New Feature! Add releases to your shelves

I’ve been talking about this feature for a while now, and I’ve finally released a version that I like well enough to put out for you guys!

You can now add specific releases of a game to your shelves.

This does two things visually to your collection. The first is on your shelf pages.


You now will see the releases you’ve added to your shelves on the individual shelf pages. Hopefully that’s fairly straightforward.

The second is on the game pages.


You will now have a list of what shelves you have the game on, plus it will tell you how many releases are on that shelf. This seemed like the simplest, least cluttered way to indicate that you have releases on your shelf. If you want to see which releases you have on a shelf for that game, just click the link for the shelf page and it will snap you down to the game entry on that shelf.

How do you add a release to your shelf? It’s pretty simple we hope. On every game page, there is a link that points to the releases page for that game. On the releases page, you’ll see the familiar shelf tools you’re used to. Simply find the release of the game you’re looking for, and click the corresponding button for the shelf you want to add that release to. It’s that simple!

Please let me know what you think, or how we could maybe improve this.

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thank you peter. looks good visually, straight forward and seems native.

I’ve previously always been attentive to specify what platform I play a game on when i start a playthrough via platform data area, as well as date on ‘playthrough date’ area. I hit the ‘playing’ shelf button, then platform, then start date, or i add platform when i hit the finish date, once i finish a game. This seems more or less a second way to do things.

So I notice two things… First thing I notice is that If i go to a game page of a game i’ve marked as played and specified the release the old way, my recorded date hasnt migrate over to the new releases page. Will that some point migrate over? (not a big deal, just curious) I just went ahead and marked a random game as ‘played’ from the release pages and sure enough it shows up in the former platform data area, so that’s working and it indeed does move over to the more visibile area.

Second thing I notice is something to look at: Check out this page:


For some games it would seem the platforms vary from what’s avaiable in the old way and the releases page. Oftentimes the ‘releases page’ has more because they are region specific, but in this case it’s the opposite!

Now region specific releases being in the GB database is interesting and I never did notice it. The fact the relaeses page can be ‘marked’ specifically by a region specific release now is actually pretty cool because it means we can potentially specify and track whether we played the orig japan release of persona/FF/etc to let us know in a way if we played a fan translated rom or something or a region specific localization. That’s something we couldnt do before, but we can do it now… :slight_smile:
This gives me an idea Since GB tracks the region specific releases of games, could/should grouvee ‘shelves’ be filtered down to display release specific info if we start marking them in this way? In most places (like your first screenot the shelf itself, and the platform data area on a game page) it coud lump them together in most places for simplicity sake, but since the release page has all of them… If someone marks region specific stuff, it could be useful or interesting to show up in some places, like look at as a shelf filter for SNES (Japan) or PAL specific. Anyone who isnt tracking that wont see it anyway (because its not on their current shelves) but anyone who bother to mark something could do it this way and could see it in some places maybe) those guys have reason to want to keep track of it.

Any chace we could mark release data a third way? I would kind of like to see a platform roll down at some point when declaring playhtroughs, (region specific is another issue).
Anyway Awesome idea. I’m going to go ahead and mark all two of the japanese games i’ve played now this way. :smiley: Thanks again.

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Are you talking about when you would specify the platform using the Edit Platform button? Cause that’s actually still there. I might merge the functionality of the releases and the platform stuff, but it’s separate for now. As for the date part of it, whenever you add the “main” game to your shelf is the only date that’s actually recorded. Maybe I should record adding releases too.

Yes, this is definitely an annoyance that I have to figure out a good solution to. @aqwelorr and I have talked about how to handle it a little bit. It seems like maybe creating dummy releases for platforms that don’t have releases might be a good way to handle it. I don’t know yet. For now I was thinking about just making it automatically add platform data for you when you specify a release. Not sure yet.

I’m sure I could add something to the filters to let you filter games that you own in a certain region.

Not a bad idea. Same goes for reviews too honestly.

Glad you like it!

Bleh, I should have read what i wrote more carefully. Ignore that bit about ‘date’ i meant data. Just take any game you’ve added to any shelf in the past and paired it with a platform… The platform you paired it with isnt showing up marked on your shelf in the new format with it’s associated release. It’s related to the second thing probably, it’s like there are two separate databases of releases somehow of ‘release data’ and ‘edit platform data’.

I ran three tests to confirm (on for played, one for playing, one for wishlist), but if you go to the releases page, specify a shelf on a platform release, it doesnt show up on the correspeonding shelves page.

