without an account - do you mean without itch.io account (Steam, Epic, GOG etc. in the future)? If yes - would you prefer to register a new account on the Gamescovery webpage that is specific to Gamescovery?
without Discord - do you mean that you don't like Discord and would like to communicate with developers/users on another platform? If yes - what platform suits you best in your opinion?
Yes, I agree that the project should have something more than just Discord. I just thought Discord is quite popular among gamers. I will think about Matrix or Lemmy in the future.
About the account - well, I need an account to be able to record what games you rated and what recommendations you currently have. Otherwise, I have no idea for now how I can show correct data to correct people. I decided to allow people to register with game store accounts because that's easier for me to implement.
Theoretically, I can allow users to be in the "offline" mode, so all their data is stored locally. Data will be lost if you, well, remove it by yourself, or your computer drive dies. The only note is that the recommendation algorithm is not open-source, so you still need to send your data to the server to get new recommendations...
Anyway, thanks for the idea, I will think about it 👍
Well, currently, you must enter every game you played manually. I don't read games from users' account because I don't want to deal with private data for now. I only ask the game store that the user chose to give me the user avatar and public name, and confirm that "yes, this user is registered on our platform and account valid".
After that, I use id that the store gave me to connect you to what games you manually rated on Gamescovery and what games were recommended to you by Gamescovery.
Because it's easier for me to ask game stores for an account than to build an authentication and validation system by myself.
Most of the game stores has official way that allows me to use an account, registered on their platform, in the Gamescovery app, for authentication reasons.
Since I don't need to store any user data besides rated and recommended games, it's a win situation for me, because:
Your personal data, login, email, password, etc., are stored on the servers of the game store, so I don't need to worry about securing this data and other legal stuff.
Game store already validated your account, so I don't need to build a defence system to protect Gamescovery from bots.
Most gamers already have an account in one or more popular game stores, so they don't need to register one more.
It's the same mechanism when you go to any new webpage/app and they propose to use your existing Google/Apple account instead of creating a new one.
So yeah, answering your question "why do you need to connect your game store account on Gamescovery?" - the answer is "to save money and development time".
I need the user to have an account so I know who rated what games and who requested what recommendations. To do that, I need to build a system on my webpage for users to be able create a new account, so I need to store their credentials, which I don't want to do. Or I can use an already existing account from the game store.
Connecting my account to your site gives you access to large amounts of personal information, even if you’re not using it.
I don't think that's true. Or at least this is true if you allow that. When you try to log in with your itch.io account onthe Gamescovery page, they will tell you what data will be accessible to me. See the following screenshot as example:
Hi, thanks very much for this feedback, love it ❤️
I never heard about backloggd.com, but it's a good long-term thinking from you, that if the project survives to a stage where it has a big userbase, it's a good idea to have compatibility or "plugins" with other trackers and data sources.
I also like your idea with the rating scale, I will definitely think about implementing your idea or some variation of it.
Yeah, it would be stupid to lock the project inside of itch.io games only. I started from itch.io and indie games for a few reasons:
I would like Gamescovery to bring value for indie games community, so authors, who have no money for an advertisement campaign, have more chances for a bigger player base.
itch.io data is very chaotic. So I decided that if my system can classify and correctly recommend itch.io games, it would definitely have no problems with better data, like from Steam.
In the future, I definitely plan to support all popular PC game stores in the following order:
GOG
Steam
Epic
I also think about the support of the consoles, but this will be in the rather distant future.
I have one more question, if you don't mind - what is your feeling about game recommendations after you rated 3-4 games? Were recommendations lean towards predicable "correct" way, or were they completely random and off?
Once you've got enough ratings, Criticker normalizes your scores. We do this because of the wide variety in the way people rate things. For some people, a score of "80" is close to a masterpiece, while for others "80" is middling. Some try to spread their scores equally across the whole scale, while others adhere to the system they learned in school, when a "60" was real bad. Like, if you came home with a "60" on your math test, you were probably going to get grounded.
