Resize game windows, design changes and more.

Hi All!

It has been a long time since I did an update to the site. I am sorry about that but I've also been making up for it recently too. Through the summer I have decided to change game engines as I was using construct 2 to make 2D games and i wanted to start making 3D web games instead. I decided to choose Cocos Creator to learn as it uses typescript and they seem very HTML5 oriented. I've already released the first version of my first game with it here with source code to learn from. Recently though I've started to improve the site rather then build onto it. New features is always great but improving existing ones is even better.

So now the two main changes is the looks and the new game windows. I always want to get feedback from as many devs as I can. So recently BlitBlat games responded to a tweet of mine asking for members suggestions, suggesting the ability to change the game window sizes. I wasn't sure at first as I wanted to keep game windows as responsive as possible, even if some games aren't responsive. I started looking into it and making a fair few changes I managed to make it responsive and also much better then it was before. It also meant a new embed code too. One without the JS which no longer was needed since the ads were made to be in game. 

The design elements has actually not just been visual but has also been beneficial as well. The reason for the design change was optimisation originally. I decided that I would move the login to its own page. It makes more sense for protecting the login form to have a login page instead. I also decided to remove all stats out of the header, instead every page feeding games or posts etc states how many are being displayed out of total results. I've also made stat pages for games, members and posts that can be found in the footer. This has made a lot of difference. The code had to pull back all games, posts and users every time from the database just to count them. It didn't really matter when we were smaller. Now, it's best not to be doing it. I've also optimised the homepage, which was always slower then most other pages. Now it pulls all the games once for all the games on the pages instead of 6 times and 6 calls to the database. I think this has made a huge difference. We also have had a logo change. I never was happy with the logo for the site, so I've changed it. The games also now state the size of the files so you can estimate loading times, someone suggested this on our discord. 

I've gone through and made a lot of fixes as well such as the search if empty would give a 404 error, it now brings back all the games or profiles etc. The tags on the game pages used to cut off the last letter of the last tag, which it doesn't any more. Speed optimisations and other fixes as well.

A lot of code was changed, so potentially I might of broken something too. I did a fair bit of testing but please get in touch if you do run into any problems. I'm also keeping everyone far more up to date on both discord and twitter so I recommend following there too.

Thanks,

-iDev