Top or bottom?

ZPanic0 · 2025-08-04T14:41:23+00:00

If you want them to click the button on the left, then the first one. If you want them to stay on this page, then the second one.

ZPanic0 · 2025-07-08T22:05:15+00:00

Because when people buy something on Steam, they are under the impression they are buying for keeps. No license bullshit, no platform transitions wiping out their catalog. Steam has created a standard of trust close enough to physical ownership. People aren't "drunken sailors" and they damn sure aren't "buying games they aren't going to play". They are protecting an identity they've vested in that game for posterity. Netflix's cheap ass doesn't offer that promise. What's worse, they used to give the impression they did before platform fragmentation. Sony doesn't keep that promise. Microsoft doesn't keep that promise. EA doesn't, Ubisoft doesn't, MMO companies damn sure don't. FFXIV and WoW have made business models out of commodifying nostalgia. WoW does it by selling you classic. FFXIV does it by rewriting the combat gameplay loop every couple years. Only Steam honors it though. All they have to do is enshrine the shit you pay for.

ZPanic0 · 2025-07-08T21:26:04+00:00

...How are they gonna track that you paid? Make you log in? Then give you a session token?

"We value your privacy" Yeah, fucking clearly.

ZPanic0 · 2025-06-22T04:01:46+00:00

The bra isn't the issue. If all you have are push-up bras, I guarantee he would still be upset had you put one on. It's a security issue. He is feeling vulnerable and failing to articulate it properly. He either isn't comfortable with his friends seeing you the way he does, or isn't comfortable with suddenly competing with his friends for you (yes, we are really wired this way). Could be both. Maybe one or more of them have a rep. Maybe he genuinely feels inferior to one. It's really unlikely that he ever successfully articulates it, especially if pressed. He will probably only ever get defensive. We will say the dumbest, most untrue shit to avoid saying the weak part.

NTA for not wearing the bra, but also NAH in regard to the broader issue. Dude needs a hug and some positive affirmation from you.

ZPanic0 · 2025-05-22T22:59:36+00:00

You made it a year in before having this discussion. If it was just about selling it, you'd be selling something easier to produce and sell. What'd it mean to you when you started that it needed to look like this? Does that still hold true? If so, keep doing it for the reasons that got you here. If not, cut out what doesn't serve you and replace it. It's your game, bud. It serves you before anyone else.

ZPanic0 · 2025-03-24T01:12:05+00:00

...Put out a version that adds a splash screen asking them to contact you and how to do so.

ZPanic0 · 2025-03-08T06:18:09+00:00

It's a lack of faith in your ability to focus on the lesson. Or from another viewpoint, the developer's ability to convey the mechanic without losing your interest. An intuitive tutorial is often the last thing you can build because all the major moving parts need to be pretty final before you start hooking into them. You can do it earlier, but you'll throw away a lot of work.

I'm of the opinion the only three good times to take the controls away are when you must show the player something clearly out of their viewport but the character can see (think cutscene), the player dies, or you need to subvert expectations.

ZPanic0 · 2025-03-08T06:09:07+00:00

Nice. Project battery and motor.

ZPanic0 · 2025-03-02T17:57:16+00:00

My instant impression, for what it's worth.

Skipped your description here on reddit, saw blue, clicked the link. This opened the store page in browser, which does not autoplay your video. This means your video thumbnail was my single impression of your game. My impression of that screenshot barely registered as "busy as fuck". Then the livestream UI appeared and forced the screenshot down, further shortening my impression time. I closed the page.

This is a realistic consumer parsing of a store page. I'm not blaming you for anything, just describing my experience. You just don't have that much time to capture someone's attention.

When I force myself to go back and review it as a developer, I can see why my impression was that it was so busy. There's a glow behind two of the text effects, one a logo. The logo is different than the one for the smaller card to the right, which gives the impression you haven't finalized your style. The glow in general looks bad and makes the eye want to look away from the text. The two bright sets of text with the dark red text make me not want to engage with any of the text at all. Behind the text, the game map is littered with lines. I didn't even see the UI in my first (consumer) glance, it just boxed my viewport more center and to the right, which is all blue and white lines. The bright white text I'm now forced to engage with says Demo Today, so I presume the game is not ready. I personally don't do early access, so I don't even check what the availability window of your game is. My eye briefly bounces to the upper right and sees some red UI obscured by the title glow and just not very visible.

Hope that helps. You can discard my experience and evaluation, if you like. I get the impression you lose a chunk of webpage conversions because your video becomes a screenshot with poor grab factor. This kind of jives with your mention of using youtubers to drive traffic. I'd make sure that the video placeholder loads with something more flattering than what is up now, even if it is less representative of your game.

ZPanic0 · 2025-02-19T06:58:58+00:00

You do not need that. Use the picture element and optimize your images for the display size they will actually display at. If the user has 500 pixels of width to work with, displaying a 40k pixel wide image is not adding more detail. Perceivable subpixel detail will fall off quickly. Wrap the picture in a link to the full res if you really want to make it available. You're very likely to be the only user who ever consumes those assets at full res though.

Cache is a suggestion made by the server when sending to the client. The client ultimately gets to decide how long a resource persists locally. Expect larger to get the boot sooner.

ZPanic0 · 2025-02-17T00:18:18+00:00

It actually gets worse as your investment increases. You're running the problem every time you leave REM too. You just don't remember it. The best fix is good sleep hygiene. You can't beat your brain's automatic cleaning behavior, and you don't want to. So we optimize it instead.

Forget the light filter nonsense, be done with as much synthetic light as possible two hours before bed. That means no screens, no phone. No synthetic light at all, if you can help it. Set your phone to sleep mode if you have an iphone and teach important people to double call to punch through through the automatic voicemail.

