Game launcher

A simple game launcher for developers to showcase their games. Especially useful during gaming conventions for example.

⚠ It's not aimed as being shipped with your game on Steam or other platforms.

How to add games

1. If not present, create a folder called games next to the executable.
2. Inside, create a folder for each game you want. The name of the folder will be the name of the game.
3. Place your executable, capsule image, background image and description.txt
4. The game executable will be launched by the launcher
5. The capsule must be named capsule with the following extensions supported: jpg, jpeg, png
6. The background image bust be named bg with the following extensions supported: jpg, jpeg, png
7. In description.txt, put the description you want to see below your game capsule in the launcher
8. Optionally, consider adding a config.ini for advanced setup.

Here's an example folder
game_launcher.exe
├── games
│ ├── Game name
│ │ ├── game_executable.exe
│ │ ├── capsule.jpg
│ │ ├── bg.jpg
│ │ └── config.ini

You can also check the Fake folder to see a game example

Advanced Setup

A config.ini can be used to customize a game. Using the config file you can set extended information such as release date, platforms, and even a QR code.

See the example config_fake.ini file in the Fake folder for a full list of properties.

Note: If used, the "description" key will override the description.txt.

Launcher configuration

The launcher itself is configured using launcher_config.ini.

• shortcut_kill_game: global shortcut used to kill a launched game. Requires shortcut_listener.py to be running. See [shortcut configuration](Shortcut configuration)
• fullscreen: true|false, start the launcher in fullscreen
• window_title: if windowed, the title you see in the title bar

Shortcut configuration with Python

shortcut_listener.py is a script to listen to a specific shortcut to kill any active game started by the launcher. It communicates with the launcher using websockets (yes a bit overkill).

Requires python 3.10.x with the following package asyncio, websockets, keyboard

pip install asyncio, websockets, keyboard

The python script will be launched automatically by the app if you have a shortcut_kill_game set in launcher_config.ini.

How to navigate

Navigate using keyboard or gamepad using the usual keys used for navigation (arrows keys, enter).

alt+enter to toggle fullscreen of the launcher

Limitations

Right now, the launcher is only working with windows and linux. Supporting mac shouldn't be complicated but I don't have a mac nor experience with macOS. If you want to help, please see #2.

Development

For development, you can use the games folder present in the project using the same configuration as explained above.

Contributing

To start contributing, open an issue about what you want to do if there's not one yet, clone the repo, do you changes and create a PR!

Thanks to the contributors for their work 👇

💁‍♂️ About me

Full time indie gamedev. You can find me everywhere 👇

• Discord
• YouTube - Gamedev
• YouTube - Godot related
• Twitter
• Itch.io
• All links

If you enjoyed this project and want to support me:

Get exlusive content and access to my game's source code

One time donations