I've spend some time (and money) to get the knowledge about all (almost...) php arcades on the market. Now I really know what best features should be added to chika.
Lets walk through:
1. MOCHI MOCHI MOCHI.
mochi offers rss or json feeds for arcade publishers. We can AUTO publish games to our websites without even a click... on some other aracdes it's possible right now... But I will not point them out - if you would like some info pm me.
Chika should go that way too... And even further - add a mochi bridge to grab some money from mochi game ads and integrate mochi scoreboards (YES, IT'S POSSIBLE).
2. Scoring system
As I stated above - I would preffer a scoring system form mochi rather than one built in chika. Why? Because all the games that use chika's posting scores method are OLD ONES. It's not possible to have a pro arcade site with games dated 2001... So, I would resign from current scoring system (or leave it as an option) and integrate mochi into chika.
Beside that - as I mention in some other post - socring system is full of bugs...
3. wake up!!! it's a web 2.0 world we're living in!
chika should get:
-tags & tag cloud
-more SEO options in backend - (game desc as meta desc, game keywords, titles, cats pages meta etc.)
-more ajax (i.e. ajax supported search, comments, shoutbox, etc etc.)
-more social - pm messages for users, avatars
-news module (blog like) - I'm thinking about integrating wordpress with chika:)
-auto "featured games module" - on the backend you choose games that you want to be featured - first on the main page.
-cross category and categories levels - there are maaaaaany games that we could add to more than one category. why not to do so?
4. TEMPLATES. It's really problem now to have an unique template for your arcade. I know several chika arcades that haven't even changed a logo...
I think you - guys at chika - should provide a tamplate creation service. I really could pay for something cool & fresh w2.0 looking.
5. CONTENT IS THE KING.
I really don't know why most of the arcades on market have only one way of publishing games... and only SWF games. In chika you can only upload swf file and game img file.
IT'S not enough! Adding a game should be reanamed to adding a content with following options:
-games from mochi (see 1.)
-upload: swf, img (as standalone content - e.g. funny pics category), other formats like dcr, flv, avi etc.
-embedd - youtube videos, dailymotion etc etc
-embed - flash games from other servers
6. other nice stuff like:
-game resizing tool.... look at any game at my site: http://www.grajogry.pl/ - just above the game there is a green hand icon which you can slide to zoom in & out.
-social bookmarks (digg it etc.)
Ok, that's all what I wanted to point out (for now
. Hope at least some of these ideas will be implemented in chika (mochi mochi please....).Best regards... and happy new year:)
p.s. how can i get this tamplate: http://www.moodyme.com/ ?
