Neil Wheatley

On a mission to create a free archive of verifiable gaming knowledge for everyone.

4 minute read

Summary: We took some big steps forward in 2022. We’ll create new editor guides, article creation projects, and database features in the coming year.

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Happy new year to all who love video games!

This is Neil, founder and developer at Dbljump, a new gaming knowledge database with encyclopedia-like article text.

This feels like a perfect moment to bring you a status update. I didn’t write enough on this blog last year, but we made lots of progress. Now, at the start of 2023, Dbljump has a foundation we can quickly build new features on and start adding data to.

I’ll tell you about our plans and goals below. But my biggest hope is that you’ll start to see what’s special about Dbljump, and that more of you will want to get involved.

Here’s a round-up of what happened last year, where we are now, and what we’re working on next.

Almost the whole front-end got rebuilt in 2022

We completely rebuilt three our front-end sites in 2022: Dbljump.com, About Dbljump, and the Dbljump Editor.

These projects were about making things look better and work better.

Rebuilding was also about improving our software, so we can develop new features faster and maintain our applications more easily.

New editing tools

The Dbljump Editor - where editors create and improve articles and add data - got a full redesign in the first half of the year.

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There’s a little bit of work still to do on this:

  • We need to improve how article text and game credits work
  • Some features for adding places are still missing
  • There are lots of quality-of-life features we’d like to add, such as quick-add buttons for cities, places, people, and games.

The old site is still up at editor.dbljump.com. If you decide to compare them side by side, let me know what you think!

New Dbljump.com and About Dbljump sites

We revamped two other front-end sites in the second half of the year.

Please take a look at my recent blog post on this. And take a look at the new Dbljump.com and About Dbljump sites.

We started a YouTube channel

I made our first YouTube video to demo making a game article with the new editing tools. But it was a bit long and it didn’t really find an audience.

Making videos is hard! Also, I don’t especially love hearing my own voice or being on camera.

At the same time, I want to represent Dbljump and tell everyone about what we’re doing, so I’ll work on making more entertaining videos in 2023.

Take a look at the Dbljump YouTube channel.

Dbljump is still a non-commercial project with stable finances

It costs money to run Dbljump, and the project has no income at present. It’s our goal to become a commercial business at some point and to generate revenue through a mix of advertising, sponsorship, and patronage.

For the time being, costs aren’t an issue. Our hosting, development, and marketing costs are small and I’ll continue to pay for them as long as needed.

We saved some money this year by moving the Dbljump API from AWS to Hatchbox.io. We still use AWS for serving front-end apps and images.

We’ll start looking for sponsorship or funding when our audience and userbase start to grow.

The community and database remain small

Because we focused on improving the project foundations in 2022, there wasn’t much time for gathering data and promoting Dbljump to new users.

That’s ok. Many users who join Dbljump drop it pretty fast, and I believe that’s because the user experience just isn’t there yet.

We’ll address that in 2023 by:

  • Creating a new Guides website, which onboards new editors and documents how to use all the tools. I’ve already started working on this and will write about the progress soon.
  • Running an article creation project to demonstrate what Dbljump can do. This will have a narrow focus, e.g. a small company like Shin’en Multimedia or Sega AM3. We’ll share updates via social media and invite people to get involved.
  • Continuing to evolve Dbljump.com and the Dbljump Editor with improvements and new features.

Dbljump can only succeed with an active community and growing content. But we can’t realistically build the community until we have a really attractive platform. We’re getting closer to that point, and we’ll keep working hard!

More 2023 projects: Expanding the database

Two more projects are planned for 2023.

Game versions will get new attributes like min. and max. players for local, LAN, and online play, supported control types like VR, AR, and motion controls, and more. Way down the line, when we have a good amount of data, this will help us provide excellent game search features.

We’ll get back to data scraping with a new approach. Previously, we’ve scraped company data from Wikipedia. This time, we plan to use a script to create simple article text that references our data sources. This seems like a fairer way to take data from other sites, while also presenting data with verifiable sources.

I’ll write more about these projects once they get started.

There are exciting times ahead!

Thanks for reading our status update.

If you’d like to help make 2023 the year when Dbljump really gets rolling, please sign up or email me directly about more ways to get involved.

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