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Some things
Sup gang! Just thought I should post about a couple of things.
FIRSTWISE: I did an interview about this wonderful community! Perhaps you would like to read it?
SECONDWAYS: I have done away with the star rating system for games. I hope most of you don't think it's a big deal. I really only ever meant it to be used as a sorting mechanism, back for the Pirate Kart II, rather than having it be a way of giving feedback in and of itself. If you like a game, or have some criticism to offer, you should leave a comment! Communication with your peers in a supportive community is waaaaay better than watching anonymous numbers going up and down; let's do more of the first thing, and less of the second. High fives? HIGH FIVES.
THIRDWHISTLE: Soooo how are things going for you guys? Anything about the site / community that's bugging you? Any way in which things might be cooler? Just kind of want to check in.
Comments
Thirdwhistle
Doo doo dooooooo, doo doo dooooooooo!
Better visibility for non-event games. It feels silly when you were making something for an event, didn't get to finish it, and have to submit it early to the next event just to get people to see it. Perhaps the front page needs a timeline of games submitted to the site or some such?
Also move signups back to the event description page, perhaps only show the latest X people who signed up?
Responding to this the only
Responding to this the only way I know how - adding more crap to the left side of the page.
oh god this site needs a complete redesign so badly
Oh, awesome! Site has
Oh, awesome! Site has improved, like, tenfold now. But we still need to do something about the wiki. It's all old and moldy.
Honestly, the wiki should
Honestly, the wiki should probably just more or less die. There's nothing that it does that a handful of sticky forum posts couldn't do just as well.
I've taken the link off the sidebar. It's still technically linked at the top of the page, but no one ever looks there, and I should probably just ditch those links too.
Was the FAQ part of the
Was the FAQ part of the Wiki?
I liked having the link to it in the top left; I actually used it because I could never remember the server for the irc channel. (I see there's still a link in the front page..)
Yep, it's a wikipage. Don't
Yep, it's a wikipage. Don't know how up-to-date it is, though. It might be a good idea to add a link to the chat page to the sidebar, especially now that the IRC channel is more active.
Whoa, I had no idea Games
Whoa, I had no idea Games was already linked to in the navbars. Man, I never even look at the top navbar. The Recent Games on the side is infinitely better, especially with the screenshots.
Nobody looks at the top
Nobody looks at the top navbar! It's basically invisible. Might as well not be there.
I really dig the recent
I really dig the recent games on the left! I kinda wish it was at the top of the main page or something, because I do have to scroll down quite a bit to see it.
The biggest thing I can think of about the site though is that the link to submit your game to an event is really hard to find quickly. Could we redo the text on the KotM event pages slightly to make that link stand out better? (like put it on its own line, caps+bolded, or make it a button! Actually it probably makes sense for signup/login/submit buttons to be standard on event pages?)
If a submit button for the current event was just always at the top like Ludum Dare does, that might be even better.
I like the idea of a redesign. I think we could put some of the sidebar stuff (upcoming/recent events) horizontally in a header, go 3-column, and put a lot of the account stuff behind another click, and that would clean it up a bunch. I should do a mockup.
Be warned before spending
Be warned before spending too much time mocking stuff up that theming Drupal is a nightmare and I'm way more likely to try and move the site to a different CMS than to try to implement a sensible design in Drupal 5.
That said, I have been thinking pretty seriously about migrating the site to a different CMS.
Played with this a bit --
Played with this a bit -- I've added the signup form back to the event page, where it clearly belongs, but kept the list of people who have signed up on its own page. Ideally I would either have the list of signed-up users be in a "collapsed" state like the form is, or just a link with the current number of signed-up users that takes you to the list. Not sure which one is better nor easier to implement.
Oh also re: site/community -
A complaint directed at myself: I STILL haven't generalized the Pirate Kart launcher into a Glorious Trainwrecks Event browser. Even though it's set up to make that pretty simple. Like, for serious, to make it use a different event right now is JUST changing one number in one config file. If I can query glorioustrainwrecks.com for a list of recent events (names, ids, dates, any other stats we want it to show), it should be cake to add something for selecting an event to the UI somewhere.
Here you go. (I am
Here you go.
(I am reasonably sure that the timestamp is the number of seconds from Jan 1, 1970, midnight UTC. Let me know if that doesn't hold up and I can figure out how to massage the data so it does.)
Timestamp works great! It
Timestamp works great!
It still has some issues but this is a pretty good start, I think: http://glotra.s3.amazonaws.com/GloriousTrainwrecks.exe.zip
(I'm definitely open to suggestions for how to improve it, too)
Aaaaaahhh this is
Aaaaaahhh this is loooovelyyyyy
It would be cool if it showed events that haven't actually happened yet if people have posted games to them!
Yeah the event filtering
Yeah the event filtering right now is: things that have started yet, but came after the GDC Gameboree (I think nothing before that has games attached because we didn't have that submission form back then).
Maybe instead it should list them, but default to selecting the most-recently-finished(started?) event.
Oh yeah I need to add Atari
Oh yeah I need to add Atari support to it now. :D
Now that there are no
Now that there are no ratings (which is awesome), would you consider having a special page that displays random games that don't have any comments (or only have comments from the uploader)? Or a paginated list of all such games?
Ooh, that is a _marvellous_
Ooh, that is a _marvellous_ idea. I'll implement it when I get a few minutes.
(Technically you can already sort of do this by sorting by comment count, but a randomized list would be really something.)
This doesn't take into
This doesn't take into account the fact that authors can comment on their own games and some games will only have comments by their author...
Tumblr
Ha, you just want an easy way to get new stuff for your tumblr. :-P
Maaaaybe. But I'd much
Maaaaybe. But I'd much rather games get comments on them here and now, even if it means technically disqualifying them for Zero Feedback. My quixotic goal is a world where no more games go without any comments.