Changing the Game

The Friday update to Blazing Games has been posted early, though the "official" announcement will not be made until late this evening. For the few of you who actually subscribe to my blog, you can look at the changes by going to Thirteen Spikes. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I am doing something different with game pages, or at least will be if the Blazing Games visitors don't hate the change. I will explain my rational for the change in the remainder of this entry. Feel free to post a comment or email me.

I am making the change due to the basic fact that the game pages were getting awfully cluttered. By breaking the game page into five logical sections and having tabs leading to each section makes it easier to actually find what you want.

The overview section of the page is the landing point. Here there will be a summary of the game so people can quickly decide if the game is what they are looking for. This page will also have revision history for the game and a road map for future releases.

The Instruction section holds the actual instructions for the game. I am going to try and be more thorough with the instructions. I suspect that despite the extra effort I will be putting into the instructions, these pages will be the least viewed pages for the game.

The Play tab will actually hold the game. In cases where there is more than one episode of a game, this page will act like a list of episodes (with icons for each episode) so that people can select the particular episode that they wish to play. Games will now start appearing within the same browser tab instead of opening a pop up window. With multi-episode games, I will make pop up windows a separate launch option.

The article tab will be for articles that have been written for the game. For instance, Thirteen Spikes has a strategy guide that was released today, which is what appears in the article tab. As is the case with multiple episodes, if there are multiple articles then the page will be a list of the articles with summaries so people can find the article they are interested in reading.

Finally, the download tab. As you can see, any tab that is not being used is greyed out. When the tab is not greyed out, it will be used for downloads. These are mainly Open Source Release zip files, but could also be level sets. If in the future I start releasing Apollo (not the official Adobe name, but as the official name is not yet announced, I am using the code name) versions of my Flash games, they will be located here.

That covers the new format I am thinking about using for the game pages, but it is conceivable that my visitors will not like the new changes as much as I do.