Command & Conquer Community - Website Development
Revitalizing the Command & Conquer franchise with a modern, accessible website designed to engage the gaming community and preserve its legacy.
The aim
To create a fully bespoke resource for Command & Conquer Games and Mods. Bringing a new modern and discoverable resource.
The result
View the C&C Community website
Since its launch in 2021:
- Over a million requests per month.
- 22 thousand new unique visitors each month.
- It appears in all top searches for all Command & Conquer games.
Features
- Bespoke C&C Remastered Red Alert Leaderboard
- Bespoke C&C Remastered Tiberian Dawn Leaderboard
- Bespoke CMS to manage pages, news, and fetching of various custom news feeds and media.
- Live - Fetching of Twitch.tv Livestreams for Command & Conquer
- Online - Fetching against various community API's to show online player counts in a single page.
Tech
- PHP, MySQL, Laravel and TypeScript for JavaScript.
- Photoshop for design
- The content and media on the site was a collaborative effort of community members.
C&C Remastered Leaderboard
First a sync tool had to be created so it could fetch against an API storing all the game data, saved to a database structure and be parsed out into a frontend. With thousands of records daily, the tool had little room for error.
Leaderboard Steam stats and profiles
Leaderboard listings for both games showed the top 1000 players for the season, complete with a search for finding your profile.
Each player had their own Leaderboard profile page, showing further detailed stats and their recent games. The profile avatars fetched against the Steam API to show their profile images.
Live page
The idea of the Live page was to automatically show who was playing Command & Conquer games, embedding a preview and a link out to their Twitch profile page.
Stats page
The Command & Conquer community is split up into multiple communities and multiplayer servers. Online play is handled mostly by the community apart from the recent Remastered Collection. The community stats page is designed to show online numbers for all servers in one place. It will automatically save the records for the last 24 hours and embed them into a graph.
Custom CMS
A bespoke CMS was created to manage various parts of the site.
News articles are auto-added into the system from various Command & Conquer community API's. They come into the system prequipped with a title, description and any media it finds. Pending approval, admins can then decide to publish the news to the site.
Admins can also add custom news into the system and will appear in the appropriate categories they select.
Custom pages can also be created.
Credits
Below are the core team members who alongside myself came up with the idea of this new central resource. Combined we made an excellent team to produce a standout website.
- Ben Leech (Copy creation & Page structures)
- CCHyper (Asset creation)
- NoStringsPrd (Video creation)
- Rick Tousseyn (Marketing)
- Tore (Server setup)
A shoutout to the Petroglyph Games team for providing a C&C Remastered API to fetch game data against too. Without this, the web leaderboards wouldn't have been possible.
