itch.io

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.

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

I'd avoid OAuth.

Informal, per-server accounts seem fine. Why not start with a pragmatic solution - like a password to register with the server. If you know the passphrase you can join the server. The server can pass a private session key to the client — if the password changes, regenerate the key.

Then allow joining the server with a unique username / password. If you choose to manage your identity within the client - the client could do the account configuration for you — but that implies that the client has the password in the clear to submit to the server. Without central management it's hard to ensure folks have created a unique username – worst case, you'll have Alex as a user name and you'll join your friends server and you'll become Alex #2 when participating.

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.

At Gugu42's request, here is a conservative alternate design that take into account some of Elisée's proposed features...

Imgur Album with Updated Screen

Do you intend on having a single identity / account? In your Trello board mockup you've placed your username in the corner. It think it makes a big difference in the experience overall - how and when you authenticate. Do you do it centrally or distributed.

Well, I was generally trying to match the style they've set forth on the website. I'm pretty certain I wouldn't carry that through onto the IDE user interface. I'll post a conservative alternative when I get some time.

Sure thing. I was trying to do justice to the brand you've been building and match your current tone. Plus, I've been primarily looking at it as stand-alone application. This changes the appearance of the experience.

Do you think your users will have many server connections?

What's the most important thing you want someone to do on this screen — is it a frequent or infrequent action?

Is there an existing product with a launcher/connector that you like? Minecraft, Blizzards Game Launcher?

Functionally, it looks you aim to support quite a few things:

• Welcome a new user to the product
• Communicate essential news about the project, possible release notes
• Provide links to community sources
• Show that a local server is running on a given IP and Port
• Provide statistics about the currently running server (number of users)
• Start / stop a server manually
• Adjust connection settings
• Adjust account settings
• Adjust plug-in settings
• Add a new server
• Edit a server (Rename, change port, delete)

We continue with the process of connecting to a server, handling network/auth errors:

• Connect to a server, communicate timeouts or networking errors
• Authenticate with the server, create an account on a public server, communicate auth errors
• Display a list of projects on the server to join
• Add a new project
• Edit a project (Rename, backup, delete)

• Display server messages
• Provide links to server resources (predominantly website links)
• Join server discussion channel(s)

My first impression was that this was lightweight 'launcher' UI that I wanted out of my way so I could open my IDE and get working. It feels like it's getting heavy before it's time. However, I understand that your big selling feature is the collaboration. I just wonder if the discussion and project/server portal should be part of the launcher / local-server window.

I'm just catching up; I'll keep thinking about it.

Just some minor feedback, but it might be nice to polish up your stand-alone startup experience. It's not really clear what's happening when you first launch the application, without reading a tiny bit of documentation.

I did some unsolicited work rather than just file a bug. I'll likely continue with the editor itself later this week.

Startup Dialogs [Imgur Link]