Introducing DPADD - A social network and journal for gamers

Hi all,

Today I launched the private beta of DPADD, a project that I've been designing and developing for the last few months.

Here's what you can do with it:

• Record the games you play
• Rate and review games
• Create a ‘To Play’ list to help you remember and organize the games you want to play
• Follow and see updates from friends and industry professionals
• Many, many other exciting features to come!

None of this would be possible without the Giantbomb API, so thank you so much to GB and all the contributors.

If you want to check out the site, sign up here: http://dpadd.com. I'm accepting people to the beta as soon as I see the sign up (generally within a few minutes).

Here's a few screenshots of how things look on the inside:

• http://bit.ly/ZA91zW
• http://bit.ly/Y4GC4y
• http://bit.ly/XD5kcE
• http://bit.ly/10Dbaxj

Any feedback, thoughts or questions would be appreciated!

@l3monade: Looks pretty cool :) Will you implement achievement tracking? :]

This actually sounds pretty awesome. I'll give it a go.

@morrow: It's on my list of "nice to haves" but likely a while down the road (got to be honest =P).

@reckless_x: Awesome! let me know what you think or if I can answer any questions.

Looks good. I signed up.

Just some initial impressions!

Awesome and clean interface - very inviting!

Game ratings are only showing as whole numbers even if they are marked halfway. For example, I've rated TRAUMA a 2.5, but it shows as 2. Also, I'd like for games that I've rated to be added to my games played list.

Other than that, so far I'm really digging it. Nicely done :)

@reckless_x: Great feedback! Thanks!

The rating one is a definitely a bug, I'll take a look and see whats happening.

And regarding the rated game being marked as "played" I think that make a lot of sense, I'll look into it and see what I can do!

Something that would be more convenient is if you could drop down a menu when you hover over a game in someone's activity feed and rate/add to playing/add to 'to play' from there instead of having to pop over to the game's page to do so.

Another thing that would be cool is if there was a "most wanted" or "most playing" list of all the games everyone is adding. Stats like that are fun to see.

Loving the progress though! :)

Also, is there currently any way to edit reviews that are already posted?

You could make it so that whenever you rate a game, it also adds it to your 'played' count. Not everyone who plays a game is gonna rate it, but everyone who rates something *has* played it.

Actually on that subject there is some confusion. It says on your profile a number of 'played' games, but to add to that you have to submit it through 'playing' games. I'm not sure what you mean to represent with this.

My sentiments exactly!

@dungbootle: Good thoughts, really like the idea of rating/playing/wanting right from the activity feed. Regarding your other point, it's something that's in development. I don't want to promise a timeline or anything but you can expect a "discovery" focused page with trending games, wants, etc in the not too distant future.

@reckless_x: Currently there is no way to edit an existing update (feedback noted). The work around right now would be to copy your review, delete the update and then repost it.

You guys are making my day with this feedback...keep it coming!

Looks awesome. Just signed up and waiting for my invite. ^_^

Is there a way to view followers?

& also is there a way to discern between games playing and games currently playing? I'd like to see that for sure!

edit2: also would be cool to get notifications for comments and such!

Just got my invite, looks pretty cool so far :)

Pretty neat stuff, love the simplicity of it. Would be kinda rad to have platform specific stuff dealing with the "I want to play" portion.. would be rather cool to be able too look it up and see others that also want to on your specific platform. I assume this is a thought that has already been tossed out there

This would be a really nice feature.

'Review' is misspelled as 'Reveiw' on the update box.

I signed up for the site today, pretty neat so far!

Just a comment: pictures of the game's box art would help under the search results. I did a search for Need for Speed: Most Wanted and didn't know which version was which from the results (PS2 version/recent version).

Hey guys, ( @infinitespark@dungbootle@hairymike87@tescovee@reckless_x + others)

I wasn't able to respond to all the awesome feedback yesterday as I'm a "new member" on giantbomb and an restricted to 5 posts per day. All your thoughts and ideas above have been noted and I'll be working my way through them over the coming weeks.

Yesterday I pushed the ability to see who follows you and who you're following (Visit your "Game Journal" and click the yellow "Following" / "Followers" links). I also added the ability to follow people directly from the 'People' page.

You can see updates as I make them here: http://dpadd.com/changes I'll post changes there from now on (GB probably doesn't want me using this thread as a change log forever).

Keep the ideas coming!

If anyone wants to add me!

Looks pretty good so far. Now to add the long list of steam game to play!

One thing that might be a bug? or not sure if you can change it....but it would be cool if/when you rated a game it was selected as a game you played so you don't have to go back in and select it as played. So it wouldn't be listed twice on your time line. another thing is if you are looking at a specific game, and try to rate another one the stars don't display, and you have to go to the "home" screen to rate/review another game.

