The New ohiofgc.com

Where we were and where we're going

Cory "corjam" Sutyak • Jan. 25, 2023

Allow me to take you on a journey into our history. A little over three years ago, November of 2019, "K*" and myself combined our powers in a beautiful ginger union. As TO's we had an issue of visibility. Ohio as a state is huge and our regions are not close together. Our major hubs are usually at least 2 hours away from one another. We all have different discords/twitters/other social media profiles. Unless you, as a prospective new player to the scene, knew exactly what you were looking for, chances are you wouldn't be able to find information about your local fighting game scene.

K* had the idea to make a google calendar for all of Ohio's events. I had web development skills. Together we made the original ohiofgc.com. A central place Ohio Fighting Game Players can go to be empowered to connect with their local scene. That was (and still is) our mission statement.

The original site was a simple one pager that aggregated the calendar and all of the social media links for all of the local scenes. It was simplistically beautiful and an incredible success. I know many players who only found out about the scene because they found the website. We were often the first google result for any search term related to finding local ohio fighting game events. The site also has helped facilitate cross pollination/collaboration of the different scenes which was vital during the pandemic. Additionally, the source code for the website was made open source. The Pennsylvania scene forked the code and have their own version of the site running. All of those successes made the efforts worth it.

Click Here To See The Original Website

So, why change? Why now? This past November, I realized we hit our 3rd year anniversary of the original site launching. I'm not one to really care about anniversaries, but that realization had me thinking. What are the problems we still have? What can we be doing better?

For starters, the biggest pitfall of the previous site was keeping the calendar up to date. The system we had before was essentially someone telling K* or myself that they wanted an event added to the calendar and then we would add it to the google calendar. While it wasn't a hard process, it was an annoying process and prone to us straight up forgetting. The second largest pitfall was that the old site was entirely static. Any changes that needed to be made required me to update the html. Which, again, wasn't a hard process, but it was annoying. As a result of the site being a simple static site, we were also incredibly limited in what we can do with it.

With great tenacity, I spent the past month or so crafting the site you're seeing now. This new site was made to correct those previously mentioned problems. Instead of us having to manually update the calendar, TO's can now have an account on the site to manage their events themselves. We are also using a shiny Content Management System to build new/modify existing pages as needed, allowing more dynamic content.

For those technically inclined, we are using a heavily modified version of Wagtail, which is a CMS built on top Python/Django for the backend. I am extremely proficient with this stack and I'll be able to extend it in just about any way I want, which excites me to no end. If you are also proficient with this stack, are a member of the community, and would like to contribute, please reach out to me. Help is always appreciated.

How will this project be extended in the future? Here are my current ideas:

• A platform for the community to publish their guides and their stories.
• A stat tracking system that can import challonge/start.gg brackets for the ohio scene.
• Integrations with discord and twitter to auto-post events & content.

And that's it. New website, new logo, new motto, new possibilities and hopefully new opportunities. With the next generation of fighting games starting with Strive and continuing with SF6 and T8, among countless others, I think this is an exciting time for our scene to attract the new players that arrive as these games drop. If you have any interesting ideas for the site, let us know!