MUTALO

Hi! Thanks for your reply.

Since the war in Ukraine and the increasing risk of a potential WW3, I’ve become more aware of how fragile internet access can be. So over the past few years, I’ve been archiving things that matter to me—my GOG games, some artworks from Pixiv (with artist permission), classic books, music scores, and soon probably some manga.

The archive was already portable, but it quickly became chaotic and hard to navigate. So I decided to improve it by organizing it more thoughtfully—using a portable virtual machine as a base. Just today, I downloaded Lubuntu, and I plan to configure it tomorrow. The goal is to build a clean, offline ecosystem where I can manage everything easily: Calibre for books, something like Playnite for games, and so on—complete with tags, descriptions, cover art, and sometimes reference images or videos.

Basically, I’m trying to recreate a more accessible and user-friendly way to browse my collection—something that feels like Pixiv for images, or GOG for games.

So far, the games archive hasn’t been overloaded. But on Vector and Freem, I recently discovered some retro Japanese games made freeware by their devs, which I’m a big fan of. With those added, my collection will quickly become as large and hard to manage as my Pixiv artwork archive. That’s why I really need to get organized.

I obtained permission from GOG to archive game descriptions and metadata for personal use, along with the game itself. But itch.io has remained silent. And since many devs here are indie creators—like the artists I’ve contacted on Pixiv—I prefer to ask individually. A few artists on Pixiv (~3 out of 80) declined, and I fully respected that—even though, in the end, they upload their works to be seen rather than downloaded like a game. It’s a different context, but I still prefer to ask developers too, just to be sure and respectful.

Thanks for reading and thanks for asking. I’d really appreciate your permission to save your game data for my personal archive. I’m happy to share my motivations and how I approach my project, so thank you for taking the time to get to know my project as a whole.

TL;DR: Since the Ukraine war and the risk of WW3, I’ve become a data hoarder. But I want to stay organized and respect legal and ethical boundaries.