Currently, I'm investigating if this is something my recommendation algorithm needs, some maybe I will implement some kind of normalization for scores on Gamescovery, we will see.
From my point of view, it's not that complex to grab data from game stores and put it into my database. For services without insane rate limiting, I can pull 100k games in a few hours. Storing all the needed data is also not a problem.
The biggest problem with game data for now is to distill it and calculate differences, and this is what takes the most time and computing resources. Currently, Gamescovery DB has 70k+ games from itch.io and I spend a lot of time filtering it than on grabbing data from itch.io (originally, I grabbed around 100k games from itch.io).
So, when the right time comes, Gamescovery will have games from Steam without any complex hacks. I'm not sure about GOG and EGS, didn't check that.
Hi, I see, hopefully you will be willing to participate in further testing (for example, in beta) when the project is in better shape.
The only reason I bring the current alpha to the public is to test the concept and see if people are interested in it at all. I spent around 1 year (1 year of time, not of working hours) to make the current alpha, and there is no sense in spending one more year on a project nobody actually wants. For now, feedback was somewhat positive, so I want to continue and see what I will build next.
The main idea of my recommendation algorithm is to calculate the unique test for every user. It doesn't and wouldn't compare the tastes of different users to calculate assumptions. I hate this, and those kinds of recommendation algorithms seem to never work for me. When doing my research on the beginning of the project, I found that such algorithms were first used for social media, but I don't feel these algorithms are correct (as I feel it, I can't prove this with real numbers for now).
So, hopefully, Gamescovery recommendation algorithms wouldn't have biases like "well everyone likes X so X”, since it never tries to compare 2 or more users. Besides that, Gamescovery will allow users to tweak the algorithm so that users can actually customize it to make the algorithm better for them. That doesn't mean users will be able to completely change the behavior of the algorithm, but rather direct it in a direction they want.
I see, thanks for your opinion, I will definitely take that into account. I also find Criticker not that useful, although I have less rates than you have (around 400 rated things). And as you, I also believe that trying to compare me to other people to find "commons" - it's not the best ways ot do recommendations.
Thanks again for that 3-4-3 system, I started doing my research yesterday, pretty sure it will end up implemented in Gamescovery until the beta.
Hi, hopefully you will find time to use Gamescovery and share your thoughts.
I don't plan to use accounts from game stores to read a list of your games. This is because that way I need to access (often) private user data, which requires more code to do that, securing access to prevent private data leaks, and overall, not every person likes when 3-rd party software accesses and stores their data. If a lot of users request this feature - I will think more if should I implement it.
For now, you must input and rate every game you played (if it is present in Gamescovery's library) to Gamescovery to have any knowledge about what games you like. Also note - for now, you can search and rate only games from itch.io. Games from Steam and other platforms are planned for later.
Hi, I have never heard of Ludocene, thanks for asking.
I took a quick look and can say:
They built a pretty gamefied experience, I lean rather to a more "boring" experience "play -> rate -> receive next recommendation" with simple, clear UI.
They have a simpler way to rate games - "like" or "dislike". I want to build a more complex system where players rate games from 1 to 10, so the system can "see" more nuances of what a user might like.
I see on Ludocene that you can add tastes of different "experts" to influence your recommendations. My system doesn't do that and won't, I aim to provide a personalized experience for every user without any influence from other users.
As I see it now, the only common thing between Ludocene and Gamescovery is that it's a system that tries to help gamers discover games they would like. So Gamescovery is neither inspired by Ludocene, nor tries to be an improvement on it.
For now I gathered a bit of useful feedback and on my way to implement improvements.
I'm aiming to release a beta version of the Gamescovery in 4-5 months. I will let you know here when it will be available so you can join and try it by yourself
Hi, no. I cannot imagine telling my boss that I think I'm better than he so I want to replace him.
The problem of telling a boss of my boss is that I have no real pro arguments why should he choose me as a leader to replace the current lead, that has been working in the company much longer than I am.
I also can't really resolve problems of a boss of my boss because 90% of my tasks - is a "customer" support and low effort copy paste bug fixes, so I have no place to "show myself".
