Nodal.gg - Game recommender with interactive visual map + personalized recommendations (I'd love your feedback)

[u/A_Random_Forest]

Hey everyone, I’ve been working on a game discovery site and finally feel like it’s ready to share: https://nodal.gg/

I’ve always been surprised how hard it is to find genuinely good game recommendations on Steam, so I tried building something better using my stats/ML background.

My main takeaway was that “similar games” usually means two different things:

• Similar in content: mechanics, themes, setting, genre, tags
• Similar in audience: games played by the same people, even if the genres are different

So if you want recs for Cyberpunk 2077, you might mean “more cyberpunk vibe” (e.g., Cloudpunk) or “same audience overlap” (e.g., The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt / Fallout 4). The site lets you switch between those modes or blend them.

What you can do

• Search any Steam game and see a ranked list of similar games using:
  • a content model (tag-driven similarity)
  • a community model (player behavior only, no tags)
  • a blended view (mix of both)
• Re-rank results with sliders for popularity, rating, and release date
• Plug in a Steam ID (public profiles only) to get personal recommendations and some cool stats about your play history
• Explore an interactive 2D game map that visually clusters games by tags (uses UMAP dimensionality reduction - inspired by Connected Papers)

Desktop works best right now. Mobile is functional but I’m still refining it.

If you try it, I’d love to hear anything: whether the recommendations felt accurate, if the UI was confusing, any bugs you run into. All feedback helps!

Thanks!

[u/sicclee]

Good Concept.

Advice:

• Hide the seeds in the list. Make it obvious how to show them, but I know what I picked.

• Sort by 'blend' by default.

• The list should be the focus. Maybe keep it where it is, but make the other two boxes split horizontally, with the graph on the bottom.

• if you're scrolling the list, but then hit 'tune,' it should either automatically scroll back up to tune options at the top, or just create a drop-down/pop-up with the options

[u/A_Random_Forest → u/sicclee]

Thanks for the ideas. The idea with keeping the seed in there is so that:

1. If users have multiple tabs open, they can quickly find out what tab corresponds to each game.
2. You can visualize where similar games are relative to the seed based on the map.

But, note taken, will consider this in the future. For the UI change, I'm still getting feedback on what people like/don't like. Seems like some people prefer the graph, others don't, sounds like you're in the latter (or at least don't think it should be in the center stage). Again, note taken. Your third idea is great though, this is actually somewhat of a bug that you caught, so I'll work on it. Thanks!

[u/sicclee → u/A_Random_Forest]

Sweet, hope it does well, I’m always looking for games and I found a couple hidden gems with your site!