Well, it's done and it's working! The new tsumea has been months of arduous work, a whole lot of which went into migrating the data, and planning and rebuilding the site all over again. But now it's a whole lot more structured, organised, and future proof. The old tsumea was built gradually over the years but not in a cohesive, orderly way. Things got messy, parts were difficult to find and fix, and adding new things took longer than they should have because of it. Fixing it all was sorta like recoding an old game but having the hindsight of knowing how to build it all again much better. The new tsumea is on a content management system that's two generations newer than what it was previously, and we're on a great foundation to build upon some really cool stuff for the near future.
From a user's point of view, it may not look like much has changed, but we've expanded on the idea of "accreditation" where users can mark what games they worked on or what studios or education they're at. Now users, developers, and games can also have awards they've received from events like GCAP displayed on their pages.
The events pages have been drastically improved so that we can include a whole lot of information about an event including listings of awards winners/finalists, and speakers. We can also look up awards winners and finalists at past events on the Events page. We also have a podcast section. Previously, podcasts were posted in a forum thread, but now they're much more part of the site with each podcast embedded and playable in their own pages, and if the person, company, or game in the podcast has a page on tsumea, they'll be listed and linked on the podcast page as well.
There's a lot of other streamlined adjustments and changes, but I won't bore you with all the details. I've got more plans for tsumea this year and this was just the first big step accomplished.