What would be cool is if it looked like this:


See how Harry Potter says game boy color? Awesome. :slight_smile: Currently if you add to any shelf from releases page it wont show up like this (in the screen i manually did it from the shelf page itself) it will still look like older entries in the shelf that dont have platforms associated with them. This would be cool.

I also didnt actually think to ever go and look at my wishlist shelf either, as I would have started marking them by platform… Funny how I am still learning how to use the site. I currently really just use the game pages itself and if i keep track of platforms, i have left myself notes via statuses and flag them as private. I think i’ll start doing it this way XD

Even though it doesnt show up on the shelves themselves, being able to mark releases is powerful tool, and i can dig into the release data on a game page at any time to see what platform i was looking at or had played. Best feature yet since i joined site imo.

I agree with the discussion so far, a tighter connection between platform details and releases would be great.

I’d also slightly change how prominently releases are featured. If I add three releases to a game and open a shelf with said game, I will see two entries - one for the game and one for the list of releases. The description reads ‘Releases for … on this shelf’, but it’s a separate item on the shelf. What adds to that is that you can’t actually interact in any way with the releases (as opposed to games), other than clicking their covers. What I mean is that the releases add a lot of noise to the shelves, which ultimately makes it harder to visually parse the list.

Maybe it’s possible to move this information to the parent game, either as condensed list somewhere or similar to how dates finished are displayed? This would also allow releases to be displayed in compact mode. Otherwise, if I’d go ahead and tag releases for all games I own, my list would be twice as long.

On the other hand, I’d feature releases more prominently on the game page since there is much more screen space available. Instead of hiding releases in their own menus, the releases and platforms owned by the user could be displayed directly on the game page, similar to the platforms.

Another, slightly off-topic, thing I just noticed - are the sections on the right column on a game page intentionally ordered like they are right now? First we have aggregated community data, after that game metadata and the last section is global community data again.

Edit: Some clarification on what I mean:

All in all I really like the new feature, it’s a great step towards keeping our games organized!

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I almost made the look of the shelves with a plus sign that expanded and showed the releases when you clicked it. I think I might try that because I agree it gets a little cluttered.

Agreed. Shelf buttons should be there if the cover is going to be there.

Right now the releases sort of show up on the main page. In the parentheses next to the shelves it at least indicates you have the release shelved. I’ll play with displaying it on the page a little more though.

Sort of? The user data in the middle is the most thought out part of the layout to be honest. The rest of it was kind of layed out based on how it looked with the flow of the page. I’ve played with moving the boxes around quite a bit, and this has been the best I’ve come up with.

Thanks for the comments! Glad you like the feature. Also, thanks for the Gold sub!

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I think it would be better. Right now, if I add the same release to multiple shelves (as I usually do) it looks really messy.

I have one somewhat stupid question. How do most people use this new feature? I am always in favour of having more data in my database, but I am still looking for a way to incorporate this. I guess the best is to work with the releases only, and not the game (as the information “propagates”), in that case I’d probably argue that one should move the releases to somewhere else, as it makes every manipulation take one more click. I am not sure where this would fit, but the releases are a bit hidden away given that if one wants to track releases, they are the primary entries one interacts with.

Also, plus one to making the releases expandable in the shelves view. Having them listed under every game entry is a bit overwhelming, and it takes up a lot of space.

Right now, it’s just for displaying more information. A lot of people use the site simply to keep track of what’s in their collection, and they wanted to be able to say which version of a game they had. We should be able to filter shelves based on releases, and it will also show up in your data export soon. I basically wanted to get the info in the database, and see what we could do with it :slight_smile:

I’ve been playing around with layouts where the releases would just be on the main game page. There’s also the possibility of putting it in a meta data dialog that you could add even more info about your game.

Definitely coming soon!

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The releases are now expandable on your shelf.

Looks something like this now:

I think it looks pretty good if I do say so myself :slight_smile:

Let me know what you think!

The expand is great, thank you. I really like it. :slight_smile:

By the way, which shelf does the search function draw from? I tried searching for a couple of games I have multiple releases for in different shelves, and couldn’t discern a pattern. Does it only count releases that are in all shelves? I am not sure about you, but I think I’d prefer an “or” logic rather than and “and” logic on that. This would be more consistent with what the search already does (as it transcends shelves).

This looks incredible now, thanks a lot!

The search doesn’t take into account the releases yet. I’ll have to fix that.

One thing I noticed when I was using grouvee the other day. It is a bit hard at a glance to see whether the expandable releases belong to the game above or the one below when you are in the middle of the list and can see neither the top or bottom.

