As you guys have noticed, I've been pretty active developing the games section (and other parts of the site) lately. I guess long breaks are the best motivator. Eg, made this
Coding is fun, and I'd like to continue to develop the games section into a web app / SaaS that people utilize or think about first when choosing to present their projects online.
You guys have recently displayed a huge amount of uncreativity when it comes to feature suggestions, but I'm always looking at ways to make the system better. Coding web apps is mainly quite easy. The main factor in success of an application is planning out or implementing what it is going to have and what it is not going to have. That's the pivotal part. I could have a logo upload, a width and height field, x and y fields etc, or I could just position is myself without any options where most logos will fit. That sort of decision making.
What this topic is actually about
Quality control. Here's what I think is a bit of an issue:
It's not very enticing. The landing game page is quite important in attracting new members to try it out and actually use it. Having games with barely any content isn't really helping our cause, it makes it look quite amateurish. But in reality there are those pages which are intended to be that way, so 1. we want game pages that are early in development, to slowly build and blog about etc, but 2. we don't want those on the public listing when they first go live.
So right now I am thinking about enforcing some parameters of eligibility to be displayed on the public listing homepage. Just the homepage. I am thinking these games will be a secondary featured category. The parameters could be:
A logo upload - to tidy up the look and quality of the games landing page
a demo upload
at least 1 gallery upload
So rather than a public listing of all of our games, as is our current system, it would be a homepage with our most established and best-to-show-off games, followed by categories such as "new" or "all", plus the filters we already have in place.
Thoughts + discussion?
My next priority for the games section is built-in project cards (the project cards are coming back, but this time inside of the games section). Not just that, but a bunch of automatically generated images based on your various uploads, and automatically generated BBCode for you guys to advertise your game pages, coz you really need that... plus themes plus design options plus sidebar customization.