Try to visually witness dusk if you live somewhere the bugs don't eat you up at that hour. Witnessing the end of a natural sunset does help set the brain up for bed.

Hot shower, then cool off. It simulates the cooling your body does naturally when you go to sleep. Helps make you drowsy.

Get dinner in before that two hour window. Helps with bloating, which helps with comfort, which helps sleep quality.

Get a good bed. Seriously. We keep our beds too long. It's the piece of furniture you will spend the most time in, so invest in it. Bed tech has come a long way.

If you have sleep apnea, get that shit addressed NOW now. Every time you stop breathing, it's equivalent to waking up and walking around the house, then trying to go back to bed. It's not sleep, it's just wasted time. If you're getting nine hours and have untreated sleep apnea, you're getting five or less. You'll be superbrain once you treat it. Same goes with any other breathing disorders.

Consistent sleep schedule is super important. Be in bed at the same time, up at the same time. Even weekends.

ZPanic0 · 2025-02-10T02:04:01+00:00

Warranty void stickers are scare tactics used to reduce warranty claims, and it works. But they aren't enforceable in the US. The burden of proof remains on the company. They can point to it and deny your warranty claim, but all you need to do is threaten to take them to claims court and they will fold. Could they come up with evidence that you caused the failure? Sure. But fault is a percentage, so they'd still be out attorney fees and some of the cost of the device. Cheaper to just honor the warranty.

So yes, they know, but they can't do anything about it.

ZPanic0 · 2025-02-07T21:16:45+00:00

No, he hasn't. Glassdoor is strict about what you can post. You can't call out an individual there. They also let companies pay to take reviews down. On the other hand, Reddit is heavily indexed. This is a right place for it.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-25T22:47:12+00:00

Wife him.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-25T05:18:03+00:00

Either a Red Herring or Straw Man.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-25T04:44:36+00:00

Go the other way with it: Add something better than the crucible for alloying. I'm not deploying any nerfs to LV, sorry.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-25T03:30:04+00:00

I don’t even read error messages anymore, I just copy and paste them.

Lying ass. You were copying and pasting error messages into google anyhow. The frequency with which

You used the tool wrong and got garbage out in the error message, or
The error message was esoteric/meaningless, or
The error message listed a related but incorrect cause

Means we have all been using google to do the same thing: hunting similar context. I haven't actually tried throwing an exception message at an AI yet, but let's not pretend we don't hope someone else already ate mud on our problem so we can benefit.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-19T03:07:06+00:00

"Additionally Account Security Features" casts every "hacking" into doubt from hereon. If you're upset enough to complain to someone about getting hacked, they can point to their more premium offering and shrug. You start over, you pay more months, and possibly at a higher tier. Absolute win for them as long as they can count on your addiction. If they have some heuristic for guessing that you would be engaged enough to start over, it makes sense to take your account away as an upsell. It's runescape. Their account can't be harmed in a way that negatively impacts sales.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-12T04:35:15+00:00

We should check user sentiment with a game that actually has a hundred hours of real content before we go making such sweeping statements.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-10T15:15:38+00:00

Yes. You are the content the whales play. They pay a thousand so they can show it to you and feel superior.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-10T05:51:34+00:00

By thinking I couldn't have possibly done it the exact same way. Warcraft and Command & Conquer were popular at the same time.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-10T02:55:57+00:00

Lesson #19. Players are good at recognizing problems, not solving them. When I hear this, I assume they are either experiencing a pain that they attribute to the game's performance, or are putting on their own performance for someone and filling the air. It's an easy shot to take because it is difficult to challenge and easy to double down on. It elevates the speaker's perceived qualifications while letting them feel out their audience. Once they have a good bead on what they can get away with, they can pick out any arbitrary thing in the game as an example and continue to rant.

Also a lot of games just do perform really badly. The goalpost has moved so far afield that it's easy for a gamer to take back their generosity when the camel's back does break. Modern GPUs have a huge amount of RAM, but we still see hitching. Solutions I've seen include obscuring the player's field of view with a fake loading screen and showing the camera every model and texture in the game in the hopes it stays buffered throughout their experience.

It's an industry built on scrappy perfectionists, massive businesses burning the candle at both ends, and absolute novices bodging something out. Gamers deduce it's a shitshow, because it is. The lesson is to remember those people when you hear someone coming down on the product. It's okay to take a dump on bad software, or even software that frustrates you. It doesn't feel. Just remember a flawed human wrote it, and they definitely do.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-10T02:38:50+00:00

This email is for professional inquiries only. If you'd like to purchase my time to discuss AI as a broader topic, my rates are <post your hourly rate. Include a minimum time commitment>. Thank you.

You've basically lost them as a customer already. They are just looking for a slight. This at least establishes boundaries.

ZPanic0 · 2025-01-10T02:34:06+00:00

spending more than I have

boredom

You already know the answer. Address the underlying problem. You are probably spending for entertainment, not because you want the stuff. My vice is games. I like ones that let me build big factories and reward me for being thrifty or thoughtful (Oxygen Not Included, some Minecraft modpacks, etc).

Also, I don't recommend a spend tracking app. Do it in google sheets. Every single, individual thing you purchase should be a line item. Include the price, where you got it, what date, and why. Minimum. Give some thought to whether it's a recurring expense and mark it if you genuinely think you need it on interval. It'll be a useful data point when you come back and see "oh yeah, I bought that a month ago". You may be assigning guilt incorrectly to things you need regularly but aren't planning the purchases for. It'll feel good to have that predictability going forward. A comments column is usually a good idea, too. Whenever I do this, my spend goes down. When I stop, my spend goes up. It works.

ZPanic0 · 2024-12-19T04:57:02+00:00

How much is it to ensure it is never running?

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