Images in Game Descriptions

As long as GJ is hosting them I think it should be fine.

You could try that with limited amount of games, and if it doesn't work, remove the feature and pretend nothing ever happened.

Maybe the image size (dimensions, not the file size) should be restricted somehow? And maybe there could be a button called "Show/Hide Images", so people don't have to see them if they don't want to.

I'd definitly take advantage of such a feature to stylize my pages a little more, and make them look closer to the style of their respective games.

I wont doubt that spam developers are going to try and abuse it. But at that point they're already abusing the ability to create game pages as well.

Maybe have a cap to how many images you can have in the description. Enough to be sufficable for the serious developer, but not so high that it can be severly abused.

I was completely against the proposal until you mentioned Kickstarter. There's some phenomenal image work being done there, and bringing that style to Game Jolt could be really neat.

Of course, there's going to be a lot of trash: gifs, memes, etc. You'll probably have to do some preventive measures (gif play on hover, max-height, etc), but it'd definitely enhance the pages.

The only thing that I have against it is that I don't know if it'll work with the current design. It works well for Kickstarter because the page is a giant white canvas with a few boxes with text (no images) to the right, whereas Game Jolt's is a bit more busy with images and icons.

I'd say try taking something like the Wandersong Kickstarter and incorporate that into the design and see if it looks good. No matter what, there's going to be bad designs, but the question is: are good designs possible with the existing layout?

I'm against this.

The game pages should be the same as far as possible, with a common layout, which enables users to browse faster due to familiarity. Adding nontext content to descriptions like images or tables will enable game devs to make totally custom out of this world pages, where this isn't needed & break the site browsing experience. If anyone want pretty custom content then they should go to the games website.

If anything - take other game websites/shops as example - they also follow this method, of all item pages to be the same.

Looking at KS, the design actually has quite a bit of busy-ness on the right side of the page. For GJ game pages we have some stuff on the right as well, but actually less as the page gets longer.

I think one of the issues may be that many devs just don't care as much about making a nicer description for their game. Since they are free games, many times it's a quick jam game and they just want it up so they could get some traffic and build a small audience of gamers and get some let's players checking it out.

I think that our "canvas" may actually be able to look even cleaner than KS for projects with longer descriptions. Here are some examples. Notice that when you expand description and scroll down it is eventually just the description showing.

• http://gamejolt.com/games/chkn/123470

• http://gamejolt.com/games/thunder-gun/385

• http://gamejolt.com/games/wibble-wobble/80737

• http://gamejolt.com/games/the-tribe-alpha/127539

I think it will probably make sense for larger scale projects, and also for ones that are in active development to be able to "hype" the project a bit to get a follow. It'd be more "in-context" than a screenshot or video uploaded to the media bar, although I would want to make sure people don't stop putting stuff into the media bar since it's a very concise way for gamers to get a glance of what a game has to offer.

Just a heads up that tables can already be used. And they look pretty good imo. Many games use them for controls, for example: http://gamejolt.com/games/wibble-wobble/80737

I'd say that's an example of a very bad game description - it doesn't say anything about the game at all, instead it's full of stuff that belongs in a readme file or "how to play" screen inside the game.

As for kickstarter pages - I noticed devs started inserting huge images in the description, often one has to scroll a lot through all the screenshots and prize images to see any text. Bad design imo.

For building up hype you say... That is what game news are for, aren't they? And they enable to embed images and other stuff. I'd say it's the best setup, just stay as it currently is.

I like seeing controls in the description. It's consistent for me as a gamer to always check their. Especially for browser based games.

System requirements are another thing that could be put into descriptions (though it would be nice to get this as a site feature eventually). Either way, I really don't personally thing tables look bad on game pages.

The idea is cool.

It's one of those features that's nice to have but I'm sure it won't harm anyone to not have. There might be a few people who may demand it but I'm sure a good majority of small devs uploading small games will not use it. Only the bigger projects may take use of it. But who knows?

The concern of spamming and abusing is there but usually whenever someone uploads a spam game they don't really put that much effort into it so I doubt that they'll design a good description but I'm sure we will see a couple 'meme masterpiece' descriptions here and there.

It's nice to have things in one place. Not only are you reading about the game but you can get visual examples of a feature or something right there next to the paragraph explaining the feature. I find it a bit better than reading and scrolling up to look through the images.

I mean, do people even read descriptions nowadays? Also, by default, the description is truncated after the first few lines. I try to put the most important info above the fold, cus ppl just don't read these days.
That's my impression anyways, since I still get comments about stuff like "does it support keyboard" and is it "online MP?" even though all that is already in the description.

I guess it's a matter of preference. I prefer that game controls use popular, widely used schemes, so a player can figure it out in a few seconds instinctively without any other help.

(yeah I spend too much time reading about game design instead of actually writing code ;-) )

yes

I can see redundancy possibility here i.e when a dev posts screenshots in game description and in media section above. But that would be dev's responsibility not GameJolt's to manage those

I'm okay with either choice but if images were to be enabled, I want their size to be limited

I think if you were to do it, you would need to (at least for the first few weeks) limit the amount of images you can have in a description. Also, having certain limits for the dimensions would be needed in order to stop the entire page from being one big picture.

