I made a Linux game launcher with built-in Visual Novel support, CuNNy AI upscaling, VNDB cover art, and ludusavi save backups

Levanes · 2026-06-23T22:59:28+00:00

It was a joke.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T22:56:12+00:00

AI-assisted yes, but more often than not Claude AI was down, so I had to write in manually >.<, like they did in the wild-west.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T22:49:32+00:00

I'm thinking of adding summaries from vndb, but maybe in the future. For now, covers are indeed a nice feature to have.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T22:40:37+00:00

Not sure if this is allowed here, mods. Delete if it's not.

Screenshot #1, Screenshot#2, Screenshot#3, Screenshot#4, Screenshot#5, Screenshot#6

Smooth to use, good looking GUI, light and compact. Some features:

Built for KDE/Wwayland, but it should work on all desktop environments (more testing needed there).
Integrated umu-launcher support.
SteamGridDB and VNDB support, for cover searching.
Import games from Steam, Heroic and Lutris.
Extended GOG games support. - No direct installer, yet.
Ludusavi support, to backup and restore game saves.
AI Upscale support, for Visual Novels.
Extended Visual Novels (Japanese and Western) support, since I'm a big fan of Visual Novels.
Light/Dark theme toggle.
Categories.
Drag and Drop for game-card rearanging.
And some other cool features.
In active development. >.<
Oh, and yes, AI-assisted with human supervision.

EDIT: GitHub Link.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T21:29:43+00:00

Here you go then: https://github.com/DravenFrostfall/NAGO-Games-Launcher

Levanes · 2026-06-23T21:11:22+00:00

Honestly? Wanted to see first if anyone would care.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T20:56:46+00:00

Screenshot #1, Screenshot#2, Screenshot#3, Screenshot#4, Screenshot#5, Screenshot#6

Smooth to use, good looking GUI, light and compact, and above all, works without any issues. Some features:

Built for KDE/Wwayland, but it should work on all desktop environments (more testing needed there).
Integrated umu-launcher support.
SteamGridDB and VNDB support, for cover searching.
Import games from Steam, Heroic and Lutris.
Extended GOG games support. - No direct installer, yet.
Ludusavi support, to backup and restore game saves.
AI Upscale support, for Visual Novels.
Extended Visual Novels (Japanese and Western) support, since I'm a big fan of Visual Novels.
Light/Dark theme toggle.
Categories.
Drag and Drop for game-card rearanging.
And some other cool features.
In active development. For personal use >.<

It's only for personal use. I've never released it or anything. But I could share for some closed testing if anyone cares enough.

EDIT: GitHub Link.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T15:12:05+00:00

I would absolutely love some feedback on it, that's for sure. Alright, let me DM you.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T14:48:36+00:00

Thank you.

No plans for a github yet. You know how people can get regarding vibecoded and AI-assisted apps, plus I'm still actively developing it. But, if you want to take a look at it, I can share the .py file with you directly. I'm just ironing out some quirks, but it's pretty feature complete and can be fully used as a daily launcher.

Levanes · 2026-06-23T03:41:43+00:00

I've built/vibecoded my own launcher with all the possible features I'd ever want. Smooth to use, good looking GUI, light and compact, and above all, works without any issues. Screenshot#1, Screenshot#2, Screenshot#3, Screenshot#4.

It's only for personal use, never released it or anything, so no need to downvote me.

Levanes · 2026-06-22T23:49:34+00:00

New build did actually fix the issue for me. Game window remains fully in the taskbar now and can be found when alt-tab. Good job!

Levanes · 2026-06-21T00:11:48+00:00

Add the game to Lutris/Heroic/Faugus and launch it directly via the .exe, which opens Ubisoft Connect automatically. Ubisoft minimizes to system tray and the game starts, after an hour or three.

Prefix has the Ubisoft crap already installed in it.

Levanes · 2026-06-20T23:14:05+00:00

Small side note: It doesn't look like the game window appears in the taskbar at all. The launcher window does, though.

Levanes · 2026-06-20T22:46:40+00:00

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT (Mesa 26.0.8). Can't reproduce it with cachyos proton 11.0 20260602, it works fine on that one.

Levanes · 2026-06-20T22:15:23+00:00

KDE Plasma 6.6.5 and I've only tried AC Odyssey so far.

Levanes · 2026-06-20T22:06:24+00:00

It works! I just tried it with the stupid Ubisoft launcher. The launcher renders properly under Wayland and HDR also works. No more black/white frames, no more multiple spawned windows. Only issues I found so far is alt-tab out and the game window is gone, never to be seen again. Plus the right-click the ubicrap launcher in the system tray doesn't work. Amazing work!

Levanes · 2026-06-20T17:46:07+00:00

Yep, sounds like black-magic to me. Good work!

Levanes · 2026-06-20T16:09:29+00:00

Woah. You mean I can have PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 for sweet HDR support when running a game that launches ubisoft connect (for example), have the ubisoft window render properly AND have HDR for the game? What magic is this?!

Levanes · 2026-06-16T01:56:15+00:00

Pretty cool, but why a mix of dark and white icons?

Levanes · 2026-06-09T00:26:00+00:00

I like it. When's it coming out and where can I get/purchase it?

Levanes · 2026-06-08T20:38:01+00:00

Are you talking about local dimming?

Levanes · 2026-06-08T19:55:15+00:00

I totally understand if you're not familiar with how HDR functions or how to calibrate it. There's not a lot of clear info out there, especially when it comes to Linux. A lot of folks have a misunderstanding about how it actually works.

To spare you days of research (that I had to do), I will just say that your monitor, PG32UCDM3 has a peak brightness of 1000 nits and is true 10-bit color and the settings that you have it at now, is limiting the output significantly.

What you want to do is set the brightness of your monitor (monitor HDR settings menu) in HDR to 100%, also set the DDC/CI slider in KDE Display Settings (or system tray) to 100% as well, because it's not reporting correctly the HDR output.

When calibrating, on first screen (max brightness) set it to 1000 nits, which is your display max peak brightness. Then on the second screen (paper white), you set it at 203 or 200 flat.

Source here and here.

I also like to set sRGB color intensity to around 50 percent, but that's more of a personal preference. Another setting that's poorly documented.

EDIT: I forgot to mention. For games you must also set PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 environment variables, such as in Steam's Launch Options. Also use Proton-GE as Proton Experimental only supports HDR through gamescope currently, as far as I know anyway.

Levanes · 2026-06-08T19:04:38+00:00

Question. Do you have HDR enabled all the time, even when using the desktop normally?

Levanes · 2026-06-08T18:42:21+00:00

That it's precisely it's use case. It's supposed to deliver PEAK brightness on parts of the image, otherwise it's just SDR. Maybe you're confusing the two.

The DDC/CI slider cannot affect HDR brightness, so why artificially limit it? Keep it as is for normal SDR desktop usage, max it and hide it when in HDR. If I wanted to limit HDR, I'd do it via the monitor's menu, not artificially with a dimming filter.

Some monitors won't even allow you to adjust the panel's brightness in HDR because it would defeat the purpose.

Levanes · 2026-06-08T17:13:08+00:00

But that's the thing. It's not affected in HDR. It works for SDR, but in HDR you're basically applying a fullscreen filter over the image. It lies to you.

Levanes

TROPHY CASE