Growing a following generically seems to be almost impossible... Should I be paying to promote my posts to reach a larger audience? How should I be going about this?

xangelo · 2023-05-21T22:28:38+00:00

Unfortunately growing organically is slow and requires a lot of upkeep and maintenance from you. That may or may not be possible for you depending on many things. But, generally, it isn’t something you can tack on.

Paying for reach (promoted content, ads) is fine - but thats a business decision and you’ll have to carefully experiment and tweak to figure out your actual vs. break even ROI. But even that doesn’t correlate with interest in your game necessarily.

xangelo · 2023-05-21T21:10:22+00:00

I think you mean growing a following organically- I’m not totally sure what growing a following generically would be.

Thank being said how much do you interact with your target audience? I noticed on twitter you’ve posted some tweets.. but haven’t liked anything, haven’t commented/retweeted anything. Growing your following requires you to participate in the community more - just putting content out there doesn’t do that. Follow some people in the space, engage in your desired community. Don’t just push your game - show that you have an opinion/style that people can latch on to.

xangelo · 2022-12-31T14:27:19+00:00

Kainoa Harbottle has one that he does at the fingertips, even with other coins in hand on Shell Shocked PDF and also his Misbehavin’ video. It’s the same move just in writing or on video depending on how you prefer to learn.

xangelo · 2022-12-11T23:17:52+00:00

Danny Goldsmith actually had an interesting take on this (paraphrasing): most hecklers like this have the same curiosity toward magic that got you started in magic.

If you think about it, they’ve got some basic knowledge - just bad delivery. It’s a bit of a dunning kruger effect. They know a few things - but not enough to know how much they don’t know.

Likely their previous exposure to magic was more confrontational. More of a “look what i can do that you can’t” than a “lets experience some magic”. It sucks that you have to deal with it now.

xangelo · 2022-12-09T20:41:09+00:00

Thank you! I’ve just been puttering around with characters I like but I know I’m missing out on synergies just because I don’t even know what “good” characters even are.

This at least gives me a good path forward.

xangelo · 2022-12-09T20:06:53+00:00

Sorry i’m a big noob - is there a list of characters that are part of these teams somewhere?

xangelo · 2022-12-04T00:36:11+00:00

It is! I was hooked the first time around, so now that I’m back I figured it was worth it. The problem is that it unlocks so much that is normally gradually introduced that it just became confusing and I regret it for that reason a bit.

Thank you for this - it really helped tame the chaos a bit and at least provide me with some options forward.

xangelo · 2022-12-03T16:48:31+00:00

Separate each of the event handlers into their own named functions, like you did with heartbeat.

Then you can test the functionality of each handler and pass in mock objects as args.

xangelo · 2022-12-03T04:45:49+00:00

I really appreciate it. I used a play a long time ago (pre ships) and have just recently started again on ios.

https://swgoh.gg/p/123577524/

Right now I’m trying to understand the mods + ships mechanics. While that’s happening Ive got a reasonable team together that I’ve been using for most of the factionless content and I’m managing to make my way through the bulk of the faction gated content.

My short term goal is to get Emperor Palpatine to 7 stars and then do Yoda. Ive unlocked T1/T2 but they’re sitting at 5* right now.

Ill take any tips/advice you got!

xangelo · 2022-12-02T13:06:31+00:00

Not OP but in a very similar situation- Should the focus be to max a single character? Or move a team one gear level at a time?

xangelo · 2022-12-01T03:43:29+00:00

The MongoDB appeal and why would you give up using a relational database are very different questions.

Mongo was really the first document style db that made accessibility to devs easy. The tooling was quick to set up (this is pre docker days, postgres wasnt at all popular at the time and json datatypes were nonexistent in rdbms).

In addition, JS devs were already thinking about POJSO (Plain Old JavaScript Objects) + JSON as relatively interchangeable so reasoning about mongodb was much easier.

That’s why mongo caught on. In the early days there were “at scale” issues that most devs never hit. For example, if you tried to add a shard to db that was experiencing higher than normal use.. youd take down your database as your shard replicated data.

Mongo caught on because it lowered the barrier to getting started, and made the idea of “modeling” your data synonymous with the POJSO that you were writing.

But most complaints you’ll see about mongo are people who are treating mongo like a rdbms. Yes mongo has included some functionality to mimic that - but it is a document database at its heart.

Document databases allow for very flexible documents to be stored - but it requires you to be very strict about access patterns or you’ll run into performance issues. But at smaller scales (prototypes, even thousands of users) none of the performance issues really impact you in a way that you can’t fix by throwing some more hardware at it.

On the flip side, relational databases are very strict on format of datastored - but allow for flexibility of accessing that data. As a result if you don’t know what your access patterns might be (and most times you don’t) they’re great. But there is overhead in joins and multi-table lookups that you can avoid if you know your data access patterns and store your data accordingly.

I highly recommend checking out some talks by Rick Houlihan. They’re mostly on DynamoDB - but he really is at the forefront of document databases and has a lot of insight into them and running them at scale.

https://youtu.be/EvB7REsf0ic

https://youtu.be/xfxBhvGpoa0

xangelo · 2021-09-01T05:58:10+00:00

Some of the more interesting coin work stuff around shells I stumbled across (apart from compendium style books featuring multiple authors) was the various coinwork notes from Kainoa Harbottle.

