a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
Isherwood  ·  2463 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Gamers of Hubski. I need your help to check out my friends site..

Alright, I've made an account and I'm on my free month.

I've been playing around with the experience and I wanted to start out by saying I love the bones of the service. It's a really neat way to try out a ton of games and see what grabs me without that sense of obligation I usually have when I buy a game on it's own. I definitely didn't think I was going to want to play any of these, but there were a few that were way more intriguing than I thought.

That said, I'm not sure I would have given the client much of a chance if you and I weren't in a conversation.

What I've been chewing on is the identity of the client. There's nothing in the client that really says who you are. From my perspective, this is a neat little indie game launcher and not much else.

And I keep going back to that idea of games as art and your client as a gallery. When I go to a museum or a gallery, a lot of my enjoyment comes from the information I get from the labels.

Take a look at this

It's a white rectangle with black, sans-serif text. It uses this very rigid but ultimately understated formatting to structure it's data. It's classy.

So let's apply that idea to one of your games.

---

Dowino

Villeurbanne, France

A Blind Legend, 2015

Citrus Engine

The goal of A Blind Legend is to create a novel experience for players. To do this, Dowino developed a video game with no video. The game relies entirely on binaural audio, sound reproduced as the human ear would hear it, to direct the player through their journey.

Sighted players should appreciate the change to their senses as they play, noticing the rising acuity in hearing. Players should also take a moment to appreciate the depth of the sound design and how the developer layers different noises to produce a full and vibrant world.

---

We put this on a piece of paper and we stick that piece of paper to a wall.

So you've got your art, you've got your label, and you've got a wall. In the client, above the fold, you have a main exhibit. Commit to having a new set of game every month, every quarter, every year, whatever, that are tied together by some common theme - accessibility, aesthetic, developer location, engine, theme, etc. Do a little write up explaining the theme and why it's important to look at these works.

This does two things - it gives you a dynamic front page that provides a new value to your customers, and it opens up your service to much older games. There might be some classic from 1999 that was the first to implement rudimentary particle physics and it's worth looking at in the context of this exhibit.

Under that you can have your dynamically created exhibits - most popular, new art, whatever - but they're also exhibits that get their own static write up and gallery space.

Blow you can have an extended collection that is much more compact and only shows the information on hover.

I know I'm just taking an idea and running with it, but for me this cements your identity - you want games to be seen as an art. You want people to appreciate what games can be. You want people to have discussions together. You want gaming to be appreciated.

The way I see it, this design would push your users to see that identity on every page.