itch.io

Starting a thread rather than a one-off post, because I'd rather have somewhere to keep posting than announce something once and vanish.

WHAT IT IS

Bomberman-style arena game. A hub with 17 doors: eight decades (1955 to 2087) and nine sports. Each door changes exactly ONE rule of the game, and that rule is written on a plaque next to it.

1955 ATOMIC - long fuse, you get time to run

1985 ARCADE - you start with +1 blast range

1997 PIXEL - you start with 2 bombs

2087 NEON - the floor collapses sooner

GOLF - the fire lingers on the ground

RACING - very short fuses

One knob per door, never two. It's a rule I set myself early and I've been surprised how much work it does: every door is a sentence you can finish, and I never have to explain a door twice.

WHERE IT ACTUALLY IS

Published, playable, and almost nobody has played it: 6 visits, 3 minute average session, 0% day-1 retention. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I'd rather fix the loop now than pour traffic into a leaky bucket.

WHAT I FIXED THIS WEEK

Two bugs, and both were the same species: code that looked like it worked.

The respawn button. Dying and then pressing PLAY AGAIN dropped you in the middle of the hub instead of back at your door. The reason: I was calling PivotTo on a character Roblox was about to delete and replace two seconds later. Every placement of a dead player had been silently thrown away since day one. It LOOKED fine on the other code path only because the default spawn point happens to be in the hub - the right answer for the wrong reason. The fix is to stop moving the player and instead write down where they should end up, then apply it to the new character when it arrives.

The countdown. Someone pointed out today that my door countdown steps in 0.25 second chunks, because 0.25s is my server loop interval and I was replicating the literal text "STARTS IN 7" to every client four times a second, for all 17 doors, whether anyone was looking at them or not. I had been reading that for weeks as "the countdown feels chunky" and never once as "you are sending the wrong thing". Sending the end timestamp once and letting the client do the math is both cheaper and smoother.

THE OPEN QUESTION

The one I can't answer from inside: does "one door, one rule" read as a menu of real choices, or as seventeen versions of the same game with a number tweaked? Seventeen is also a lot to hand someone on their first screen, and I keep wondering whether three visible with the rest unlocked would be better, or whether being handed all of them is the whole point.

If you've built anything with a lot of parallel modes, I'd like to hear which way you went and whether you regretted it.

The game: https://www.roblox.com/games/79128877763618/ - free, but it's on Roblox so it needs an account, and it's rated 16+ right now. The question above doesn't need you to play it.

Next update will be the countdown rewrite and whether it actually changed how the first minute feels.

Bomberman-style arena game, free, no download. I'm after the kind of feedback you only get from people who have never seen it before.

The structure: a hub with 17 doors. Eight are decades, nine are sports. Each door changes exactly ONE rule of the game, and that rule is written on a plaque next to the door:

1955 — long fuse, you get time to run

1985 — you start with +1 blast range

1997 — you start with 2 bombs

2087 — the floor collapses sooner

GOLF — the fire lingers on the ground

RACING — very short fuses

The idea was that "one door, one rule" would be legible: read the plaque, know what's different, pick. What I can't tell any more, having built the thing, is whether that reads as a menu of real choices or as seventeen versions of the same game with one number tweaked.

The numbers so you know what you're looking at: 3 minute average session, 0% day-1 retention. Tiny — which is exactly why I'd rather fix the loop than buy traffic.

Three things I'd like an outside opinion on:

1. Does "one rule per door" sound like a reason to try a second door, or does it sound like a settings menu wearing a costume?

2. Seventeen is a lot to face on your first screen. Would you rather be shown three and unlock the rest, or is being handed all of them the whole point?

3. If you do open it: what were you doing 60 seconds in? That's the number I'm actually chasing.

Link: https://www.roblox.com/games/79128877763618/

Two honest warnings so nobody wastes a click: it's on Roblox, so it needs a Roblox account, and it's currently rated 16+ so under-16 accounts can't open it. If neither of those works for you, questions 1 and 2 don't need you to play at all and I'd still take the answer.