http://XboxIndies.com

It lives! Mwahaha! :)

I launched the new site tonight. It's 90% the same but let me run down some of the new stuff:

• Newsblog on the front page. Should be useful for us to help share trailers, reviews, XNA Round Up, and more to our visitors.
• Comments directly on game pages. Now users can give feedback right on the site. We'll see how long this feature sticks around before it's so terribly abused that I have to pull it.
• Fully featured browsing. We added back in the letter selector as well as allowing you to choose multiple genres, price points, or features to find exactly what you want.
• Better searching. We've enhanced the search logic to try and give the best results at the top of the list. We also added the search bar to the sidebar of the main page as some of you had asked.
• We upped the number of votes to hit the front page "Most Recommended" to 25 votes.

In addition we are also using http://xblig.info (notice the 'i' in there) as our short URL system. So effectively you have four ways to link a game now:

http://xboxindies.com/game/miner-dig-deep
http://xboxindies.com/tiny/0kU
http://xblig.info/miner-dig-deep
http://xblig.info/0kU

As you can see we've gotten down to some really small URLs there :).

And we've also gone ahead and automatically set up all xblcg.info URLs to automatically forward to their xboxindies.com counterparts, so none of your old links have been broken.

So what do you think? Pretty nice? If you ever have ideas for content for the newsblog or want to send me a trailer link or press information or anything like that, send it all to nick@xboxindies.com.

Wow, nice work! I like that a lot, it's very clean and professional.

Great new site (I registered already, to give my recommendation for Kodu :-).

One thing I noticed: On the Kodu page, all four screenshots are the same. This seems to be a problem on your site, since on the marketplace, there are indeed four different screenshots (your site picked up the 3rd screenshot from marketplace).

I also noticed that you are still showing the old recommendation for all games, but that I am now again able to vote for each game again (assumably because you switched from the Live Login to Wordpress login?). So after a while, everyone who had already recommended on the old site will recommend (yes or no) everything again on the new site, so all votes will be doubled? Or are you planning to phase out the old votes over time?

Doc

The site looks good Nick :)

Spyn Doctor:

One thing I noticed: On the Kodu page, all four screenshots are the same. This seems to be a problem on your site, since on the marketplace, there are indeed four different screenshots (your site picked up the 3rd screenshot from marketplace).

Yes, there was a bug in the code that retrieved those images. A few other games had been hit by this as well. This has been fixed.

Spyn Doctor:

I also noticed that you are still showing the old recommendation for all games, but that I am now again able to vote for each game again (assumably because you switched from the Live Login to Wordpress login?). So after a while, everyone who had already recommended on the old site will recommend (yes or no) everything again on the new site, so all votes will be doubled? Or are you planning to phase out the old votes over time?

I'm not really sure. I wanted to keep the old votes so the site didn't reset to 0s, but I couldn't transfer a Windows LIVE login over to the Wordpress system since the login tokens the LIVE apis give me are based on the domain, so even if you signed in with the same LIVE ID, it still couldn't match you to your votes. I probably won't phase out the old votes since I don't want to lower the numbers. Ultimately I don't think it'll prove to be a big issue that there are some extra votes in there from before, but I guess we'll have to see.

I'd like some sort of way to display some of the dynamic information from your site on mine. Specifically: "X out of Y users recommended this game on xblcg.info. Click here to recommend it!". I tried some PHP scraping but didn't get too far ;)

Curious why you switched from Windows Live ID to Wordpress.  (If this was already discussed in another thread, just point me to it.)

Matthew Doucette:

Curious why you switched from Windows Live ID to Wordpress.  (If this was already discussed in another thread, just point me to it.)

Ditto. I liked LIVE better; I didn't have to sign up for anything new. I think LIVE might be more common for your userbase, since it is probably mainly comprised of Xbox.com forum goers and devs from XNA, both of which would already be set to review games. I think you may lose some reviewers by doing this...

Other than that minor complaint, the site is looking great! It'll be very interesting to see what gets posted to the main page. Nice work!

