Game Launcher and SteamUGC
Entry posted by Josh ·
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I'm working to move our Workshop implementation over to the newer SteamUGC API. There were recently some things updated, and that is still being sorted out. I'm also finishing up the game player.
The first incarnation of Leadwerks Game Launcher was pretty utilitarian (and ugly):
I realized this was pretty drab for a product aimed at consumers, so I designed a more outlandish colorful interface that was purely web-based:
This one looks nice, but you can tell it will start to feel dated quickly. I'm also concerned about the user's perception of this product. It is meant to be a software application, not a thinly wrapped web page. I'm also sensitive to the danger of this product being associated with garbage like this, enough so that I decided to get rid of the "Game Player" name and call it something else. The name "Game Launcher" is more closely associated with initialization interfaces like the one used in Amnesia. It's just more of an acceptable PC gaming thing:
My design also took up a lot of space and looked a lot like the iTunes App Store. It is not my goal to build a redundant marketplace within Steam, and that is what this looks like.
So with that in mind, I came up with a third design that makes better use of the GUI and minimizes the web elements:
The buttons in the left-hand lower corner are unicode characters, interestingly.
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