One year ago today I started work on GBF Guide. Because of that, I wanted to ramble a bit on the creation of the site and what its meant to me. This won’t really be about GBF so feel free to skip.

Year One

Creating it was really a spur of the moment idea. I had been prescribed an increased dosage of antidpressants and in the resulting high I decided sure why not I’ll do it. At the time I don’t think I could have predicted how much work I’ve actually done for it.

Originally the site started off as mostly copying the work done by Lolicore and cendol with their Wind Guide with their knowledge of course. From there I focused on one element at a time and found myself changing things around with each update as more progress was made and I realized how I wanted to focus things or limitations of my earlier ideas.

For example, grids on the site were images of grids built in granblue.party. It wasn’t until I was four elements in I decided to create a way to make a native grid builder. That in turn required rebuilding all the stuff I had beforehand.

In the last year, I have really learned a lot both about web development and Granblue itself. I have not once regretted starting this for those reasons.

The day the site went fully public was definitely a scary day. I don’t normally put myself out there like that due to social anxiety issues. I was so nervous going live that I sat there for a few hours with everything written up to afraid to press the button. Every message I got was immediate panic even though everything was positive or constructive feedback. This said I really do appreciate those kinds words. Thank you everyone for finding what I have done useful.

Since I started work on this, I have unfortunately been dealing with nonstop medical issues. I’ve been working on getting them resolved as they come up but still it has slowed a lot of work I’ve wanted to do so far. Last GW, I got COVID during Round 1 which made for a rough time. I’ve not fully bounced back from getting it either. Despite that, I’ve getting back into work on the site in the last couple of weeks. It’s been slow but steady.

Due to the previously mentioned  anxiety issues and depression, I have had many doubts along the way. Lot of times thoughts of can I even do this or should I even do this popped into my head. Imposter syndrome definitely hit full force many times. I really appreciate the words of encouragement from my crew that really helped push me though those thoughts.

Likewise, I really thank everyone who reads and finds my site helpful. Really does make it seem like the things I do are useful and worth doing.

Future plans

For future plans, presently I am working on pages for Arcarum. Hoping to be done with them before the month is over.

I also plan to make a system to better show character options for FA. This one I want done before next GW but I would like to finish it sooner if possible.

The next couple of months will have a lot of changes to the game that will definitely shift around a lot on the site. For this reason as well as the character options system I have delayed updating some of the grids on my site.

I would also like to be on top of creating pages for the next content. We will get seven new raids soon enough: Super Faa and six M3 raids. The difficulty of the M3 raids are currently unknown so I do not know how much effort they will require. Super Faa on the other hand will definitely require a lot of effort to do properly. At the very least I would like to do a link dump of the relevant setups.

My main hope with making this site is not only to show examples for grids and setups for raids, but as well to give ideas for people to come up with their own setups based on what they have. I feel like I could do better with this and I have some thoughts on how to address it.

Past this, the main content I still need to implement before the site hits version 1.0 are

• The World
• Faa
• Bubs
• Belial
• Hexa
• GOHL
• Akasha
• BHL
• UBHL
• Improving weapon and character pages
• Mobile support

After that I will create new pages as needed from new content, by request, or as I see fit. I have a few ideas already.

I would like to try to recruit two others if possible. One for handling the social media side of things and one to assist with editing. Both areas are places I need help on.