I really think the site is a cool concept so far, and it has some crazy potential to be a really neat place. Keep up the good work man.

@tescovee Hey there, thanks a ton for the kind words, I really appreciated it.

The "Games you've rated should automatically be played" feedback is something I've heard a few times and will be addressing within the next few days. It makes a lot of sense, I just need to think through the implications of it. Would you expect to see two "Feed updates?" or just have that game marked as played on a game page / on your journal.

Regarding your other point, I think it's a bug. Will look in to it.

Thanks again!

When selecting a game that has the same name as other games (AKA Tomb Raider is the same as Tomb Raider), it'd be nice to see the box art or release date/system to help differentiate between multiple versions. As awesome as I'm sure the original game is, I want to play Playstation 3's Tomb Raider, not Playstation!

@likeassur: Great point. It's in the queue to fix ASAP. I'll probably do box art and release year.

Thanks for checking out the site, keep the feedback coming!

Seems more put-together and focused than Raptr, I'll definitely give it a shot. Thanks for sharing duder!

EDIT: That being said, I'm disappointed that it's only manual entry for games at this point. I know getting it for the consoles is a long shot this late in the generation, but logging in through Steam to automatically log games would be a big step in the right direction.

@pudge: Good thought. Integrating console/steam APIs is definitely on my radar but will definitely be a large scale endeavour. Xbox live doesn't even have an official API, you have to do some seriously hacky stuff to make it work. I agree though, it will be important for this thing to really fly. I do want to avoid is the insane 'raptr-style' auto update stuff, I think there's a more elegant solution that's yet to be found :)

Let me know if you have any other thoughts.

I agree, there should be a happy medium between micromanagement and a stream of garbage that no one wants. Perhaps push the auto-updates into a queue, and then deal with them when you log onto the site?

I am very glad you are keeping a darker theme, its very aestetically pleasing.

Also, if you do this right, there is a real future for this. Fans who are listed as playing a game can be given codes as a present by the developer. Or, this could represent an unofficial sales number for people to see and reference in the future, great way to see if there are fans for a particular game.

I think i would be cool if it was just marked as played and rated once on the "your journal". Just a suggestion since i have no clue as to how easy/hard that would be to implement.

Just wanted to let you know there's still a bug that doesn't show the full review score (even though you've added the decimals!).

@reckless_x: Heya, are you experiencing this on new reviews or just old ones (from yesterday and earlier)?

I haven't posted any new reviews since yesterday! I'm guessing it didn't retroactively fix and I'll have to repost?

@reckless_x: Yeah, I think so :( really sorry about that. Really unfortunate bug that occurred right before I launched.

Great idea! I signed up, and am looking forward to trying it out.

The search is very specific. Heart of the Swarm shows nothing, you'd need to write StarCraft II: (not 2 and not just a space) before it. Of course just writing 'starc' is enough to make it show up but still. It also says it's release date is unknown when it already came out.

A bug I guess: I hover over my name on the top-right corner and try to click on Account Settings or Sign Out but the menu disappears when I do that. (Chrome) Seems cool though

@chibithor: Great timing! I just (like literally 2 minutes ago) deployed a major search update. Typing "Heart of the Swarm" should now find the right game. No more autocomplete garbage :)

Thanks for the thoughts, let me know if you run across anything else thats janky.

Hello folks,

Some of you may have received an email last night about some big updates to dpadd but I wanted to share it with you here as I've had the most high quality feedback from giantbomb users. I'm hoping some of you will check out the changes and help me through the next batch of feedback. You can learn a little about what I'm planning and add your own ideas here.

Here's what's new:

New type of update: Playing

Until today you were only able to share games that you've "played" to your game journal. You can now share the game you are currently playing.

Notifications

We've added notifications to the site. Now you can instantly see when you get a new follower or when someone comments on one of your updates.

Game Tooltip

Ok, this one has been around for about a week now, but we love it so much we wanted to share it with you directly. You can now mark game as 'played', 'want to play' or rate it just by hovering over the game art on any page.

Several other updates, tweaks and bug fixes

We've fixed a ton of bugs and made lots of other changes all thanks to your great feedback.

Thanks for all the feedback and keep it coming!

--

Clayton (L3monade)

This is neat. Not sure how much I'd use it, but I approve.

@l3monade: This seems like an amazing service. Thanks for posting. I'm a fan of Letterboxd and have been looking for something like this for gaming, both as a way to manage my crushing backlog and track what I've played. I posted a few comments on you feature request page. Keep it going.

@djou: Thank you so much. I love letterboxd, being compared is a great compliment. Looking at your feature requests now, I'll digest and figure out how they fit into the queue. Thanks again!