At the beginning of ENG 351, we were tasked with describing ourselves in a site we built using HTML. A simple task, but digging in revealed a lot more work than expected. And from the start I wanted the site, as infantile as it would be, to represent me in some way. Who I was, what I valued, a little bit deeper than “Hi, me Ryan, me English major”. So I got creative with the design and attempted to recreate the game Darkest Dungeon in HTML, and it was harder than I thought it would be. Slowly and logically testing every change and revision, I landed on the final product, as you can see below.

A childish attempt at replicating the layout of the hit indie game Darkest Dungeon, I still felt it was a good swing for a first time HTML site. It was way harder than I thought to get the images to behave and stay in the line/correct size, but I did a decent job at it. I made the title red to mimic the red title of the game, and then gave a very brief description of myself and my interests. I’m not huge on talking about myself, so it was hard to find much to put beyond what I had here.

Then, at the bottom, is an embedded video from Darkest Dungeon itself, and acts as a life line for this silly page. You watch it and realize the game is way cooler than my depiction of it.

But, for revisions, it was hard to find things to change. Its such a bare bones and simplistic project, and in my case had very little info. But, in order to justify the appearance of the page a bit more, I cleaned up a lot and added some description.

I had an italic thing at the top, but that was distracting from the rest of the page and wasn’t required, so I removed it. I kept the same description of myself as before, since nothing huge has changed in it since the beginning of the semester. I also resized the Collector (cage head guy) and added some of his creepy minions he summons – the heads and spine of past adventurers. I also added a description of Darkest Dungeon and why it looks the way it does (characters in a row, spooky, etc).

We talked briefly in class about how jargon and other specialized words or ideas can alienate people from websites or content, that the rhetoric can form a gate. I wanted to explain what Darkest Dungeon as a game instead of just some spooky images and videos. I explained why they were in a line, how that affected the game, and how the theme of the game impacts the gameplay and mechanics. The description only scratched the surface of the game, but I intended for it to just de-mystify the game a little bit.