Project Galaxy is Dead?

Project Galaxy, the project which I have hyped on my blog for the past few months is most likely dead as of September 3rd, 2010 at roughly 12:05 AM. The remaining publisher who we held out hope for has declined our offer. I am extremely heart broken as a result.

Galaxy was essentially supposed to be an online games portal with a core idea behind it. The goal for us was to pitch the project to potentially interested parties, continue development, and make our partners some money.

Fixing "Whitespace is not allowed at this location" Bugs With PHP

Have you ever opened up an RSS feed and been greeted with the following error?

Whitespace is not allowed at this location.

Line: X Character: X

This is usually because your RSS feed features characters which stop it from properly parsing feed. Characters like, &, <, >, etc are usually to blame, they are known as "reserved characters".

If your RSS feed is pulling content from your blog for instance, one way of fixing the issue is simply editing posts that use those characters and remove them. This might work if you have a post or two with the following issue, but what if you have dozens?

An Update On Things

Its been a while since I've blogged about anything last. I left for Winnipeg last Saturday and got back home Wednesday night. We went for a family event that a long time friend of my dads was holding. Winnipeg was great, I was able to take a few sights and meet some fantastic people in the process.

Project Galaxy seems to be back on, I sent a proposal to a game publisher asking if they would be interested Thursday night. We haven't heard back from them yet but are still holding out hope for good news.

Another Shelved Project?

Unfortunately, it seems the project that was previously alluded to may not be coming together at all.

I've been told I have big ambitions and am a creative person, whether any of that is true, I don't know. The idea started years ago yet wasn't developed into what we had in mind until late June of this year. We were supposed to get a quick demo up in about a weeks time to show to potentially interested parties. We didn't meet that date. Even now, the project is probably about 70% finished, we have quite a few things to do before we can show it to anyone. Charlie and I have other programming projects we maintain, even some that we were collaborating on so we didn't want to spend too much time on a tech demo if there was no guarantee that it could go anywhere since we would only lose time and resources.

Programming: What I've Been Doing Lately

Charlie Page of Insane Visions and I have been working on an upcoming PHP project codenamed "Project Galaxy". We can't go into specifics at this moment but it will hopefully be pitched to game publishers interested in the idea. On a personal level the project combines everything I've learned in the gaming industry and in University when it comes to business. As a team, Charlie and I were able to bring our coding experiences to the table to build a good framework from the ground up.

I'm not a great programmer by any means, I'm more of a concepts person, despite this I was still able to make good progress on a personal level with the project. Seeing Galaxy get to this stage (about 75-80% finished) was not easy by any means. To a certain extent I was burnt out with programming, Charlie became flooded with work. Scheduling issues were present, finding people who could work for cheap was also tough. Other issues were really with the code itself, in the beginning it was a nightmare, if something broke all work on the project had to be stopped until it could be fixed. What was supposed to finish in a week began to drag on.