I built an offline-first PC game launcher that calculated my 18,838-hour backlog debt

Ritesh Soni — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 13:44:35 +0000

Like a lot of PC gamers, my library is scattered across 8 different storefronts. Between Steam sales, free weekly Epic games, GOG installers, and Xbox Game Pass, I had 1,420 titles sitting across my drives and no clean way to manage them on a portable SSD without background launchers eating RAM.

So I built Logpile, a 100% offline, open-source PC game library manager for Windows.

👉 GitHub Repo & Installer: https://github.com/ritesh-soni-logpile/logpile

1. Facing the 18,838-Hour Backlog Debt

Once Logpile scanned all 8 sources (Steam, Epic, GOG, Xbox, EA, Ubisoft, Amazon, and Standalone) and synced campaign lengths, the Sanctuary Dashboard gave me the brutal truth: ~18,838 hours of unplayed story campaigns, plus a breakdown of sub-5-hour "Quick Wins" I can actually finish over a weekend.

2. Fixing the "Portable SSD" Problem

If you keep games on an external SSD and plug it into a laptop, Windows often swaps the drive letter from D:\ to E:\, breaking every shortcut in traditional launchers.

Self-Healing Paths: Logpile tokenizes paths on the portable drive using {{PORTABLE_ROOT}} and resolves the active drive root at launch time.
Rolling Save Backups: When a game closes, Logpile zips the local save folder (keeping the newest 3 backups) inside logpile_data/saves/. When you plug into a second PC, it checks file modification timestamps before launch and offers a 1-click restore if the portable save is newer.

3. Solving the "I Haven't Played This in 3 Weeks" Problem

Dropping a 50-hour RPG for two weeks usually means forgetting the story and the controls.

When you exit a game, Logpile shows a quick toast asking if you want to leave a voice or text checkpoint note.
If a game sits idle for more than 14 days, the Game Dossier puts a "Jump Back In" card at the top with your note, your latest screenshot, and a 4-bullet combat/controls refresher pulled from locally cached StrategyWiki guides in SQLite FTS5.

4. Zero-Bloat Hardware Protection (0 MB RAM Overlay)

Launchers shouldn't cost you frames per second.

Fast Guide Mode (Ctrl+Space): Opens an in-game overlay to search cached offline walkthroughs with 0 MB RAM overhead.
Optional BYOM Local Companion: If you drop your own .gguf model into the /models folder for natural language filtering or voice commands (via Gamepad R3), Logpile automatically unloads the model from RAM after 30 seconds of idle time or the exact millisecond a game process spawns.
Pre-Launch RAM Guard: Checks free system memory before booting a title and offers a 1-click option to close heavy background processes like Chrome or Discord.

Try It Out