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Would appreciate feedback on website for my game

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harmon89
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Hello everyone!

I've posted about my game Portals and Prophets on here a couple times during my game design phase. The rules have been streamlined and I've done extensive playtesting, and am happy with where the game is at. Over the weekend I launched a website for the game, and plan to run a Kickstarter campaign this fall.

I'd really appreciate opinions and thoughts on the website, and how the game is portrayed on there. What could be done to make the game sound more exciting and appealing? Are there some questions you might have that aren't answered on the site?

http://portalsandprophets.com/

gxnpt
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Joined: 12/22/2015
your game

I am not really qualified to offer comments on artistic anything but from a functional view your site works well.

Also, I agree that the game is a game with a Christian theme, not a preachiness pretending to be a game.

I could easily see the same game with any "historical" - including alternate or mythological histories - timeline of events being used.

Classification of events and timeline are the mechanics with specific events as thematic elements in line with the mechanics.

So, if it showed up at a game group I would be willing to play it. Congrats on that.

harmon89
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Exactly

Right on. Preachiness is not the goal here.

Being a fan of Lord of the Rings, I'd also thought it would be fun to modifying the game to fit that theme. I think a cool map of Middle Earth with event cards from it's rich history would be so much fun. Of course, that would get into copyright issues I'm sure, so can't really do that.

My goal is that someone could still enjoy the game as an atheist. Viewing the game as mythology shouldn't hinder your enjoyment of the game in anyway.

MAR
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Joined: 04/23/2017
Portals and Prophets

I have not heard or read about your game yet, so I will have a good unbiased view of your site. Here is my initial thoughts of the site:

First view of home screen is clean, professional, easy to find menu, and good menu options. I like the picture of the game as the first thing that you see, and I like the logo in the top left of the page. Learn more and contact us are appropriate and well placed.

Scrolling down further, I like the game information, about us, contact info, and giveaway. Overall impression, good opening page (I entered the giveaway!) Going through your pages, they all provide fine information.

"Travel back in time to witness extraordinary biblical events. Be at the right place at the correct time in history to play your cards and score points for experiencing an event." Should it say be at the right place at the right time? Maybe not, just wondering.

In regards to the game: I like it and think that it will be fun. I am looking forward to maybe a gameplay video or something. As others have pointed out, the theme can easily be used for other historical genres,which might be fun for expansion.

Good Luck!

-MAR

sheeptree
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First view of your webpage,

First view of your webpage, it looks professional and the buttons are easy to see.

It's optional and isn't really a design critique but I suggest that where you have the heading "The Game" you reiterate the name of the game so the heading would be "Portals and Prophets" and then keep the subheading of "The bible-themed strategy game". This would help to lock in the title of your game in your readers' minds.

The strip where it says "kickstarter starts...": The white text against the translucent green can be a little hard to read when scrolled around certain areas of the background image behind the strip. Maybe try black font color? I'm not sure how it will look without applying it.

Everything else looks ok to me.

spaff
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Joined: 11/05/2015
LOTR copyright

harmon89 wrote:
Being a fan of Lord of the Rings, I'd also thought it would be fun to modifying the game to fit that theme. I think a cool map of Middle Earth with event cards from it's rich history would be so much fun. Of course, that would get into copyright issues I'm sure, so can't really do that

My understand is the Tolkien estate is pretty generous with granting use of the IP- so long as you do a good job with it.

harmon89
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Joined: 01/13/2016
Thanks for the compliments

Thanks for the compliments and suggestions everyone!

And spaff, that's good to know. Will definitely keep that in mind.

ssm
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Joined: 04/06/2017
Technical Side

I will comment mostly on the technical side of things.

1. The image of the words Portals & Prophets on the top left of the page should be higher resolution. When looking at the site with a retina or hd screen it is noticeably fuzzy compared to the rest of the pages.
2. You may want to swap out the jpg images for png images. Doing so should aid in speed of page loading.
3. Swap out the google fonts for basic web-safe fonts. You use an seo plugin, so I am guessing you care about seo & ranking.
There is a thing called best practices for web design. Google fonts are the opposite of of those, and go against google's own seo guidelines. A portion of visitors will be served web-safe fonts instead of google fonts when visiting your site, which will take longer to load than one or the other. On devices, google fonts need to be loaded by the user before they can be displayed on a web page, even google's own devices don't come with google fonts.

In general the pages take awhile to load for me (I scrub everything when coming off the web, so no cache is saved). IDK how the video services work, but can say if you are given the option for webm format, you should choose it. Webm allows almost all browsers to play videos without plugins or scripts, and are usually a smaller footprint.

The one thing I will gripe about is the movement of items as the pages are scrolled. For me, when I am scrolling and things are coming into view after I pass them, I skip them & figure if they were important they would just be there to see (the stuff that comes in from the sides on your site).

harmon89
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Thanks for the technical

Thanks for the technical suggestions.

Can you explain to me why PNGs will make my site run faster? PNGs produce larger file sizes so I would have assumed that would also cause the site to lag.

ssm
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Joined: 04/06/2017
When I was dealing with

When I was dealing with images, png were slightly larger than jpg sometimes. PNG scales almost infinitely, so a smaller image can be shown at any size and usually will load much quicker. One of your 'header' images is near 1300x600 pixels at 66kb. It is a small file size, but a huge image that has to load. File size isn't always tied to load times in the ways we think of size & time. No matter the file size, a jpg will usually use more resource to display than a png being displayed at the same size.
For images, for me, it is easier to think about image size rather than file size. The 1600x600 image may be 300x150 as png, but may be 185kb. But the server is feeding a smaller image that is then scaled up by the browser, rather than a large image to fit the space.
I don't know how things work in wordpress or if one is better with that platform.
The way I think about images is a jpg is an image that needs to be displayed, a png is a set of data that comes with instructions of how to display the included image points.

One thing to mess around with if you care, have the time, and if wordpress offers it is to use a preview feature. A preview feature will allow you to see the web page in progress as a real web page without publishing (it publishes to temp memory). With that you can play around with image formats & sizes and see how they display, just remember to clear cache a few times of refresh the page a few times to be served the newest version of a page, or your computer will keep serving the page it has stored.

I actually came back to mention one other thing.
When creating a web page, it is best to create the page you want, then create a second page of it, but put together from top to bottom. On a couple of pages I noticed something load, then go away & something else took it's place.
Web pages load what was put on the page first, not what is at the top. So when you dump things on a page and then rearrange them, they load in a haphazard fashion. If you go to a shopping site and scroll a page of images and notice they blink into existence randomly, they are loading by first to last no matter where on the page they are.

harmon89
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Thanks! When I get some time

Thanks! When I get some time I'll have to look into some of these things. :-)

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