MArcomage

the concept of the game is nice and well developed, but still i don't think that the design of the site does come up to the content. so i tried to improve it a bit. i haven't come that far till now but i already made a suggestion for a new card design. you can habe a look here:

http://www.imagehack.eu/bild.php/16901,marcomagecardsv1jpgH9S0M.jpg

what i have changed is the following:

_backgrounds of the cards are white for common, silver for uncommon and gold for rare.

_colors for recource costs:
no cost (white/no color), bricks (red), recruits (green), magic (blue), bricks/magic (purple), bricks/magic/recruits (brown), and so on ...

_icons for the recources

_round corners

_some typographic changes

_card lenghts are now all the same


well, i really would like to help to bring the site up to a next level

Seriously, I really don't like your design at all. Those things doesn't look like cards to me. Only thing I like about them are the round corners.

Also there are 2 problems in your design:

- "card height is the same" - this is really a problem. Since the card height depends on the card effect text it cannot be bounded by a constant. The text height is set to relative unit size, thus user can adjust it's size using browser settings (Opera - wheel up and down). Don't forget that cards are HTML elements, not images.

- even if we would be able to bound the card height by constant it's really a waste of screen space. If you look at the height of all cards you can see that most of them are much smaller then highest cards. So in your design every single card would use same ammount of space as the highest one - it's really a waste of space. I think most people prefer to see the game screen with little scrolling as possible. This would most probably enlarge space requirements for both game and deck section.

well, thank for your opinion.
i see it different. first of all the design issue is more important to me than the rest. i am pretty sure that 4 of 5 people who enter the site for the first time will leave within less than 5 seconds. i mean the site looks like from the early days of webdesign. i don't have the feeling i am on a fantasy-related site. it is too technical and frankly spoken the agressive colors (red, yellow, cyan, green, blue) hurt my eyes. all together. in short it is just not a site you want to stay and you feel comfortable at all.

i don't want to lower your work at all. i can guess you invested hours and hours in this project and i already mentioned that i think all besides the design is just great.

regarding the cards: ehm...do the cards now look like cards? i don't think so.

al least i would suggest to align the cards on the top cause now the cards just seem to fly around somewhere in air and it makes the whole think bumpy and nervous.

Yeah, you're right about the website design - the colors are too agressive and I plan to redesign it and even add some user selectable layout (skins). But I think card layout is ok (maybe the round corners could be added).

I especially like the background he used. I believe the current background picture is there for historical reason's, but I think it's ugly, especially because half of the picture isn't really a picture.

As for the card design... Not much "flavor" bit cold hearted modern style. Don't think it suits fantasy.

As for whole new site lay outs: Im really curious.

Cards are now aligned to the top of the page in both games and deck sections.

nice. i think it is much better now.

Getting rid of the background image, and just making the back solid black or white will do wonders for the site.

It's a pain in the ass trying to play this game on a mobile device because you have to download that huge image everytime you play a card.

Layout for mobile devices can be specified separately. When we have a new layout ready, then we can start working on a "lighter" layout for mobile devices.