Ideas and next steps for gamedb.reicast.com

[FernandoBasso]

In conversation with the fine ladies and gentlemen in the #reicast-dev room on emudev discord, it was agreed upon that we should open an issue to discuss ideas for the website. Therefore, this issue is a continuation of #122.

Some ideas have already been informally mentioned by members of the community, but since I had thought of them as well, I'll add them here nonetheless in this initial post.

• What is the purpose of having reicast.com and gamedb.reicast.com? Wouldn't just one be enough? We could merge the gamedb site in the current menu of the main site. Still, if we keep adding content and features on gamedb, then perhaps it is really best to keep them both separate. Anyways, a discussion may (or may not) ensue from this. I don’t think any particular approach is either good or bad.
• We could stop using Jekyll at all (I am found of Vue.js) and make the entire app just by consuming json and the github APIs. I could argue both ways in favor of Jekyll or a based solution here. I’ll spare the trouble, though. I am sure folks involved know enough to judge by themselves the pros and cons of each (but I can provide some more comments on this if requested).
• Create a filter/search for games. This can be accomplished with a single text input, or with with A to Z letters, or both combined.
• Paginate, or in some other way, not load all the stuff on the home page at once (as we currently do, even though we have lazy loading of the image thumbnail at this point).
• Add a version/tag at certain points in the development of the website so we can have a sort of “release notes” describing the changes for that “version” (which would help to track what was decided upon, worked on, and what remains to be done).
• Work more on the darker version of the website, perhaps use another dark color instead of the current bluish one.

I have more in mind, but I'll stop here for now. Whatever else is suggested, I'll have to take my time to implement it nonetheless. One step at a time.

Hoping for comments (favorable or otherwise) and suggestions for the initial topics above, as well as any other ideas.

PS: I wish to remind people that the work I have done so far was not an “Hey, look ma! The shiny new website! It is cool, huh!”. No it was just something to get started. An initial step. As @skmp wisely put it, incremental development is the best and early feedback avoids pain and wasting of work. I’ll strive to follow that earnest piece of advice. Let’s gradually improve the website(s), step by step.

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