I've been looking at a lot of the arcade scripts out there, and a lot of them appear to be very beefy, which is something I don't want. I want a site similar to that of OneMoreLevel.com, it's simple.. easy to navigate, and it doesn't have much clutter. So would it be best to find someone to write a custom script for me to accomplish this, or should I just purchase one of the pre-established scripts out there.. which then I would need to lop off a ton of functions. I'm pretty much a minimalist by nature, I don't like sites all jazzed out. Is $200 acceptable for this type of thing (please look at onemorelevel.com, I'd want something that is similar in structure and that simplistic in nature)? I was looking at the source code, it doesn't look that sophisticated, but unfortunately I don't know how to write raw code (but, I can understand it -- as strange as it sounds). I'd guess it would probably take someone with knowledge only a few hours, I'll do 100% of the graphics.. so the person would just need to toss in placeholders for the graphics until then. Thanks
I'd go with a pre-made solution only because having spent the last year writing and revising the Arcadem Pro arcade script, I can tell you from experience that there are a lot of little things that can easily be overlooked. Also, with the right theme, it's pretty easy to turn a full featured arcade into a minimalistic one. For example, with Arcadem Pro, one of the 14 included themes is a 1 column theme with a lot of the glitzy features removed. With Arcadem Pro 2.709-RC1 and above, you can easily find any valid XHTML/CSS theme and then convert it within an hour into a Smarty template (or you could pay someone $50 or less to do that.) In this sense, you can find the perfect minimalistic design that suites your particular tastes, and then quickly have your site up and running. One of the advantages of my arcade script is the fact that it comes with MochiAds games integration (which earns cash from day one and gives you 2000+ free games) as well as allowing you to import games from AVArcade, IBProArcade, GameSiteScript, phpArcadeScript and more. This means you can easily have 10,000+ unique games quickly, and is something that a custom solution wouldn't be able to provide for a mere $200. The last thing I'll say is that with my solution, should you ever decide "hey, it would be nice to add a MySpace embed code" you can easily turn that feature on, or any other feature, with just a few modifications to your template. In this way, you can scale up from a complete minimalistic design, all the way up to the most glitzy and flashy arcade, and everything in between. That's the main advantage of using a flexible arcade script. You can check out a live demo, get pricing information and more at the Arcadem Pro arcade script sales page.