Game Bundle database plans

[elf]

I'm working on a database for the itch.io megabundles and other bundles I've bought. I have a spreadsheet! I have Google sheets! I have lists! I have something like 10,000 games I have acquired through bundles.

...I need help figuring out how to collect all the info into useful database categories.

I would love to brainstorm with someone(s) who
1. Has something like database experience
2. Has some understanding of video games
3. Has played some TTRPGs; has some idea of the TTRPG industry/hobby area
4. Ideally, has bought at least one bundle and browsed the contents.

(If you haven't, I can suggest the currently-active Palestinian Relief Bundle, 373 items for $8, or TTRPGs for Trans Rights - West Virginia, 529 items for $5.)

Notes & more details:
1. I am doing this in MS Access. There's a vague idea of porting to MySQL later, but I don't speak SQL and couldn't figure out how to get started with it. (I can only work with Access because it mostly looks like Excel. I am not a database person.) A couple of decades ago, I had some basic training with Access queries; I am somewhat aware of types of data fields but it's very very beginner. I do not need a database expert but I need help figuring out how to set up the many-to-many tables.

2. Probably everyone here has enough video game experience. My main focus for this is the TTRPGs; I might like to eventually expand the "video game" category into things like RPGMaker, Visual Novel, Action Platformer, etc. but that's all distant and vague; I just need someone who knows the difference between "this is a video game" and "this is fun software" (e.g. Electric Zine Maker) so I can make the labels accurate.

I do not need someone(s) to sort through the games and figure out which is which - I need help establishing categories and noting what the edge cases are. Help figuring out exclusive video game categories would also be awesome.

3. TTRPGs are the reason I'm making this, with a strong sub-focus on solo TTRPGs. I can figure out how to deal with the games - it's the "not actually a game but definitely TTRPG content" I'm having trouble with.

Should adventure modules be tagged as TTRPGs? What about classes or playsheets? System-agnostic lists of monsters? And so on.

4. It'd help if people had acquired a bundle or two and then tried to find out "what the hell did I just purchase? What is all this stuff?" so they'd understand the scope of the problem. (Multiply by about 40; I have purchased 42 bundles to date.) (Okay, let's call it 35; some of those are basically "developer put their 4 games on sale together.")

I would love to chat, either in comments here (although that's very slow) or on Discord where I can screenshare and say "this is the main spreadsheet... here's my 350 edge cases which are too many..."

Comments

[packbat]

Some disorganized thoughts to mine for ideas:

• It's definitely possible to classify most TTRPGs within existing storytelling genres. Is there any kind of standard list of genres that appeals?
• A lot of TTRPGs are based on specific systems - e.g. Wretched & Alone SRD, Carta SRD, Peregrine SRD, Princess with a Cursed SRD - and tagging this systemic origins can be helpful for finding specific kinds of games.
• When we were trying to do this, we also tried to tag games by number of players. We never finished structuring things or making a form for adding and editing games, though.
• URLs change, but it still might be good to include them.
• Special equipment - conspiracy boards, tumbling block towers, Tarot cards, etc. - were another thing we were tagging.

[elf]

The TTRPG section will definitely have a field for game engine.

I am debating if that's the same field as the video games' "game engine," which will have options like Unity, Godot, RPGMaker, etc. It kinda breaks my brain to put those in the same field, but... they're mutually exclusive and have the same label. So maybe.

(However: TTRPGs can have more than one of them. A TTRPG can grab elements from 2 or more engines; video games don't work that way.)

URLs will be included; upkeep/corrections are a far distant issue.

Tools for the TTRPGs is part of the fields only used for those games. I assume all TTRPGs expect writing materials of some sort. (Some don't but those are so rare I can just throw that in a "notes" field.)

Common tools are
* Dice (I will need a whole separate subtable for "what kinds and how many") (may include "coin to flip" as a d2)
* Cards, playing
* Cards, Tarot
* Block tower
* Meeple
* Tokens
* Graph or hex paper
* Game-specific printables (need this map; need this tracking sheet, etc.)
* Other (a specific soundtrack, candles & a lighter, envelopes & stamps, a Discord with specific channels, etc.)

...I will need to do something with the "other" category because I want to search for "games that require fire." But that might just mean a sub-field of "Other" so I can add a list.

