Post by evangelos25 in Build and indie game discovery and suggestion platform

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First of all, thank you for your response I really appreciate it.

You’re raising something real, and I’d rather engage with it honestly than defend a pitch.

A clarification first. I don’t pull from itch.io. The catalog comes from IGDB, which covers commercially released games that went through some baseline quality filter just by existing on those platforms. The 1.2M itch.io problem is real, but it’s not the problem I’m solving right now and honestly, dumping 1.2M unvetted games into the catalog would break the thing I’m trying to build. Quality over volume is a deliberate call, not a limitation.

About the curation. You’re right that tags alone don’t work. That’s actually why the platform combines multiple layers instead of relying on a single signal: mood (“atmospheric”, “cozy”, “tense”), genres, themes, completion time, platform, and rating filters. Each layer narrows the search further. Someone looking for a short, atmospheric puzzle game under 5 hours on PC with a high rating gets a very different and much smaller list than a genre tag alone would produce. It’s imperfect, but it’s a fundamentally different bet than tag matching.

On the review point. You’re describing exactly what the platform should grow toward, and honestly what I’m already working toward. A number out of 5 tells you consensus, not fit. The next feature I’m building lets players log not just a rating but how a game made them feel and refine or add tags from their own experience. The mood and vibe signals are an attempt at that: matching on what a game feels like rather than how it scored.

The data integrity question is real: Community tagging can be gamed. But aggregation handles most of it: one bad actor’s vote is noise, a pattern across many players is signal. IGDB solved the same problem with community edits, moderation, and trust scores. The mechanism doesn’t need to be perfect, it needs to be resistant enough that manipulation doesn’t pay off.

One more thing worth naming directly. “hidden gem” is subjective by design. A hidden gem isn’t a game that’s objectively great and undiscovered it’s actually a game that’s right for you that you haven’t found yet. Someone who loves cozy farming games and someone who loves brutal roguelikes are looking for completely different hidden gems. The platform doesn’t curate taste, it narrows the search based on yours.

That’s the actual goal that if you finished a game you loved and want something similar, you shouldn’t have to spend an hour reading reviews, watching trailers, and cross-referencing completion times. You already know what you liked and the platform should use that to get you to the next one faster. The closer I get to a real player profile, what you played, what resonated and what didn’t the more precise that match gets.

What also makes this different from every other IGDB-powered discovery site is that developers can actually participate. They can submit their game, own their listing, and reach players who are actively looking not just browsing a database someone else built. Any dev, including itch.io devs, can go through the upload flow. I just don’t want to pull 1.2M games automatically and call it discovery.

On the “no ratings” point, that’s one of the harder problems to solve honestly, and I’ll be upfront about it. I’m building this solo, which means every design decision, what to approve, what to reject, how to weight signals falls on one person. An approval step helps filter obvious noise, but it creates a new problem: I become the sole judge of what’s worth listing, and that doesn’t scale and isn’t fair. A genuinely good game with zero ratings because the dev had no marketing budget looks identical to a bad game with zero ratings on paper. I don’t have a clean answer to that yet. What I do know is that volume alone isn’t the goal a smaller catalog where every game has a real chance of being found is more useful than 1.2M entries where 99% are invisible anyway. The right mechanism probably involves community input, dev engagement signals, and time but it needs more thinking, and this kind of feedback is exactly what shapes those decisions.

Since you’ve thought about this just genuinely curious: if you were setting the rejection criteria for dev-submitted games, what would you use? Not “is the game good” because that’s subjective, but what signals would tell you a submission is worth listing versus noise? I’m still working that out and I’d rather not get it wrong.

Lastly none of this is black and white. There are real tradeoffs between business logic, engineering constraints, design, and what most players actually want and as a solo developer I’m navigating all of those simultaneously. This is a work in progress. The direction is clear even if every piece isn’t built yet. Where I genuinely agree: without a richer player profile, the recommendations are educated guesses at best. That cross-reference layer is the hard part, and I’m not there yet. But that’s exactly where I’m going.

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redonihunter7 days ago

So your plan is to rely on the players being the curators. Might work. But it will be super hard to re-invent this. This is going on and being developed and worked on for at least 30 years or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_%28website%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

Even harder will it be to get users to use your platform. I see threads like your's here every other month or so. Someone comes along and wishes for a new place for people to find games, or to promote games. Might work out (it did for Itch, though the motivation to create Itch was a bit different.). But most do not work out. I remember a longer discussion with someone here that had nice big screens of mappings with how corelated tags were or something like that. I do not remember the specifics, but I think it was the same overal concept of somehow deducing what a game's target audience is.

