The website is dead – long live the new website!

Almost exactly two years ago I screamed as an email titled “Frictional Games: Job Offer” dropped in my inbox. I continued screaming as I called my mother to tell her the news. Half an hour later she sent me a follow-up text.

“I looked at the website you sent me. Are you sure it’s a real company? I’m worried.”

Since that day, my life has never known peace.

One of the first big questions I dared shoot at Thomas and Fredrik was “Hey, can we please do something about the website?” They said yes. In my foolishness I posted the first blog in 3 years, stating we were still alive – expecting to hype people up for an imminent release of a new website.

The release wasn’t imminent. Instead we were met with… well, let’s call it a Series of Time-Consuming False Starts.

As 2020 grew closer, some passive superstition started gnawing at me. This time the screaming was internal, and kept me awake at night at the thought of entering the new decade with an old website (a perfectly normal reaction, right?). Our fans making fun of the site didn’t help either, dealing further damage to a project I now considered the measure of my pride.

Fuck it. I’ll make it myself.

And I did. You’re looking at it! The monument to my mediocre design skills, superior patience, love for colour orange, and some help from the rest of the team (as well as our IT partner Vessinge).

Gregor, Kira, and Alex, sharing between them about 2,5 brain cells worth of WordPress experience.

So, what’s new?

The main new thing is that I’m nuking the concept of posting content on separate platforms. All future news and blog posts (previously on our Blogspot) will be posted here and here only. I have gone through all (376) past blogs and news articles, as well as posts on our forum and mysterious third-party platforms, and hunted down the images and videos, fixed or removed all broken links.

Other new things, in no particular order, include:

What’s coming?

There wasn’t quite enough time to finish everything before winter vacation. Here are some things you can expect to see in 2020:

  • A press kit page for media
  • Additional information for prospective employees, both about working at Frictional and working in Sweden
  • People of Frictional posts (including mine and the people who have started before me who I’m waiting on)
  • Make early Frictional-related games (Fiend, Unbirth and Energetic) available, if we can find them
  • Design improvements (if any fans out there know WordPress, hmu)
  • More good old tech and design blogs

And now Frictional Games is off for a winter vacation! (Great timing considering all that clicking has driven me to the edge of yet another carpal tunnel.)

Here’s to a great 2020!

PS. Is something broken? Should we add something else? Let us know in the comments!

6 Replies to “The website is dead – long live the new website!”

  1. Hey, last few years I’ve been following this blog very quietly, but I realy enjoyed all of the articles so far! The new website definitally is a great improvent. There’s just one “missing” feature I could think of… Do you plan to add RSS support to this (relocated) blog as well? Or is there some other way to keep us updated on everything that gets posted to this blog?

    Have a great holiday and the best whishes to you all for 2020!

    1. Thank you, Sven! RSS was one of the things I didn’t have time to figure out before the holidays, but I will ask our IT partner to add it once we come back from vacation.

      Have a lovely holiday too!

  2. Hiya
    When open a page from the items of the drop-down menus in a new tab, The drop-down menu remains visible even when I no longer mouse-over it.
    For example: Use
    Next Frictional Game
    in line 212 of the html file, to open another tab and (line 212)
    remains visible. Line references are for https://frictionalgames.com/ .
    When i do the same thing in another drop-down menu this one freezes, but the first one disappears. Not exactly site breaking but you said to comment if anything was broken. I got this bug on both regular Firefox and Tor, my OS is Ubuntu 19.10.
    Otherwise the redesign of your site looks really nice.

    1. Oh, thank you for the feedback! I will let our tech partner know once we have a chance to talk, and see if there’s a solution.

  3. I regularly check this website to see what’s next. Seeing this has me excited!! Are we just around the corner from frictional next game?

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