Legion System Update #1: Going Pixel

Welcome to the first Legion System Update.

From now on, every week, I’ll write up what’s changed on Legion Comps. What’s new, what’s been fixed, and occasionally what I broke and then quietly fixed before anyone noticed.

Mostly the first two.

The idea is simple. You shouldn’t have to wonder why a button moved. If something changes on the site, you’ll find it here, explained by the person responsible.

That person is me.

This week is an easy one to start with, because you’ve probably already noticed it.

1. The site has gone pixel

If you’ve visited Legion Comps this week, things look a little different.

Darker. Chunkier. Considerably more pixels, in the sense that you can now see them.

Our homepage skins were already pixel art. Gunships, drop pods, the occasional ork. They looked great. The trouble was that everything underneath them still looked like it belonged to a different website.

Scroll past the top of the page and you went from a battlefield to a perfectly sensible competition site. Which is fine, but it felt like two games sharing one cartridge.

So the rest of the site now matches.

• Headings, buttons, prices and countdowns use a pixel typeface called Jersey 15.
• Buttons have notched, pixel-cut corners.
• Ticket progress bars fill in segments, like a health bar.
• Badges and filters have been redrawn to match.
• The Space Marine in the How It Works section has been redrawn in pixel art. He still doesn’t do anything. He’s there for moral support.

Moral support, now in pixels.

I have spent a good part of the last week making a website look deliberately lower resolution.

It was harder than it sounds.

2. What hasn’t changed

A new coat of paint is only useful if the important things stay exactly where they were.

Paragraphs, forms, the free entry wording and the terms and conditions are all still in our normal, very readable font. Pixel lettering is fun on a button. It’s less fun in the small print, and the small print matters.

The way the competitions work hasn’t changed either:

• Every quest still has a capped number of tickets.
• Every quest is still drawn on the date shown on its page, using our provably fair draw process.
• There’s still a free postal entry route on every quest, with an equal chance of winning.

If anything is harder to read or use than it was, please tell us. That’s a bug, not a style choice.

3. A strike force has landed on the homepage

The homepage is currently wearing our Strike Force skin.

A gunship sweeps across the sky. Drop pods punch down onto the plain and burst open. A squad of armoured marines marches across the defence line, and an outrider tears past on an assault bike.

All of it sits behind the content, so it won’t get between you and the quest you came for. If your phone or computer is set to reduce motion, the animation stops and you get a still battlefield instead.

Skins change through the year, so this one won’t be deployed forever. Enjoy it while it’s there.

4. Under the hood

For those who like to know how things work.

The pixel look is built as a theme rather than a repaint. Almost every colour, font and corner on the site now comes from one shared set of settings, and the pixel theme swaps that set out in one go. The original design still exists. Switching between the two is a setting, not a rebuild.

It also means a fix made in one place applies everywhere, instead of me hunting through every page for a stray shade of grey.

I found several stray shades of grey.

5. What happens next

Another one of these, next week, and every week after that.

Some weeks there’ll be something big and shiny like this one. Some weeks it’ll be three fixes and a sentence about when emails get sent.

You’ll get both, honestly reported.

If you spot something odd on the new look, or there’s something you’d like us to change, let us know.

Rob remains at the computer.

The website now looks like it runs on one from 1994. This was intentional.