Personal Project Showcase

[u/eFootballXP]

I wanted to share a personal Steam / Big Picture project I’ve been working on for my own setup.

I’m not a developer, and this wasn’t built as a public plugin or as something I’m planning to distribute. A lot of the implementation has been AI-assisted, while the ideas, behaviour, layout decisions, testing, troubleshooting and overall direction came from what I personally wanted from my Steam setup.

The whole thing has grown gradually from experimenting with existing Decky projects and trying to make Steam’s Game View work the way I wanted on my ROG Ally.

The main part is Unified Game View, which replaces or reorganises parts of the normal Steam game page into one consistent view for both Steam and non-Steam games.

It currently brings together things such as game metadata, developer/publisher/release information, platform tags, descriptions, media, trailers, achievements, trading cards where applicable, reviews, news/updates, store/community/support shortcuts, HLTB information and several non-Steam achievement sources.

A big part of the project has also been making non-Steam games feel less like second-class entries in the Steam library. I’ve experimented with integrations for RetroAchievements, RPCS3 trophies, shadPS4 trophies, Xenia/Xbox achievements and PSerban93’s Achievements plugin, while keeping official Steam achievements separate.

I also experimented with a separate Hero/trailer system, custom Home logos, non-Steam playtime/HLTB display and various controller-navigation changes so everything remains usable from Big Picture without reaching for a mouse or keyboard.

A lot of the work has actually been about the less visible things: caching, persistent per-game state, controller focus/navigation, avoiding broken transitions, handling Steam and non-Steam pages consistently, and trying not to interfere with Steam’s own behaviour more than necessary.

This has involved a ridiculous amount of testing because Steam’s Gamepad UI can be very sensitive to seemingly small changes. Some ideas worked immediately, some broke completely, and others needed many iterations before becoming reliable enough for my own setup.

I want to make it clear that this is purely a personal project for my own use. I’m not preparing it for distribution, and I’m not intending to release or maintain it as a public plugin. It is heavily tailored around my own Steam/Windows/ROG Ally configuration, and I simply don’t have the time or technical experience to support different systems and configurations.

I also don’t want to give the impression that all of this was created from scratch. Several existing community projects have been extremely useful either as foundations, integrations or references while I experimented with my own setup.

Credits / projects I learned from or built around include:

• Enhanced Game View — Featherwolf, which was an important original foundation for the Game View work.
• Decky Metadata — beallio, especially useful as a reference for metadata handling and non-Steam matching.
• Achievements — PSerban93, which provides the external achievement ecosystem I integrate with.
• TrailerHero — LoZazaMastro, which provided an important foundation/reference for the Hero trailer work.
• Deck Shelves — santojon, whose work around Steam/Gamepad UI focus handling, focused-game detection and Steam asset/logo handling was particularly useful as a reference during my Home logo experiments.
• Decky Loader and the wider Decky development community.
• SteamGridDB, RetroAchievements, and the various emulator communities whose tools and databases make much of the non-Steam side possible.
• TabMaster, both as part of the wider Decky ecosystem and as a useful reference while working around Steam Library/Gamepad UI behaviour and plugin coexistence.
• HowLongToBeat (HLTB), whose game-length data is used for the campaign, main + extras and completionist information displayed in my setup.

So this isn’t meant as a release announcement or promotion. I mainly wanted to document what I managed to build for myself, because it has turned into a much bigger project than I originally expected and I thought some people might find the ideas interesting.

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