I plan to add "number of players" fields. Discussions with database people has established the best/simplest way to do this is a "GM Y/N" field (lots of gmless TTRPGS), and "min players" and "Max players" fields. I may wind up using "99 max" as a way to say "this is for a GM and as many people as want to play."

[melannen]

I have been (very slowly) still going through the ones I've bought and am very interested in your project! Unfortunately I am not a TTPRG person; in my personal half-finished spreadsheet everything tabletop has been getting put in the same category (which it sounds is what you're doing with the video games.)

What's the audience of this database? If it's mostly for you, my advice would be different than if it was for a limited group of indie TTRPG fans than if it was meant for a broad audience of everyone interested in itch.io bundles.

For the sorting I've done, for not-actually-a-game content I ended up with three fairly broad categories of "tools for making games"; "supplements to specific games"; and "tie-ins that aren't game content (for things like soundtracks and comic book adaptations.) There's definitely overlap even there, though, a book of monsters might be a prose tie-in, a player's supplement, and a game-making tool all three. For tabletop games you might also want to distinguish between software and static content.

I haven't used Access in about ten years though; how gracefully does it do multiple tags of the same type? I would be tempted to do a "tabletop" tag for everything tabletop related, and then subtags for complete playable games + my three categories, and a tag for software/static, and then maybe look at going more fine-grained with the games/systems/genres they're associated with. In my messy Excel spreadsheet I am using columns but that gets annoying fast if you get too complicated, and I think Access has better options? The categories you want to use are going to depend a lot on the options you have for structure, and how you're planning to search/filter once it's done.

[elf]

Audience is:

1) Me - a way to categorize & sort the games so I can find what I'd like to try, what I'd like to share, etc. "Works for me" is top priority.
2) Other people who have bought bundle games, for fairly obvious reasons.
3) Gamer community in general - so the database could be used as a template for other game databases.

Access has two options for subtags - a yes/no cell (Gonna use this for "does this game need a GM?") and "link this to another table that has the options listed." I don't quite know how to do that, but I don't need to yet - I'm still wading through subcategory options. And main table option.

Option 1: Main table for "Games"; secondary main table for "Bundles" (games can be in more than one bundle);
Games list title, creator, game URL, creator URL, game-sort-as so they'll alphabetize properly (and "2ECONDS TO 2TΔRLIVHT" gets categorized under "Seconds" where I can find it) (there are games whose name is an emoji) - and then categories - main, secondary, etc.

Option 2: No "Main" table. Collection of tables for each main type of game, with only the fields appropriate for that type.

What I'm currently stuck on:
Do I have three main types: Video Game, TTRPG, and Other (includes fiction, soundtracks, zine software, etc.), or are the main types VidGame, TTRPG, Game Assets (art for video games, audio clips for video games, adventure modules, "5 NPCs for your Mork Borg game", etc.), and Other.

...When I search/filter for "TTRPG," should that include
* Adventure modules
* New class/race/region/etc writeups - some for specific games, some generic
* Lists of game content ("30 merchants for your fantasy rpg")
* Non-game content - print-and-assemble dice, essays on how to GM, magazines that might include a little of any of those)

When I search/filter "Video Games," that should include playable games. Should it also include
* Assets for game development - art, audio, maybe other?
* Game dev software
* Other, IDK, maybe there is something else in the vidgame support field I haven't noticed because mostly I've ignored the video game content

The general "Other" category has its own collection of hassles but doesn't matter as much. My notes so far:
* Fiction - Text
* Fiction - Comic
* Magazine/Compilation
* Art Assets
* Audio (Soundtrack etc)
* Nonfiction - Text
* Nonfiction - Comic
* Software (e.g. Zinemaker)
* Other
* Unidentified/untagged yet

...you can see how this gets troublesome. I'm aware that nobody can tell me "you SHOULD have these things in the same filter," but it'd be nice to have some idea on how database setups work enough to know whether some options are smoother than others.

Oh, and somewhere in the mess is probably "add a field for the itch.io tags and another for the listed price," but that is data that presumably could be grabbed by a bot at some point.

[melannen]

If you're prioritizing for you, that makes it somewhat easier, I'd come up with something that does what you need to do and then think about add-ons that might add flexibility for other people. One thing I've found when trying to come up with personal cataloging systems is that taking some of the things I'm organizing and actually shuffling them between piles can really help me figure out my priorities (whether that's actual index cards or using software that's designed for visualizing that or whatever. Making it physical helps my brain spin it a different way and can also help you figure out how the size of the various categories matters to you.)