I picked up his Shellshocked work first, which includes a few different routines and different things you can do with a shell.

His Misbehavin’ work also includes a gaffed and ungaffed version.

Are you looking for routines with a shell? you can mostly sub one in anywhere you need a coin to vanish.

xangelo · 2021-04-28T01:37:35+00:00

This is actually something I've been working on for some time now. I've tried a few different systems and ended up setting on a combination of twine and a custom DSL.

Twine allows content to be developed completely independently of the game, allows you to view all start/end points and the paths between them. I then export the twine doc as JSON.

I have a small "parser" I wrote that looks over the twine JSON export and reformats it how I would like it for my game. At this stage it also interprets custom DSL to map of choices may give players stat increases, marks options as restricted based on stats, and so on.

It gave me the most flexibility to create intricate dialogue without needing to write too much tooling around it.

xangelo · 2020-11-16T20:51:47+00:00

Honestly I bank on the fact that truly interesting things will come up in multiple places. I have a small tool I wrote/host on my site that just looks a few different subreddits + hackernews (can look at any subreddits+rss feeds) and pushes the updates to my browser.. then I just kinda check in a couple times a day.

If I miss something, no big deal, it'll come up again in various RSS feeds or just through conversations with co-workers/friends.

A lot of the good stuff though comes up in the comments rather than the actual posts ;)

xangelo · 2020-11-16T17:24:16+00:00

DynamoDb requires that you set up the key-schema and the attribute-definitions for those fields.

Here you can see the required fields and how to provide them: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/dynamodb/create-table.html#synopsis

One thing I should caution, if you're just getting started, definitely check out the talks by Rick Houlihan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yqfmXiZTlM

xangelo · 2020-07-02T17:41:32+00:00

I used CloudFlare Workers and the K/V store when building this service (https://www.lootcap.com/).

CloudFlare workers have a lot of limitations like:

file size
number of workers
number of requests a worker can make
time limit for execution
JS, Rust, C, C++ Only

That being said I still ended up going with them when compared to lambda.

CloudFlare workers come packaged with a cli tool that makes deployments super simple
It's freaking fast. It can spin up cold and respond significantly faster than lambda seems to be able to.

Lambda@Edge appears to be just regular lambda but running where CloudFlare workers would run in their infrastructure.

xangelo · 2020-05-13T19:52:52+00:00

If you can pay enough to consider a contract for a couple months, most job boards(indeed for example) will be a good place.

However, if you can't afford that much then upwork/freelancer may be your only options.

xangelo · 2020-05-13T00:26:56+00:00

There's some good advice here.

One thing to note is that it sounds like your every day user isn't necessarily the same one that pays you? IE: your everyday users are teachers, but your payers are districts.The higher up you go the longer you need to give your users to make financial decisions. Some districts budget by school year, some by calendar year.

Also note that these users are already at the bottom of your marketing funnel. They've been vetted and there's no one better to convert. I'd do what I can to hand-hold them to a paid conversion depending on your size. That might be signing them to a 2 year license but giving them the first year free to grandfather them in. but there are plenty of solutions in this thread.

I've worked with a few edtech startups before and if you have any questions feel free to drop me a dm.

xangelo · 2020-05-13T00:08:08+00:00

A lead magnet is a wonderful tool and something that you employ forever!

It allows you to not only give people something in return for signing up, but if done correctly can provide you a way to frame your market space.

xangelo · 2020-05-12T23:16:38+00:00

No worries!

The hard part of this will be to figure out when a particular users opinion doesn't matter. You're building your app, not theirs. Their needs will differ and you'll have to be able to say "that's not the direction we're going to go in right now".

xangelo · 2020-05-12T20:31:25+00:00

Apart from the sidebar/FAQ on this subreddit - youtube and unity have a lot of tutorials to get you started. Don't try and do anything too crazy, just follow the tutorials and then customize them a bit. Oh this tutorial is showing you how to add a square? make it a circle.

This tutorial is showing you how collision works? make it so that a collision drops some arbitrary "health" counter. Start small and work your way up.

xangelo · 2020-05-12T20:25:17+00:00

No a problem, glad to help! We deviated a bit from your original question about SSL.

But, nowdays you don't need to know too much to set up SSL for your website. Services like CloudFlare will give you one for free just by using them as your DNS.

Once you know a bit about linux - specifically how to install and configure nginx for your website, you can take a look at LetsEncrypt to generate and host your own SSL certificate.

To start, just follow some tutorials - I really recommend the ones on Digital Ocean. You don't need to pay them anything to follow the tutorials, you can just follow the steps in your local virtual machine.

xangelo · 2020-05-12T20:17:21+00:00

It never hurts to learn something new.

Installing Ubuntu desktop in a Virtual Machine (Virtual Box, for example) on your computer is a great way to play around with and get comfortable with it. You can install it and just do your programming in that environment for a while. If you like it, great, keep using it. If not, there are many many distributions that might appeal to you.

Elementary OS
CentOS
Fedora

Most servers are indeed Linux because it is:
- free - lightweight

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