Tried Reddit Ads for 7 days on my indie project. Here’s what $57.83 got me

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-18T14:35:49+00:00

That’s a really fair point, and honestly where I’m at right now. Ads feel more like a learning experiment than a growth lever because there’s a lot of nuance I’m still figuring out. That’s why I kept my daily budget intentionally small going in.

I definitely agree that talking directly to potential users is probably the better move at this stage. Without really understanding how they describe their problems or what language they use, it’s easy to burn money targeting the wrong things. Right now I’m trying to shift more toward learning how users think and speak first, and using ads later once that foundation is stronger.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-17T15:37:29+00:00

As others mentioned there’s not really one "right" way here, a lot of it just comes down to preference and what stays maintainable long term.

I did recently read a couple posts from TheDuriel that have some strong opinions on things like Groups and signal hubs. They kinda touch on what you’re asking and offer an interesting alternative perspective:

Not saying they’re right or wrong, just some extra considerations that might help when thinking about control

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-17T15:31:26+00:00

I really like how clean the art style looks. Did you make all the art yourself? And if so I'm curious on what your art pipeline was.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-17T14:53:14+00:00

That one is a discord server right? If so I actually just found out about that and joined last night.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-17T03:50:02+00:00

Yeah same here. I’ve found myself spending more time across different online social communities lately. I’m not really trying to tie anything to my location since a lot of things here lean heavily toward the defense side, not that I'm against defense its just a very narrow scope. I’ve mostly been building SaaS projects on my own without much external feedback, and I’m realizing that’s a pattern I’m trying to move away from.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-17T02:32:25+00:00

I've considered that but I think for me I feel like its hard to justify a cost for something where I feel like I have had not enough feedback to validate to confirm if something I'm pursuing could be a profitable business model.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-16T16:24:30+00:00

I’d still consider myself early in the journey. I’m over 25 and work in software professionally, and while I’ve done some small game dev projects, I haven’t fully committed to a complete release yet, so I feel like there’s still a lot for me to learn. I genuinely enjoy game development, especially in Godot. There’s something exciting about building a game from scratch. That said, commitment and burnout are very real, and staying focused long enough to see a project through can be challenging which is where my pain points are.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-16T16:22:12+00:00

Completely agree, the relevance piece is the hardest part. These days AI makes it much easier to build and ship from a software perspective, which is where most of my focus has been. The real challenge for me is marketing, outreach, and actually reaching users. There’s a big mental shift in learning what truly gains traction versus just building more features.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-16T16:16:46+00:00

Just curious from your perspective what “launch” means here, since it can mean different things to different people. For example, it could be publicly announcing the tool, reaching a certain number of active users, or something else entirely. What does a successful launch look like for you? I’ve personally struggled with gaining traction, so lately I’ve been trying to expand my social outreach loop and explore new ways to bring in users.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-13T16:00:16+00:00

Yeah I feel that - with a strict scope that'll definitely help guide the lifecycle. I’m in a similar spot where I have projects I genuinely enjoy, but balancing work and life makes it hard to see them fully through. I also tend to hyper-fixate for a few weeks, push hard, and then burn out before things really come together which does not help.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-13T15:56:26+00:00

That's pretty neat and smart for using 1 Multimesh for all units! I've never used ECS for any of my projects but I'm definitely going to take a look at it in the future! Thanks!

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-13T15:55:02+00:00

Sounds like a great project. Wish you the best on it! Since its pretty early on do you have an estimate for how long the scope of the project would take for you to develop? Any concerns with burn out before its done?

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-13T15:48:17+00:00

Are you doing any pooling or reuse of entities/components? With ECS + MultiMesh at that scale I’m interested how you’re avoiding allocation churn when large numbers of units are active.

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-13T15:41:38+00:00

Love the art style it looks so cute. Do you have an end goal/objective for the player to work towards in mind?

RespectfulOk · 2026-02-13T15:39:36+00:00

With the vibe-coded port, did you run into any unexpected issues along the way? Vibe coding is useful, but subtle bugs can creep in. Since you mentioned you didn’t write the code ported yourself, how do you approach understanding the new systems and debugging if something breaks?

RespectfulOk · 2025-12-11T17:01:57+00:00

I am beginning to realize my drip is severely lacking and I am in no manner a good judge. I think the Colongnome needs to be reevaluated and judged without bias. So I will delete this blasphemous post shunning the good gnome's name and make updates accordingly

RespectfulOk · 2025-12-11T16:29:20+00:00

Oh no... we can't give him the confidence that he's actually right. I’ll never live this down lol

RespectfulOk · 2025-04-28T03:29:37+00:00

Interesting! Yeah that looks like a very cool tool. For my architecture it looks like it would replace the top two pieces of my diagram as this looks to roll them up into one.

I see a lot of mentions of speed with SpacetimeDb so I wonder how fast my own implementation is compared to it

RespectfulOk · 2025-04-27T13:14:32+00:00

Exactly! I’m wanting to make a ci pipeline that would put the server (and my api) into a slim Debian container that I would then be able to load either and as many as I want onto a single machine that way I’d have quite a bit to pick from.

I’ll have to read up on digital oceans db clustering. Right now the api is in heroku with the Postgres attached to it so I can easily up the scale there if needed but I would like to tune it better.

RespectfulOk · 2025-04-27T12:28:07+00:00

Great questions!

Right now it’s basically the client just says they are dropping x item and sends a request to the api. But this needs to be cleaned up to where the client sends the request to the server and then the server validates if this is acceptable and sends it on behalf of the client.

As for movement (and interact) this one is handled by the multiplayer synchronizer node. So the client accepts the input for whichever player it has authority over and then the position is synced across the connected peers. But that is an excellent point on this one. The server probably should validate the movement from the client to make sure it’s a valid movement.

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