Managing Your Games

Game Playlists

The Winnitron functions on a concept of game playlists. This is basically a folder containing a collection of games. The basic folder structure is shown below:

example folder structure

There's no limit to how many playlists or games you can have at a time, but eventually your computer will run out of resources and having too much on there will be hard to navigate.

Using the Winnitron Launcher Locally

To use the Winnitron launcher locally, you just need to have the proper folder structure in place.

Adding a Playlist

To make a new playlist, just add a folder under your playlists folder (the default is WINNITRON_UserData/Playlists).

As of v2.3.0, each playlist folder contains a winnitron_metadata.json file that the Launcher reads for playlist info. For playlists read from the Network, this is automatically written, but for local-only playlists you'll have to add it yourself. Fortunately it's short:

{
  "local": "true", // THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART
  "title": "Awesome Games Made Right Here!",
  "description": "Don't you want to play these sweet games? (Hint: yes)",
  "slug": "awesome-games" // this has to match the playlist folder name!
}

Alternatively (or if you're running v2.2.0 or earlier), the Launcher's sync will ignore any playlist folders that begin with an underscore, so for example:

WINNITRON_UserData
  Playlists
    Official Winnitron
    _My Local Playlist
      A Game
      Another Game
      Yet Another Game

Adding a Game

To add a game, just make a folder within a playlist folder with at least one image file and an executable. You then need to add a winnitron_metadata.json file to the root of your game folder and change the info to match your game. For example:

{
  "title": "Jim's Adventure",
  "min_players": "1",
  "max_players": "2",
  "executable": "adventure.exe",
  "image_url": "http://example.com/jim.jpg",
  "keys": {
    "template": "default"
  }
}

Removing a Game from a Playlist

To remove a game from a playlist, simply delete the folder containing the game and the next time you run the launcher it should update the playlist accordingly.

Using the Winnitron Network

This is where the magic happens. Go sign up for an account at network.winnitron.com and request a builder's account by contacting us (info in the wiki footer).