kasperoo•This week
I’ve built a gaming recommendation and exploration platform called Which Game Next
Hello there!
Me and a few of my best friends are software engineers, and we’ve been working part-time on developing a side project for the past 12 months. It’s called www.whichgamenext.com, and we’ve recently launched into open beta for everyone to check out. Your feedback would be invaluable to us!
Our aim has been to build a gaming recommendation engine, alongside providing market oversight for where you can legally and officially purchase or obtain modern games from multiple stores and/or subscriptions. It’s often difficult to figure out what you have access to if you only have a single specific subscription, like Game Pass PC, or if you’re only interested in games on GOG/Nintendo (what a mix!). We started by identifying the available digital stores and subscriptions and slowly compiling our database using multiple automated services to gather data on these games. Think JustWatch, but for games!
One major service we’ve partnered with is IGDB, which has been supplying us with JSON data dumps that served as the initial seed for our game data. A massive thank you to them for their continued support!
With the data in place, we’ve been focusing on exploring new features. So far, this has included private and public user-generated lists, personal backlog tracking, and the ability to like or dislike games. We’re now improving our recommendation engine, tackling the complexities that come with it, and having a lot of fun along the way. We’re utilising modern AI strategies and solving fascinating problems related to large-scale data aggregation. We truly can’t wait to share this fantastic work!
In addition to this, you can soon expect curated collections, articles about games, and supporting links to help you make informed, unbiased purchasing decisions. Your shared data will drive the recommendations. But it doesn’t stop there—we have plenty of other features on our radar, such as importing games from your favourite stores, syncing your gameplay time, surfacing data like “How Long to Beat,” and creating new and exciting ways to interact with this growing community!
This is a passion project created by a group of gamers who want to spend their time and money wisely, without purchasing biases. Since it’s a side project, we mostly work on it at night, but we’re excited to grow the community, share our vision, and, who knows, maybe one day make it our full-time job!
Let’s dive into the technical details:
• Monorepo architecture: This speeds up development by sharing libraries, living style guides, configs, etc. Nx.js has been brilliant, enabling us to create a dependency graph of changes and only build/deploy what’s modified in a PR.
• AWS: We’re using the free tier (with a few exceptions where we pay for smaller services). Achieving self-sufficiency is critical for us. Additionally, we applied to the AWS Startup Foundation programme and received $1,000 in AWS credits, which has been incredibly helpful!
• Infrastructure: Fully deployed as code with Terraform.
• Backends: Built using Express and Nest.js, split into around 40 projects and counting! Each project plays a unique role in gathering and syncing game data.
• Scalability: Designed from the ground up, utilising AWS Lambdas with auto-scaling and load balancing.
• Databases: We use Postgres with RDS and DynamoDB for storing various data.
• Frontend stack: Built with React, Next.js, Tailwind, Zustand, TanStack Query, Jest, and Storybook.
• CI/CD: Managed with GitHub Actions and Amplify hooks for deploying the frontends.
• Admin portal: We’ve built a bespoke CMS to control the main website. It synchronises with external services, tracks game data changes, and allows us to selectively apply ‘patches’ from sites like IGDB. The system also includes data override and rollback capabilities, ensuring we maintain control over game data.
• Automation: Partially automated, so manual intervention is rarely needed.
• Scraping tools: Fully integrated into the admin portal with log trail capabilities.
• Cloudflare: Used for on-the-fly image transformations; we’re considering moving to it full-time as our CDN for free WebP conversions.
• Authentication: Handled by Cognito, with a custom frontend built from scratch.
Key learnings so far:
• AWS cold starts: Not ideal! While the platform is still new, we ping endpoints to keep them responsive. This won’t be an issue once traffic increases.
• Lambda memory matters: We learned the hard way that low-memory configurations can delay responses by 2-3 seconds.
• DynamoDB partition keys: If not designed correctly from the start, you might have to start over (yes, we’ve been there!).
• GitHub Actions: Setting up node\_modules cache reuse takes time, but it’s worth it—don’t give up!
We don’t know where this project will take us yet, but it’s been a fantastic journey so far. We’ve learned a lot, explored technologies we don’t typically use in our day jobs, and built something we’re genuinely passionate about.
Your feedback would mean the world to us. What do you think of what we’ve done so far? What would you like to see added? Is this a service you’d use? Do you see the value in it as we do?
Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you in the comments! (or our newly created /r/whichgamenext
