If you play video games on the PC, I’m sure you can relate to the feeling of having too many unplayed games sitting on your backlog (and somehow you never know what to play 🤔). And then each time a Steam sale rolls around, your list just continues to grow.

If you’re looking for a way to organise your backlog, and you want to use Trello to do it, I have the solution for you!

I recently released Gaming Backlog which allows you to connect to your Steam account and easily bulk-add games as cards to your Trello board 🎉

I can’t guarantee that using this will make your backlog any smaller, but it will make for a very pretty-looking Trello board that you can stare at when you’re looking for something to play.

Troubles with authentication and Steam

This side project turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be (don’t they always). I was rendering everything in an iframe on the Trello board, but Steam authentication won’t run in an iframe (I assume for security reasons) so I had to pop open a new window, have the user authenticate, and then redirect back to the Trello board.

I detailed some of the authentication gotchas in another post last month here:

Setting up Steam Authentication using OpenID

Emma Goto 🍙 ・ Jan 2 '20

#steam #games #authentication

One of my biggest surprises is that authenticating with Steam doesn’t really grant you anything. It returns you the user’s SteamID, but this ID is public information that you can get from a Steam user’s profile. The only benefit it really provides is a “smooth” way of getting a user’s ID, instead of making them jump through hoops to get it for you. Unfortunately that also means when you call the Steam API to grab a user’s games, their profile needs to be public. Luckily most people seem to leave their profiles public by default, so I'm hoping this isn’t too big of an issue.

Architecture

Everything that renders on your Trello board is from a static site I hosted on Github Pages, while the authentication flow and the calling of the Steam APIs is handled by an Express.js app hosted on Heroku. Could I have done this all on the one app? Yes, but to be honest I don’t really know what I’m doing so my Express.js code is like a house of cards that I'm afraid could fall down at any second! I don’t trust my free Heroku plan to give me 100% uptime either, or to be very fast, so I split it out into two apps to try and mitigate this risk if it does go down.

What’s next?

For now I will leave this Power-Up as is and see if it gets much usage. The Steam API does provide a way to grab a user’s achievements for a particular game, so the next feature I might add is the ability to add your achievements as a checklist on your Trello card.

If you do decide to check this out, please let me know how it goes, as it hasn’t been extensively tested beyond me adding my own games to a backlog.

Thanks for reading!