how to add a non steam game

フィル

Australia
Ashfield
NSW

I'm a high liver / I'm a sloooooooow burner

Overview
Like many of you, I've bought hundreds of new games in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. Also like many of you, I'm happy enough with Steam and don't want yet another launcher on my computer. In that spirit, here is my half arsed guide on adding your Itch games to Steam, while still having all the pretty game artwork in your Steam library instead of the default featureless grey box. This process will also work with games from GOG and other stores.

Setup
First up, some organisational stuff. This will be a lot easier if you have a dedicated folder for your non Steam games, and a dedicated folder for their pretty artwork. Here's what it looks like on my machine:

(Mac screenshot, but the steps are the same for Windows.) As you can see, there's folder with my GOG games like Alpha Centauri, as well as my Itch games like Art Sqool. Inside that is the artwork folder containing all the JPEGs and PNGs that Steam is so keen on. (I haven't put my DOS games or ROMs in with the other games, because I play those through emulators. You can add the emulators to Steam but not the individual ROMs.)

Okay, so let's go though the process of adding a game from the Itch bundle. One of the big name games of the bundle is Celeste, so let's add that.

Adding A Game
First, launch Steam and go to the Games menu, then choose Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library...

That opens a sort of search engine thingy that tries to scan your computer and all attached drives for games.

It takes forever and is annoying, so just click the Browse button on the bottom left to open a conventional file picker.

From the normal picker you can find and add your game, in this case Celeste. If you can't see it in your Steam library now, you may be filtering on recent games -- turn off the recent filter to see it.

Important: launch the game now from Steam. As well as adding it to the recent filter and confirming that you've chosen the right file, this is mandatory for adding the artwork. Once you're happy that it launches correctly, close the game.

Copying Steam Artwork
Okay, now for the artwork! There are two possibilities here: downloading the artwork from Steam, or creating it yourself. Happily most of the games I've tried from the Itch bundle support the first option. I'm going to assume that's the case for this example, but stay tuned until the end for how to do this for a game not already on Steam.

Now for the fun bit where we get the artwork for freeeee! First, find the Steam AppId of the game you want to add. If you don't know how to do that, there's a good website called SteamDB.info where you can search for a game and find its AppID.

Here's what the SteamDB page looks like for Celeste.

From this I can see that the AppID is 504230. If you can't find the game on SteamDB, then you'll have to create the artwork manually (about which, more later). But in this case, hooray, we found it.

The first bit of art to download is the little app icon. You can just grab that straight from the SteamDB page like so:

Save the file in your artwork folder and give it a sensible name. I called it celeste_icon.png. Now find the game in your library, right click on it and choose Properties... -- this will open a dialogue. Click Choose Icon to open the icon picker and choose your icon file. The file type filter on this dialogue defaults to PNG so you might need to change it to All Files to see JPEGs.

Next is the header image. Remember that AppId we found earlier, 504230? In your web browser, go to: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/504230/header.jpg to download the header artwork for AppID 504230, Celeste. You can use File > Save As to download the image and save it to your artwork folder. Save it with a meaningful name like celeste_header.jpg.

You can also just save it straight from the SteamDB page if that's easier:

Right, let's add the header to Steam. Go to your Steam home page where you can see Recent Games in the main pane. Since Celeste was the last game we launched, it has a wide game image while the other games have tall game box images. This wide image is called the header. Right-click on the header and choose Manage > Add Custom Artwork to add your header artwork from your artwork folder.

And here's the result:

You get the idea now, so grab the rest of the artwork, and save it to your artwork folder with meaningful names:

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/504230/library_60... -- this is the tall box art that appears in Recent Games

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/504230/library_he... -- this is the big background image on the game's library page

https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/504230/logo.png -- this is the game's logo on its library page (not every game has this)

Now you can go to the game page in your library, and right click on the artwork area to add the custom background (library_hero.jpg) and game logo (logo.png).

After you add them, it looks like a really truly Steam game!

Finally, we can add the box art. Open and close some other game so that Celeste isn't the most recent, then go to the Recent Games section and add the box art (library_600x900_2x.jpg) in the usual manner.

It should look like this:

With all the artwork in place you can now see the game in all its glory in your collections, Big Picture mode, etc.

Adding Your Own Artwork
What if the game doesn't have an AppID? You can still add your own artwork, following the same steps above. You can either download fan made artwork from https://www.steamgriddb.com/ or make the artwork files yourself (e.g. by screenshotting the game, downloading official art from Itch, etc). Once you have some art you just need to save it in the following formats:

Header -- 460 wide x 215 tall JPEG
Game Box -- 600 wide x 900 tall JPEG
Library Hero -- 1920 wide x 620 tall JPEG
Logo -- any width x 360 tall PNG (with transparent background)
Icon -- 32 wide x 32 tall PNG (with transparent background)

And that's the end of my screed.

how to add a non steam game

Source: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/109367/how-add-itchio-game-steam-including-library-artwor

Posted by: bainknoted.blogspot.com

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