Tempus GameIt

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you might know about my yearly tradition that I refer to as the “Years in Review” where I attempt to track the games I play in a given year. I don’t go into a ton of detail in this process, mostly it is just a hashmark of “Was this game played during this month” and it doesn’t go into much detail to quantify how much something was played. Other bloggers do similar things, and one of the more interesting versions of this is from The Ancient Gaming Noob where he has used a software tracking tool called ManicTime to log actual hours in specific games. There was a time when I briefly kicked around the notion of writing something to do this for me… all in the name of attempting to replace functionality that Raptr used to do.

Last year I learned that my friend Kevin Brill had been working on precisely this side project and had made quite a good deal of movement towards a production client. Essentially, TempusGameIt, as he calls it, is an application that you install and hangs out in your system tray and then utilizes an application detection library to log when you are playing specific games. This information gets uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers and quietly tracks the games that you are playing, matching them against its database of existing games. I had known this was a functionality that existed, but with the New Year, I decided to support this project and become an active guinea pig. So since the beginning of the year, I have been keeping the client updated and logging my gameplay.

I’ve wanted to talk about this application for a bit, but decided I should probably get permission from Kevin before diving into it and introducing my audience. Right now this is mostly an application that has been bouncing around on the Gamepad.club Mastodon server with a handful of us testing it, but I believe I am the only person who is actively running it all of the time. Essentially there is currently a Mac and a PC Client with some side discussion about potentially creating a Linux client at some point. This installs a service on your local machine and when you double-click the icon in your system tray it opens a webpage at http://localhost:45000/ that allows you to configure various options. You can publicly log your time or privately do so… which makes certain aspects of the data only available to you. You also need to configure which drives you want it to scan and identify games on. Essentially each time you install new software as it stands currently you will need to run another sweep of your drives. For me, I technically have games on three of my four drives so I have it inventorying those.

Under Catalog it will show what games have been detected. Occasionally the same game shows up multiple times, specifically if there is for example a 32-bit and a 64-bit executable. If a game does not exist currently in the known catalog of available games, there is also the option for you to add it which involves you searching for the game title and then selecting which process currently running in memory represents that game. I’ve done this for a few things that had not been seen yet like Fallout 76 and more recently City of Heroes. Once the game has been detected and is in your local Catalog, the detection from that point forward just works “automagically”. I believe there is some sort of minimum session length, as there have been a few times I have seen my sessions get ignored if I accidentally launched the wrong game for example as I occasionally do with Steam when I click the wrong listing.

From there everything pretty much takes care of itself. Your session data will begin showing up in your local interface as well as when you are logged in through the TempusGameIt server. The application has several different ways to slice the data and in truth, this is probably going to be perfect for most users. For example, this is a snapshot of a weekly view showing how much time I spent in games. Right now my data is heavily skewing the usage patterns of the application as a whole, but I am hoping as more folks start using it the global data becomes a bit more interesting. I’ve requested to have a raw export option because in truth I would rather dump my information and fiddle with it in google sheets than have reports compiled for me. At a minimum, I plan on using this information to feed into my “Years in Review” process, but I think I will be able to generate far more specific data than I have ever before.

There is a bunch of functionality that I have never touched as well. Supposedly the application can detect new screenshots from specific applications and have those uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers as well. Additionally, there is a methodology for linking to various game accounts and tracking achievements. The fact that I have my profile fairly locked down in Steam and tend to run in “show offline” mode seems to be throwing an error when it attempts to track achievements there per a discussion with Kevin last night. There are also a lot of ideas that are planned for the application and you can see where various features are on the roadmap via the Trello board. There is also a discord server for discussions and feature requests, but I think for the moment Kevin and I are the only ones who have joined it.

For the moment this is a passion project, but one that I personally think is really freaking cool. At some point, if there is ever a Patreon or something of the sort to fund development I will probably pitch into it. For the moment it is doing a functionality that has been missing since Raptr, and it will be interesting to see how this service evolves. I’ve not talked about it a ton to this point, but I figured if nothing else I would share it with my readers. For the most part it “just works” and has required little fiddling. There have been a few things I have talked back and forth with Kevin about and have helped debug a few problems but the majority of the time it quietly does what it is supposed to be doing.