  • As a result of our web development team’s inexperience with mobile-ready design back in 2022, the navigation panel looked like this on phones:
...Yeah.
...Yeah.

I started reworking the website in December 2022. Some of these problems were fixed, but the website just didn’t feel good enough. It was also too hard to manage the code with some features I wanted to add, so these features were ultimately scrapped. Funnily enough, this form used a program that was ultimately dissolved a few months ago, and all of its documentation was lost as well, so this version was totally unsalvageable.

The configuration form for our application positions (February 2023).
The configuration form for our application positions (February 2023).

After experiments with these features I took a long break from working on web systems – until July. It took roughly two weeks to get the first mockup of the website based on the awesome Retro’s designs:

First day of development of the new version (July 2023).
First day of development of the new version (July 2023).
Work-in-progress mobile navigation panel.
Work-in-progress mobile navigation panel.

The rest of my work on the website was polishing, website integration with our backend systems (which also were rewritten from scratch) and implementation of the new administration structures. And there it is! The website is now fully complete and ready for use.

Even though I haven’t enjoyed web development in the past, working on this was an absolute pleasure and I’m looking forward to maintaining this website in the future.

Wizzerinus | Technical Lead

We’d like to thank you all again for following our development and we are excited to dive further into all the new things we have in store!