Hi, sorry for the late response.
I heard your scepticism regarding using tags as the main data source. Unfortunately, for now, I don’t have a good solution for that problem. Maybe the situation with tags on itch.io will improve one day, we will see.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on general and sub game genres and confirming that with the otome tag example. I noticed that myself, but now I have confidence that this is something that should be tackled. I will try and see how I can improve the classification algorithm using relations between general and sug genres.
See the computer game genres relation graphs I found, look actually cool:
And after a while, look at what I found! This is very nice from the side of Dexter Yy that they shared that thing with the public. I will definitely use it for the development of my project. Also, thank you for giving me an idea to search for those graphs - found a bunch of cool stuff.
You can’t ping people on Itch. This is not a social media platform to contact and chat with users. You cannot even contact users directly. Nor developers.
Aaa ok, that’s strange, my previous experience with forums told me I can ping a user. Anyway, glad you found this thread by yourself :)
If that is so, your current system’s perspective is very wrong. Breakout and platformers are nothing alike. Hidden objects have nothing to do with visual novels. There is many more such examples.
True. Yesterday, I added more parameters to classify genres in a better way, and I managed to bring down the count of “duplicates” to 13. See the following image how the genres comparison graph looks now:
So thank you for the pin point.
The issue is, if you try to analyze tags on Itch, your system’s data is bound to be faulty. Itch tags are not accurate and you do not know the ranking of relevance, even if they would be accurate.
Yeah, I remember you said it last time in that other thread on the forum, and I also see this now by myself (as I mentioned in the previous post on this thread). For now, I don’t have a way to tackle that problem. From my side, I can only create some kind of tool that helps indie developers to put correct tags or find games with potentially incorrect tags, but this is not the main point of my current project. Also, game developers on itch.io must understand that the better tags they have for their game - the more people will find it and play it.
I am still unsure what you are trying to create. Is your system trying to tell people that like breakout, that they will like platformer games? Or if they like visual novels, that they will like hidden object games? Because, that would fail. Exhibit A is me. I do like some platformers, but I never liked breakout. I like some visual novels, but I do not like hidden object games.
Mmmmm, kinda yes but not. You see, this is the first step in the whole system - compare game genres. Comparing only game genres wouldn’t be a good recommendation system, as you said. I want to go beyond and compare other parameters as well, such as creators, style, mood, etc. Totally, I have planned to have around 13 parameters to describe the game, but for now, I only operate on 1.
Btw, if you like platformers, the current system will likely recommend you another platformer rather than a random breakout game.
You might want to double check popular games on Itch with their respective tags on Steam. Steam tags are ranked by relevancy and relevancy is chosen by users.
Let’s try this.
Backpack Hero, Tags on Itch
Role Playing, Card Game, Strategy
2D, Cute, Deck Building, Dungeon Crawler, Pixel Art, Roguelike, Roguelite, Turn-based
And on Steam. “Popular user-defined tags for this product”
Replay Value, Inventory Management ,Turn-Based, Roguelike Deckbuilder, Deckbuilding, 2D, Fantasy, Roguelike, Strategy, Building,
Choices Matter, Turn-Based Strategy, Roguelite, Casual, Procedural Generation, Singleplayer, Card Battler, Controller, Female Protagonist, Moddable
The developer chose role playing as a genre. Users disagree. It is not even in the list of the 20 most popular tags. Neither is card game, though deckbuilding is used. Nor Pixel Art. Nor Dungeon Crawler. And Steam has a cute tag. But users disagree there too. And yes, the characters are cute, but this is just not relevant, neither is the fact that it is a pixel art game. Curious, isn’t it. Also, the game centers around inventory management, but on Itch no tag indicates such.
I totally agree with this, and I have an idea how to overcome this - when my system can grab data from Steam or other sources, I will merge that data with existing records if there are any. For example, I indexed and put into the database Backpack Hero from itch.io. Then, I grab data from Steam, and while indexing Steam games, and found that I already have Backpack Hero game in my database. So I merge additional/missing data, and I use the same tags when recommending this game, so both itch.io and Stam users benefit from this. The process of merging data is not a trivial thing and will probably require manual review of every merge case, but I hope I will find the best solution if the project survives to that stage.
On the first attached image, you can see a graph representing the correlations between different game genres. The closer two genres are, the more similar they are. A black line between two genres means that, from the perspective of my current system, those genres are essentially the same.
In the current system, genres are described by 10 parameters. I may need to review the values for these parameters to better differentiate genres or add more parameters to analyze genres from different perspectives. The graph itself is somewhat strange, for example two very similar genres with only a small difference in weight can sometimes appear far apart for unknown reasons. If you notice any inconsistencies, they might be due to how the graph is visualized. However, I would still appreciate it if you could share your findings so I can double-check them.
On the second attached image, you can see a graph showing the differences between itch.io games from 2013. These differences are calculated based on genre differences. As before, black lines between games indicate that the two games are indistinguishable from the perspective of my system.
Fact #1: A small number of games (fewer than 10) on itch.io from 2013 have no recognizable game genre in their tags. Unfortunately, these games, and any future games with the same issue, will not appear in my recommendation system, as game genre is mandatory for the system to function correctly. If you are a game developer, always include the game genre in your game’s metadata. It’s better to assign multiple genres (if applicable) than to leave it blank.
Overall project progress: The backend is already complete - I can assign scores to games I like or dislike, and the system can already provide reasonable recommendations. Next, I need to create a frontend so interested users can try it themselves, and I also need to collect more game data from itch.io. I estimate this will take me about a month (including frontend development + data collection + and calculations).
