This is a project I used to learn Laravel back in 2015, early on in my web development career. It was originally a mess of PHP with no framework, and the implementation into Laravel was pretty sloppy and ignored several best practices. I've decided to publicly share it now partially beacuse it's fun to share and also because it resonated with the Besiege community.
Besiege, a sandbox video game developed by Spiderling Studios, allows players to build medieval siege engines. It was released in "early access" in January 2015, which is when I first purchased and played it. At the time, players found it challenging to share their game saves in a consistent, reliable manner. I saw this and used it as an opportunity to make this project.
I managed this website from 2015 to 2019. However, as the game's popularity waned and Spiderling Studios introduced improved file sharing support via the Steam Workshop platform, I decided to shut it down. Regrettably, the final backup of all image files and game saves was deleted due to its substantial size and my reluctance to risk re-uploading any inappropriate content that users occasionally submitted to be cheeky or perhaps malicious. I also reached out to Spiderling Studios to see if they wanted to take over the website but received no response.
I was happy with this project when made it in 2015. It became the go-to website for Besiege, second only to the publisher's own site and Steam, and the first ranked site for sharing Besiege game saves. Over its four-year lifespan, it hosted tens of thousands of user-submitted files and images, serving millions of page views and file downloads.
I have many notes for my past self looking back on this code. However, I remain thankful for this website and the opportunity to learn a lot about web development and building an online community. It represented a significant step in my professional programming career and helped me get my first job doing dedicated web development later in 2015.