Steam Pal

An app to find new Steam games by exploring and learning about different genres. Uses Tinder-Style navigation to save games for later, in case you want to revisit liked games.

Comment

Inspiration

Over this summer my friends and I have been wondering what new games to play, because we got tired of playing the same rounds of Valorant over and over again. When we looked at the Steam recommendations though, we only saw games we tried already. The “Search by categories” tab didn’t help much either because the games were either unappealing or just not what we searched for entirely. This is why I wanted a tool that could give random Steam games that we could have missed, and from genres we usually don’t explore.

Problem SteamPal solves:

Many gamers, including my friends, are unaware and uneducated of the variety that gaming has to offer, because they only stick to a couple of games. Steam doesn’t do much to fix this, and their recommendations are kinda dry. Many gamers don't get to truly experience new games, mostly because they don't know how to find games from new genres. So, I wanted to change that.

What it does

SteamPal takes a genre (Action, Adventure, Casual, Racing, Simulation, Sports, and Strategy) and finds a random Steam game from that category. This ensures that the games will be new and fresh, instead of sticking to only one genre. Then SteamPal finds important data about the game, including the steam link, so that the user can quickly get to playing it. If you happen to like a game, it will be saved to your favorite games tab so that you can get access to it later, but also continue browsing.

While building this app, my friends and I have already found several games that we will be playing later, including games from genres we have never played together, like racing and sports.

How I built it

This was built on Node js, using ExpressJs and Socket.io to manage the server and client code. All the browser formatting was done using the classic HTML + CSS. The games are obtained from the Steam Api, which has over 50,000 games in its catalog. These games were filtered by genre and then stored into JSON files. Steam is also the most popular site where games are published, which makes the games there accessible to lots of gamers.

What's next for Steam Pal

This app can also easily be expanded to learn from what the user has previously liked, so that games are recommended based on sub-genres. Another way to take this further would be to filter games by recommendation scores, so that really niche Indie games with great review scores can get noticed. Finding games based on current sales that are happening would also give the selection more depth as the user would be more likely to try new games out if the prices were lower. The possibilities are endless.

Share this project:

Updates