That being said, I would use this feature to create nice little headers to separate catagories (i.e Synopsis, features, FAQ, etc.) and give the page a little extra flair.

Why stop at game descriptions? Let us customise the whole page!

Yes, a complete CSS support so I can write something like this:

		
			body {
    -webkit-transition:  -webkit-transform 2s;
    transition: transform 2s;
} 
body:hover {
    -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); 
    transform: rotate(180deg);
}
		
	

Everyone would love it! Some predefined customization features would be nice, though, like background colour etc.

Okay, ignore this, let's not go off-topic. I still think image support could be useful, but I think the images should be hidden by default, so there could be a button that said "Show images".

If images are used as headers and stuff similar to KS, I'd imagine this could make things really confusing to users.

...Well, that's true. But if they are big as hell and spammed everywhere and automatically shown, users will also be confused (and annoyed).

Maybe the description could be hidden if it has images? "This description contains images that might slow down the game page, click here to show the content"

Probably wouldn't work either, though.

Uhm... well, if I speak for my own game, I'd like to quote a part and say what looks cooler?
Below is (a part of) the character descriptions I put in the game description of Star Story.

		
			WITHOUT PICS
		
	

Wendicka Lovejoy

The main protagonist of the story. Wendicka is a tomboy, with a very straightforward (sometimes even tactless) personality, but she always means well. She easily panicks when things are not going the way she planned.
Due to some reasons nobody knows, Wendicka cannot eat or drink and has to live on electricity in stead. This "curse" as she calls it, also allows her to control electricity (giving her some powerful lightning spells in battle).

Crystal McLeen

Surrogate sister to Wendicka. Crystal and Wendicka grew up together. Crystal is in all ways the calmness to Wendicka's wild and panicking nature. Crystal tries to keep her head cool in every situation (though when Wendicka panicks that's pretty hard even for her).
An unknown person turned Crystal into a cyborg after an incident that would otherwise have been fatal to her. Crystal hates her implants, but she knows she needs them to survive.

Experimental Human Replica Unit (ExHuRU)

This android was programmed by admiral John Lovejoy to protect his daughter (by adoption) Wendicka. He lacks all sorts of emotion nor is he able to comprehend human irrational thinking. Wendicka hates being protected and she tries everything to get rid of him. Too bad for her, her father blocked out all possibilities for to reprogram him.

		
			WITH PICTURES
		
	

Wendicka Lovejoy

The main protagonist of the story. Wendicka is a tomboy, with a very straightforward (sometimes even tactless) personality, but she always means well. She easily panicks when things are not going the way she planned.
Due to some reasons nobody knows, Wendicka cannot eat or drink and has to live on electricity in stead. This "curse" as she calls it, also allows her to control electricity (giving her some powerful lightning spells in battle).

Crystal McLeen

Surrogate sister to Wendicka. Crystal and Wendicka grew up together. Crystal is in all ways the calmness to Wendicka's wild and panicking nature. Crystal tries to keep her head cool in every situation (though when Wendicka panicks that's pretty hard even for her).
An unknown person turned Crystal into a cyborg after an incident that would otherwise have been fatal to her. Crystal hates her implants, but she knows she needs them to survive.

Experimental Human Replica Unit (ExHuRU)

This android was programmed by admiral John Lovejoy to protect his daughter (by adoption) Wendicka. He lacks all sorts of emotion nor is he able to comprehend human irrational thinking. Wendicka hates being protected and she tries everything to get rid of him. Too bad for her, her father blocked out all possibilities for to reprogram him.

		
			END OF COMPARING
		
	

This was the kind of thing that made me a bit against disabling images in descriptions.
On the other hand I do think we should make clear that if you put images in the description, you might have a good reason not to put the picture in the description or the screenshot/video section.

Indeed, some remote linked pics may indeed die due to the host being cleaned up (or being removed completely), so maybe a way to upload the images to GJ can be very important in a game description.

I can understand the concern that some people overload their profiles with pictures f****ng up their game profiles in the process. Do we need proper moderation on this, or shall we say that if that kills their pages they got only themselves to blame for low attention?

OK, another example why this is a bad idea: eBay (and similar auction sites) - every seller makes a totally custom item page, using mostly big images, making the browsing slow as hell and you can't just quickly scan the text for relevant info, because you need to analyze the layout first, this leads to confusion and bad choices by users.

Come on, I can't be the last human on earth who likes to read text over watching pictures, can't I? :-P

PS. yes, I do think gopher was a superior protocol for the web ;-)

What if there was a divide, like a short description and then a longer one if you clicked read more? Or is that what news articles should be for?
You could also limit the amount of pictures used to say, three.

Also, I like Jani's idea of limiting dimensions.

Yeah, this is actually the use case I had in mind.

Maybe a size limit on the images needs to be inforced (If you guys allow images in the description). I don't think big images taking up the screen is a good idea, but small ones would be tolerable. The images should also integrate with GameJolts style somehow, having plain images could potentially look bad. Putting a border or something around them could possibly make them integrate with the sites design better.

Another reason for me, to put in images in my game descriptions is in order to put in THIS icon in some of my games:

People really caring about that stuff, might be drawn to a game with a license icon present (I think putting in a field for licenses is a good idea anyway).