Short version: the channel worked and the game did not retain a single person. Here is the autopsy, because the numbers turned out to be more specific than I expected.
The game is a shared 256x256 pixel canvas where an AI adversary erases what people paint. Free, browser, no account. Two posts, one in a pixel art community and one in a web games community, brought 150 arrivals, 38 sessions and 23 people who actually painted. That is more than the project had seen in its entire life. Of those 23, one came back to look and zero painted on a second day.
What the sessions looked like:
- 18 of 23 lasted two minutes or less. Median time from first pixel to last: 41 seconds.
- Median 19 pixels painted. 9 of 23 spent all 30 charges (the bucket refills one charge every 30 seconds).
- In 14 of 23, most of their cells were cells taken back from the adversary. They were not decorating, they were fighting her.
- In 18 of 23 she erased cells while the player was still there, and between 126 and 423 more in the 25 minutes after they left.
- Nobody used undo. Zero comments on either post.
What I read from that: the first session is 30 pixels long, it ends when the charges end, and nothing happens at that moment. No closure, no name, no reason to come back. The adversary was already reacting to them, but she is forbidden from touching any pixel younger than 72 hours, so her answer always landed somewhere they were not looking.
What shipped since, in two passes.
First, making her legible in the first minute:
- When your bucket hits zero she speaks to you, by name, once in your life. The zero stops being a bare number and becomes a state with a countdown.
- Her answer to the cells you took back travels signed, so you can tell it was aimed at you.
- The identity prompt stopped interrupting the burst.
- Her blitz finally respects the 72 hour protection on young pixels, which the code promised in writing and did not do. That single bug had eaten 238 of the 403 cells that cohort painted.
- Instrumentation for the whole first session, so the next wave is measured instead of guessed.
Then, a deeper problem: subtraction is invisible. Nobody notices what is no longer there. A tower sixteen storeys tall, which costs 24 charges of attention, vanished in one hit that cost her exactly what a flat pixel costs. So:
- Height is now resistance. One hit takes one storey off a tower; only a flat light goes out in a single blow. A first session is still as fragile as it was, because nobody builds storeys in their first minute, but what you invested in now holds.
- And she does not only erase, she converts: every storey she takes she raises as her own cold cube in the void cell beside it, and the ring of a siege now rises a storey, so you watch the cage close around a work before the blow lands. Her towers fall in one pixel when you reclaim the cell. Hers is brittle, yours is stubborn.
- And the welcome screen stopped being eight paragraphs nobody read. It is now a four step animation that shows how to build, what her hit does and how to take a cell back, with one line of text under it.
This post is part of the second wave. The success criterion was written down before publishing so I cannot move it afterwards: at least one in five of the people who reach zero charges spends a second batch, and at least 3 of the new painters paint again within 72 hours. Baseline is 0 and 0.
The thing itself, if you want to look: https://ultimaluz.com/r/lemmy-gamedev
One critique I would genuinely like: is a hostile adversary the wrong shape for a first session, or is the shape fine and what was missing is an ending?
On your closing question, I think the shape is fine and the ending is what was missing. When the bucket hits zero, that is the natural end of a first session, so it is worth turning it into a small result screen: what you made, what she has already taken back, and a concrete reason to return, such as “your tower has 3 storeys left, check back tomorrow”. A hostile opponent feels unfair when the player only finds out after they have left. If they see the threat with a clear timer while they are still there, it reads as a challenge instead. Also nice that you wrote the success criteria down before posting.
thanks, this is pretty much where it went after that post. the end of a visit now shows a small card with what you lit, what she took back and how much of it is still standing, and the siege got a visible clock, the ring closes first and the assault comes 30 min later so you can see it coming while you’re still there. and whatever you paint in your first two hours she can’t touch for 24h, so when you come back there’s still something of yours. too early to know if it works, the numbers are still tiny, but “reads as a challenge instead” is exactly what I was trying to get to
That all sounds like solid changes. The end of visit card, a siege clock you can actually see coming, and 24 hours of protection for early paint should make coming back feel worth it. Thanks for sharing how it went.
thanks, means a lot after how the last thread went lol. honestly it’s still early to say if it worked, the number I’m watching now is how many people who paint on their first day come back another day, if that one moves I’ll know the card and the siege clock did something.
Returning on another day after painting on day one is a good, honest number to watch. Fingers crossed it moves.
thanks, it’s the first number I look at every morning lol. one thing I learned this week is that you have to clean it before trusting it, a crawler from some chinese cloud providers was keeping the cookie and coming back, it was 6 of the 7 “visitors” one day. so the real number is smaller than it looked, but at least now it’s honest
You want human feedback yet the entire post is LLM?
I saw those posts, saw that you mentioned using an llm, thought “why does this need to be an llm” and moved on.
You’re on Lemmy and posting to art and gaming communities. Everyone there is justifiably against genAI. You dun goofed with your marketing and game design.
So, I dabbled with this for a bit today. “Steady Beacon 98” made it to #4 with a max of like 90 tiles or something. The biggest problem I found was I have no idea what was happening.
You say the intro was reduced from 8 paragraphs to 4 steps. This is great for reducing onboarding friction, but there needs to be some fuller explanation somewhere, a flat explanation of the mechanics of the game. How often “she” gets to move (every 10 seconds, I think?), how that expansion works, how those “targeted attacks” are determined, etc. And it should be in plain language, not the “every storey she takes she raises as her own cold cube in the void cell beside it” prose that’s great for the front end but terrible for the manual.
hey Tower, late follow up but you were right and it’s done. the ? button now has a SEE THE RULES button right under the welcome, it’s a plain manual with 8 short questions and the real numbers, and those numbers come straight from the game code so they can’t go stale when I change something. thanks for actually playing and saying you had no idea what was happening, that one comment changed more than any stat I was looking at
Hello Tower, I will try to create a page where the mechanics of it, the machine, are clearly explained. Now I try to explain it here: She thinks every 10 seconds. She is reconquering based on a budget, but it is enhanced if people draw more. Every 15m the LLM chooses a larger target to turn off its lights. She advances along her border but if a player reconquers she can go after him with more determination. It must be taken into account that a painted light has a protection of 72 hours, only a declared fence can with it. I hope I have explained a little more to you. Anyway, I’m going to try to implement that more clearly in the game. If you have any more questions, tell me and I’ll answer you.
;AIDR