The hardest selling point might be, why use your platform, if they can just use one of the already existing ones, like igdb. Including the actual platforms, the games are available on. Most people are perfectly capable of finding new games to play on Steam, by the features of Steam. Itch has ~~some~~ a lot of quirks, but even here you can learn how to find games you might like.

To pitch as a service that you can match a game to a player by mood or vibe, you have to have a metric of what the game is and more importantly, what the player really wants.

If you accept developers to submit their own games, you will need to decide if your goal is to have a discovery feature for professional games or for hobby developer games. There is literally no entry bar on Itch. So claiming to be a published developer here, would mean nothing in terms of professional level. I do not know how igdb handles this. But I doubt you can submit a fresh game published yesterday and only on Itch by a hobby dev.

When you say hidden gem, I would think of games like this https://www.igdb.com/games/vambrace-cold-soul . Interestingly the one critic did give it a 9. While the people that bothered to rate it only gave it a 6. It's basically a story rpg with the turn based combat mechancis of Darkest Dungeon. Still some people call it a roguelite or roguelike, even on igdb. It is the 7th most popular tag for this game on Steam. But this is rogueish the same way any rpg can be a bit different each playthrough. But it lacks the "run" mechanic any rogueish game has - it is not meant to be played several times. So using that rogue classification to recommend the game to players, might fail utterly.

And the issue is, that even somewhat known hidden gems, just have very few ratings. You can't do much statistic with only a couple reviews.

Speaking of Darkest Dungeon. They made a sequel. The sequel has about 1:3 negative ratings. The first one has about 1:10. What you do not see is all the people that were wise enough to skip the sequel. The sequel also only has about 15% review numbers compared to the original. Superficially, they share the same tags. But everything that made DD1 tick and resonate with the players, they took away from the sequel. The issue with roguelike and roguelite is, that most people cannot distinguish between those and often use the terms "wrong". But dd1 was roguelike and dd2 is roguelite. One is full of careful planning and investment and dread to lose all that, the other ist just grinding.

So what your thing ideally should be able to is this: see what makes people like dd1 and recognise that they probably will not like dd2.

And as a counterexample for sequels. Monster Train 2. They took everything from MT1 and improved it. MM2 has only 50% of the reviews, not 15%. But most importantly, the ratio of negative ratings on Steam is about the same for both games. It's 1:20. So I dare say it gives the same vibes to the target audience.

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evangelos254 days ago

My plan isn’t one or the other. it’s a combination of manual work, automated enrichment, and player contribution over time. You’re right that collaborative systems have worked for decades precisely because people want to contribute when the platform gives them a reason to. That’s the direction.

On getting users you’ve identified exactly where I’m stuck. Building the features is the solvable part. Convincing people to try something new when they’ve seen a dozen similar posts this year alone is the real problem. The saturation you’re describing is real and I feel it. Players are disengaged from new platform announcements because most don’t deliver anything meaningfully different.

The difference here is that this is a niche platform focused only on indie games. Not all games. Most platforms like IGDB or Steam just index everything, which means indie games get buried under AAA and AA releases. Even when you search for similarities on those platforms, the results mix everything together regardless of what you actually want. I tried it myself: I love pixel art, games like Dead Cells or Huntdown games lets say like 2D, action, fast. On IGDB or Steam the similarities are loose at best and often completely off. Wrong genre, wrong scale, wrong feel. So I built my own similarity algorithm specifically to get as close as possible to what you actually want. The filters compound: pixel art, 2D platformer, action, rating above 7, completion time under 20 hours. That combination on most platforms either returns nothing or returns noise. Here it works and returns genuinely close matches. I found games through it myself that I couldn’t surface anywhere else. There’s also a strict mode that tightens the match criteria further for people who want very precise suggestions rather than broad ones.

Your Darkest Dungeon example is the clearest illustration of where tags fail completely. DD1 and DD2 share the same tags on the surface but everything that made DD1 resonate the dread, the careful planning, the weight of losing something you invested in was removed in the sequel. No tag captures that delta. What would capture it is players describing how each game made them feel. That’s the player mood logging feature I’m working toward. Not metadata assigned by a database, but how the game actually felt to the people who played it. Over time that signal would naturally show that DD1 and DD2 land differently for players even when every classification field is identical. But also, and this matters I can’t decide that for anyone. Some people genuinely love DD2. Some prefer the lighter roguelite loop. The platform shouldn’t exclude DD2 from suggestions or penalise it for being different from its predecessor. What it should do is surface DD1 to the player who logs “dread, strategic, investment” and DD2 to the player who logs “fast, replayable, casual runs” and let the player decide. The signal separates them, the recommendation follows the player’s own taste, not a verdict on which game is better. Monster Train 2 would cluster with Monster Train 1 for the same reason, players who loved the first described the same feel in the second.

