About this site
Inspiration
I vaguley remember a dota player/ personality Merlini having a website featuring organized dota games he had played. Here fans of his could search and filter through these games by hero names, in-game items, etc. Some of these games even had youtube videos with a first-person-view (FPV) of Merlini playing. I tried searching for this website again in 2020 but it seems like the site has gone offline since.
Fast forward to 2020 and I am searching for a note taking software to try and help organize my notes. After some research in this topic I come to the conclusion that there are two main ways to organize notes. You either use folders or you use tags. And imo tags are the way to go. So I decide to try and build a site similar to Merlini's and categorize some videos using tags.
When Merlini's site was still up I did not analyze it carefully to see how he was building it. But I believe that he was using the public Dota 2 API (horrible documentation) along with the Dota 2 match ID in order to organize his data. This is an approach I was thinking of taking myself but unlike Merlini whose entire site focused only on Dota 2 content, I do not wish to limit the type of content I produce to only Dota 2 vidoes. For this reason and because not all games in which I plan to record videos for have such an accessible API, I have choosen to organize my data using tags. Usage of the Dota 2 API might still be a good idea however speed up the process for videos featuring Dota 2.
Video relations
The following relations hold true for all videos. Videos have tags associated with them. These tags are used to categorize videos. Videos can be associated with a certain game. Games are associated with certain genres/ categories/ devs/ publishers.
Video Example
Here's how a video uploaded featuring the steam game Dota 2 might look.
- hero: treant protector
- role: hardsupport 5
- lane: safelane
- notable player: arteezy
- 7000mmr
- 7k
- fpv
Tag (video tags)
- Dota 2
Game
- Free to Play
- MOBA
- Multiplayer
- Strategy
Genre
- Valve
Developer
- Valve
Publisher
How to search
And here's how a user might use the above filter categories tag, game, genre, developer, publisher to find videos to their liking.
A user may only want to view videos featuring a particular hero. Notice from the example above that the tag for heros is in the following form, "hero: treant protector".
Go to search find the tag button and toggle "hero: treant protector" tag to find videos containing this tag.
The video tags are what really define a video and give it its unique attributes. The goal is to use intuitive tags so that users familiar with a game are able to easily transfer that familiarity into words which have hopefully been captured with tags. If someone thinks, "Hmm I like this game, but I'd really like to look at X content from this game", and the program is able to deliver I would consider it a success.