lamarcke (u/lamarcke)

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

Rumudiez · a year ago

Okay, now that it's darker out I can see the game covers faintly. I guess I'd suggest making it a little brighter since it's hard to make out detail in daylight if you want it to come through, not a big deal if it looks how you want already

I also see it's actually a png on desktop and jpg on mobile. For an image of this size, I don't feel like png is a good fit without significant optimizations like restricting colors to a very limited palette. Baking the underlying background color into it as a jpg, like you did for mobile, could help reduce the file size quite a bit for a lot less effort. I converted them at 90% quality and ran them through ImageOptim which got the file size down to 115KB for the desktop image and 88KB for mobile

Sorry for the AI comment. I noticed Tailwind and NextJS while inspecting the images and jumped to conclusions

lamarcke · a year ago

Oh, no prob. Thanks very much for the heads-up, by the way. I've made the changes locally and they will soon be in production too.

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

Rumudiez · a year ago

why is the black background a 1.5MB JPG[1]? and it even has a responsive counterpart[2] that's half a megabyte for mobile. surely it could have just been `background: #000`? I didn't go looking for issues, I just noticed the image load in jaggedly (not progressively encoded) and couldn't believe my browser would do that for a solid color fill. did you use AI to make the website?

[1] https://gamenode.app/img/desktop-bg.png

[2] https://gamenode.app/img/mobile-bg.jpg

lamarcke · a year ago

It's actually not a solid color background, but a very low opacity collection of game covers.

The same goes for mobile, where if you look closely you will see Dishonored 2's cover.

And no, it's not AI generated. We started working on it before ChatGPT made it's debut (yeah i know it's not the first LLM but no one considered vibe coding before it), and you can see our entire source code in Github.

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

piyuv · a year ago

I open the website. Cookie banner does not have reject option. I close the website.

lamarcke · a year ago

Sorry, it's just there to say we use it, but we can't actually not store it since the only info we do store is your session's cookies (and only if you're logged in). We will look into adding it, but it won't do anything if you decide to login anyway :)

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

nottorp · a year ago

Hmm the disc games don't show up in 'purchased' but do show up in 'played'.

Not sure what the api offers.

Of course, that only goes for discs that have been in the console at least once. Believe it or not, I have some still shrink wrapped.

lamarcke · a year ago

Hmm i understand. I'm going to add this to our backlog and see how it can be done in the next weeks. Thanks!

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

kikki · a year ago

> IMO Playnite is a behemot and it's very hard to overtake it

Why do you need to overtake it? Playnite is open source, you could contribute to it to make it better.

lamarcke · a year ago

I meant that in a "we're building our own alternative" kind of way. That's why i said it makes more sense to contribute with a plugin for it.

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

ryu2k2 · a year ago

I built mal for videogames too over 10 years ago. A friend also did individually. And I know at least 5 other sites that are "mal, but videogames" or have similar features.

Imo the concept is a waste of time until there are APIs for each console/store to fetch user data and automate libraries. Most users don't bother and the few that do already have accounts spread on like 10 different sites for this kind of thing. Personally these days I just keep csv files of my collection and play history and turn them to HTML via a ssg.Turns out that I don't need anything more than this.

But good luck!

lamarcke · a year ago

Thanks! I understand where you're coming from, when we launched the first open beta we honestly didn't have any feature that we could use to argue "hey, you should use this instead!".

I personally think there's a overlap between people willing to manage their anime library, and people willing to manage their gaming library. Both have tons of options, and most will choose none.

But take MyAnimeList, for example: A mainly English-speaking audience, so we could assume most users are either using Crunchyroll/Netflix/Hulu, or the hundred possible options for piracy. But they still come back to update their profile in MAL every once in a while, despite all the options they have - and we have users which do exactly that too. We're trying our best to offer a solid management experience (e.g. mobile users may press and hold in any cover to manage a game, and desktop users have that directly at hover, and other QoL), and offer features on top of that. Our PSN and Steam integration are very recent, we only launched them ~8m in, and so is our mobile version. All of our users are basically early adopters, but they still log-in once or twice a week, and our only way of changing that is offering more reasons to stay online. That's why we're also building social-related stuff, like the Posts system, the reviews, and etc. We think users are way more likely to stay with us if they can interact with other people. This is kinda what Anilist is doing too.

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

StrangeSound · a year ago

Hey, I'm actually in the process of building a desktop application that does this. Perhaps we could chat? I'm also leveraging IGDB. I have focused mainly on windows/Mac/Linux, with my main driver being steamdeck compatibility

lamarcke · a year ago

Sure! Do you have Discord or anything similar?

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

metalliqaz · a year ago

I have been using GOG Galaxy to try and track my entire collection but of course its connections to other gaming services are always broken.

I've heard that other tools like Playnite work better but I've not gotten enough motivation to try as yet.

I prefer Steam's well-integrated interface. It would be nice if it could scrape other launchers too.

lamarcke · a year ago

After my endeavours with various store APIs and trying to get all of them to fit with our constraints, i understand why GOG Galaxy is always broken

Most of their external APIs suck tbh. Steam and PSN were the best experience i had, and the PSN one is not even officially documented. Epic doesn't even let you use their user library endpoints if you are not a partner unfortunately...

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

Adachi91 · a year ago

Pretty trivial, I built a browser scanner for my phone using a QR scanner library[1], while browsers are contemplating adding an API natively.[2] You would just need to use a lookup service for the UPN of the game title.

[1]: https://github.com/mebjas/html5-qrcode [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Barcode_Det...

lamarcke · a year ago

That looks really cool, and i believe we could do something by trying to match the game title's with our database. Thanks for the heads up!

lamarcke commented on Show HN: A website/app to help manage your game library gamenode.app... · Posted by u/lamarcke

lamarcke · a year ago

I would guess that's pretty doable for our mobile version, but I can't promise without doing some PoC fist

But it would probably to this: - Scan the Barcode - Fetch the product name from it and try finding a match in our database (ManticoreSearch does a good job in finding matches with similar names)

It all depends on if the product name would even be there at all, or if it can be retrieved easily

lamarcke · a year ago

Since i don't have a Playstation console currently, can you tell me if disk games are also featured in your library? (E.g. other users may see them when they enter your profile)

If they are, you could import them directly from our PSN integration.