It took some time, but now Yu-Gi-Oh card game has been added to Magic Sorter!
In this article we're going to look at the path followed to add a new gameto the system, plus some other plans for the future.
Please bear in mind that support for Yu-Gi-Oh is still in beta: there will be issues here and there, but this is the initial step to a truly multi-game platform.
Why it took so long?
I agree, it was a long journey. To be fair, everything started months ago, during 2020 fall. The system was almost ready, but then I realized I wanted to improve the recognition engine. Moreover, it wasn't possible to scale up the existing system, MTG engine required 8Gb of RAM, so it wasn't possible to almost double it to handle Yu-Gi-Oh cards.
That meant I had to put the integration aside, finish developing the new engine and then switch back.
Beside that, there are a lot of different services that should be created or updated in order to handle a new game, from scraping for images to gather all the metadata, to update the API endpoints to allow the selection of different games. Finally, update the interface on Magic Sorter to let the user choose the game they wanted to sort.
On the bright side, the whole system is built using different micro-services, so I was able to update one after another without service disruption.
Do you know that the API server was able to recognize Yu-Gi-Oh cards since a month ago? Now you know.
In the future, addition for new games should be way faster, since all the plumbing has been deployed, I will "only" have to focus on recognizing new cards.
Why Yu-Gi-Oh and not Pokèmon?
I'll be honest, I'm mainly a MTG player, so I don't have a large knowledge of other games. One of my first customers had a large collection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, so I started from them, there wasn't a specific reason.
There will be changes in subscription levels?
Yes, but not in the immediate future. The plan is to have different subscriptions based on the games you want, with bundle discount. But before getting there, I want to test the system until it's reliable enough.