At Gugu42's request, here is a conservative alternate design that take into account some of Elisée's proposed features...
Digging the second set of mockups! :)
Something that might not have been clear from the functional launcher mockups I shared: the chat / community-tab is supposed to be global, not per server. There's already a per-project chat and that's probably enough?
The idea is that the global chat is about... serendipitiously meeting people, finding projects and helping one another :D.
Yeah I read your previous post and I wondered about that. This is what felt a bit odd to me. You're creating two places for chat with two different UIs / code paths. One in the editor and one the portal launcher. It feels awkward, but I get it.
Perhaps it's just Superheros on the left (with your account, if you have single-sign on) and there's a Community first item.
8 years ago(+1)
I'm about done for the day — but I updated with a community tab. I think this gets a bit in the direction, structurally. I added in a Games tab, because I think it might be nice to mine the discussion area with a monitoring bot and keep a running list of shared games.
As a feature request, it would be nice to focus on importing a game into your server. From a Getting Started area, links to key places (documentation) is good, but having sample projects with a one-click install would be really helpful. Similarly, if I connect to a server it would be nice if people had an export option to allow people to clone/branch the game locally. This way someone could share a project on their sever and when you connect, you can simply take a copy from the discussion area.
This means that you really should construct an input field in the discussion area which allows you post a game from your server as efficiently as possible. The biggest barrier I see there is that folks won't have their routers set up correctly and they'll need to distribute via some hosting service.
My biggest beef with all of this is that when I first start, it's not really particularly friendly getting you connected and starting a new project. It's awkward for a new user to understand that they have an game-building tool, but there's this server in the way. A novice user would launch the tool and expect "New Project" to be seen almost immediately on the screen. All of these designs fail that simple test.
?1
As a feature request, it would be nice to focus on importing a game into your server.
Yes, definitely something we want to have. Created an issue for it.
The biggest barrier I see there is that folks won't have their routers set up correctly and they'll need to distribute via some hosting service.
Definitely a concern, but I think with good documentation like this maybe most people will be able to port forward.
My biggest beef with all of this is that when I first start, it's not really particularly friendly getting you connected and starting a new project.
I think clicking on "My Server" (or "My Computer" or whatever) before being able to create a new project is an OK thing to ask, it's a single click and it's important to have this context of "OK, this is being created on my own server but I can also connect to someone else's".
The explanatory paragraph reminds me of the first run popup in CraftStudio:
I think we should have it appear only once in Superpowers too. But it should be shorter and more to the point (just realized that text says CraftStudio is still "very much in development". Oops, forgot to update it...). That "Create my first project" button could be carried over, too, and it would remove the awkwardness of having to open the server you were concerned with.
What would you like to do differently from CraftStudio — in terms of the launch / discussion area?
Would you like to see it showcase "released" games or maybe more like a classified to find team members?
Would you like to build a server portal for a team?
To keep the feature list concise it feels like:
• Provide news about Superpowers, documentation, tutorials, release notes, web links, etc.
• Manage your server, your games, and team permissions
• Discuss — in a decentralized way?
• Explore other people's servers and games — in a decentralized way?
[Stealth edit...]
I should note that I haven't seen CraftStudio before — and my original goal was just to encourage you to polish up your 'out of box' experience for first-time users. It looks like you've got experience with that and have a direction. So, I'm happy to sit back and watch it happen — I'm sure you have your own timeline for these things.
Cheers.