Darkadia

Custom tags are go!

Tinylogan — Thu, 02 May 2013 08:29:17 +0000

This one's been on the to-do list for far too long, but I'm happy to let you know that Darkadia now supports custom tagging. That means you can now create and filter by your very own custom categories.

You can create new tags straight from the pop-up dialogues, or head over to your profile editing screen to edit or delete existing tags.

So, how about a "play next" category, or "favourite co-op games", or "for sale"... The choice is yours!

P.S. You might notice that you're limited to a maximum of three custom tags. The soon-to-be launched Darkadia Pro accounts will have no such limitation. What's Darkadia Pro you ask? Well, it's a new paid option offering more specialised features than a standard Darkadia account. You can check the work-in-progress Darkadia Pro page for a rundown of what to expect.

Darkadia badges

Tinylogan — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:38:02 +0000

Here's a wee Friday morning update for you... Darkadia badges! Now you can show off your games collection on your own website, or as a signature in forum posts.

Badges are updated once per day, so it'll stay fresh no matter where you use it. You'll find yours under the extras tab in your account settings.

Here's mine:

Small change to the library category filter

Tinylogan — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:25:30 +0000

I've made a change to the library category filter in response to your feedback. You can now once again make your own combinations of categories to filter your library by. The pile of shame super-category remains.

The shelved and unshelved categories have their own entries in the list, so if you want to exclude shelved games from a view, you have to specifically select the latter. The exception to this is the pile of shame, which does exclude shelved games.

Update: The uncompleted category now also excludes shelved games.

Out with the old (scrolling), in with the new (scrolling)

Tinylogan — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:43:45 +0000

Hi all. I've just released an update to Darkadia that changes EVERYTHING. And by everything, I mean just one thing: the way you browse your library.

Gone are the navigation buttons and the ability to scroll left and right. Now to see all of your games on one magnificent page, all you have to do is... scroll down.

Way back when I started working on Darkadia, the navigation interface was the very first thing I tackled, so replacing it was not an easy decision to make. In the long term though, I believe the change will be for the better. For one thing, some of you have really big libraries, and as you discovered, the old navigation system just wasn't up to it. For another, the change will enable me to more easily add a drag-and-drop custom sorting function as well as the long-awaited list view. Wouldn't that be cool?

I've also nabbed a few bugs in this release relating to the search facility and IE8.

PS. I've tested the new navigation on a wide variety of devices, from desktop browsers to phones and tablets. I can't cover it all though, so if something is amiss, please drop me a line.

Revamped library filters

Tinylogan — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 10:41:36 +0000

Darkadia updates are a bit like buses then, aren't they? You don't get one for ages, then two come along at once!

And this time it's the library filters that have received a bit of attention. Along with a new look and feel, there's also a shiny new keyword search — finding a particular game in your library has never been easier.

The old toggles have been moved to Filter by category dropdown, and they've gained some new new friends. Look out for the combination categories such as Pile of shame, Completed and shelved, and Played and uncompleted.

As ever, if you spot any problems, do let me know!

Goodbye tooltips

Tinylogan — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:37:36 +0000

I'm once again very pleased to announce an update to Darkadia; one which is long overdue. This is an important update -- if not the most expansive -- as it lays the groundwork for a number of future updates. Work is already underway on some of those, so hopefully I won't have to keep you waiting too long.

Here's what's changed:

The old tooltips have been replaced with shiny new dialogs, providing more room for what's there at the moment, and for what's to come.
A new game toggle has appeared. You can now mark your games as 'shelved'. Use it for games that can't be beaten, or you don't intend to finish. Games marked as 'shelved' won't be counted against your unfinished total.
Share your notes. Any new game notes you make will now default to public unless you specifically tag them as private. All existing notes have been marked as private.
Added small text tooltips for games on your library page.
Numerous smaller improvements and bug fixes.

Profile pages and wishlists are here

Tinylogan — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 20:59:38 +0000

I'm very pleased to announce an update to Darkadia, which brings several improvements and a significant new feature: wishlists! The first thing you'll notice is a new wishlist tab on your profile. Your wishlist will be empty right now so head over to the games page to populate your list. Look for the star icon to add an item to your wishlist.

There are a few other improvements in this release as well:

The games page has been revamped to include mini lists of most popular games for given timespans.
The games listed on your profile page now launch the tooltip when clicked.
Various bug fixes.

