Integrating Heroic Games with Home Assistant

Heroic Games is an amazing launcher that I use for games bought from stores like GOG so I can play them on my Debian desktop without any vendor-specific launcher. It works great and has interesting features like executing scripts when you are about to start a game.

As a self-hosted enthusiast and Home Assistant user, this gave me the idea to create an integration for Home Assistant so my automations can take advantage of this information.

So there were 2 clear objectives:

1. I wanted my office ambient lighting to automatically switch to a more relaxed setting whenever I launch a game in Heroic.
2. A notification when I spend too much time playing a game, reminding me to take a break (yes, I often lose track of time when gaming).

I was also testing the OpenCode Go subscription, so I decided to give it a try. Mostly, I notice that LLMs love to write Python code, but for the sake of this small script I instructed the model to avoid Python and create a small script in Bash, keeping external dependencies minimal when executed by Heroic.

A key dependency for the project is MQTT, which allows me to send messages to a Mosquitto broker hosted in Home Assistant. Upon receiving a message, Home Assistant updates the corresponding sensor entities.

While MQTT adds a requirement, keeping it to a single dependency won’t add too much complexity if all you want to do is let Home Assistant know that you are playing a game.

All instructions for installing, configuring, and using the script are available in the GitHub repository that I am planning to maintain if there is interest. So far, it is serving me well.

Heroic Games Home Assistant

Connects Heroic Games Launcher to Home Assistant over MQTT

Repository

After setting this up, I created a simple automation that sends a Telegram notification when I have been playing for 30 minutes:

alias: Notifica Juego de Heroic Games
description: ''
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - binary_sensor.heroic_games_launcher_heroic_playing
    to:
      - 'on'
    for:
      hours: 0
      minutes: 30
      seconds: 0
conditions: []
actions:
  - action: notify.telegram_jono
    metadata: {}
    data:
      message: >-
        🎮 Llevas 30 minutos jugando
         en
        Heroic Games
mode: single

Future Work

• If Home Assistant is able to create a media_player from MQTT, I will definitely update this so instead of just showing a sensor with the current game, it will show the poster of the game on the media_player.
• For some reason, the script has to be set up per game in Heroic. I think there is an issue with Heroic as far as I could research. Since I play one game at a time this is not inconvenient for me, but I will try to test this further or submit a bug report when time permits.

Disclosure: AI was used to improve readability and clarity; the whole process was tested and created by me.