The idea behind Game Track comes from a will to keep better track of your gaming activities, past, present and future.
As of today, there are 3 major console companies, and several different game studios with their own store services and game launchers. This division makes it harder for people to organize their hobby, to the point where it almost becomes a chore. This separation also turns playing with friends harder, as even though you all may have bought the same game, one is playing on a PlayStation, one in a XBOX, and another one on a PC through Steam or the Epic Store.
The Game Track’s purpose is not to replace all of these stores, platforms and consoles, but to bring them all together in one place, where people can see their friends and their friends’ games through multiple platforms in only one space, and also see where they can get their favorite games for the best price available!
To make this project, the first step was research, and to begin the research the project needed to be understood.
Differently to the apps and websites like Game Pass, Steam, and so on, Game Track is NOT a store, so the goal is not to sell any of the games, but to allow better communication between gamers, and their hobby of choice.
What this is means is that, the Game Track app is a videogame social network, so that’s where the research needs to start.
The project that is most similar to this is the GGapp website, made by Charles Watson.
The inspiration for the layout was taken from streaming services, as they deal with extense catalogs that are not there for an explicit sale to the user, unlike game stores which’s goal is only to sell.
The planned userflow was to make everything available to them from the home page. So in the home page there are sliders for:
Apart from that, the permanent bottom menu would feature links to the user’s game library, wishlist, recommended games, and a search page.
The game page's main concern was in how to put all the information necessary, while maitaining a friendly and easy experience for the user. For that, all information sections can be expanded or hidden by a simple touch.
The recommendations have also been divided into:
Others from the same publisher was later discarded as several publisher release games for several different publics
For the user’s profile page, inspiration was taken from Twitter (X) and Last.fm.
Both theses social medias allow users to navigate through different sections in each others profile, and in this case, these pages were adapted to the main profile, friends page, complete games list, and favorite games.
Another inspiration from Last.fm was the posiibility of customizing how your content is shown in your main page.
For that, an overlay (later switched by a simple button press) was added so that the user could choose between display styles and time frames of what is shown