This release follows hot on the heels of last week's release, which officially introduced profile pages. I hope you're enjoying the increased pace of development. I'm currently working on what I think might be Darkadia's killer feature: a game recommendation engine. The system will compare your library with thousands of other libraries and find the popular and loved games that you might have missed. Useful!

Private profiles

Tinylogan — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:30:41 +0000

Quick update today to add a new feature. It's now possible to make your profile and game collection private (i.e. visible only to you). You'll find the new option on your profile edit screen.

More updates are coming... Please check back soon!

Fresh new look and some game discovery features

Tinylogan — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:55:32 +0000

A quiet week day job wise meant I could get around to crossing a few items off Darkadia's ever growing to do list. There's little I like better than pushing out new features, so here are a few things for you to check out in this new release:

Release notes

Fresh new look. Nothing too dramatic, but I've lightened the overall colour scheme and packed in dozens of little refinements. Hope you like it.

Game discovery. The old game search page has been revamped to allow you to browse through the highest rated, most popular and most recent games on Darkadia. The page is available at http://darkadia.com/games (doing away with the old member/yourusername/add style. The page is now also available to unregistered users, which I hope will lead to more users taking the plunge to sign up.

Easier organisation. Once you've added a game to your library, simply click the more info link on the item to bring up the fully featured tooltip with access to the usual toggles.

As ever, if you spot any bugs or just want to let me know that you find Darkadia useful, please drop me a line.

Ringing in the new year with some changes

Tinylogan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:12:39 +0000

Hi all. Happy to say I'm back with a few changes, and some renewed energy to get the ball rolling on even more new features in the near future.

A couple of changes in my professional situation meant a bit of a slowdown towards the end of 2011. I'd quit my job to begin a career as full-time freelancer. I was pretty excited about this as I thought it meant I could spend more time on Darkadia. Well, the exact opposite happened. I got busier quicker than I expected and when you're being paid by the hour, then it's not very hard to set priorities.

But the Darkadia community never ceases to amaze and hearing from you (mostly feature requests!) and the occasional donation are what keep me going. Thank you for that.

Anyway, enough about me.

I've been busy making preparations for a new list view for your library. This meant writing some generic list generating code that could be used anywhere on Darkadia to output a list of games. The first place I've put this into action is in the search results. I've always been annoyed at how hard it can be to identify a game from a thumbnail (if available) and the title, so the change means you'll now get much more information back when performing a search. Just hit the 'more info' link on a search result.

I implemented game ratings a while back, and it was always my intention to make available the community's collective ratings for games. I just had to wait a bit until enough of you had rated your games to make the data worthwhile. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this has gone with over 3,000 games now rated, so all that data is now available. You'll find the community's rating on the info tab of the library tooltip, and you'll find a new "all ratings" sort option so you can sort your library by the community's favourites.

A few bugs fixed, but a few improvements too

Tinylogan — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:16:22 +0000

A small update this evening, fixing up a few bugs from the last round, and a few improvements. If you spot any problems, do drop me a line.

Release notes

Sorting of games has been improved: Articles ('the', 'a' and 'an') are now ignored.
Library toggles no longer display when there are no games in a user's library, as happens right after initial registration.
Slight improvements in page load times.
Game count removed from the platform dropdown (this will return in a more useful form soon).
The playing toggle can now be deselected.
Usernames now allow hyphens (you'll soon be able to change your username).

Big update brings ratings, toggles, sort options and performance improvements

Tinylogan — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 12:34:48 +0000

It's been almost six weeks since the last update, but I've been hard at work bringing you today's update. What started as a small task to add support for game ratings, has ended in a sprawling update that includes a number of architectural changes all designed to bring speed improvements.

As ever, if you spot any problems, do drop me a line.

Release notes

New features

Added a 5-star widget so you can give your games a rating.
Added an option to sort the library by your rating.
Added options to sort by the reverse of all sort options.
Added a 'Now playing' toggle to mark which games you're currently playing.
Added an option to view just the games you're currently playing.

Other changes / bug fixes

Added a close button to the tooltips.
The 'played' toggle is now automatically selected when clicking the 'now playing', 'finished', and 'loved' toggles.
Massive speed optimisations.
Reimplemented the game tooltips, fixing problems with positioning of the tooltips in all browsers including Mobile Safari.
Scrolling in lists and tooltips now work again in Mobile Safari.
Improved touch events on mobile devices: clicking on games now much more responsive.
Various visual improvements across all browsers.
Removed the 'new' label from recently added games (just sort by date added instead).
Fixed a bug in all versions of IE causing the box art height to be incorrectly calculated.

