Hi, you may have noticed that new features have been added to oagd.net, especially during the last couple of weeks. The most recent major change is the new “game pages”, see for example Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 and Paradise Lost. This is just the first version of game front pages, coinciding with the release of Paradise Lost. Not all new editing functionality is enabled for users yet. This is simply because not every detail is fleshed out yet – please be patient 🙂
We are also working on support for auto-downloading games (on demand) directly to FS-UAE Launcher – where possible.
The reason for these changes is that while the primary function of oagd.net was to serve as an online configuration database for FS-UAE Launcher (and other clients), the scope of the project grows, as we now also try to host game ourselves where possible – or link to legal download pages. People may now start to browse oagd.net without necessarily wanting to edit the online database.
We keep in mind that trying to do “everything” is not not always a good idea. The primary function of oagd.net was, and still is, to be a great resource for helping people to play games, either directly to human visitors, or indirectly when clients such as FS-UAE Launcher retrieves information from this site. It is not an encyclopedia, and it will not try to compete with e.g. HOL on the level of detail available about games. For this purpose, we link to HOL and Wikipedia instead 😉
It will probably help to have some kind of “mission statement” at some point. But in short, if something is useful to people playing Amiga games, and we can host or link to it, it should have a place on oagd.net in the future. I’ll follow up better later with more details and documentation regarding any changes 🙂
Just did a quick photoshop mock up to give you some ideas about reshuffling the UI. It’s by no means a final idea, just something for though.
http://tinypic.com/r/2w7r70z/5
I was thinking also that maybe you could have each page have a colour theme based on the game cover. I know iTunes does this automatically (http://tinypic.com/r/aafw2w/5), but we could maybe have an option to edit the colours for each game? Back ground gradient colours, and main text and title test colours?
Thoughts?
Thanks for the mockup 🙂 I’m not sold on all the changes, but there are indeed some good ideas there. I especially like the new tab placement and think I might adopt that :D. Extra graphics for rating, and flags for languages are also planned!
Game-specific color themes is certainly doable (either automatically chosen / or manually selected), provided some mockups exists that proves that it will look nice 🙂
Will do a mock up for colour themes soon. Stupid real life keeps getting I’m the way of my Amiga stuff! :-p
I’ve created a simple example for what I mean. On the screenshot you see the game “Yo! Joe” (my favorite btw 🙂 ). The title bar, FAQ/Contrib. area, screenshot area and synopsis/disclaimer area have 25% transparency. The game entry area have 50% transparency. I don’t know, as this could be separated. The backdrop is a screenshot of the game. Maybe one could use the lightest or the darkest contributed screenshot. This screenshot could be scaled to fit the game page in height and width but keep aspect ratio. The screenshot must be centered to look good. Also the screenshot have a color overlay of white with 50% transparency. As filter I have blurred this screenshot.
And here is it 🙂 : http://www.bilder-hosting.info/bilder/rgh1370016118p.jpg
Sorry, wrong link! Here’s the right one: http://www.bilder-hosting.info/viewer.php?id=rgh1370016118p.jpg
Nice! Definitely has potential!
Thanks for doing a mockup – that really helps to understand/discuss details. I too have tried something similar, but I don’t think the result is that great – the background image is “washed out” anyway, and causes the main content to be less… visible. A difficult one, this. Perhaps background images isn’t the way to go. Maybe custom headers or something else could be used to give certain games special attention…
Maybe it would be useful for this reasons to create a “cover wall” or in this case “screenshot wall”, with dimmed, scaled and (maybe) blurred screenshots of the game.
As example what specially I mean here is a screenshot of the cover wall in Windows Media Center: http://www.wegotserved.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/music-wall1.jpg
Well, it’s not easy to say what looks good or not until someone takes a screenshot of an oagd.net games page and, and manipulates in backdrops (or similar) so there is an actual example to look at!
Ok. Is this an order to me?! 😀
What about a dimmed (25/50/75% transparency or so) fan art picture as backdrop of the frontpage of a game?
Hi, I have thought about something similar. It would be nice to be able to polish the game pages for the “best games”. The problem is that is really quite difficult to make it look good. I did do an experiment where I tried to use dimmed scaled screenshots (with color and/or grayscale) as backdrops. So there are some problems:
– The pages are flexible and uses the available width, this makes it somewhat more difficult to do a backdrop which looks good in all cases.
– Depending on the background, this may cause text to be more difficult to read, and with flexible pages, it isn’t easy to design the backdrop *around* page content.
– Having a large number of backdrops designed for a specific page layout could very much “lock” that layout – it may not then be possible to make layout improvements without breaking the existing backdrops?
I’m very open for suggestions though (but with example mockup please :))