Arguably the current setup for games and places is unnecessarily complicated and has extra user overhead.
#Enumeration of issues:
Moving places between games is a nightmare. You end up with empty games whenever you add a place to a game, and then if you ever want to move a place out of the game
You have to go on a scavenger hunt for an empty game that can hold the place
You end up with places in games with obsolete names/settings since you’re moving places into old games
Game names may be obsolete due to the contents of the place changing (for instance, I have a place named “Profile Mockup” that has a game called “Meeting Place” – it has always been in this Game and wasn’t added to the Game when it was empty)
Awkwardly two settings pages instead of one with messed up sovereignty (why is genre per place and not per game? Why are developer products in both Place and Game settings? Etc)
Clutter anywhere in the UI that distinguishes between Games / Places
Insanely confusing terminology
#Proposed change:
Games / Places become a single entity.
This means no obsolete names, confusing terminology, or clutter on pages that currently distinguish between Games and Places.
Regardless of how many times I move a PlaceGame (random name) in/out of another PlaceGame, it’s immediately available for use again without me having to go on a scavenger hunt through a list of Games to find an empty one to house the Place. This also means I no longer have obsolete settings when I move a PlaceGame out of another PlaceGame.
Settings are combined into one settings group making them easier to manage and understand. The current game settings can be “Locked to parent PlaceGame settings” while the rest of the settings can optionally be inherited or manually set.
The current system isn’t so bad really, but the properties of a game and a place should be merged as you suggest, with toggles for each place, or for all places to inherit the properties of the game.
The design of the site for those pages, and the develop page, is so archaic that hopefully they will be updated soon and more functionality added.
My biggest problem is that yesterday I made a new place by clicking this:
and it also created a game, which is now empty because I moved the place into a game.
The easiest solution to this would be to allow you to delete a game when its empty, but this is not an option for some reason(?!!)
I think that the best (subjective of course) solution to this would be to be able to see the game that the place is a part of (and all of its settings) when you go to a configure a place but change nothing else with the system.
So at the top of a redesigned (pls) place settings page, there would be a section that said “Game Settings” or something and said something like this.
Game Settings
This place is (the starter place / a secondary place) for the game (gamename)
Current Game Settings:
– blah
– blah
– blah
This place inherits its properties from the parent game (checkbox).
Place Settings
– the current normal stuff
Above all I would really like a redesign of the game settings page
All that really resolves though is settings unless I’ve misunderstood you. You still either have to deal with empty games (if we’re unable to archive/delete them) or manually clean them up (if we’re able to archive/delete them), and there’s still the confusing terminology.
I probably misunderstood your suggestion in the original post; it sounded like the settings were one of the big issues was the settings ( and I think the same )
Manually cleaning them all makes more sense than anything else to me, but… Having a starter place contain all the other places - so the starter place would replace what ‘games’ are today makes sense.
This raises the problem of not knowing which game is the starter place for others on a quick glance of the Places page (unless there was some kind of UI marker, or a structure like this:
Settings were one of the issues, with the other big issue being complication. Separating Places and Games just makes the system of the two more difficult to understand than it needs to be. Settings issues can easily be resolved without merging Games and Places, but all of the other issues mentioned in the OP cannot.
Not needing to manually clean them up in the first place is a better solution.
This information isn’t readily available in either the Place or Game section of Develop already. I definitely would like this issue to be resolved, but it’s outside the scope of merging games/places.
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