This is a major undertaking, and I wish you best of luck with it!
The most important thing that your site needs, imho, is a clear and fluid interface. You have a lot of functionality planned, so the key is making it easy for people to find anything. I would strongly recommend that you limit yourself to key elements first; it is far better to fully implement five features, then to start on twenty, run out of time, and not finish any of them.
I would come to a site like this to find games to play. That means that anything that helps me find games would be a feature that keeps me coming back. That primarily means a lot of categorizing (windows/mac/linux, freeware/paid, remake/original, and any game should be able to belong to multiple genres). Some ideas that came to mind are a feature that "if you liked this game, you'll probably also like X, Y and Z". Home of the Underdogs used that to great effect. It would also be nice, when you click on a user profile, that you get a list of the top five or ten favorite games of that user (other than stuff he wrote himself). And tag clouds. Actually I don't like tag clouds myself, but they are a common enough web feature that you should probably consider them.
One thing that would be very useful is a "report error" button, primarily to let users point out broken links. Of course, don't bother implementing that unless you have somebody watching the results every few days.
I mentioned categorisation earlier. For categorisation to be useful, it helps to have clear definitions. For instance, Tetris and similar falling blocks games are considered puzzle games by some, and action games by others (okay, bad example since it's not an adventure, but you get the idea). The Legend of Zelda is variously known as an action game, an adventure game, and an RPG, and probably others.
If you're going to host flash games as well, expect your content to skyrocket and, probably, your average quality to plummett (apologies to any flash authors out there). I believe that the target audience for "flash games" is fundamentally different from that for "indie games", so I would personally recommend focusing on either but not both.
The only thing that would help developing games that the site could host, essentially, is a big and active community. Free resources don't cut it, there's plenty of those on the web already.
The most important thing that your site needs, imho, is a clear and fluid interface. You have a lot of functionality planned, so the key is making it easy for people to find anything. I would strongly recommend that you limit yourself to key elements first; it is far better to fully implement five features, then to start on twenty, run out of time, and not finish any of them.
I would come to a site like this to find games to play. That means that anything that helps me find games would be a feature that keeps me coming back. That primarily means a lot of categorizing (windows/mac/linux, freeware/paid, remake/original, and any game should be able to belong to multiple genres). Some ideas that came to mind are a feature that "if you liked this game, you'll probably also like X, Y and Z". Home of the Underdogs used that to great effect. It would also be nice, when you click on a user profile, that you get a list of the top five or ten favorite games of that user (other than stuff he wrote himself). And tag clouds. Actually I don't like tag clouds myself, but they are a common enough web feature that you should probably consider them.
One thing that would be very useful is a "report error" button, primarily to let users point out broken links. Of course, don't bother implementing that unless you have somebody watching the results every few days.
I mentioned categorisation earlier. For categorisation to be useful, it helps to have clear definitions. For instance, Tetris and similar falling blocks games are considered puzzle games by some, and action games by others (okay, bad example since it's not an adventure, but you get the idea). The Legend of Zelda is variously known as an action game, an adventure game, and an RPG, and probably others.
If you're going to host flash games as well, expect your content to skyrocket and, probably, your average quality to plummett (apologies to any flash authors out there). I believe that the target audience for "flash games" is fundamentally different from that for "indie games", so I would personally recommend focusing on either but not both.
The only thing that would help developing games that the site could host, essentially, is a big and active community. Free resources don't cut it, there's plenty of those on the web already.
