Welcome to the Future…
A little birdie may have told you that the folks at Game Jolt have been brewing something really, really, really big for the last few months. It has come time for… the Great Gas Release.
Okay, okay, that may have been an April Fool’s joke, but it contained nuggets of truth. We really have been cooking up something awesome and we’re ready for you to taste it.
If you follow us on Twitter, you may have have seen a few tweets with the #GameJoltNext hashtag, and you might have wondered where we’re at with it. Our road to the future has been fraught with peril—giant orcs blocking our path, evil aliens trying to control our minds, and even a creepy animatronic bear stalking us in the night.
We at Game Jolt have been working hard to get this new site to the point that it can be used and enjoyed by all of you. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without all of our amazing testers (thank you we love you!) who continue to submit bug reports. Well, now you can too!
The point of making the new site was to create a better framework for the future. We’ve had a lot of plans, but have been limited by the current site—it was made in 2008! Now, we’ve built a strong foundation for Game Jolt that will take us into infinity and beyond the next 7 years.
But, what does the future behold?
A lot. Let me tell you about it. If you want to skip right away to trying out the new site, you can access it at:
Mobile
So I heard you like small computers.
Well, fret not, because now every single freakin’ page on the site works on your mobile device, whether an itsy bitsy phone screen, a middling tablet screen, or one of those huge 40 inch mobile screens the future is rumored to have…yeah.
You can now browse games, follow ‘em, add ‘em to playlists, keep up to date on the latest news for games you’re following, chat with other members, etc. all from the comfort of your toilet.
Better Browsing
Game Jolt is an open system, allowing anyone to post a game. It always has been. One of our goals is to make it easier to find the games you like, to somehow sift through the massive amount of games to locate those you might be interested in.
To accomplish this, we’ve added some new ways to view games. You can browse through different views, like the week’s best games, the all-time best games, and our daily featured games. We’ve added Hot Games, Hotness being a rough measure of community interest in a specific game. And of course there’s still the classic Newly Added section if your middle name just happens to be Intrepid.
There’s also a new Featured Tags area that will be the host to themed views. For those interested in finding games within a specific theme, this will be your go-to.
Filtering
We’ve noticed that many people didn’t realize you could filter games while browsing Game Jolt. Our solution is to make it more visible, and with more options, allowing you to quickly filter what you’d like to see. Tired of seeing unfinished games? Just toggle to view Complete games only. Filter by operating system, type of browser game, or maturity rating. You can even filter by text input!
Pro tip: Include phrases by putting them in quotes ", and exclude words with a minus sign -.
Playlists
Finally, you can organize the games in your library! Playlists are a cool new way to organize, curate, and share collections of games. You can share your playlists and follow other people’s playlists, which are then added to your library and updated when new games are put in it.
Playlists take care of another big request that we’ve been hearing from you for a long time: a way to follow developers. Now, you can add all of a developer’s games to your library in a playlist that will be updated whenever that dev releases a new game.
Playing Games
First of all, browser games no longer launch as soon as you open the page. Even better, when you click to play one, it will be pulled to the forefront in its own modal window, so you can play it without distraction.
But what if you need to view the description to find out the controls, or you want to rate the game and go back to playing without refreshing the page, or a friend of yours sends you a chat message? What to do!? Well, now you can minimize the game, do your business, even browse other pages on site, and still bring it back up to play.
News
For a while now, the news feed has just been a list of the latest news on the homepage. No way to see older news, no way to filter news, nuthin’.
We’ve changed this up quite a bit! Similar to how games are presented, we’ve added a Hot sort for news. This takes into account details such as follower count to show you the Hottest news. Want to see all the news instead, or just news from the games you’re following? Now you can do that, too. So start following more games!
Activity Feed
Notifications have gotten a total overhaul. Mercifully, you can now dismiss all notifications with a single click. But what if you get a news update you wanted to read and accidentally dismissed it? How will you ever find it again!?
Well, now there’s an activity feed where you can find any notification you have ever received. You can filter them and page through them with ease. This should help you stay up to date with the news and activity that interests you most.
Search
Let’s face it, search is just terrible on the current site (hangs head in shame). Well, that’s changed! We now attempt to be so good with search results that we show an autocomplete dropdown as you type. Our goal is to get the results you’re looking for within the top 5 suggestions. Also your search history is stored to make common searches quicker.
Pro tip! You can press the s key to quickly focus the search box and type right away so you never have to use the mouse. Huzzah!
And of course many more things…
Use Markdown in comments to format text, add links, etc.
See what platforms a game runs on in the game listings, before you click into it.
Become a master of keyboard shortcuts to navigate the site faster. Press
shift+?to view them all.Oh, and you can finally unlink your social media accounts on your own. Uhhh, yeah.
And more, and more, and more…
More to come…
There are a few things that aren’t quite implemented, like forums and developer dashboards. If you’re a developer, you can’t manage games through the new site yet—you’ll have to do that on the old site for now. But wait until you see how much better we’ve made uploading and managing games!
What if I find a bug?
Tell us! But first, see if it’s already been reported on the Game Jolt Next issue tracker. If it’s not there, please add it by creating a new issue. Hold off on requesting new features while we focus on finishing our current to-do list.
So how do I get to the future?
Just point your browser to:
The new site will live there for a while. And don’t worry, if change is hard for you, you can still access the old site at the usual URL (for now).
Thanks for test driving Game Jolt Next! We hope you like it.
90 comments