I have a feeling and only 90 minutes to play

It's late enough that I should be in bed. I already know the feeling I want: unhurried and that dopamine-infused click when a machine I built finally runs, kind of like this web app I'm building here. I open Steam. It asks me for a genre.

I've spent almost thirty years helping digital products put people into boxes. I also own 874 games, which is how I know the box doesn't help at 10pm. The storefront is doing what I've helped teach storefronts to do before. I'm on both sides of it.

Gamefeels is the layer I keep reaching for. A hundred feelings, bunched into eighteen doors, sitting on more than 130,000 titles. You pick a feeling. You get a shortlist, with a written reason each game is on it.

These screenshots are from the current build. I actually use this.

Most nights I start at Browse. Wonder, if that's the feeling. The catalog re-sorts, the games I already own get marked, and if the pile is still huge I cut it with mystery or whimsy until something actually fits.

Some nights I don't want to hunt. I want a handful already ranked, and when the ranker has a reason I want it written down. The night I grabbed this shot, Paper Bride 2 Zangling Village was sitting there for Completionists, like me.

I had no idea what this game was, but I clicked through to learn more and ended up saving it to my backlog with a deal watch enabled. I would've never found this on Steam, so... hey, maybe this crazy idea will work.

If I click through, the "feels mix" is sitting next to the buy button. Balatro came up Mastery, Luck, Chance, Chaos, and a paragraph on why. Open on Steam, because I already own it.

I write collections — "Feel Guides" — by hand. No. 03 is about games with stories that keep rolling around in your brain days and weeks after you finish them. Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper are both on it, seven games in all. I'll keep doing this, and others will contribute over time, as well.

Besides the games and core emotional categories, I researched how to utilize science-informed playstyle archetypes to "quick start" emotion-based game curation. BrainHex already named the ones on this grid: Seeker, Survivor, Daredevil, Mastermind. Bartle and Quantic Foundry did the older maps. Gamefeels built on that, adding more core playstyles, then dozens more for people who don't sit in just one. Now there are 92 split across 4 clusters: Explorers, Contenders, Nestbuilders, and Chaos Agents.

I wanted a floor the ranker could stand on from the first night, from how a sitting feels. Keep playing, keep moving around the site, and the playstyle pick is supposed to get sharper from there. A strong guess on night one beats a blank slate in month three.

After I play a game, I sometimes pull up the site in Curate mode and mark how the experience felt for me. Baldur's Gate 3 in this shot, a hundred hours in, sitting in that list of 874. Transformation at Peak, Destiny set to Strong.

Picks read those marks. Browse does too. If I mark them wrong, Browse and Picks are wrong. I still do this by hand. It does not scale.

I want that same signal from people who are just playing, after a session or from a library they already paid for, without making them do my job. I'm trying a few ways to ask. None of that is in the product yet.

You can hook Steam, or dump a GOG or Epic file, and the library you already bought becomes part of the answer. Save a new game that looks interesting and name a price you'd actually pay. When you finish, you can write how it landed, then keep the note or throw it out. There's no score.

The ranker already runs. Making the shortlist feel like mine, or yours, is the part I haven't finished. Guides that follow you around have the same problem.

Feel labels still come from me in Curate. I don't want that to stay a one-person job.

Emails still need to arrive reliably. Steam and Google sign-in, maybe even Twitch auth as an option, also remain. None of this part is glamorous, per se, but it's clearly necessary. Compared to getting the curation engine directionally correct, this stuff's easy!

Private beta first, small enough that I can actually read what you send.

A public one in October at the earliest, if those tests hold. I'm not picking a day. After that I want Deal Watch: every price I'm watching, on one page.

When the next Tuesday shows up with ninety minutes open, I want to open Gamefeels and see a list of recommendations that feel like magic and not just a re-heated sales chart list. I'm betting you'd like that, too.

Would love to hear what you think and answer any questions you have. You can reach out to me on Bluesky at @delabar.design.

P.S. - oh, there's also support for dark and light modes.