I Built a Gaming News Shorts App to Solve My Own Annoyances

As an introvert who’s spent years navigating(read: barely surviving) the high-pressure world of software development, enduring crunch times, the shadow of the 2008 recession, and the fear of layoffs, gaming has been my steel and shield. For over two decades, video games, especially single-player ones have been my lifeline. From Super Mario Bros. on the NES in the mid-’90s to Sonic the Hedgehog on the Genesis, from the freedom of GTA Vice City on the PS2 to the relentless grind of Diablo 2 on PC, and from the thought-provoking journey of Persona 5 on the PS4 to the scary brilliance of Alan Wake 2 on the PS5, video games have gotten me through some of the toughest times.

But enough about me. I wanna talk about something(well, two things) I finally decided to take a crack at. First, writing an article, such as this one! And the second, a side project.

The Problem

Over the years, I browsed all the major gaming news sites to keep up. And while a few stood out and still are amazing, most of them have some issues that i couldn’t stand.

Where do I even begin? The clickbait titles, the aggressive ad placements and the endless padding/fluff in articles, just to get to a single sentence worthy of news to drive impressions. It was exhausting.

Now, I get it. People need to eat. Clicks drive revenue, and unfortunately, “enshittification” is a part of life. But come on, does it always have to be this bad?

So a few months ago during a lunch break at work, I was mindlessly scrolling through this garbage when it hit me: “I should try and maybe fix this, or at least mitigate this for myself”.

I hadn’t touched Android or backend development in five years, so it seemed like a good opportunity to brush up on those skills. And since AI is everywhere now, maybe I could leverage it to build something to create concise summaries from public gaming news RSS articles while removing the fluff. Something I could actually enjoy using rather than doom scroll.

Challenges and Technical Ingredients

I decided to create my own “gaming shorts” app to see if I could build something that actually worked for me. At its core, the recipe seemed simple. I would need an app (Android or iOS), a backend to deliver shortened news, and a database to store it all. For the summarizing part, I could leverage one of the many AI REST APIs available, like GPT or Anthropic. It all seemed doable but only if I kept things minimal and not fall into the trap of overthinking about additional features at the start.

Tech Stack:

Here’s how I approached it:

• Frontend: I chose Android and built a simple UI using a ViewPager2 that supported both horizontal and vertical scrolling, depending on user preference. Each page would show a thumbnail, a title, and a summary. And because I can’t live without dark mode, I made sure that was added too.

• Backend: I leaned on my experience with Express.js to build APIs that would use AI to summarize public RSS feeds and store the results in a MySQL database.

• Hosting: Based on advice I got from a few friends, I opted for a $4 DigitalOcean droplet as I wanted to keep costs low because at the end of the day, I was building this just for myself. I could always scale up if such a day would come.

• AI Integration: The only real challenge was wrapping my head around how AI APIs work. Tokens? Prompts? Temperature? Models? All of these parameters was new to me. After some research and fiddling with these values and configurations, I finally found a sweet spot where the summaries looked concise and meaningful.

This project was never about perfection. It was about creating something that I could use every day. Once I had that, I could think about sharing it with others.

Early Testing and Feedback

Once the app was stable, I decided to share it with some of my friends and colleagues. I wanted honest feedback on the UX and functionality. Their feedback was invaluable; pointing out some UI inconsistencies and some performance optimizations. More importantly, talking to some Android-savvy friends helped me better prepare for the eventual Play Store app review. They shared some nuggets of information about best practices and things to avoid.

Decision to Ship an MVP

After about a month of using the app myself, I decided to take a crack at releasing it into the wild? Selfishly, a part of me wanted to add a little feather in my career cap, a small “I made this” moment. But even if it got zero traction, I knew I’d still feel proud that I had solved a problem for myself.

I chose to launch an MVP and build on it later based on feedback. I wanted to keep it light-weight and not bloat it with features in the first version and extend the development time by several months.

Share Your Thoughts

If you’ve made it this far, I would love to hear your thoughts, whether it’s feedback on the app, suggestions for features that could complement the core idea, or just a conversation about managing and launching side projects.

You can check out the project on Peerlist here: https://peerlist.io/akashvercetti/project/gameshortsxp

Or you can check out the app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.akashvercetti.gameshortsxp