I think the UI needs a bit of a modern refresh...

[Chucklepie]

I love BGA, but the front end sure does need a bit of a modernisation. Ignoring look and feel, which is more a personal thing, if each element of a game were treated with a 'mobile first', or even a more normal grid layout, it could adjust far better for varying devices. Seems to me the layout manager is hard-coded and was created before more modern flex libraries were created.

I know ultrawide monitors aren't that popular, but here we have Earth. I have to make each element tiny and still scroll 3 pages to view all the elements, yet 70% of my entire width is just wasted space, but in order to not scroll so much I have to make text too small to read. Turning it into a game I love into something hardly worth playing online.

Same goes for most games, tbh.

Screenshot from 2023-07-02 19-24-41.jpg (113.8 KiB) Viewed 501 times

[Tisaac]

I love BGA, but the front end sure does need a bit of a modernisation. Ignoring look and feel, which is more a personal thing, if each element of a game were treated with a 'mobile first', or even a more normal grid layout, it could adjust far better for varying devices. Seems to me the layout manager is hard-coded and was created before more modern flex libraries were created.

I know ultrawide monitors aren't that popular, but here we have Earth. I have to make each element tiny and still scroll 3 pages to view all the elements, yet 70% of my entire width is just wasted space, but in order to not scroll so much I have to make text too small to read. Turning it into a game I love into something hardly worth playing online.

Same goes for most games, tbh.

Screenshot from 2023-07-02 19-24-41.jpg

Not sure what you call "layout manager" but I think you are underestimating the amount of work to make an interface good on various devices, especially for board games that are not a usual linear content as most of the web is. Earth was very recently added so of course flex was available when the developper coded this one, but flex is not magic.

[Chucklepie]

I do know actually, I'm a software developer, and using a modern flex layout system makes things trivial no matter what device is being used

But the problem I see it, is the constrains imposed by the BGA api framework, not necessarily the per game developers. Just look at how on many games tutorial modes you have to go through half a dozen screens of it telling you it has to do something because of the limitations of how the replay system works.

I'm not complaining or understating how much effort is put into the site, merely putting suggestions for how better testing and an improved UX/UI framework would massively improve things.

[GTSchemer]

Speaking as a BGA developer (and software developer for decades), flex does NOT make layout trivial. There are many considerations and factors which affect proper, responsive layout, some of which need decided on a per-game basis.

In addition, this is programmed on a per-game basis. BGA does not provide or enforce a game layout other than the scoreboard / title bar regions.

[Tisaac]

Cannot agree more. Flex is NOT magic when you have huge unbreakable elements to display all over the place. Boardgames are far from typical use case of web developpement.
Our point is that it would make more sense to create specific suggestions for each game where you think layout could be improved by giving a quick mockup on what you think would work better instead of a generic "layout sucks on game" thread. But i agree with you that layout is a very important part of the UX and i usually spend do many hours finetuning it in the games I made.