On dev submissions and criteria you’re right that it’s a delicate matter. Right now there’s a manual approval and rejection flow with a reason given. But the criteria aren’t clearly defined upfront and that might create frustration. The honest answer is that a finished game with existing reviews and some evidence of player engagement is a much stronger submission than a fresh upload with nothing behind it. Making those criteria explicit before someone applies might be a fair approach rejection hurts less when the bar was clear from the start. Still working out exactly where to draw that line.

The hardest part isn’t the engineering. It’s making someone understand within thirty seconds why this is different from the last thing they saw. That’s unsolved and I won’t pretend otherwise. These are all genuinely good points and I appreciate the depth of this conversation more than I can say. It’s rare to get feedback that actually challenges the assumptions behind what you’re building rather than just the surface of it. I’ll keep thinking through all of this a lot of what’s been said here will directly shape decisions I haven’t made yet.

If you’re curious about where it goes from here, I post development updates in a Discord new features, decisions, open questions. You can find the invite link on theindiegame.io. No pressure at all, but if you ever want to follow along or throw in an idea, you’re more than welcome. Any perspective is valuable, especially from people who think about games the way you clearly do.

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redonihunter3 days ago

Well, from my impressions, the projects "announced" here, are most often made by developers for developers to get a vehicle for promotion. The pitch is not for people to find games, but for devs to promote games. (Your's is a better approach).

I found the discussion I mentioned, it might be of interest to you /t/4748289/itchio-api-for-game-metadata and /t/5258962/games-recommendation-system-dev-progress

Steam tags are interesting, because they do have a ranking. With enough popularity, they should become more accurate. Then again, if one curator runs in the wrong direction in the beginning, a lot of people might just agree and not question the wrong classification. This is also bound to be influenced by trends over the years. Glaring examples: https://thejaspel.itch.io/backpack-hero on Steam the game has no indie tag. Or the fact that peopl voted "rpg" the 15th most important tag for https://store.steampowered.com/app/646570/Slay_the_Spire/ . That game is not even close to a rpg, but opinions obviously differ here.

What it should do is surface DD1 to the player who logs “dread, strategic, investment” and DD2 to the player who logs “fast, replayable, casual runs” and let the player decide.

The thing is, dd2 is not replayable and not fast and not casual either. A run will last like 3 hours. And you do not replay it, you grind it. And that grinding means, it is not casual. Replayable means, you get worth out of a new replay. Maybe you associate this with rogue-lite, because neither dd1 nor dd2 is tagged with "replay value". Or you just used things you think are opposite of investment.



	Darkest Dungeon	Darkest Dungeon II
1	Turn-Based Combat	Turn-Based Tactics
2	Dungeon Crawler	Roguelite
3	Dark Fantasy	Dark Fantasy
4	Roguelike	Dungeon Crawler
5	RPG	Lovecraftian
6	Lovecraftian	Singleplayer
7	Difficult	Roguelike
8	Turn-Based	Perma Death
9	Singleplayer	Turn-Based
10	Perma Death	Turn-Based Combat
11	Strategy	Party-Based RPG
12	Atmospheric	Gothic
13	Dark	Story Rich
14	Indie	CRPG
15	2D	2D
16	Roguelite	RPG
17	Horror	Hand-drawn
18	Gothic	Turn-Based Strategy
19	Fantasy	Procedural Generation
20	Great Soundtrack	Stylized

I see here that tag usage changed over the years. Even on Steam with their limited tag pool. What's with turn based tactics not even appearing in dd1? New tag? And what's with all the rpg tags. Those games ain't rpg. And there is no perma death in dd2, hence it not being a roguelike anymore. And notice how it is no longer tagged indie. An interesting signal is the appearnce of story rich and hand-drawn. dd1 was hand-drawn too.

And I notice that some tags are more accurate than others. Lovecraftian for example seems to be rather accurate. And rpg seems to be noise selected by people that do not know that just because you control "a character" does not make a game an rpg.

So what does this actually say? Tags are not reliable. Because people have different opinions when to apply them and how important they are. That goes for selecting the tags, and for creating any signal from tags to match to a player.

What I initially meant with the 30 years, there has been reasearch done. Companies use classifications and player profiles and obviously techniques to match those two. Which means two things: 1, you might dig up knowledge how to do this. The theory behind it, and ways that will not work or are established industry standard. And 2, re-inventing this from scratch in any way that can compete with existing solutions is gonna be hard.

Yeah, having a mapping of feelings a game will invoke and searching for those is well on paper. But this sounds like a thing that cannot be gathered automatically from existing data.

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