Guest login and straight to portal

I had done it before but I am doing it again, and I think I’ll really stick to it this time: skipping the intro screen and going straight to the portal on first land on the site.

Previously you would first land on this screen:

And then, if somehow you were convinced signing up for a game would be worth it (never mind the 123040234230 games you can just play instantly), you landed here:

… Where the button I want you to press is one of those three in the upper left corner. Yuk, how could I ever expect somebody to make it all the way trough that?

In the shiny new version, everybody who lands is logged on automatically as a ‘guest’ account, lands in the portal, and will probably be able to figure out which button to press:

Other changes:

• On the left you now have some basic game play instructions.
• The quick challenge box below the chat is gone, but I never made it to work anyway. The sad news is that it also had the currently online users, which was nice for knowing who you can chat with or challenge.
• The Start Game button takes you to campaign mode, which is designed to ‘ease in’ players into the game. I still need to work on that a lot though, for example level 0 which starts with just 2 soldiers is nearly unbeatable for beginners because the bot moves too fast
• Logging in with your account is moved discretely to the top
• Multiplayer / practice / guide are also more visible, but still obviously less important than campaign mode.

The only thing I don’t like that much is that you cannot see who is online anymore in the portal. So I think I should look for a way to get that information somewhere in the portal I think. Perhaps using some kind of dropout, so that it does not clutter the layout even more? (I want to keep the amount of text to a minimum at all costs)

As of this writing the web site is down btw and this change is not deployed live yet.

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