Mostly replying to kilkonie's post above:
Atmosphere
Sure thing. I was trying to do justice to the brand you've been building and match your current tone.
You definitely did, it feels like one of Pixel-boy's mockups! :)
Is there an existing product with a launcher/connector that you like? Minecraft, Blizzards Game Launcher?
From a visual point of view, the Blizzard game launcher is an interesting reference (very polished). The Steam and itch clients come to mind too, but they are probably too dark. Superpowers is bright and happy.
I dislike Minecraft's launcher, it feels unpolished visually with its out-of-place default widgets. But hey, it gets the job done with its big Play button, profile management and news section.
For Superpowers, we need to strike a balance between welcoming and functional, I think it's especially important that we avoid pushing too much of our own universe into the launcher, to avoid making projects with different aesthetics feel out of place. The Superpowers website has a fairly neutral color scheme with a few bright pieces of artwork that works well I think.
Functional goals
As exemplified by the long list of features you wrote, the launcher has a fairly big job to do. It's the headquarters for one's server(s) and a bridge with the community. But it doesn't mean it needs to get in the way of getting to work, just like Steam isn't supposed to get in the way of playing your games, we just need to be smart about it. A list of recently opened projects might come in handy, like the one that appears when you right-click Steam's icon.
The global community chat was a big thing in CraftStudio (Superpowers's predecessor), and many CraftStudians are missing this place where we can meet, chat and invite one another to our projects in Superpowers. Plus it's great for beginners to get real-time help when getting started. For people who don't like that kind of social integration, we should totally have a "Go invisible" or "Don't join community chat on startup" option though.
The launcher should be easily dismissed but remain in the system tray so that your server keeps running, you can be notified of mentions in the chat, open it to join a new server, or manage your local server.
Do you think your users will have many server connections?
I see it like this: there are two types of users that we need to accommodate, those who work with close friends / on their own on a single server and don't care about interacting with the broader community for the most part, and those who will be very social and go check out / help out with many projects. It's a fine line to walk for sure.
- For people not yet invested in Superpowers who are joining someone else's server, we already provide a very unobtrusive way to use Superpowers: through their Web browser.
- For those running their own server who want to skip the launcher UI and head straight into their most recent projects, Windows's jump lists sound like a great fit:
(Apparently OS X has a similar feature named Dock Tile).