Metadata Standards & Curation

Accuracy is the foundation of HELIX Gaming DB. To ensure high quality across all entries, submissions must adhere to the following standards.

🔤 Title Normalization & Article Inversion

Titles must represent the clean, canonical English or primary release name:

• Clean Subtitle Separators: Standardize on a colon followed by a space (: ) for subtitles.
  • Correct: The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
  • Incorrect: The Legend of Heroes - Trails into Reverie
• Article Inversion Correction: Inverted articles from ROM naming conventions must be restored to natural English reading order.
  • Correct: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
  • Incorrect: Legend of Zelda, The: The Wind Waker
• Promotional Noise Removal: Strip file extensions, release groups, and platform version tags.
  • Correct: Relicts of Aeson
  • Incorrect: relicts-auf-aeson-v0.9.1-win

🛡️ Studio Disambiguation & Collision Protection

Many indie titles share words or mythological names with mainstream games. Without strict developer disambiguation, scrapers frequently make absurd associations (for example, matching an indie romance title set in Camelot to a mainstream Nintendo sports franchise developed by Camelot Software Planning).

In HELIX Gaming DB:

1. Every game must declare its exact developer studio list.
2. Every developer profile declares all associated titles in api/v1/developers/{slug}.json.
3. Client launchers (such as Universal Game Launcher) cross-validate the returned developer against local receipt and manifest files to reject mismatched assets.

🏷️ Category & Genre Standardization

Use standardized terminology for genres and categories:

• Genres: Visual Novel, Role-playing (RPG), Action RPG, JRPG, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-Fi, Strategy, Platformer, Simulation, Adult.
• Categories: Single-player, Multi-player, Co-op, Controller Support, Cloud Saves, Steam Achievements.