Game styling

I feel this is an important one. It really helps games to have the art in there.



Currently, this is a bit of a hack in the extension, relying on the GM adding JSON to the game description.



I'd prefer to give the game a background image upload option and generally make it simpler.

But why stop there? Perhaps we should allow games to have themes - like fantasy/sci-fi etc. and change some of the other styling too.

This is a great idea, but there may be licensing/attribution issues. If I remember correctly, most publishers didn't care about their logos being used on the site, but not everyone was OK with it. I wonder if art wouldn't be regarded in a similar capacity. Any thoughts?

Versus the GM using art in an img tag as they probably already do?

This is just about letting GMs adding images outside the game post boxes.

You'd have to ask Keleth what the correspondence sounded like from the publishers. Was it surprising when someone said an official logo couldn't be used on a character sheet? It seems like a small thing, but you never how people are going to react. That being said, I can't imagine the publishers or creators being too lawsuit-y.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. This is where the DM uploads their own background image which then appears in their game.

This isn't attaching art to a game system.

Yeah, maybe not. You're example kind of makes it look like you're attaching art to the game system, since you have screen shots that look like they came from a WoTC resource, in a 5e game, as well as a header that could have copied right out of a D&D book. However you're describing it differently. If it's just attaching images I agree with you.

So I've definitely had publishers ask me to change things/take things down. Backgrounds, specially if it's something that people other than the uploader can see, can start to get hairy. Images in forums is typically something that designers don't mind, but once it starts becoming part of the aesthetic, that changes. That said, this was a feature of the extension I wasn't a big fan of. A big part of GP was a simple, clean interface, minimal images, only a few fonts. A lot of sites go heavy on imagery, and I'm not a fan of the style. That said, I had ideas for different themes based on the genre, but I think that warrants a bigger discussion. I'll think about this, but right now, I lean to no.

Fair enough, I can respect that.

Although... here's Qralloq and RuneKyndig discussing the background image feature in their interview.



...and after a browse around other PbP sites, most of them allow at least a thumbnail to represent the game.

Personally, I like the idea of both thumbnails AND backgrounds.

Yah, this is one I'm really thinking about now. The thumbnail idea is VERY doable, and in general, I want to redesign how the "Find a game" and the list of games pages look; it can be more interactive, more robust, and definitely prettier. I'm not sure how much we can do to the current one; it's a mess of AngularJS, but maybe we can do something.

AngularJS isn't so bad - it's just a case of surrounding the tag soup with some styled divs.

Maybe wait until I've added the imgur upload before looking at thumbnails.