IndieDB

By: Derek Yu

On: June 18th, 2010

Indie DB

Say hello to ModDB‘s new indie brother! Its name is IndieDB, and it’s a developer/player run website that’s dedicated to indie games. The site is launching with a number of new features, including design tweaks, better search, and faster speed. Accounts on ModDB and Desura (a digital distribution services for games and mods) will work with IndieDB, since they’re all by the same creators.

Posted in Community, Developers

rinkuhero

i can't seem to figure out how to get it to only display indie games, rather than display both mods and indie games.
Idtst

TIGdb fading into obscurity in 3, 2, 1
rinkuhero

i think there will still be a place for that, along with the newly created indie game wiki (which i've been meaning to do a post about but i'm waiting until it grows a bit more — perhaps after it has 1000 articles). they all have different features and serve different purposes.
http://www.derekyu.com Derek Yu

Well, it would if you'd only stop mentioning it! Stop it!
Snow

This is really nice. I hope that it will also be a place where developers can share from a repository of code samples/beta engines/tutorials etc. TIG is excellent of course. It would be nice to have a central hub to have every single resource that one could use for indie development. I hope to write some papers and also do some mathematical experiments in the years to come (either of which.. if successful, I will be sharing).
Asdf

Have you found a new host for that yet? Wikia is really obnoxious.
Asdf

And before you say I should use adblock, no, that's not a viable solution. It's also dishonest towards wikia.
rinkuhero

yes of course, i'm going to host it myself after it becomes large enough. hosting isn't a problem, getting it large and active enough to warrant hosting is.
rinkuhero

“It would be nice to have a central hub to have every single resource that one could use for indie development.”

'the internet' doesn't count?
Asdf

That's good to hear, but I think it's a mistake to postpone the move to your own hosting until later. Hosting it on wikia will in itself slow growth, and once you do move people will have to change links, still finding the old site on google, etc. If the new host is already available, it'd be less of a pain to do the move right now.
rinkuhero

yes but i didn't start the wiki, fartron did, i'd have preferred to start it on its own hosting but that's just the way it went. also wikia updates its database so slow that we literally couldn't move it (database unavailable) for the first two months. now the database is available but about 2+ weeks out of date; they seem to update it randomly.
David Amador

This is cool. And my games were already there in indiedb which is awesome.
A place for all indie is a great idea.
Asdf

If that's the case, won't the database always be out of date? If the wiki becomes more popular, the amount of manual work to be done for a move will only increase as time goes on, unless it's possible to merge databases later.
rinkuhero

it won't always be out of date: if i catch it on the day that it updates i can back it up and move it at that point.
Asdf

Oh, I thought you meant that the database had just been updated but the contents was still 2+ weeks out of date. Let's hope you catch an update, then.
Mou-sou

The Internet is really, really big.
Snow

Exactly. I think it would be faster and better to have a single hub. Of course, not everyone uploads samples or tutorials. I still find a lot of information and code sample on personal blogs of programmers who experiment with things.
rinkuhero

yeah, but i kind of think the decentralization is pretty important — if everything were on one site, it'd give that site's owners way too much power — anyone they ban is gone for good from the community, and their biases would lead to certain types of games being favored over others, etc. — i like how decentralized everything is now, where people can find sites about indie games that work well with their tastes.
http://twitter.com/Metagolf Michaël Lievens

Just upload Metagolf to IndieDB… Who knows!
http://shigi.wordpress.com Laura

This is a cool idea. For some reason I was also unable to get it to display only indie games, rather than both mods/indie games… were you able to figure that out Paul?
rinkuhero

not yet — maybe it's an upcoming feature.

i wonder if i should add my games there (if it's worth the time) — hard to say. are you going to add melolune?
PHeMoX

Same here, although I fear total conversions fall into the same 'Indie' category over there…

Also, I seriously like TIGdb a lot better, even when it's perhaps not entirely up to date. I like it a whole lot better than a dozen games that are being announced and won't ever make it to the finish line over at IndieDB. More than 60% looks like it has very little chance of making it in the long run, the other 30% I already knew about. :)
intenscia

What URL are you on? http://www.indiedb.com/games only displays games, everywhere it should only be games. There are only a handful of mods on IndieDB, since Mount & Blade supports mods.
Foppy

It offers the choice between “Indie” and “Commercial”, but that should perhaps be “Freeware” and “Commercial”.
Pasty

it really looks like both moddb and indiedb are pulling stuff from the same database. even the forums of both sites have the exact same topics, so when i went looking for help specifically for indiedb, you know, it didn't work.
rinkuhero

no there are a lot of mods too — full conversion mods get counted as 'indie games' for some reason. for instance, a mod that transforms quake to look and play like call of duty is listed as an indie game.
intenscia

Hmm, I see your point though technically it isn't a mod since it is a standalone game. Titles like this are in the vast minority (i'd guess less than 1%), we will consider filtering them out, though our aim is to essentially support all game devs that fit the definition of an indie.
rinkuhero

if the call of duty mod of quake is truly a stand alone game rather than a mod of quake then it breaks copyright, which is against the rules.

which is another point: your terms of service say you can't do copyright-infringing games, yet there are a ton of fangames and copyright-infringing games on there. for instance, a resident evil 4 FPS is currently the first game listed at http://www.indiedb.com/games — that's clearly against the rules since they don't have the permission of capcom to make that game. naruto: shadow (a fangame of the naruto anime) is also on the first page there.

it's things like that cluttering it up that make it unappealing to browse or even to list my own games on. i don't hate fan games, i think they have their place (like fan art and fan fiction), but there are so many low quality ones that they clutter up browsing, and should at the least get their own tag or something so that they can be filtered out when browsing.
rinkuhero

more examples from the second page:

– an aeon flux game
– a gundam game
– a fallout 3 rpg
– a lego game

so you see, you don't do a very good job of enforcing the rule about not adding copyright-infringing games to the database — it seems to be at least 10-20% of the games listed there.
intenscia

Thanks for clarifying. Our aim is to support all game devs so we allow fan games. If we receive a complaint or copyright we will comply and react appropriately. I do see how these could be viewed as “mods” and not an indie game, this had not occurred to me. Appreciate the feedback, I will check with my team and decide what to do.
rinkuhero

no problem. and yeah, i don't think you should totally remove them either, since many fan games can be as good as games with original IP, and because it seems that a large percent of the people who use the site see no problem with it.

but i think arguably fangames are as closely related to mods (and to romhacks) as to indie games, because mods are using someone else's engine and altering it, much like fan games are using someone else's setting and characters and usually their graphics and music and arranging them to create something new.

and yeah i realize it's somewhat elitist to feel this way, but it's also like, you don't go to a database for indie music and expect to see largely remixes of commercial songs rather than exclusively original music.