RFC: Multi-step create game form

[johnpooch]

Context

The create game form currently shows everything on a single scrollable page — game type (Standard/Sandbox tabs), mode, name, variant, deadlines, and advanced settings. It works, but it's dense, especially the deadline section.

Issue 545 raised this, and PR 618 takes a first pass at improving it by swapping dropdowns for radio cards and reordering sections. That's a good step on its own, but I think we should also talk about the overall structure.

Proposal: split the form into steps

Instead of one long form, break it into 2-3 screens with a stepper/progress indicator.

Step 1 -- General

• Game name
• Mode (Standard / Gunboat / Sandbox)
• Private toggle
• Variant selection + map preview

Step 2 -- Deadlines

• Fixed time vs. duration
• Movement / retreat frequencies or durations
• Deadline summary

Step 3 -- Advanced

• Automatic extensions (NMR)
• Any future advanced settings land here

If the user picks Sandbox in step 1, we skip steps 2 and 3 entirely (sandbox games have no deadlines or extensions) and go straight to creation.

Why

• Deadlines need room to breathe. They're the most confusing part of game creation. A dedicated step lets us add inline explanations without making the form feel overwhelming.
• Sandbox vs. Standard stops being a tab. Right now, switching between Standard and Sandbox resets the form because they're separate tabs with separate react-hook-form instances. With a multi-step flow, the mode choice on step 1 just determines which subsequent steps appear.
• Scales better. As we add more configuration (custom start positions, house rules, etc.), each concern gets its own step instead of making the single page longer.
• Casual users can bail early. Someone who picks Standard + Classical and doesn't care about deadlines can click through step 2 with defaults and skip step 3.

Open questions

1. Step count -- Is 3 steps right, or should deadlines and advanced be merged into one "Settings" step?
2. Navigation -- Linear wizard (Next/Back), or a stepper where you can jump to any completed step?
3. Variant placement -- Should variant selection be on step 1 (as proposed), or its own step? The map preview takes up space.
4. Anything else you'd rearrange? The groupings above are a starting point.

Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who's been through the create game flow a few times. What's confusing? What would you change?

[KittyofEvil]

Sounds like a very good idea and agree that map choosing should come before and separately to deadline settings.

1. It feels strange to have a Step 3 with only one option, but it makes a lot of sense if you're going to add future options to advanced settings. If it's not too much more work, I think 2 steps makes a bit more sense for now, with scope to add a third one if we get more options. But I don't feel strongly about this and 3 steps is fine too.
2. A stepper with the steps visible at the top to show your progress though game creation, I think.
3. When creating a game, the variant is the first thing that I'd decide ("I fancy a game of Spice Islands," for example) so yes, it should be on the first page.
4. I think these groupings make sense.

One request: I'd like to be able to expand and explore the map of each variant when I'm choosing them: when hovering over the map, the cursor:zoom-in cursor appears; the user can click it, showing a full-screen version of the map; preferably, this should be scrollable and zoomable while in this state so that the user can fully explore the map; clicking anywhere returns the page to its previous state. This should be both in this new game creation screen and when I'm joining someone else's game in Find Games: I want to be able to examine a map before I play it.

[JorenC]

In this case, the steppers are incorrect (they should have a 'to-do', 'current' and 'done' state - now they only have two.

[johnpooch]

Can you create a bug for this, please?