So here’s what’s been going on the last few months:
Grouvee has an iOS app now, and it’s in beta.
Come post over here, or send me a message if you want access.
Steam import reworked
From your Steam settings page, it’s much more clear what’s going on. You can tell Grouvee to create a Shelf that mirrors your collection, or only add games to your Steam shelf when they’re new to your collection.
We keep a persistent log of Steam games imported now so you can see when Grouvee imported them
You can flag games to ignore from your steam imported page
Grouvee now imports Steam hours separately from the playthrough data and displays them on shelf and game pages. Before, Grouvee used to grab your Steam hours and create a playthrough based on those hours. That doesn’t make any sense really because if you have 1000 hours in Dark Souls, that’s probably like 20 playthroughs and you need to create those data points yourself.
Better writing tools
A brand new editor for reviews, statuses, and comments, with a live side-by-side preview
Add images by dragging, dropping, or just pasting them in (no more clunky dialog)
Comment replies are properly threaded now, so conversations make sense
Game box art is now being downloaded in a higher resolution so the box art doesn’t look bad on mobile like it has for the past year.
As always, leave me messages for things you want to see and I will do my best!
I noticed when viewing my own statuses on my profile, I can’t see the star review for games I’ve rated. I’m not sure if this is like that for all profiles or statuses.
Had to sign back in today, I like that the logged out splash screen now gives you a little preview of the most recent comments and reviews! From my vantage Grouvee’s community is easily one of the best around, so it only makes sense to highlight it up front.
I changed the Played shelf status from Limbo to Paused. That’s really what the whole point of that status was. You’ve Played the game, but you’ve put it down, and you’re definitely going to come back to it.
I built this timeline thing that you see if you’re using the app, or if you’re using the redo game pages, which most people here aren’t because I haven’t really talked about them. The redo page looks like this if you want to see them (https://www.grouvee.com/games/130092-persona-4-golden/?redo=1). The timeline looks like this: https://www.grouvee.com/status/timeline/1-peter/130092/ I always wanted to build a gaming journal feature this site. Turns out I already had all the data to do it. If you use the playthrough data and use Posts (formerly statuses), you can see a cool timeline of your progress through a game. The redo pages have some more buttons on them to start playthroughs and mark games abandoned, etc.
Anyway, just thought I’d throw those two new things out there for people to see!
The banner art just comes from IGDB’s Artwork or Screenshot endpoint on a Game. It just grabs the first widescreen image it finds from those collections.
I don’t know. I didn’t want to change the page again so quickly on everyone, but I really didn’t like how the new pages turned out. I’ve been kind of running an experiment where all new accounts get the new front page and new new game pages. I was just curious if it would raise or lower engagement, or get more people to come back to the site. The jury is still out there
I feel like there’s a ton of unused real estate on the left side of the screen that could be implemented to include information so you don’t have to scroll so far for certain things. Like maybe that’s where the playthrough history could be smushed into. I’m not sure what would be best for that.
But otherwise I think it looks really nice. Just maybe move around things a little bit. I feel like the community ratings shouldn’t be so far down on the screen cause our community opinions are valued!
And maybe the review and statuses should have a button higher up on the page that opens them in a new window. But I’m not sure. This are just roughdraft thoughts.
Yeah, I’ve played with the order of things quite a bit. It’s always a struggle to decide whether to push the individual user content up higher, or the community stuff up higher. The majority of users don’t post, so I’ve been favoring the individual user content like playthroughs, shelf data, etc. up higher. I currently have the History/Timeline section about the game details, which I don’t think is the right move.
I agree. I actually had the box art with shelf buttons be sticky on the left side at first, but then I had trouble with layout and it doesn’t stick.
I want to get it kind of “right” before I put the app out since these pages are the app pages.
Also I feel silly about the ratings thing cause the accumulative rating is at the top and the breakdown is at the bottom. That’s my bad for looking at the page while working!
The only way to get new games added now is to add them over on IGDB. I do believe they have made a lot of improvements in speed getting through their backlog of game submissions. You have to have a Twitch account to submit games I believe. I’m sorry it’s a little bit of a pain, I just couldn’t keep up with the submissions here on the site, and they seem to be pretty decent at it.
