playhook-collection

A companion project to Playhook — the tray launcher that turns a removable drive into a console-style game cartridge. This repository is its collection of ready-made game cards, plus a web showcase of the launcher's UI.

Two things live here:

1. The site — sevenns.github.io/playhook-collection. It is Playhook's own UI, rebuilt as a static page: same hero, same boot screen, same bar, same menu, same sounds, same gamepad. It opens straight onto the catalogue as a carousel of covers, and picking an entry previews it the way the launcher would — that entry's hero images rotating, its own background music. The Library card at the end of the row opens the whole catalogue as a grid, and its "Add game" builds an entry from files on your own disk — that one lives in the tab, and a reload takes it away — that form is the launcher's Customize screen whole, with the rows a web page cannot answer shown and inert. The Settings card beside it opens the launcher's Settings screen whole — every section it has, as a freshly installed Playhook shows it. Audio is the part this page can act on and is live there: all eighteen of the launcher's navigation sound sets and all eleven of its ambience tracks, kept in the browser and outliving a reload. The rest is shown to be read. The System card at the end of the row carries the launcher's power stack, inert, with a Github link added above its Close.
2. The collection — ready-made game.json manifests per game (hero images, the carousel cover, save paths, titles), so you don't have to write one from scratch. See collection/README.md.

The site is the first consumer of the collection's own JSON feed (api/v1/index.json), which is generated on every build — so the feed is exercised by every deploy instead of "later". It is also, so far, the only one: Playhook 0.8.0 takes a game's metadata straight from the stores (Steam, GOG, SteamGridDB and friends) and does not read this feed. Wiring the launcher to it is a separate conversation; the feed is kept honest in the meantime.

No framework, no runtime dependencies: one HTML file, one stylesheet, one bundled script. The UI code is vendored from the launcher — see PORTED-FROM.md for what was copied, what was rewritten, and why.

Build

npm install
npm run build      # → dist/

npm run dev        # build, then serve dist/ on :8000 with a watcher

Note that the watcher rebuilds the bundle only; index.html and styles.css are copied by scripts/build.mjs, so re-run the build after editing them.

Gates, both run in CI before deploy:

npm run typecheck && npm run lint

There are no tests. The launcher keeps the vitest suite for the parts that actually decide things; here the gates are typecheck, lint, a build that validates every manifest, and looking at the screens.

Adding a collection entry

Read collection/README.md first. In short: create collection/<slug>/ with game.json, meta.json and an assets/ directory, keep the assets web-sized (they are downloaded by anyone who opens the preview), and drop the entry on a card and insert it into Playhook before claiming it works. npm run build validates every manifest against schema/game.schema.json and fails on a bad one, so a broken entry never reaches the feed.

Deploy

Pushing to main runs typecheck → lint → build and publishes dist/ to GitHub Pages (.github/workflows/deploy.yml). Pages must be set to "GitHub Actions" as its source in the repository settings.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE. The bundled font, M PLUS Rounded 1c, is under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: public/fonts/OFL.txt.