Obviously we “know” that it goes below, but it would be great if this is something reflected in the design without the user having to think about it for a split second. Not exactly sure what the best solution is, if that is simply removing the horizontal line between game and release, or making it thinner / a lighter colour / dashed or something, or some other clever solution. I just wanted to point it out as I caught myself thinking about it scrolling through my list.

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I just exported my collection to a csv file and noticed that the individual releases are not exported. Any chance of getting this data offline somehow?

Yes, that’s on the list to get into the export.

definitely not a stupid question because GB is hardly straight forward and it took me some time to understand the way GB has sorted their game data. hope it helps. i’ll explain it.
basically go to a game page on grouvee. you’ll see the edit platform. What is ‘platform’? Where does it come from? its pulling that from the platforms under ‘Game Details’ section of a Giant Bomb page (not releases!) this is helpful to know the difference if you wish to add a platform to GB database so you can tag a platform for your OCD collection.

at first when peter made this update i didnt know that releases are different and exist independently of platform. In a perfect world (and GB isnt perfect, as it often has platform data and release data missing for unpopular stuff!) its kind of redundant, a PC release should have a PC platform. but still release data is cool. its great to have on grouvee. play a japanese fan translation or play international release of a SNES rom? Well you can tag that in some cases, compliations, remasters, and other goodies show up in different ways, because GB isn’t always consistent. so its nice to have both options of releases and platforms. there are also people who own physical copies of stuff so this is probably great for those who collect PAL games. People who have lists like ‘physical owned’ or ‘PC owned’ ‘not yet translated’ could get use of this sort of thing. it’s powerful, but it would also seem to be subject to GB and the whimsy of whoever makes edits (or doesnt make edits)

I was playing around with data export for the first time last weekend. I wanted to import my played shelf into gamefaqs. grouvee export is pretty cool!. I like the export feature (also gamefaqs is pretty cool place with a registered account, really would suggest everyone to check it out) my understanding is that some of the stuff that gets exported (like platforms we add to a game page, or shelves we send a game page into) is arranged sequentially in the order we did the operation. (example we add a game to pc, then add to genesis. pc will be first then genesis follow) my guess is shelves work this way too. that made it tricky to export then get into gamefaqs using their import tool, (as i didnt use any kind of seperation rules or anything fancy) but i managed by just sorting my column by platform then deleting lines as i got them finished, one system at a time, in waves. This is fine for what i was wanting to do (which was just see what it looked like in gamefaqs as experiment/one shot) but i probably wouldnt want to mirror a database this way. or update another one routinely. was too much work. [quote=“peter, post:9, topic:1027”]
There’s also the possibility of putting it in a meta data dialog that you could add even more info about your game.
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that sounds cool. I would be doing platform data this way but I want to be able to use filter>platform (or filter>everything, really) :slight_smile:

One thing i’ve run into using grouvee is a hang up with platform association of some games that GB doesnt have. Typically I will just manually add them with my GB account, but this is a chore (and i have to wait since i’m under 1000 karma) @bmo mentioned a seemingly good automatic solution: Dummy copies of platforms>releases and releases>platforms. However, what about the game pages of compilations and remasters? In this regard it gets complicated cause GB is a bit lame at times and not consistent. it would be great if we could just type in whatever we want in the platform data field anywayz regadless of what GB thinks a game page should or shouldnt be on or doesnt think a game exists on. or even import some stuff like that in. Since there are only so many platforms to pick from anyway, what would the harm be in letting a user just do a ‘fill in style’ entry for their candidate of choice once the game page is there?
also the ability to do some stuff like this through an experimental import would of course be nifty, but i probably wouldnt need to unless i create a shelf out of the blue and want to put a ton of stuff in it. (and i pretty much only want to use default shelves now as much as possible)

Another idea i had was to let a user have certain game pages (or releases) point to other game pages (or releases). Maybe every now and then there could be a reason why a user might want to associate something with something else in this way but for all practical considerations notes/private statuses work fine, and i doubt many people would ever use it. I can think of a few things it could be used for but i dont need to mirror every pacman clone to the original. (But I could!) :slight_smile:

I’d be curious to see what some enterprising grouvee user has done with the export feature. spreadsheets are powerful things! I think i might give that hypothetical meta filter a hex color code, especially for gameboy :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s excellent, thanks for the info!

I’ll see if I can get the releases added to csv export soon. @mmuffins I’m assuming you’re just interested in the release data you see on the Grouvee page (title, region, platform, date) and the shelves right?

That sums it up, yeah.