The site is great! I especially like the game comments, I love getting feedback from the public.

Site looks great! As for the WordPress login, don't care either way. But one feature I want is new tweets for new Indie games. I'm getting tweets from following XBLA XNA Ratings, but I like XboxIndies.com better.

Tommy McClain

UberGeekGames:

Matthew Doucette:

Curious why you switched from Windows Live ID to Wordpress.  (If this was already discussed in another thread, just point me to it.)

Ditto. I liked LIVE better; I didn't have to sign up for anything new. I think LIVE might be more common for your userbase, since it is probably mainly comprised of Xbox.com forum goers and devs from XNA, both of which would already be set to review games. I think you may lose some reviewers by doing this...

That's what hit me.  On the release of Duality ZF, sending in folks to rate my game (something we should all be doing) just got harder.  I didn't even have a Wordpress login! :S  But, almost everyone I know has an MSN (Windows LIVE Messenger) or hotmail account.

And, not to just be negative, the site does look great.  I like the comment section.  (Probably what was behind the Wordpress switchover?)

The nice thing about live is that anyone who has xbox live has a live account becuase its mandatory. If they don't have one then they won't be buying your game anyway.

Nice site, but there's currently an error on the game screenshots zone...

EDIT: Not anymore. :) But now the recent arrivals aren't so recent...

Harald Maassen:

I'd like some sort of way to display some of the dynamic information from your site on mine. Specifically: "X out of Y users recommended this game on xblcg.info. Click here to recommend it!". I tried some PHP scraping but didn't get too far ;)

Why don't I just go ahead and find a nice way to expose that for you rather than you scraping the site. :)

AlMra:

But now the recent arrivals aren't so recent...

How so? The ones on the front page match exactly what's in the main list when you sort by release and they're all the most recent ones.

AzBat360:

But one feature I want is new tweets for new Indie games. I'm getting tweets from following XBLA XNA Ratings, but I like XboxIndies.com better.

Thanks! I'm going to work on this one. I already have a Twitter account set up (@XboxIndies), so I just need to figure out how the site can tweet out the announcements.


Re: Everyone about LIVE. Here's what brought me to not support LIVE:

1) I wanted a newsblog and Wordpress (as far as I can find) doesn't have a LIVE plugin. I am most familiar with Wordpress and since I needed to do a lot of integration with it (supporting game comments, adding plugins to make editing things such as game videos easier) I wanted to stick with Wordpress. I will keep searching or start working on one soon. I do want to support it, but I didn't consider it necessary to launch.
2) The existing user data wouldn't transfer since LIVE gives unique login tokens based on user AND domain; so any benefit from association of users and recommendations was immediately lost anyway. I know that's not the only reason to support LIVE, but it is something that people don't always realize.

Wordpress isn't a global system (so you need a login for my site regardless of whether you've signed up on other Wordpress sites), but I don't think it'll be that big of a deterrent. I know some people were turned off by the LIVE sign in because they have a lot of personal data attached to their accounts and some didn't know how much I had access to or whether they could trust the site. I'm going to be adding support for OpenID logins today (there's a plugin already for that) and hopefully LIVE at some point. I know LIVE is a good sign in for the user base (which is why xblcg.info used that instead of a custom system), but I just don't have the pieces in place to support it yet.

There were games released today which aren't on the site: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/default.htm. The weird thing is, they were there earlier today. 8|

AlMra:

There were games released today which aren't on the site: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/default.htm. The weird thing is, they were there earlier today. 8|

That's because the RSS feed for the published games isn't updated all the time, and my RSS parsing only runs hourly. It usually takes a half a day or a day before games start showing up. I'm also doing a bit of work on the RSS reader so that it pumps out Twitter status updates, so that's potentially going to delay some of the games from showing up for an additional hour or two.

All in all, expect it to take 24 hours for a game to show up on my site, even when I'm not working on things, because of the time it takes for the XNA RSS feed to update and then for my site to actually get those changes.

