Hello. I committed way too much into this.

Introduction

If you only care about the site, here you go. https://igmgames.github.io/

Otherwise enjoy my 2nd of two write of ups on this igm site.

Where did this even start?

Back in at some point after December 2019, I started documenting IGM Games on the IGM Fan Guide. This wasn't much reason to do this, at least one I was aware of. I just did because I thought it would be neat. This ended up being useful as the DashNet discord server couldn't pin more than 50 games (usually it's less because there were other stuff pinned too). I actually had to release the Fan Guide unfinished in September 2020 because of that. It's still unfinished to this day so maybe that was for the best.

The list was simple early on. The games were just sort alphabetically, with a box for each one. Clicking on the box showed information on it on the left, which was just the name, author, description, release date, and way to play the game. Yeah, IGM doesn't support links so I had to improvise. Someone would need to type the link manually. There were other issues to this as well. IGM is not friendly for this type of thing. I had to type all of it in a single line, which did not look pretty. One look at the code and you can see why I stopped using it for the list. There's also a lot of things that I did that were a bit too much for me and were dropped from later iterations of the list. Compatibility, game labels, and ratings (based on DashNet's IGM rating system). Those were all dropped in the follow iteration and are not present on the site because they took too much time for me and were not easy (except game labels).

I should mention these two things before I move on. The first thing is categories or themes. They were added because the list was starting to get long and I needed a way to break it down. Categories came to mind. The IGM Fan Guide had the original categories as far as I remember. Since that iteration was discontinued, some new categories were introduced, others were split into two, some were removed (before being reintroduced), and others remained the same. The second thing is more of me forgetting to mention something from a CPR and only now reporting on it. I had to change the pronouns (and discord handle) back in the beginning of March of this year since they were outdated as heck. They are now updated. I think everything else is up-to-date with my only labels and such.

Because IGM itself was not good, I decided to take it elsewhere. I moved the list to the Idle Game Maker subreddit, r/idlegamemaker, on May 22, 2022. I moved to reddit since I thought it would be easier to maintain a list there over maintaining it in a IGM game (this would only be true for so long). Reddit also provided a more visible location for it, since people checked reddit from time to time moreso than a guide.

The reason why I didn't stick around for long (less than a year before I decided to move again) was because of the text limit. Yeah, this was before reddit's controversial api changes which made it less accessible, in case you were curious. The posts could only be so long, so I had to split games into multiple posts. This got frustrating though when I hit the limit. I tried to avoid making a new thread usually, so I had to make small compromises before I hit the limit. I think reddit actually shorten the limit so when I caught notice of it, I decided to give up on maintaining the full list on reddit.

When I announced that I would move the list to a dedicated site, as it was the winner of a vote I did, the reddit list remained and would be continued to be updated until reddit decided to make the api changes, which at that point, I just gave up on it fully.

The Creation of the Website

On March 25th, I announced that I would be moving the site to a dedicated site. This wasn't when development started though. I actually had plans to do a move since December of that year. I only got into fully when it won the vote that I did for where the list should go next.

So, the site. I started with a Neocities site with Zonelets, a lot like this one. However, I wanted it be seperate from my own site so I shaked things up a little bit. I ultimately used sadgrl's layout to build the layout because Orteil recommended it once. I think it made for a nice base because of it; kind of ruined when you realize that this is a somewhat common layout to use/recommend. I was about to use Github + Jekyll but I couldn't get it to work.

Oh yeah, Github. I chose Github over Neocities for it because of Jekyll. Once again though, it didn't work so I used sadgrl's layout and Github to host the thing. This mess of me trying to make Jekyll work though brought me to the Github Desktop app. With Git, it can push changes from a local version to the live repository. I found this quite neat. I think it was the reason why I stuck to it.

So I got the site ready. That was the easy part. Now for the hard part.

I had to bring over 200+ games from all of the other lists as well as new games into the site. To do this, I got every game into a google sheet with some information. On top of the original information from the IGM Fan Guide and Reddit/forum posts links (if applicable), there was now posting location (either DashNet, r/idlegamemaker, personal site, forums, or a mix of the 4), discord servers, and now ids for it's urls. This took a really long time. Once I was done with it, I went and proceeded to add all of them in simple name/author/link form in the list. This also took a long time. Both took several days over a course of a year and it was biting into quite a bit of my time.

I started monthly updates this year for the site too, as you may know. I did that so I can actually release it and get people to stop using the othe iterations. It was also why I only did the simple name/author/link for around 98% of the games because I needed this to come out quicker. It was a very big necessity. It wasn't, like, ruining me because of that either. I actually had fun doing it.

The game pages, which I'll need to do next, are a lot like the original way it was present in the IGM Fan Guide. Since html is less restricted than IGM though, I decided to go further with it (and in effect, make it more difficult for me). The pages include the information already present in the sheets, except now with a write up on the game itself with it's history. I'd say, most games don't have their histories documented at all if they had any. The only notable examples I can think of documented IGM development history was Coin Mania (a game which had it's entire development documented in tutorial vidoes) and my own games with this site's CPRs and such. I'll have to do a lot to make the pages in order to pull it off for all 261 games.

That brings us to now.

The Website Currently and in the Future

The website has every game listed with a link in the Games. Six games also have pages. Three of those are mine, with the other three created because of requests I got. There's also 4 developer pages, of course all of them being from the people who made one of the 6 games with pages. I have quite a bit of plans for it.

I plan on expanding on the site beyond just having every game. There'll be other lists (same games, just organized differently), events being documented, improved layout, and some fun homepage things. There might be other fun things too in the future as well that I might think of after this post.

That's all for this post. This website will got far and there'll be a lot to enjoy. Site updates will be on there rather than here, so go check it out! Here's a link again. I'll see you in the next post.

https://igmgames.github.io/