VGOCD - Game of the Month site

[raptor94k]

I've been at RFGeneration for a long time now, but don't often post on the message boards. I'm more of a lurker. The community here has always been supportive, posts content that deserves one's attention, and is generally pretty interesting. Which is why I wanted to extend an invitation to everyone here to help me transition my site from an in-house, closed beta version to a live, public version.

http://www.vgocd.com

VGOCD is a community playthrough website, sort of a book of the month idea for video games. More or less it is the same thing as the community playthroughs that happen on this site. Speaking of which, I'm not trying to detract from those at all, I was just hoping that some folks here would enjoy playing through games on my site as well. The first game is Watch Dogs. Currently there are virtually no users, bugs, and unimplemented features, so it's got that going for it. But I really need people to test out the site, give me good feedback, and pass along the link to gamers that they know. So please, if you are interested, check out the site, sign up, and participate in the discussion.

[Shadow Kisuragi]

Hello again raptor! I was wondering when your site would get off the ground, as the last time you were active around here you were talking about it.
I like the simplistic look...but how are you planning on archiving playthroughs?

[raptor94k]

Why hello there!

I have quite a few updates I hope to roll out over the next few months, and one of them will be game pages. My idea is that you will be able to search for a previous game and see all the comments and info associated with it. So essentially, after the month is up, people will still be able to continue playing and talking about it. This way the game never really dies, it is just "archived" as you said.

Along with this I would also like to eventually start tracking which games you took part in and which games you completed (honor system, of course) so that as a user you have a visual record of what you have done.

[Shadow Kisuragi]

What do you consider as "completed" - storyline, 100% completion, achievements, or let someone arbitrarily determine what they think is "completed"?
For the archived game pages, do you plan on storing them by date, game name, or both? It seems like a simple consideration, but it would impact the architecture of how they're stored.

[raptor94k]

I will probably have two flags for completion, one for generally beating the game, and one for 100% completion. Similar to how the Backlog does it, if you have every been to that site.

To answer your second question I must touch on another upcoming feature: I want to allow users to create their own subgroups. Similar to subreddits, you could go and create your own group playthroughs based around whatever criteria you choose and invite your friends to join you and all that good stuff.

So my idea for the game pages is to store them by name (or more likely both in some fashion) but on each page you will see it's history in the groups that have selected it for a playthrough. So for Watch Dogs it might be as follows

VGOCD Main - 5/2014
VGOCD Ubisoft Games - 8/2014
Shadow Kisuragi's Awesome Game Playing Group - 9/2014
etc.

[Shadow Kisuragi]

That's why I asked if you were storing them by date or name - date would be strictly historical, while name would allow for a non-static page.