Competition section added to Flash River

[andross_88]

Its been a while since I've been here or posted anything, but i am back for now. I promised that I would continue improving my latest web project dedicated to all the Flash developers in the world. I just wanted to update anyone interested in the site. I added a competition section for those who want to compete sort of like the FK competitions you have here. You can vote for your favorite entries.

If someone has a good idea for a competition topic please tell me because mine is pretty vague and simple. Take a quick look yeah.

http://andross.no-ip.info/flashriver

[Pugger]

Good to see your site is coming along. For the competition section you need to have a server, where people can upload their games. If people submit only a url, they can modify the game beyond a competions date. Your site should have a submit button, where you can upload the game up to a certain time, where after that time the game can no longer be uploaded (or the game can be classed as a late entry and the administrator can decide whether to let it in or not or penalize it by subtracting so many votes by how late it was).

You need a search feature, or a way of managing all those games as well. You can class them into genres - action, arcade, rpg, misc, etc. The person submitting can choose the genre it best fits into - also need to be able to remove a link when the game is complete or never going to be finished.

But your sites coming along nicely, getting better everytime I see it. (P.S. Can you change the font to arial or something a little smoother?)

[jesserules]

when i hit vote, it says that my vote has been submitted, but it doesn't let me vote .

[andross_88]

Thanks Pugger for the constructive comments. I totally agree with you about using an uploading system instead because that way no one would be able to upload the same file more than once. Once the deadline passes I could just disable the upload system and start up the voting phase. As for the categories, that would be good for another section of my site, but for the Competition Arena there wouldn't really be a need for genres since all the games will be based on the Competition Topic.

Yes jesserules, i am still working on the voting system. For now your vote goes to the overall score. Thanks everyone for your feedback even if it was just two people.

Oh, the update. You can upload you .swf files into the Competition Arena and I changed the font to Arial (easier to read I guess).

http://andross.no-ip.info/flashriver

[Pugger]

Hey, good work. I was thinking, if a person has a game that uses multiple files or xml, would their be way for people to upload these with the main game?

Out of interest, what else do you have planned for the site? I do like the idea.

[jesserules]

Hey, good work. I was thinking, if a person has a game that uses multiple files or xml, would their be way for people to upload these with the main game?

Out of interest, what else do you have planned for the site? I do like the idea.

they could load them from their own website.

[andross_88]

Sure Pugger, I could have the server actually create folders for each submission so that you can have multiple files. The only problem with this is that if there is an increase in the number of people viewing this files, my server could start to lag and other issues could arise. Speaking of the number of visits, I forgot to add a counter to the site. I need to get an idea of the number of hits it gets if any.

As for future updates, I plan to create a forums section dedicated to flash game development and probably a tutorials section, with the help from you guys of course. I want this site to be helpful to both beginners and experts in flash game development so that is key. As I said a month ago, this is just a small project i thought would be fun to do (something i could use for my portfolio once i start looking for work), so i don't know exactly how it will turn out. I sure could use ideas though. Thanks again.

[token 3]

I've just completed / half finished a site with a similar purpose to yours, it's still in testing and if I get time I'll add and tidy it up a lot more.

I looked mainly at navigation, and how it can maximise the number of views of each project; through what I've called trails http://www.mikomedia.com/jso/

if you click on an entry you're presented with information about the project/site, you then read the comments; if you think that you and the commenter have a similar trail of thought you can choose to 'follow' them by clicking on their username; this will bring up a series of links that they have looked at.

using this method, users can easily find things that are of a greater interest to them; eventually you'll be able to view by category, number of clicks, rating, number of comments, number of views...

there's also scope (which is working with the CMS for this) for a 'developer' link, basically this is a little information about the developer; each entry/site has a developer url which relates to the developer info - this allows you to easily find projects by a certain developer.

personally, I'd only link to external sites, as, if or when your site grows you could be forced to pay a large amount of money for hosting, try to keep bandwidth down to a minimum

hope that helps,
Mike