Suggested Games is now live

Suggested games is a new feature in TempusGameIt that makes it easier than ever to get started tracking your gameplay time. Quickly see all the games in your Steam catalog for which TempusGameIt currently doesn't have a complete record, and in just a few clicks, fill out the missing metadata and get this title registered in the catalog. And you're not just helping out yourself, as this title will now be updated for any user, so you'll be doing a solid for your fellow gamers as well!

The backstory

One of the biggest challenges that we face over in TempusGameIt is the struggle to maintain a high quality catalog of games. There aren't too many publicly available sources of connecting game metadata to execuctable files. So a lot of the work that goes on to make this connection relies on the work of our great users setting up new titles and making new connections, as well as doing magic on other close-but-not-perfect data sources (you can read about how we leverage discord here).

Our application is only as useful as the data that we have to back it, and historically one of the biggest barriers to entry is installing the app, running a scan, and not seeing the games that you were expecting. There was not much to be done with this, since if we weren't tracking an exe in our catalog, then it was no different than say, Word.exe. This meant that we primarily relied on users to add a new game to the catalog mid-play session. You'd start a game, alt-tab to the app, press the Add button, and walk through the steps that associated the running executable with an IGDB search result. This was fine, but it was not super intuitive, and I ended up communicating this process out to our users a fair amount.

Then a few weeks ago, we launched Locators and a reimagining of how we locate games on a user's machine. 

One of the locators that we launched was in support of Steam, as this is pretty much a universal install if you're gaming on any computer-type device. Turns out, that if you understand how Steam stores installed games locally, it can be really powerful.

Here's how it works. Steam stores their own unique identifier for a game, as well as the path on disk where said app is installed. When finding installed games, this is an easy lookup, since we can make the jump from the local steam Id to the TempusGameIt catalog entry, fetch all the executables defined in the catalog, and then check for them in the local steam folder. It made scanning Steam titles super fast.

With the Suggested Games feature, we took all of this one step further. In most cases, IGDB also  tracks the Steam Id. So now we've got a link between the Steam Id and the IGDB.  All we need to add a title to the TempusGameIt catalog is an IGDB and list of executables. If we know the Steam Id, its connection to IGDB, and the path on disk where files are installed, then why can't we list all of the executable files and make a recommendation for the user to add this game to the catalog? Behold Suggested Games!

As with all things, there's a lot of other complications behind the scenes that had to be worked through, but we're happy with how this feature works, and are excited to share it with everyone!