Changelog
What shipped, and when
Release notes for the whole site, newest first. Including the parts we got wrong the first time, because a changelog that only contains wins is a marketing page.
On this page6 sections
Badges, embeds, and a theme that survives a reload
Two unrelated things landed the same week. Makers wanted something to put on their own site, and everyone wanted the dark mode to stop flashing white on every navigation.
- Embeddable SVG badges in several styles, served straight from a route so they work in a README, an itch.io page or a plain HTML portfolio.
- A copy-paste embed panel on every listing with the markdown and HTML snippets already filled in.
- Light and dark themes across every surface, including the generative cover art, the OG images and the charts.
- Theme choice written before first paint, so a dark-mode reader never gets a white frame on load.
What we got wrong: The first badge attempt was a PNG generated at request time. It looked wrong on every display with a device pixel ratio above 1 and it cached badly. SVG solved both problems and made the file about forty times smaller.
Maker profiles and a dashboard
Until this shipped there was nowhere for a maker to point at. A launch was a listing and then it was over, which was a bad deal for anybody planning to ship more than one game.
- Public maker profiles at /u/[username] with every published game, links out, and a total across all launches.
- A maker directory ranked by votes received rather than by follower count, because followers are not something this site tracks.
- A private dashboard: edit any listing, see how a launch is doing, delete a game and its comments in one action.
- Editing a live listing now takes effect immediately instead of going back through review.
What we got wrong: We shipped profiles without a way to delete a game, on the theory that nobody would want to. Three people asked in the first week. It went in the following Monday.
The leaderboard and the launch archive
The front page decays on purpose, which means a good game disappears from it within a day. That is correct behaviour for a launch board and terrible behaviour for anyone trying to find something again.
- An all-time leaderboard with week, month and year views.
- A launch archive: every past day, still ranked the way it finished, permanently linkable.
- Per-day pages so a maker can share the exact day their game launched rather than a listing with no context.
- Bookmarks, so a game you liked is one click away from your dashboard instead of gone.
Collections
Ranking is good at telling you what is popular and bad at telling you what goes together. Collections are the editorial answer, and they are clearly labelled as opinion so they cannot be mistaken for ranking.
- Hand-picked collections with a written intro and a per-game note explaining why it is on the list.
- A collections index, with featured lineups pinned to the top.
- Collections are curated by a person whose profile is linked from the page. No anonymous editorial.
What we got wrong: Collections deliberately cannot affect a game's ranking. Being picked gets you traffic from the collection page and nothing else, which is the only version of this that keeps the hot list honest.
Category and tag hubs
The first version of browse was a single filterable list, which is fine if you already know what you want and useless if you arrived from a search engine.
- Twelve category hubs with real written intros rather than a generated sentence.
- Tag hubs for genre, vibe, tech and tool, each one an indexable page.
- Built-with hubs for every engine, framework and assistant credited by a published game.
- Filtering moved entirely into the URL, so every view you build is shareable and crawlable.
What we got wrong: Putting filter state in the URL was the single highest-leverage change of the whole build. It is also the one that took the longest, because every component that touched a filter had to stop owning state.
vibedgame is live
The first version was a front page, a submit form, upvotes and comments. It stayed that small for two months on purpose. A launch board that does not work at four features will not work at forty.
- A daily front page ranked by the time-decayed hot score, with new, top and discussed as alternative sorts.
- Submissions with a real preview: you can see the card before you publish it.
- One vote per account per game, reversible, unweighted by karma.
- Threaded comments under every listing.
- Accounts with an email and a password. No social login, no tracking pixels.
What we got wrong: The original hot score had no age offset, so a game with one vote in its first minute outranked everything on the site. The +2 in the denominator exists because of one very confusing Tuesday morning.