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React Launcher

A Windows desktop launcher (Electron + React + TypeScript) — a single home for your personal game collection: old titles, hand-ported copies, games bought on different storefronts, or anything just scattered across folders. Drop a game into its own folder and the launcher pulls in the cover, trailer and description, then launches it with one button.

Why this exists

Over time every gamer ends up with a collection that doesn't fit into any single store client: old discs, portable copies, indie games without Steam, titles from several storefronts at once. None of it has a shared library, stats, or a single way to launch — you end up remembering where everything lives and keeping a dozen shortcuts on the desktop.

React Launcher solves exactly that:

• One library instead of a pile of folders and shortcuts — any game dropped into content/ shows up in the shared gallery with a cover, description and a "Play" button.
• No manual metadata wrangling — the add-game wizard looks the game up on Steam and fills in covers, screenshots, the trailer, description and facts by itself.
• See what's missing and how much space it takes — the library health check flags games without a cover/description and shows how much disk space each game uses (and how much free space is left overall).
• Play stats and motivation — profiles, playtime, levels/XP and achievements, so going back to old games is more fun.
• One interface for the whole family — several local encrypted profiles on the same computer, each with its own progress and favorites.

Features

• Game library — folders under content/ turn into cards with a cover, trailer, description, genre/series and rating; search, filters, grouping.
• Add-game wizard with Steam search: auto-fills the name, genre, rating, description and facts, and downloads covers/screenshots/trailer — no manual config.json editing.
• Library health check — a table of games missing a cover/trailer/ description with bulk re-fetch from Steam; per-game disk usage breakdown (installer / data / trailer / covers) plus a whole-drive summary.
• Profiles — several local profiles on one PC; each profile's data (stats, favorites, theme, achievements, screenshots) is encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and unreadable outside the app.
• Gamification — levels and XP, 160+ achievements (bronze / silver / gold for play habits, plus one-off secrets) — computed only from real activity, so editing a file can't fake it.
• Screenshot and gameplay recording — Ctrl+Shift+F9 for a screenshot, Ctrl+Shift+F10 for up to 20 seconds of recording, right while the game is running; a gallery on each game's page.
• Save backups — one-click backup and restore of save files, with the current state auto-archived before a restore.
• Themes — dark/light plus a set of ready-made presets, and your own theme editor.
• Gamepad and fullscreen support out of the box — full mouse/keyboard-free navigation.
• "Feeling Lucky" — a spinning reel that randomly picks a game from your library.
• Favorites, install/compatibility instructions on a game's page, a button for the game's own external settings tool, and custom launch arguments.
• Updates — checks for a new version at startup, shows its changelog and replaces the portable exe by itself (see Updates).
• Russian and English UI.

Out of the box: quick start

There are no prebuilt installer/portable .exe files in the repository yet — the app is built from source. This takes about five minutes.

1. Requirements: Windows, Node.js 16 or newer, npm.
2. Install dependencies:

   npm install
   

3. Profile encryption key — a required step; without it the app won't start (no PROFILE_ENCRYPTION_KEY → the main process exits immediately):

   cp .env.example .env
   node -e "console.log(require('crypto').randomBytes(32).toString('base64'))"
   

   Paste the resulting string into .env as the value of PROFILE_ENCRYPTION_KEY. Don't change the key once generated — otherwise existing profiles stop being readable.
4. Run it:

   npm start
   

   This starts the React dev server and the Electron window together. On the first run there are no profiles yet — the app asks you to create one (just a name, no password).
5. Add your first game — on the home screen, the add-game button opens a wizard: type the name, optionally search Steam to auto-fill covers/ description, then point it at the game's files and its .exe. Alternatively, lay the game out under content/ by hand — see Content library below.
6. To build an actual .exe (portable and an NSIS installer), run npm run build:exe — see Build below.

Setup

Requirements

• Node.js 16 or newer
• npm

Install

npm install

Development

npm start

Starts the React dev server and the Electron app together.

Build

Build a standalone executable:

npm run build:exe

Output goes into dist/: React Launcher Setup <version>.exe (NSIS installer) and React Launcher <version>.exe (portable). dist/win-unpacked/ is an intermediate folder, not meant for distribution.

Updates

The app can check for a new version, show its changelog and replace itself with it. There is no update server, only static files: a latest.json manifest next to the exe on any web host.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