Nitrome Pixel Love Wiki
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Slayin
Blog image
  Information
Link to play: Pixel Love
Released: July 9, 2012
No. of levels: 50
Data saved: Characters obtained
Genre(s): Action, RPG
Website(s): Nitrome.com
Special: Also an iOS game
  Other games in series
Game 1 Game 2

On Nitrome Wiki, do you remember the blog post I made about introducing a new style of infobox that had a collapsible component to it? Well, here is the blog post to refresh your memory.

I had some time yesterday to fool around with this code, designing a new infobox for game templates. What you see on the right now is the result!

There's still a few knacks to work out, and this blog post was partly made to test how the infobox would look against a bunch of text, as it would normally in an article. The colour choice is a bit tentative, as are the order of the parameters of information. But I've made the decision to implement this change to Template:Infobox game starting Saturday.

Changes[]

Since I've coded this new infobox with parameters that work a bit differently than our current model (based off of Nitrome Wiki's, with parameters that don't quite fit in with Pixel Love games), I'm listing some major coding changes below:

Image parameter[]

Pages on Pixel Love games use the image posted on the Nitrome blog as the main image for their infobox. Since the dimensions and url are constant for every image that goes in there, the new infobox will only require you to insert the name of the image URL, followed by its extension. For instance, for a file such as File:Catastrophi-blog.png, you would have originally had to type in [[File:Catastrophi-blog.png|150px]] next to |image=. This becomes |image=Catastrophi-blog.png in the new infobox. The .png bit was omitted from the template's code because a few Pixel Love blog images are .jpg, like Tobe's Hookshot Escape.

Also going into the image parameter is a default size to maintain consistency for each infobox. It's going to be 190 pixels wide rather than 150. 150 only works well for the current infobox design because the infobox itself uses small text, making the image seem a tad too protruding.

Images, when hovered over, will also have a "Blog image" tooltip. Doesn't hurt to have one in there, does it not?

Additional and removed parameters[]

Like I said earlier, the original infobox design on this wiki was taken from Nitrome Wiki's, with all of Nitrome Wiki's parameters on there. Pixel Love games seem to share characteristics that Nitrome games often have identical, for instance, how their menu screens are navigated or what progress is saved in a Pixel Love game. Since these are different from Pixel Love game to Pixel Love game, I thought these could be acknowledged in the infobox.

Here are some additional parameters I added, as well as some removed.

  • Removed parameters:
    • Game types - Didn't think this applied to Pixel Love games. Come to think of it, this barely applies to Nitrome anymore.
    • MA awards - I'm not sure whether to add this in or not. Not that many Pixel Love games are found on Miniclip, let alone have rewards. I'll consider re-adding this later.
  • Parameters added:
    • Developer
    • Date of feature
    • Data saved - like high scores, levels, unlocked characters, etc., something that a player playing on the same computer would retain even after they log off.
  • Soundtrack availability - A parameter for listing sites where the game's soundtrack can be purchased/downloaded from.
  • Changed parameters
    • "Controls" to "Controls scheme" - I started implementing this on the current infobox. Rather than using the infobox to define the game's controls (which are already stated in the "Controls" section), the infobox can simply state what parts of the computer are used for the game's controls. You know, like the keyboard, or mouse.
    • "Prequel/Sequel" to "Other games in series" - I wanted something that would list all the games within the games series, whether they are spinoffs, sequels or prequels.

Credits parameter[]

The credits parameter will now become a collapsible component of the infobox. It will also code a bit differently. Instead of using <br /> tags to separate different sections of credits from each other, each "credit" section will be centred in the infobox. At the moment, the horizontal rules have to be manually added with <hr> in place of the br tags that separate each acknowledgement. I could make each credit their own section in their own parameters, but the credits in each of the individual games tend to vary from each other, and I thought it would be best to leave that parameter open for every games' own interpretation.

Implementation[]

The plan is that three days from now (as of Sept 18), I'll apply the changes from Template:Infobox game/test to Template:Infobox game, and start to edit all the Pixel Love game articles so that their information is up to date with this new infobox. I'll do some more testing with the template before that, but I think the template you see now is the one that will be applied on Saturday.

Not all parameters are (obviously) going to apply to all games, and there may be more parameters that can be added in the future.

This will be a tedious but exciting challenge, I think. Until then,

HAI!


UPDATE

All game pages should be edited now to comply with the modified infobox code. If not, let me know, or feel free to edit the page yourself! Any further suggestions you have in mind for improving this template can be tested out on Template:Infobox game/test and the Project:Sandbox, or brought up in the comments below.

See you all on Monday for some more... PIXEL LOVE! :D

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