I Started Building a Gaming News App. It Turned Into Something Much Bigger.

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. This is the story of a side project that started as a lunch break experiment and quietly turned into something I'm proud of.

The problem

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the first version of this app. Back then, the problem I was solving was simple: gaming news sites are exhausting. Clickbait titles, aggressive ads, endless padding just to get to a single sentence worth reading. So I built a small Android app that used AI to summarise public RSS feeds and cut the fluff. A gaming shorts app, just for myself.

It worked. I used it every day. But the more I used it, the more I noticed a different problem, one I was quietly ignoring for years.

As a gamer with a Steam library of a thousand games, I had no single place to manage any of it. I was juggling half a dozen apps and websites just to check what deals were live, which free games were available this week, what my achievement progress looked like, which game I should play next, and whether my favourite esports team had a match tonight. It was fragmented and honestly kind of exhausting. The news app had solved one slice of the problem. But the bigger picture was still a mess.

So I kept going.

The scope creep I didn't fight

Here's the honest version of what happened next. I told myself I'd add deals. Just deals, nothing else. Then free games notifications, because that felt obvious. Then Steam integration, because I wanted to see my library stats. Then achievement tracking, because I was already in there. Then Play Next recommendations, because I kept staring at my backlog not knowing what to play. Then esports, then Hoyoverse Showcase for my Genshin and Star Rail characters, then a backlog manager, then widgets.

There was a point around month four where I looked at what I was building and asked myself if I should stop. It had grown far beyond the original idea and I wasn't sure I could finish it properly. But I was also using it every single day. Every feature I added was something I actually wanted. That kept me going.

At some point I also had to accept that "GameShortsXP", the original name made no sense anymore. The app had outgrown it completely. So I renamed it Pulstral and rebuilt it from the ground up.

What Pulstral is now

The feature I'm most personally excited about is the Pulstral Score. It's your achievement skill rating, calculated purely from rarity. The rarer the achievement, the more points it's worth. You climb through 15 rank tiers from Wanderer to Transcendent. The first time I saw my own score and crown jewel achievements laid out, it made me look at my library differently. Suddenly a 100% completion on an obscure game with brutal achievements felt more meaningful than a platinum on something everyone has finished.

Beyond that, linking your Steam account unlocks a full suite of tools. Play Next gives you smart backlog recommendations based on what you're close to finishing or what's a quick win. Achievement Hunter tracks your progress across your entire library. The Achievement Timeline is a chronological record of every unlock. Trophy Case lets you showcase your 6 best achievements and share them as a card. Library Stats shows your total hours, completion rates and genre breakdown. Wrapped gives you weekly and lifetime stat cards you can share.

The rest of the app covers game deals and price alerts across Steam, Epic, GOG and Humble; a free games tracker with push notifications; esports live scores, upcoming tournaments and streams; a Hoyo Showcase for Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail and ZZZ; a game backlog manager; an upcoming releases calendar with reminders; Game Pass listings; and 4 home screen widgets.

The news summaries from v1 are still in there too, now as one section of a much bigger feed.

Tech stack

The core is this: Android frontend in Kotlin, a Node.js/Express backend, MySQL database, hosted on DigitalOcean. What's grown is everything around it. The backend runs 18 cron jobs, and handles a lot more caching than I ever anticipated needing.

Android frontend in Kotlin, a Node.js/Express backend, MySQL database, hosted on DigitalOcean. What's grown is everything around it. The backend now talks to a dozen third party apis, each with its own rate limits and rules. The complexity that comes with that was something I didn't anticipate.

With so many third-party APIs in play, I had to get serious about things I used to ignore before. Smart caching strategies to avoid hammering APIs on every request. Cron jobs to pre-fetch and refresh data in the background so the app feels instant. Exponential backoffs for when external services hiccup. Rate limit handling to stay within API quotas without silently failing. None of this was new territory conceptually, but actually implementing it in a production context, where real users might be waiting on real data, forced me to think about it properly for the first time.

Why I kept going

The first version got almost no traction. But I kept using it myself, kept finding friction in my own gaming life, and kept building. At no point did it feel like I was chasing an audience. It felt like I was solving my own problems, one at a time.

If it resonates with other gamers, that's a bonus. But even if it doesn't, I'll still be using it every day.

If you're a gamer, I'd love to hear what you think. Feedback, feature ideas, or just a conversation about building and shipping things on the side.

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