But yeah a lot of those are more database architecture questions than cataloging questions, and I don't really remember enough about Access to help (I do remember that the "link this to another table that has the options listed" part was where I decided screw it I'll just use a spreadsheet the last time I tried :P )

But I vote for Option 1: main table with everything unless there's a good logistics reason why not; it will make things much more flexible later if you change your mind about what you want your top-level categories to be or where individual items go in them. The only reason I might not would be if I want to go way more fine-grained on on other fields for some things, but even then I might be tempted to load everything into a main table first and then pull out those special categories into separate databases just for them (if the software will let you do that easily!) But as someone who extensively uses library databases, I can tell you that most of them have a lot of fields that are blank on most records because they only apply to certain media types.

For the other: I think it's important to have "video game, playable"; "video game assets, not playable", "ttrpg, playable" and "ttrpg, not playable" as very top-level filters, but I don't know the best way to do that. (I don't think I would ever actually be interested in "All tabletop related, playable or not" or "all game assets, video or tabletop". The only big-bucket one of the four I might want is "all playable games".)

I probably would separate out the game assets from the other-other stuff; 'game devs' is a very specific category of users and non-game-devs probably won't care about most of those, ever, but they might want to browse comics or soundtracks. Whether I did any other top-level divisions on the Other category would depend on if there was one kind of content that was heavily dominating it, probably.

[elf]

ooh, I hadn't thought of "playable" vs "not-playable" as a category. I could do that.

That puts (in my mind) adventure modules in "playable" and TTRPG expansions like "2 new classes" or "12 NPCs for your wizard school" into "not-playable." Cool.

And "Dev" can be a category, with sub-sections software, audio, art. And yeah, most people are never going to care about "30 new pixel sprites for your RPGMaker game." (I mean. There's stuff like "tarot cards in 10x15 pixels" for game assets. Which is nice, but... not actually useful outside of a game design space.) (Also I could be misremembering the size of the tarot cards.)

Dev-Software is interesting to some people. The other stuff, less so.

There is other software but it's rare enough that I'm not worried about it.

So: Play-Vid, Play-TTRPG, Dev -Soft -Audio - Art, Resource-TTRPG...
Read -FicText -FicComic -NonficText -NonficComic, Other -Audio -Art -Misc.

(Soundtracks are Other-Audio. Sound effects collections for video games are Dev-Audio.)

Probably.

[elf]

Links: Solo TTRPGs from bundles, including a few solo-ttrpg bundles

TTRPG-specific bundles, with erratic amounts of data captured because the formatting evolved as I collected more bundles.

also happy to share the master excel spreadsheet, but that's messier.

[got_quiet]

Are you familiar with https://randombundlegame.com/ ?

It's a manager and search engine for megabundle games. I find it to be relatively accurate, with a few exceptions. I believe it relies on drawing tagging and genre data from the game listings on itch.io. There's no ttrpg genre but there is a preset tag for it.

[elf]

I am - I visit it so often, if I start typing "ra" into my browser, it pops up. I find it both wonderful and inadequate for my purposes. It's stuck using the author's tags, and the authors are horribly inconsistent. (...Itch.io should have tag wranglers so that "solo" and "solo-TTRPG" and single-player" all get synned.) (They've added a "solo" search function but it doesn't catch everything because some solo ttrpgs are not tagged with anything like that.)

It also won't tell me which games need dice, cards, tarot cards, a block tower, etc. And it won't tell me which TTRPGs are "85 pages with worldbuilding and a complex combat system" and which are 1-page "here's an idea and the a couple of charts; have fun."

...but my main reason for not relying on RandomBundleGame is that I've bought several bundles that aren't in its collection. If all my games were in there, I'd probably be too lazy to try to set up a database. But the four "Solo But Not Alone" collections aren't there, among others. RBG has 14 bundles; I have over 30 good-sized ones, plus a bunch of smaller ones.

[got_quiet]

Damn, 30 bundles is a lot!

I see what you mean about the supplied tags being inadequate. I'm not familiar with TTRPGs to know what's important info, so all I can do is wish you luck. ._.;