Beginning the remixes project

This semester I will be working with Mary to bring remixing to surface on the Looking Glass site.

Remixes are a cool way to learn from others by taking a cool action from an existing world and adapting it into a new story. As of now, the way to create a remix is to bookmark a world and then perform the remix from Looking Glass by adding in a clip from the bookmarked world to your own world while building it.

As of now, the community site doesn't show much information about remixes and there is not an apparent connection between bookmarks on the site and remixes in LG. Thus, we went into this project last week with lots of questions and and an open canvas of possibilities.

Summary of important things we thought about:

• How do we explain remixing?
• user intentions vary depending on if they have already started building a world or are browsing
• quickly playing remixes while browsing (uniterrupted experience)
• filtering and searching (tags, character types, etc.)
• avoid limiting future use based on preconceived ideas of what a remix can be used for
• motivation for remixes? wishlist -> challenge
• remixes should be visually distinct from other content on the site

With Caitlin and Jordana, we determined the core functionality to start with, and this week we began building the core of the remix addition. 

Mary took on the display of the remix videos partial and the index while I worked on integrating bookmarks. I added the header/subheader which would give users the option to navigate to either view all remixes or view bookmarked remixes. Since we had previously talked about the connection between remixes and bookmarking, I thought this was an important first step to linking them.

After integrating remixes and bookmarks from the remix side, I added a Bookmarked Remixes category to the user profiles' bookmark subpage.

I started on the view details page for individual remixes. I added a video and the option to bookmark, but was uncertain still about what other elements would be good to include. I know we will probably want to add in tagging functionality as a next step, but wanted to run this page by the team again before continuing.