A Simple Motivational Tool

As a indie developer by night, I find myself constantly looking at devlog images for motivation on my own personal projects. However, do to the fact that I have a full-time job and work on my own games, I don't have much time to glance through the forums like I want to. So recently at work I was tasked with learning a bit about web scraping, and this little tool was born.

DevLog Collage is a simple way to look at a randomly generated collage of devlog images. Each time you refresh, you get a new collage to look at, and clicking any of the images will take you to the forum post. It's far from perfect, but I had fun making it, and hope you guys like it.

Right now, all of the data comes from the tigsource forums, but I'm currently writing a scraper for the Unity forums as well and it should be done soon. Any and all feedback is appreciated. Enjoy!

 

Very nifty!

 

Stuck at 29/30.. would it be possible to display results as soon as they come, instead of waiting for all?

 

That's awesome. I greatly enjoy checking out dev logs. I'll have to bookmark this. Thanks for sharing it!

 

I got a similar result. Photo 29 and 30 consistently took much longer then 1-28. Something odd going on in the code there.

 

Yeah! Thats cool.
Thanks for sharing.

 

Simple, but super cool!

 

Now works,
also would prefer being able to middle mouse button click those images/links,
so can first open multiple links (on tabs), and then go look at them : )

 

Also its not motivational at all... its yet another time sink

 

Same here, this is basically what I browse all websites like while looking for something. Whenever a page breaks that kind of workflow, it feels incredibly awkward and cumbersome to browse.



Conceptually the whole thing is a very cool idea though! Would love to see it for the Unity Forum too.

 

I get the folks over at TIGSource are very prolific game devs (and making more of the kind of games that interest me personally) but geesh like 95% of the results seem to be pulled from their dev log forum.

Are there only a couple of hard-coded sources with TIG being the most important?

 

@Martin_H Ha ha. Wise to slow down sometimes. Didn't catch that. Although that is not completely accurate because I have seen at least one (and I thought two) different website.

 

Okay, just came up again.

Helium Rain http://helium-rain.com/
Platformania http://www.platformania.com
Try. Die. Repeat. http://trydierepeat.com/

Actually, kind of looks like the Add A Game is being used for people to spam their sites for marketing purposes. Which, of course, always happens anytime you have a way for people to add their games. So many people making games. All need exposure. I guess I just gave them a tiny bit more.

 

Hey all,
I didn't seem to be getting notifications for the topic, so sorry for the delay in answering the questions. As a side note, I worked more on the site this weekend, and it has tons of improvements, so be sure to check out the site again and add your own games.

I changed the progress meter here to more accurately reflect the loading, and it will now timeout if an image can't be resolved. The collages are made on the client side to allows gifs to play, so I have to know the width and height ahead of time. The new preloader should make this a non-issue, but I have been investigating ways to save the dimensions ahead of time so I can pre-calculate the collage.

This has been fixed... sort of. I had a few requests to see all the images when you click on one, so that's the case now. From this new modal, you can now right-click the devlog link and open it in a new tab.

I added Touch Arcade over the weekend - Unity and Unreal are next on the list.

Very true. The ultimate goal with the site is to get gamers and other developers involved in indie projects, so I don't want to discourage anyone from adding games. That being said, however, when you highlight an image there is now a button to report the image for a variety of reasons. If you don't think an image should be in the collage, report it and I will take a look.

Thanks for all the feedback - keep it coming!

 

Now when we click on a image there is a modal popup - which is fine. But the page jumps to the top of all the images when the modal popup appears. I don't know if that is intended behavior - but it isn't user friendly.
All else real cool. I really like reading tig devblogs -

Edit: btw I'm running up-to-date mozilla FF in case that matters.

 

A view of the Made with Unity forum for the past 1 week, courtesy of google images:

https://www.google.com/search?q=htt...forums/made-with-unity.11/&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:w

or even a video feed:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:forum.unity3d.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/made-with-unity.11/&tbm=vid

Or if you prefer Works in Progress:

https://www.google.com/search?q=htt...rums/works-in-progress.34/&tbm=isch&tbs=qdr:w

 

True, but where's the animated gifs?