New Arcade WordPress Theme – RGVAC
Been waiting for this to drop, furiously tapping my leg. But tonight Brian updated his RGVAC arcade game website with a brand new theme that I designed. I was really happy with the way the layout turned out, it uses pieces of artwork from some of his favorite games.
Custom Arcade WordPress Themes
Hopefully you’ve read this far;) I know some people scan. RGVAC is not free and not for sale. This is a custom contracted WordPress theme paid for by RGVAC, or Brian’s Classic Arcade game website. Now that I’ve got that out of the way before someone asks about downloading a copy.
A little bit about the design
I knew right from the start that I wanted to use some pieces of artwork from Brian’s favorite games, which I already mentioned. Brian has been collecting for ten years plus now, and I know he is passionate about particular arcades. Most people just want the typical stuff, some Donkey Kong, some Pac-man, but what made this site so enjoyable to design is that I got to use elements from Quantum, Black Widow and even Tim Skelly’s Screw Loose, which Brian owns the only known working version of that game. (It may make my top 15 prototype arcade game list ;)) If you haven’t already, go ahead and bring up Brian’s arcade blog in a new tab.
Can you see the elements from each of the games I mentioned above? Black Widow is pretty easy, the red banding and spiders in the sidebar as well as the spiraling pattern in the background. But can you pick out Quantum? Probably, but if you didn’t, there is a ghosted piece of the control panel overlay in the main banner and one other element not from the control panel. Leave a comment if you can pick it out.
There are the two Screw Loose characters up by the search field / the comments indicator, and elements from the Centipede sideart with the ‘flaking’ red bar at the top drawing from the blue explosion patterns from Atari’s classic.
Top that off, I really wanted to play off the words ‘Classic’ and ‘Arcade’, so I tried to give the banner a weathered satchel brown paper type look, as if we were looking at the games in an old 50’s style movie reel. Top that off carrying over the old RGVAC logo with a little modification, and some of the 80’s style font outlining and you get a pretty sweet looking website. The real key to all of these pieces of artwork was already having them in a vector format to easily manipulate.
RGVAC is now a blog style website
If you are interested in a custom arcade game theme for your website give me a call. A little research on the internet will let you know how powerful WordPress is for syndicating content and propelling yourself to the top of a given niche. Most arcade game website could really pass for blogs, here’s a short list of arcade game blogs that already exist.
If you are looking to get noticed a little bit more, and are actually looking to reduce some of the work it takes to maintain your website in the long run, shoot me a line. I might be able to help you out.
Here are some similar arcade posts
- Arcade Game Inspired WordPress Theme – BCPArcade.com
- Custom Super Bug WordPress Theme
- New Space Invaders Website Design – Game Stencils.com
- “Kong Me Baby” – Free Donkey Kong WordPress Theme
- Atari Command Free WordPress Theme
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Comments
@Jeff’s Arcade:
It sounds like Brian is going to try to add everything back in from his old blue colored website, as well as a ton of arcade related stuff that he didn’t add into the old design because he knew he’d be updating it. Time is always an issue for transferring one arcade website to another, but hopefully he sticks with it. Plus he knows I am here to help however I can, and he got through a ton of stuff in one night without knowing very much about WordPress and the php based core.
Must say a proper thanks to Jeff for his work on rgvac.com.. the man’s got skills in the design arena! Finally gives me the motivation to get my personal game site back off the ground again with a sharp design.
Like Jeff mentioned, there’s an absolute TON of stuff that was missing from my old site that I plan to re-introduce on the new one. Ranging from rebuilding cabinets from scratch to some major repairs on some super rare machines. It will of course take time but it will get done! The whole wordpress thing does change the game a bit with all the prethought you have to give organization and content management.
@Brian Jones:
I think the thing I see first when I look at a lot of new WordPress sites is the use of classes to easily display content.
I know a couple of arcade collectors are using the WordPress GUI Library interface to position their images. But I would suggest if you are going to have images in posts to make sure you add a number of classes to do so into your stylesheet to center align them and give them some breathing room. Here is usually what I use;
.centerBorder{
text-align:center:
padding:10px 0;
}
.centerBorder img{
padding:3px;
border:1px solid #efefef;
margin:0 4px;
}
That is going off of memory, but that should allow you to add in a div block that will center an image inside of it, and then give any image inside of that block a thin grey border that is off the edges of the image a little bit, with a touch of space (margin) between each image inside of the div block.
This is incredible, I’ve never seen those possibilities with WordPress before, thanks for opening my eyes. 😉
@sniper game guy:
Thank you for the compliment. The design possibilities for WordPress are only limited by your creativity. Most individuals who release free themes don’t do much on customization of functionality or design. I tried at the least to provide a nice arcade geared theme design, since I am not a programming guru.
After I originally left a comment I seem to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and from now on every time a comment is added I recieve four emails with the exact same comment. There has to be a way you are able to remove me from that service? Thanks!
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August 26, 2008
That would be me….guilty of skimming. I was curious where Brian’s site went as I was looking for a paint code a week or so ago. His site was gone but when I dug a bit deeper and found your Atari theme lurking there, so I knew something was up. I found the paint codes on his oleszakcreative.com site. Nicely done, it looks great.