Nick Gravelyn:

AlMra:

There were games released today which aren't on the site: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/default.htm. The weird thing is, they were there earlier today. 8|

That's because the RSS feed for the published games isn't updated all the time, and my RSS parsing only runs hourly. It usually takes a half a day or a day before games start showing up. I'm also doing a bit of work on the RSS reader so that it pumps out Twitter status updates, so that's potentially going to delay some of the games from showing up for an additional hour or two.

All in all, expect it to take 24 hours for a game to show up on my site, even when I'm not working on things, because of the time it takes for the XNA RSS feed to update and then for my site to actually get those changes.

Ok... Thanks for the info.

AzBat360:

Site looks great! As for the WordPress login, don't care either way. But one feature I want is new tweets for new Indie games. I'm getting tweets from following XBLA XNA Ratings, but I like XboxIndies.com better.

Tommy McClain

Just posting back to say we've hooked up twitter.com/xboxindies to send out tweets whenever a game is added or updated. If an update includes a price drop, we make mention of that as well (we don't mention price raises, instead simply tweeting that the game was updated).

And here's something for the developers. :)

I've added the start of developer pages to the site. Right now they just list your games with two screenshots each. I've also added support to xblig.info to support short links as well. So for example:

http://xboxindies.com/dev/halfbrick
or
http://xblig.info/halfbrick

Now even if you don't have a website... you do. This is a great way to show people all of your games at once, as well as putting them in place to recommend and comment on them. I've gone ahead and made links to these developer pages from each game specific page as well as within all game boxes in the main games list. Hopefully this helps consumers find more games from developers they like.

Nice work Nick! The random screenshot is our favourite part and it brings us to refresh the page to find out more screenshots.
We cannot find the method to contact Xbox Indies in the site. We suggest to add some contact information for developers/readers to contact the web master.

In the game information site, it will be great if there are links of news, press, reviews, rating about the game. For example, add a section on each game's page for members to type in a title and a link for that relevant information. Developers and share their press, interviews and reviews on other site and readers can get all information in one site(XboxIndies.com).

To complete the switchover http://xblcg.info/ now redirects to http://xboxindies.com

I'm hoping that the links that used to point to http://xblcg.info/ work in http://xboxindies.com/ or else maybe you can work with me to set up a bit better method.

Hotwave Games:

In the game information site, it will be great if there are links of news, press, reviews, rating about the game. For example, add a section on each game's page for members to type in a title and a link for that relevant information. Developers and share their press, interviews and reviews on other site and readers can get all information in one site(XboxIndies.com).

The problem is then verifying that data as correct. People are free to put links in the comments where it is clear that it is user generated. But data in the main sections needs to be validated since it is provided as "official" data. At this point, none of us working on the site want to invest the time to moderate and validate those links because we all have jobs, other projects, and personal lives.

malfunct:

I'm hoping that the links that used to point to http://xblcg.info/ work in http://xboxindies.com/ or else maybe you can work with me to set up a bit better method.

I had already set this up by modifying xblcg.info. It would simply take anything after the / and put it at the end of xboxindies.com. Since we've kept the same structure and URL support, all those links being forwarded should work perfectly.

Just curious if the user activity (voting) has dropped since the Windows LIVE ID to Wordpress switch?  I have found myself to be off the grid, and it's intriguing how a little thing like this can matter.  Wondering how far this extends beyond just me.

Matthew Doucette:

Just curious if the user activity (voting) has dropped since the Windows LIVE ID to Wordpress switch?  I have found myself to be off the grid, and it's intriguing how a little thing like this can matter.  Wondering how far this extends beyond just me.

I'm not really sure. We had more voting before total, but I have no idea what frequency of that voting was. In the just over a week that we've been live, we have had 73 people register for the site, we have 57 followers of xboxindies on Twitter, and we've had 52 comments on games. I don't think that's too bad considering we haven't gotten really any press that I'm aware of (and I tried by emailing Kotaku, Destructoid, and others).