Introducing the new GamesWatch
After a year, I am launching the new and improved version of the game reference website for game creators and game fans.
It is my utmost pleasure to announce that almost exactly a year after launching the original GamesWatch website in 2018 I am launching the new and improved version of the game reference website for game creators and game fans. For those of you who aren’t familiar with GamesWatch, I would like to tell you about what it is and how it came to be.
The initial idea of GamesWatch came to me back in 2017 while I was playing Mad Max on PS4. I was enjoying the the game and its small design details so, so much. It made me realise that as an UI designer, I could learn a lot from games. I wished there was a place where I could browse a vast collection of game designs and this motivated me to make a crudely coded HTML prototype of how this page could look like.
Fast forward to January 2018, a year later, to me launching the first version of GamesWatch knowing that I could do a lot more in terms of the user experience, the code base and features.
So much has changed in the past year. During this time I realised GamesWatch could be so much more. I find games amazing, beautiful and fascinating. There’s so much work going into them. There’s so much to know about the stories they tell, the state of the art technologies that are used to make them, the stories of the people making them… I wish there was a place where people could spend their time getting to know the world of games — the trivia, the lingo, the history, the creators. All of it. I want to create this place and I know I need to start with the basics.
This is the reason I spent last year redesigning and rebuilding the whole website from scratch. It’s completely rebuilt in React, with Next.js, a framework for server-rendered React applications, and Sanity — the Norwegian headless CMS. It is now faster, superior to the previous version with lots of technical improvements under the hood but the best of it are the user experience improvements.
Improved homepage
The new homepage is more inviting, explanatory and it’s showing recently added games.
Improved gameshot modal
The gameshot modal is now displaying some useful metadata and the gameshot link is sharable.
Introducing categories
Some of the tags are now curated on the Categories page, in useful categories: Interface, Layout, Location, Pattern State and Visual. They also have previews.
Introducing high-quality video gameshots
Last year I introduced animated gameshots in the form of short animated gifs. Now, the animated gameshots are short high-quality videos so you can see the game in all of its beauty.
All of this was a fresh start and there’s a lot of good stuff in store for GamesWatch in 2019. So check out the new GamesWatch at gameswat.ch and feel free to spread the word!
I’m also posting tidbits of game trivia and nice little details regularly on the GamesWatch Instagram account. Check it out!
GamesWatch is my side project and I am investing a lot of my free time and money in it. If you love games just like me and want to see GamesWatch succeed, please consider buying me a coffee. Even the smallest contribution can go a long way. Thank you!
