JoshuaJSlone said:
I thought looking at the top sales of games between specific dates was pretty interesting, so
put a new tool in Labs to do similar things for arbitrary time frames and/or publishers and/or platforms.
Doing this, though, I realized how similar it is in input and output to the old
Game Search. Probably they should end up combined.
Now THAT'S a good idea. One I've taken to heart.
I've tried to combine the key features of both of those pages and a few more new things into
this new game search. It sits in Labs for now, but the plan is to have it replace the old Game Search once it's been vetted for a while and fixes/further suggestions have been taken care of.
Major changes from old game search:
In the old Game Search, you could specify a Release Date by using an exact date, or with wildcards. That allowed you to do things like narrow things down to a specific year, or month, or all dates that are the 10th of the month for some reason. Now, however, you can specify a range of dates. That allows new possibilities, but if you want it to behave like the old one (for checking releases on the 10th for whatever reason), you can put NONE in for the second date.
Since I switched that to a range, the same has been done for Launch Price. And in the same way, you can make it act like the old way by putting NONE in the for second option.
Order By. In the old game search it first arranged things by platform, then by release date. Now you can be much more freestyle with this. By title alphabetically, OK. From greatest to least sales, OK. From greatest to least price, OK. Hopefully the short description and examples included there are OK; it seemed much easier to program in and more powerful from the user point of view than if I'd tried to give a few options from checklists or whatever.
Column hiding. Looking up some javascript for a related purpose recently, I learned how to make columns appear and disappear at will. This seems a decent solution for when there are many possible things to show, but you'd rather concentrate on... whatever you want to concentrate on. For now there are two columns that start as hidden: the Japanese title (I think it's safe to say that most current users lean more English than Japanese) and the "As of" date for when the game's LTD was last updated.
Feedback:
Feedback would be good. Bugs, of course. Feature suggestions, taken into consideration. But what I'm most interested in is presentation. It's something I tend to take into little consideration when slapping these things together, and since I know exactly what it's (supposed to be) doing, I'm not a great judge of how friendly things are. Could the instructions and examples on the right use improvement? Would it make more sense to order the inputs on the left in a different way? How about the order of columns on the bottom? Stuff like that.
Examples:
This version of the search uses almost the same parameters as the old one. This means both that links to search results from the old one should still work, and that it's easy for me to show before/after for how things look. Of course, if I use a fancy "Order By" or one of the other new features from the new one, it will get ignored for the old one.
Looking for the best selling Phantasy Stars, as we were recently?
Old New
Looking for 2006 Atlus releases?
Old New
Looking for the most successful games from D3 Publisher?
Old New
Games with the word Bob in the title, from most recent on back?
Old New
Cheap Square Enix titles?
Old New
