This article was originally published on Ko-Fi and may have been modified slightly.
I think we all were on a game page at least once and thought »I would love to see a trailer to this game«. If not, I had this thought probably every time I used my private Questlog account. Every time I heard of a game in a podcast, blog post or on Mastodon and I searched for it on Questlog I clicked on the link of the official page, then on Steam and then finally searched on YouTube because nowhere was a proper trailer.
So I wanted to implement a quick update to list videos on the game page itself. This could be an easy task, just fetch the video links and embed them into the page, right? Wrong!
Questlog still is heavily focused on privacy so this was definitely not the way to go. The plan always was and still is to keep your data safe. So third party scripts are a no-go until the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. (which means probably never). This means more work for me but a better user experience for you. (hopefully)
Not only Trailers but also gameplay videos help you to get a good impression of a game.
Better mobile experience
Another factor was, that the mobile experience of embedded YouTube videos is just terrible. Click on the video. Let it load. Click on the full screen button. Full screen not supported for whatever reason. Click on the video title. The YouTube app opens and finally you can watch the video or safe it for later. I hate this and don’t want this for Questlog.
So I just fetch the YouTube ID and get the data from the YouTube-API. So you get a list of videos with a thumbnail, title and video duration directly on Questlog without talking to a third party service. This comes with some downsides for me, but I think that’s worth it. Worst case is, that you will see a game with videos without thumbnails for a while because of the rate limit of the YouTube API.
Not all games have videos yet. I updated all games that are on your playlists and that are in your play statuses. Also the last 50 releases and the next 50. The rest will get videos over time. New fetched games will have their videos immediately.
In the future you will be able to suggest videos for games, but this will come with another update for more user content.
Changelog
- Optimized error pages
- Notification when Questlog is deploying
- Videos, such as trailers, are now saved for games
- Changed Chevron on all “More”-Links
- Added lazy loading for multiple image types