Hydra Launcher

Hydra is an open-source platform for managing a game library, built with Electron, React and Rust. I own its interface: the full launcher redesign, the web dashboard, and the component system that keeps both consistent. Everything ships in the open, on a release cadence the community can read commit by commit, so a design decision has to survive being implemented incrementally. This page covers the most recent work.

Hydra Mobile takes the library, achievements and friends off the desk. Its landing page had one job: make a companion app feel worth installing before anyone reads a feature list. I designed and prototyped it in code around a single pinned stage. As you scroll, the phone turns and moves through five states, a hand demonstrates the gesture, and real recordings of the app are scrubbed by scroll position rather than played back. Further down, the feature cards are rebuilt as live fragments of the product, not screenshots.

Playtime and achievements already existed, but they ended in a number on a profile. Gamification turns that data into a loop: daily and weekly missions, streaks and levels earn points, and points buy avatar frames and banners in a store, which are then shown off on the profile that started it all. The design work was less about the screens and more about the economy they expose. Every reward needed a visible reason, and every purchase needed a place to be seen.

Two features came from the same question: where does Hydra stop working? On Steam Deck, Game Mode suspends desktop apps, so sessions and cloud saves stop too. The Decky plugin keeps them alive inside Steam's own quick-access panel, following its patterns for anything interactive and handling the awkward rules plainly: no restoring a backup of a running game, no cloud features without a subscription, no deleting saves from a sidebar. Hydra Classics did the same for older games, with a catalogue, per-system settings and Recomps that need no emulator setup.

Hydra Cloud is the paid tier, in a product where most people arrive for free. The subscription page leads with what a subscriber keeps, not what a free user lacks, and Gifting lets the community do the selling. Onboarding follows the same logic: a short tour that gets a library into place first and introduces paid features only once there is something to protect.

Features reach players through a release, so I treat launch as part of the product. Every major version gets its own package: changelog banners in English, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian, and vertical reels for social, many of them built directly in HTML and code so the motion can reuse real interface pieces. The range below runs from product walkthroughs to a 1-bit trophy teaser and a Halloween found-footage piece.

Designing in public changed how I work. Metadata arrives from sources nobody controls, so components have to look intentional with missing art and odd aspect ratios. Contributors implement at their own pace, so each change has to stand alone rather than wait for a sweeping redesign. And the feedback is immediate and specific. The habit I kept is treating the system, not the screen, as the deliverable.