The GarageGames Resource Database

Searching for information on the internet can be a time consuming, and often frustrating, process. If you were to search the internet for information you may try one of several approaches:

First, you may try using a web search engine such as the "Game Development Search Engine", or Google. These are great for doing catch-all searches, but they index all the words on a page which means they often return many pages which are not relevant. When an engine returns over 400 links for the word Collision, how do you know which links are worth looking at? The links are not rated, or classified, the summaries are not very useful, no clues are given as to their relevance. Sorting through that much data is no fun, and the only option available is to add more words to the query.

You may browse through a manually built topic tree such as Yahoo, or Google's Web Directory. Classification by general topic is useful, but again, links are not rated, nor can they be commented on by developers. You also cannot search individual topics, and the information is not domain specific.

To solve the domain issue, you may try a domain specific site, such as GameDev.net or flipcode. These are excellent sources of information, and since they are domain specific, search results can be of higher quality than using a web search engine. Unfortunately, their search engines typically employ the same "index every word on a page" approach, and suffer the same problems; un-informative summaries, and no rating, classification or commenting. These sites also only search information which they host, so articles or information published on corporate or academic sites is not available.

Another approach you may use is to build your own collection of useful "Home Pages", such as those maintained by individuals or University departments. These sites usually have very targeted information (based on the interest of the author(s)), and the quality can be very high. But of course you need to find them first, and when searching for a topic, you need to search each page individually.

Features

The resource database is an attempt to address most of the problems with finding useful game specific information on the internet. To this end the resource engine provides the following features:

1. Unified Resources. All resources (except forums posts) are in one database and classified into several types: news, articles, books, howtos, web pages, tools, plan files, code, etc. Searches can be limited to one or more types, so if your looking for articles, only articles are returned (not 20 pages worth of forum posts).

2. Separate Title, Synopsis and Author. The title and synopsis are manually entered and not automatically extracted. This results in descriptions that are clearer and more informative, not simply the first four lines of a page or article. Since the bodies of articles and pages are not searched there is less of a problem with matching random pages with a given word. The title, synopsis and author fields can also be searched separately for more targeted queries.

3. Separate Keywords. Keywords are used to help further define a resource and narrow searches. Individual words can be used in many contexts, searching for the word collision may return a resource with the synopsis "...managing the collision between design and implementation". For some words, searching only the keywords can vastly improve the quality of the results.

4. Developer Ratings. Allowing developers to rate resources provides two features. The first is simply the ability to filter resources by their rating. The resource result page can be sorted by rating, or the search itself can be set to filter out resources below a given rating. Ratings at this level can be useful, but are anonymous, and the quality can be suspect. The second, more interesting features is the ability to search for resources based on ratings from a specific developer. This allows you to search the resources "recommended" by a developer. This rating search is a filter on top of any other search options so, as an example, you can search for all articles who's keyword field contains the word collision that Tim Gift has rated above useful.

5. Developer Comments. All resources can be commented on. This allows all developers to post information on, or otherwise discuss, any resource. Similar to resource ratings, you can filter resources to those commented on by specific developers.

The goal of all these features is to help you find the information you are looking for. The problem is not whether the information exists, it's having the tools needed to sort through the mountain of data to find it.