Small tweak to the platform filter

Tinylogan — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 14:21:51 +0000

Just a small update today, but one that will hopefully make your platform tagging a bit easier. In addition to seeing the number of games you have tagged for each platform, there is now also a special "uncategorized" option on the platform filter dropdown list, which will allow you to see which games still need to be tagged.

This also means that every user will see the platform dropdown, regardless of whether they have tagged any of their games.

Support for platforms has arrived

Tinylogan — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 19:04:59 +0000

I'm really pleased to announce that support for game platforms has finally been added!

You'll immediately notice a new platforms tab on the game tooltips. Clicking that will reveal a list of all platforms that particular game has been released on. Simply tick those that apply to you. Once you've configured a few platforms, reload your library and you'll notice that a new filter dropdown for platforms has now appeared. Hurrah!

There have also been a few other changes, visual tweaks and bug fixes:

From now on when you add a new game to your library, the "owned" toggle defaults to ticked.
Also, if the game you've just added has only ever been released on a single platform, that platform will be automatically selected.
Tweaks to the display of the filter dropdown lists.
You can now "untoggle" library filters again by clicking on them a second time.
Fixed an issue with thumbnail loading on Mobile Safari.
Removed the show/hide events for the library navigation buttons, and tweaked the back/forward buttons.
Some IE8 compatibility fixes.

ALPHA13 is out featuring browser back button support, bookmarking and performance enhancements

Tinylogan — Fri, 20 May 2011 21:41:16 +0000

It's taken a bit longer than I expected to get this update out the door. What started as the relatively easy task of enabling browser back and forward button support and deeplinking for libraries, quickly spiralled into a large rewrite of the library handling function. The result though is a much more efficient platform that's a lot faster and a lot easier to build on for future enhancements.

The site is now also running on brand spanking new server. Here's hoping we can avoid another meltdown come the next traffic surge.

Release notes

Features

Enabled the use of the browser's back (and forward) button when applying library toggles.
Enabled deeplinking (bookmarking) a filter view of the library (e.g. to link directly to all the games you've bought but haven't played.
Improved library navigation with dedicated previous and next page buttons.

Other changes/bug fixes

Moved the site to a beefier server.
Performance enhancements across the board. Should be much faster for those of you with large libraries.
Fix for the game search in IE9 in certain conditions.
Updated game data from Giant Bomb should now refresh more reliably.
Better support for library browsing on the iPad, and probably the iPhone 4 and other smart phones (though I can't test this).
Improvements to the toggle buttons.
Developer and publisher information were swapped around on the detailed game view page.

Toggle-tastic new filter buttons go live

Tinylogan — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:22:24 +0000

I've just released an update that makes the library filter buttons a lot more useful. A much requested feature, you can now filter your games by the inverse of the loved, owned, played, and finished toggles.

Want to see which games you own, but haven't played? No problem. Want to see which games you love, but haven't finished? Go crazy.

A few days ago I also released an update that adds a bit more information to the library tooltips. You can now see on which platforms each of your games were released. Each platform also has its own dedicated page of information. This change is phase one of full platform integration that will give you the option of choosing which platform(s) you own a game on. Of course, you'll then also be able to filter your library by a specific platform.

Like the new filter toggle buttons? Let me know!

A few quick updates

Tinylogan — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:12:59 +0000

These past few days I've been concentrating mainly on content and stylistic changes to the site.

You may have noticed a new header bar along the top with an expanded menu. I'd always felt that the old header took up too much space and was... unsubtle, for lack of a better word. The new design respects the fact that this site is actually about your library. The expanded menu also contains a much asked for logout link.

The front page has also received some TLC. The login form has been added directly to the page, and I've tweaked the layout and wording to make it (I hope) a little more appealing.

Finally, I've added in styling fixes for IE9 and Opera. Still some work to do in IE9, but I think the site is entirely usable as it stands. Just a reminder: IE8 and lower will never be (intentionally) supported, and the same goes for old versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

What's next? Support for game platforms.

Revamped game search goes live

Tinylogan — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:19:53 +0000

The number one complaint I receive about Darkadia has to do with users not being able to find all the games available in Giant Bomb's database. Not all of that is my fault; the search facility provided by Giant Bomb still has no support for special characters (e.g. ü, é, etc.), and there is no ranking by relevance of the search results provided, meaning that searching for "The Dig", would only return that title as the 57th result. Not ideal, as you can probably imagine.

