Over the course of prototyping the VG Archive, I’ve primarily focused on turning the ideas I ideated into functional aspects. During ideating the focus was on the timeline, and an activity function inspired by Letterboxd’s diary function. Moving into prototyping these remained the primary focus. Fortunately, as I had already been workshopping and creating mockups of the required elements during ideation, prototyping only required applying these elements into their designated function.
Given the construction of the ‘graphical nodes’ as I’ve come to call them, the timeline itself adopted a relatively basic design. Given the amount of info condensed onto the nodes themselves, I figured this design was best to keep things from becoming visually cluttered and overwhelming. This also kept the possibility for the timeline becoming a hub for future content open for the future, something which I had intentions of pursuing.
As for the activity section, the design for individual titles remained the same. Although their design as a whole was somewhat changed. I separated the titles between each individual one, and made use of separators and headers to distinguish between months and years respectively.
I also expanded the functionality of the activity section allowing users to click on a specific title and be directed to either the titles listing on an official marketplace, or an official page. Unfortunately, for many older titles such pages may not be up anymore. In other cases, certain titles may have predated the common adoption of the internet and thus never had an online presence in the first place.
During prototyping, I also heavily re-evaluated the social media presence I outlined during ideation. Initially I had planned to make use of ‘secondary’ social media accounts (most likely Instagram and Twitter) to support the primary VG Archive Blog. Although since I’ve come to reconsider this approach, for multiple reasons.
One of which is scope. I began to question if managing two separate social media accounts was reasonably within the scope of the project. Alongside my own personal disengagements from social media, I decided to put any dedicated social media accounts on hold.
Furthermore, as the VG Archive itself began to transition from an objective collection, to something more subjective and personal, having dedicated social media accounts over my own personal social media began to feel redundant. Putting any dedicated social media accounts on hold supports this more personal, passion project driven approach.
Theonewithoutafairy 