Project Timeline
- 2018 – December 2020: Initial content creation. Building trophy guides across multiple platforms and communities based on thousands of hours of gameplay mastery.
- December 2020 – September 2025: Recreating all guides in my own style using Blogger’s visual editor (Compose View). This era focused on rewriting, reorganizing, and establishing my personal guide philosophy.
- September 2025 – October 2026: Developing a minor grasp of syntax that rapidly evolved into a full understanding of underlying front-end principles. This period transformed my work from “content creation” into “front-end development and pipeline engineering.”
How It Started
From 2018 through the end of 2020, I created trophy guides because I kept encountering outdated, inefficient, and poorly structured guides across the internet. Many lists lacked clarity, organization, or modern UX considerations. So I decided to create my own versions, backed by thousands of hours of gameplay, research, and mastery.
My earliest guides were published on TrueTrophies.com, covering complex games such as Metal Gear Survive, Payday 2 (PS3), Payday: Crimewave Edition, Payday: The Heist, The Sims 4, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege.
These games required extensive research and documentation because their trophy lists involve:
- deep mechanical systems
- RNG-heavy or grind-heavy progression
- multiplayer coordination
- complex DLC ecosystems
- high skill ceilings
Writing guides for these titles meant breaking down systems, optimizing routes, documenting hidden mechanics, and creating reliable strategies for players of all skill levels.
Era 1 — Compose View Rebuild (December 2020 - September 2025)
Starting in 2020, I took all my existing guides and began recreating them in Blogger’s Compose View. I removed traditional elements like roadmaps, completion time estimates, and “number of playthroughs required” because they are often misleading, inconsistent, or irrelevant for open-ended games.
My reasoning:
- Roadmaps force a linear structure onto games that are not linear.
- Completion times vary wildly based on skill, RNG, and player experience.
- Playthrough counts don’t apply to games with dynamic or replayable systems.
This era was about establishing my own writing style and guide philosophy.
Era 2 — HTML Cleanup (September 2025)
When I opened Blogger’s HTML editor, I saw what I call “div soup” — messy, repetitive markup generated by the visual editor. I manually cleaned and restructured around 30 guides into consistent, readable HTML.
This was the first step toward treating my guides like a maintainable codebase rather than isolated documents.
Era 3 — CSS & DRY Principles (2025)
During this same period, I learned CSS and began applying DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principles. This led to the creation of my custom theme — a structured CSS component system that powers all trophy blocks across my guides.
Instead of styling each guide individually, I built reusable components:
- trophy blocks
- overview sections
- DLC nodes
- metadata labels
- consistent spacing and typography
This transformed my guides from isolated pages into a unified design system.
Era 4 — JavaScript & Filtering (2025 - 2026)
Beginning in September 2025, I focused heavily on front-end development. As my guides grew, some lists reached 50+ trophies. Scrolling became inefficient, especially for games with large DLC libraries.
To solve this, I learned JavaScript and built a filtering system that allows users to instantly find:
- specific trophies
- specific DLC chapters
- specific tags (story, multiplayer, buggy, etc.)
This was the moment my guides evolved from static pages into interactive tools.
Era 5 — Tag System
Inspired by PSNProfiles, I added a tag system to label trophies with important metadata:
- Story
- Multiplayer Required
- Co-op Recommended
- Buggy
- Time-Limited
- Paid DLC / Free DLC
These tags integrate directly with the filtering system, giving users precise control over what they want to see.
Era 6 — Earned-Trophy Checkboxes & Progress Counters
The newest addition is the earned-trophy checkbox system. Users can now mark trophies as earned, automatically collapsing their descriptions and saving progress between visits.
This system has now been expanded with:
- Platinum Progress Counter — earned vs total trophies
- DLC Progress Counters — earned vs total trophies per DLC
- Paid/Free DLC filtering via
data-dlc-type
These counters update in real time and require no retroactive edits thanks to global script logic.
Why This Matters
This entire evolution shows that I can:
- identify inefficiencies
- design scalable solutions
- refactor legacy content
- build reusable components
- maintain a large content codebase
- create a full modernization pipeline
- finalize a stable architecture
What began as simple trophy guides has grown into a fully engineered content platform. This demonstrates my ability to build, maintain, and evolve complex systems — a skill directly relevant to front-end development, documentation engineering, and UX system design.
During this period, I also discovered that the way I learn technical concepts is not typical. What many neurotypical developers take 3–5 years to fully internalize — DOM structure, CSS architecture, DRY principles, JavaScript event flow, and the underlying logic of syntax — I absorbed in under a year. I originally assumed this pace was “normal,” but it turned out to be a reflection of how my brain naturally processes systems, patterns, and structure.
No comments:
Post a Comment