I don't like strategy guides for games like Skyrim

My favorite thing about games like Skyrim is the discovery and experimentation elements. I started to play on launch day, but then stopped after only a couple hours.

Why would I stop playing one of the best games released in a long time? I realized that I wanted, for the first time, to get into the nitty-gritty of alchemy, crafting, and other things in the game. At first I tried to make a handwritten log of people, places, and ingredients, but that broke down very quickly. The game is so huge, that it's just not a practical way to approach the problem.

So, I spent the last week building rpglogger.com - it's basically a way to log your progress in a sort of "build your own strategy guide" sense. You create a 'log book' where you can add/edit/delete 'sections' in the book (e.g. NPCs, quests, items, locations, whatever you want), and define your own integer/text/string/boolean attributes on those sections. For example, if you want to track ingredients, you can add a 'string' field for the name of the ingredient, and 4 string fields, one for each of the effects it has in alchemy. That's just one example.

So, why didn't I just buy the strategy guide, or use GameFAQs.com? I don't like those approaches for games like this, because I feel it ruins the discovery elements by giving you all the answers. I needed a middle ground between handwritten notes and having all the answers.

So, there it is. One gaming geek's story. Right now Facebook login is supported. I plan on adding Twitter, and OpenID providers pretty soon. Right now you can add as many people/places/things as you want. Soon I'll be adding a realtime text search/filter box to quickly find objects, in addition to tagging support. I also built it specifically with the idea that I'd be running it in full-screen mode on my laptop, in the browser, while playing. So, there's dark background/visual theme, and limited need for scrolling.