I'm sure a lot of people are wondering what all brought this on.  Back when I originally built OGA, I was new to Drupal and didn't really know what I was doing, so I ended up making a lot of design mistakes, particularly in the structure of the site.  What ended up happening was that OGA was essentially built on a spaghetti code, so changes often had far-reaching and unexpected consequences. 

Furthermore, from a theme standpoint, I found the original theme annoyingly limiting -- for instance, the sidebar on the right was too narrow, and wasn't very good for conveying information.  Also, the site title was way bigger than it needed to be, and wasted a lot of space.  Plus, the menus were starting to get out of control.

At any rate, this move represents the jump from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.  I've been spending the last several months writing about 2,000 lines of migration code, which reorganized the site into something a bit easier for me to work with and expand on under the hood.  While OGA 2.0 isn't anywhere near done yet, this at least opens up the possibility of building it easily, so it should speed up the development process a lot (plus, I'll be able to add things incrementally now instead of dumping all the features on everyone all at once).

For now, I've added a couple of new goodies:

• User profile pictures
• Forum searching
• Gold medals now replace silver medals, which replace bronze medals (although you can view all of your medals on your profile page)

The rest of the OGA 2 features (including art collections, which is the big one) will appear as they're finished.

The last 30 days have been a whirlwind of development as Flare officially moved to GitHub. Finally we have a new release to share!

This release is all about wrapping the core gameplay in main menus, pushing Flare closer to feature-completeness. Now players have four game slots to experiment with different builds. Also, choose your gender and a portrait for your hero or heroine!

View the Official Release Notes

Special thanks to the crew who contributed directly to v0.14: Brandon Morris, Justin Nichol, kitano, Thane "pennomi" Brimhall, wokste, Alexander Olkhovskiy, Artur "zear" Rotek, Bonbadil, and Paul-Wortmann. And thanks to everyone here at OpenGameArt for the endless stream of feedback and testing!