Unfortunately, I wasn't helping matters by limiting the search results to the first 20 results, or by filtering out any games with a future release date, and then also filtering out any titles that had no cover art (in my defence, I originally hacked together the search about ten months ago and probably overnight).

Well, you have to put up with it no longer. I've just released a completely rewritten search facility with support for multiple pages of results, with future-dated and cover art-less titles intact. So now you can bring those collections closer to completion, obviously still minus such titles as Brütal Legend, and others with titles employing special characters.

Enjoy! And, as always, let me know what you think.

Disruptions on the site today

Tinylogan — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:14:40 +0000

By now you might have heard about the outages being suffered by Amazon Web Services. At the time of writing, there are still issues to be resolved, according to the company's service dashboard.

Turns out Giant Bomb, whose database this site relies on to do its thing, makes use of Amazon and has similarly been down all day. As a result you may experience timeout errors when performing certain functions that rely on connectivity to Giant Bomb.

Check out the Twitter feed for the latest information.

A new tab appears on the tooltips

Tinylogan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:49:20 +0000

Small update today as a new tab appears on your games' tooltips, which provides more information about the game. You can now see when you added the game to your library, when it was released, who developed it, who published it, as well as a confirmation of the assigned genres.

The box art has also been retooled slightly and a maximum height as been imposed.

As ever, if you spot any problems, please use the feedback form.

No more of that fixed height box art

Tinylogan — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:40:50 +0000

A small update today as the box art on your shelf is now no longer fixed in height. If you have any boxes on your shelf that look odd (either very small or very large), let me know and I'll have a look.

ALPHA6 - A change of direction

Tinylogan — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 06:25:37 +0000

Just wanted to catch up and lay down the number of changes I pushed out in last week's ALPHA6 update. The update coincided with a nice bit of publicity from Whiskey Media, the parent company of Giant Bomb, whose massive database of games I use to power this site. The publicity led to a rather nice bump in the user numbers, but excitingly opened up some opportunities to work with Whiskey Media in the future.

Anyway, on to what was included in the last release:

New library tooltips. The tooltips have been completely revamped. They are now bigger, contain more information and, more importantly, leave plenty of space for future developments. There are currently tabs for game information and editable notes.
More categorisation options. You now have the ability to categorise your games by tagging those you love, own, have played, and have finished. You can now also filter your library by these categories.
Genre filtering. The ability to tag games by genre has been removed. Instead, the default Giant Bomb genres are being used, and the ability to filter your library by these genres has been added.
Sorting options. The ability to sort your library by title, date added, and date released has been added.
Various style changes.
Various bug fixes.
Some fixes for IE9.

Finally, if you're interested to see the list of planned future changes, check the roadmap.

ALPHA4 and ALPHA5 have come and gone

Tinylogan — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:08:35 +0000

There have been a few updates recently, released as ALPHA4 and ALPHA5 respectively.

ALPHA4 fixed a caching bug and added a "no genres" option to the genres filter (you'll only see the genre filter once you've applied a genre to at least one of your games).

ALPHA5 added an option to sort your library. The only sorting options available right now are: by title (the default), and date added. I might add a few more later. I've also changed the behaviour of the game info tooltips. You now have to click on the game's cover before the tooltip will appear. This is the first step in an upcoming update that will expand on the features available in the tooltip.

ALPHA3 released

Tinylogan — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:05:09 +0000

Just a short note to say that I've released ALPHA3 of Darkadia, which brings with it a single new feature and a bunch of bug fixes, but also removes the requirement to register with an invitation code.

Games that have been newly added to your library will now be marked as "new" for a period of 30 days.

New site features

Tinylogan — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 17:23:45 +0000

I'm very pleased to announce some new features that have been added to the site.

Following on from last month's addition of a facility to add encryptable notes for each of the games in your library, you are now also able to categorise your games by genre. You'll find the genre option on the game pages (for games in your library), as well as on the tooltips that pop up when you hover the mouse over an item in your library.

Once you've set at least one genre, a genre filter will appear on your library. It'll let you filter the current view by the genre you select.

There have also been some tweaks to the look and feel of the site, and more changes under the hood than I care to mention. The upshot is that the under the hood changes I've made now should make rolling out new features a little quicker in the future.