Building a project of your own, like NIU senior Christian Temen did with Ludabase? 71 North’s Founder Services can help you take the next step.
Ludabase is a social website that lets users create albums with their favorite video games and books. Individuals with similar entertainment interests can comment or like other user’s albums to engage with others.
Ludabase was created by Christian Temen, a senior operations management and information systems major. Temen said the experience he gained by coding since he was a high school sophomore helped the process.
“It took a little bit of learning, like learning how to set up my own hosting server for the website, how to really learn how to use HTML and all the different programming languages that I used,” Temen said.
Ludabase has millions of different games and books that users can browse through, all stemming from Steam’s API, an online gaming platform, and Google’s API.
API, application programming inference, allows website developers to pull information from other major sites to use for their own websites, according to Steam.
“Every single game that’s on Steam is on there. So millions of different games. And then for books, I use Google’s API, and they have up to 40 million different titles, and then people can also create their own pages for that,” Temen said. “If they have their own game, that they want to that’s not on there, and then have it on the site.”
Temen said he created the site to help like-minded individuals find community.
“Pretty much anyone that has any kind of interests in gaming or books or really any kind of fandom, they could really just join it and then find other people that have similar interests,” Temen said.
Stemming from inspiration from a friend, Temen had the idea to create Ludabase.
“I remember being on Steam marketplace and seeing one of my friends, they had like 810 games on their wish list in there, and I was thinking there could be a better way to organize this. So I decided just to find a way to organize it myself,” Temen said.
Temen started working on the website in October 2025, but did not start picking up speed until January. The website officially launched in April.
Features in development include badges for users and albums.
“I’ve been actually developing a badge system so people that join could collect little badges, and if they share the site with other people, they can earn tokens and then use those tokens into getting more badges,” Temen said. “They can maybe use those badges to customize their profile or customize the albums they create.”
Ludabase can be found on Instagram and TikTok to learn more and stay updated on future updates.
Originally published by the Northern Star, written by Lupita Diaz. Screenshot: Lupita Diaz, Northern Star.