I'm not talking about my current job only, it's my 6th company now, and previous experiences were more or less the same.
Hi, maybe I chose incorrect words, but under a "vision" I meant "better ways to do my job, better ways to help others to do their job, and better/new ways for company/project be more successful in different business metrics".
I agree that my own company would be the best case, but that's easier said than done, unfortunately.
I'm not originally from Poland, but I have been lived here for a couple years already. My girlfriend is from Silesia and now I'm part of true Silesian family and I found that mix of Polish and Germany culture pretty fascinating
Hi, thanks for sharing your experience. Yeah, I understand that I will spend a lot of time on actual management rather than on coding itself. And, frankly speaking, I want this.
One of the reasons I want to start my own company is that I have a chance to be an architect and a manager on a project I actually enjoy instead of wrestling my way to an architect position in a random company and deal with people who is hard to deal with.
Hi, I'm currently finishing an implementation of an alpha version of my project to actually validate the idea if people are ready to pay for something like that. Even that takes me a lot of time to implement
Hi. While I can agree that sales thinking is important for a business, I don't want to be a con artist.
I already had experience to working with people as that, who sells things that don't exist yet. Everything was fine till people understand that super cool product they were promised is unreal to implement (so eventually it is a scam).
Hi, thanks for your advice. I think that 2 people will do more than one too. Unfortunately, for now I didn't find a person who is interested to become my partner for my current project.
Hi, yeah, that stuff is hard. I want to believe I can manage to do that but I have a bit of dismorale. I try to calm myself down with thoughts that even if my whole idea wouldn't fire and earn 0 money - at least I earned precious experience I can use to get a better job in the future.
Hi, yes, unfortunately I don't have a lot of time. Besides my ideas, I also have a family and other stuff I need to spend my time too. I understand I can sacrifice my family or health time for my business, but this is no go in my case, because those are more important for me than money.
I plan to try to optimize my routine time so I have more for my projects
Hi, yes, I agree with you that money management will help me with my business. I already did some homework on this and will try to revise my budget once more and start collecting more money so I can live without job for a while.
Hi, yeah, I 100% agree and I plan to involve potential clients in the product asap. Currently, I'm finishing of the implementation of an alpha version of my product that will be pitched to a potential customers.
I agree with this and I plan to involve potential customers as early as possible so they can realistically say if this is something they are willing to pay for. I spend a year of building my current stuff and soon I plan to release an alpha version to validate my implementation. Even if it's shit - at least I earned a lot of experience from that implementation.
I was a game developer who was interested in backend, automations and process optimizations. Eventually, I learned all the basic DevOps stuff to find a real DevOps job where I developed my skills further
I believe those are tools that use general-purpose LLMs, which aren't tuned for refactoring specifically. So I guess a specifically tuned tool for refactoring will beat those you mentioned in refactoring tasks.
I also imagine a tool that is not AI-driven. While AI will be used for sure for some checks, I believe static checks and other "computable" heuristics will produce better output faster. I don't want to throw a bunch of prompts into AI and sell mediocre-quality software to people.
But overall, I think about what you said, but from another perspective - why have a separate webpage if such of helper can be built into IDE/editor? I think this is harder to do than to create a webpage, but maybe this will be better for users (developers).
That's true, and that's a hard part. I have some ideas on how to solve that problem, but I can't prove anything because this is the first time I'm working on a helper like that one.
That's also the reason why I decided to ask people - there is no point in engaging in complex problem-solving, like for that tool, to only find out that no one actually needs it
Hi, hmm, I think that's almost the tool I had in mind. So if sonarqube exists, I guess there is no need for another tool in the same area. Thanks for sharing
Spent more time looking for a game than actually playing one? Help me test Gamescovery, a recommendation engine built for your actual taste.
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Spent more time looking for a game than actually playing one? Help me test Gamescovery, a recommendation engine built for your actual taste.
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Spent more time looking for a game than actually playing one? Help me test Gamescovery, a recommendation engine built for your actual taste.
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