About
Why was the project created?
I’ll be completely honest. I have a bit of a problem. I spend too much money buying games on Steam, only to play them for an hour or two, stop playing, and never touch them again. I could get a refund if I asked immediately, but I often “give the game another chance,” which can take months or even years. Even then, there are games I simply cannot crack past 3 hours no matter how much I try. Eventually, I move on and accept that I wasted 50 dollars or so. But as games continue to get more and more expensive, I’ve started questioning whether this gaming lifestyle is sustainable. Spoiler alert: it is not.
One day, I happened upon this brilliant video on YouTube and agreed with most of it. Admittedly, it inspired much of this project. But after spending weeks and months thinking about the topic, I realized there was another layer he had missed. After all, if games were ONLY about challenge, then… why do cheaters exist? Sure, some cheat because they enjoy causing others to suffer (Schadenfreude, if you will), but there must be more to it. Some genuinely repent from cheating, and when asked why they did it, their answer is often insightful: “It was because I wanted ___.” Maybe elo, a skin, rare items, or whatever else. The common trait is that they wanted the REWARD badly enough to throw the “Challenge” part of the game out the window entirely.
Thus, I improved upon Surnex’s model by introducing two layers: the REWARD and CHALLENGE layers. The goal was, essentially, to classify games into buckets that “made me enjoy them” in the same way through their REWARD and CHALLENGE, rather than superficial, generic tags like “JRPG” or “FPS.” Notice how, even if my definitions of Micro, Macro, and Mystiko are “completely wrong,” as long as they are consistent, games still get put into buckets that all “felt the same way” in terms of Reward and Challenge. So, in a way:
I can get recommended games that I may actually enjoy playing based on the games that I am already playing.
Built on 
, Powered by 
, Powered by The blazing fasts speeds of the Astro with the robust stability and security of Django, this unique tech-stack has (to my knowledge), ever been used a handful of times. I initially thought of naming it Astro-on-the-Django due to how it sounds, but after I found that this stack has been explored before, under the name Djazztro (https://github.com/Bwc9876/Djazztro), I figured this name is better, as coincidentally, Django was also named after a legendary Jazz guitarist.
Why Astro, and not React? Well, because I hated React, and wanted to do very little of it, if possible. Not a fan of Angular either, but I figured, at the end of the day, it’s all javasc.. no, “type”script anyway, so who cares. I could be using t3, but it wouldn’t make this website any better, plus, the stack wouldn’t have a cool name.
Why not Django Templates? Because I wanted really pretty graphs, and d3 just works so well with Astro right out of the box. Also, I figured decoupling the frontend meant if I ever needed to outsource development, it’d be cheaper to hire a TS dev than fullstack Python dev (I think?)
Why Django? Not Node? Well, truth be told, I don’t very much like Javascript nor Typescript, at all. There’s nothing wrong with it (so JS devs don’t kill me), I just don’t like it. As for any other backend, I did start out with C#, but I’m quite deep into python, for data science stuff, and figured, why not just use Django.
Best decision ever. Batteries included frameworks are so nice.
Unhappy with my decisions? The code is public. Just fork it, rewrite it in rust, or whatever. I really don’t care. If I needed to use PHP for this project, you can bet I’d be learning Laravel right about now.
How YOU can contribute
Just keep submitting scores. More data makes the classifications and recommendations more accurate.
If you want to financially support me, you can buy me a coffee at: (Placeholder Link)
Is there a game missing that you wish to have added?
Let us know what you’d like to see classified in the MyGameDNA catalogue.