I recently developed a new visual novel website a few months ago focusing on tracking and discovering visual novels. I'm looking for feedback on what other features to include in the website or overall on the current feel of the website.
Current Implemented Features
Tracking Visual Novels - Create your own list of VNs and compare it with the lists of your friends
Discovering Visual Novels(Ongoing) - VNs are sorted by categories -- genres,translations,legal purchases or whether they have existings walkthroughs.
User Profiles - Manage your lists,post status updates or comment on your friend's wall.
Visual Novel Database - The bulk data of vns is now populated
Franchises and Publishers are added to the VN pages
Upcoming Features
Visual Novel Contests - Determine your favourite visual novel or characters through elimination brackets or simply start a poll
Homepage - Have a homepage for the website to update users of the features that are implemented
Visual Novel Database Cleanup - Link vns to genres and clean up the misplaced data in the database.
Sample Pages
https://visualnoveler.com/
https://visualnoveler.com/vns/d-c-da-capo
https://visualnoveler.com/vns/rewrite
>>14557154
I see zero reason to use this over vndb
In fact most of the content is directly taken from VNDB so let's see what else it provides.
>Tracking Visual Novels
in vndb
>Franchises and Publishers
in vndb
>Discovering Visual Novels(Ongoing)
in vndb pretty much through tag system, staff tags, new releases tab
So what exactly are you trying to accomplish here. Seems to me you are not offering anything VNDB doesn't already have.
Not to mention it seems you excluded nukige which is an absolute death sentence to be quite honest
Add a moving interactive cute girl in the homepage. Name her Aubrey or something.
So far it's "not as good as vndb". If you want people to use it, it's gonna have to be better than vndb.
I'd recommend pulling both EGS and VNDB score and listing them in the VN profile, instead of creating a third separate site score.
Something like
VNDB: 8.23
EGS: 86
Also be more mindful of the images, seen plenty of fucked up aspect ratios. Distorting images is never acceptable, only cropping is.
I probably forgot to mention that the website is still in development.
1) What am I offering that VNDB does not?
It will provide a much better UI interface and a better search query (still in development) and provide walkthroughs and such. Many other features are still in development.
It’s understandable that the site is not better than VNDB at the moment, it’s still in development.
Most images in the website should not be too distorted aside from posters which has landscape images which is very rare.
Link to one such VN?
>>14557533
Rewrite, Koutarou's character profile image, for instance. One you linked yourself.
I also believe it unwise to compete with vndb. It has many years of tagging and database built upon it, and it does what it intends to perfectly well. You should aim for a different product, make the site complement vndb, not compete with it.
>>14557370
This. EGS score is just much better than VNDB score because of the larger and more knowledgeable userbase
>>14557533
VNDB has a great UI
I don't think walktrhoughs will make a difference when pretty much everything already has an easy to find one
Acessing an user profil doesn't seem to work. (Tried from the Muv-Luv review page).
>>14557533
In regards to UI, I'm not sure its an improvement on VNDB; VNDB is really information dense while still looking okay. This is missing way too much information to be usable.. I mean it doesn't even show titles aliases, can't see tags, no relations or other VNs etc.
>better search query
Now that might be worth using it for. I'd use it if it can query all fields at once like "Show me games from A, B and C developers, with female protagonist and rape tags scored greater than X, exclude nukige, either greater than Y EGS or Z VNDB score released on Windows and order by popularity". VNDB can get close but not it's not quite that powerful. VNDB also has normalization rules to ignore spaces/japanese quotes/stars/periods and a bunch of other things to aid searching which you'd need to replicate.
I assume the lack of nukige is just that they haven't been imported yet, otherwise it's a non-starter.
