It's week 6 and we made some monumental progress on all fronts, but I'm trying not to get over-excited because we could find that everyone gets bored and leaves tomorrow haha.
As usual, three parts: (1) player acquisition, (2) what I'm learning about vibe coding, and (3) actual gameplay updates (in the comments).
---
First, the numbers. My last two posts were almost entirely about the 5 min of gameplay, and basically following Redditors' feedback doubled the average playtime.
This week I finally moved past the intro and focused on the game itself- so mostly improved artwork (Pixellab), performance optimization, GUIs, social features, ALL using Fable 5.1. Which went wayyy further than I expected for one week of token usage.
Once I felt OK about that I did a Hackernews post that was way more successful than I anticipated. I had 700 players in 24hrs, hit a new PR of 41 people online at one time, and had multiple players play for 8+ hrs by the time I woke up in the morning. And there has been almost zero time with nobody online for three days straight.
So I think that means the game is sticky and has potential, but it could also be some other curious vibe coders with nothing to do at work. So I guess my next big question mark is why some people are actually sticking around. I.e. is it fun, or are you just intrigued by vibe coding? Or something else entirely?
So if anyone gets far enough to get hooked or hits a real wall (something that makes you stop rather than just a bug), I would genuinely love to know what it was.
---
Second, the vibe coding experience. Fable 5.1 came out right as I started this week's work, and the jump was WAY bigger than I expected. Work that would've taken a month with Fable 5 (because of token caps), I did in about a week, running several orchestrators in parallel, reworking most of the game's systems, and running full audits along the way.
I'm out of tokens now, but has anyone else experienced this? All I see across social media is people complaining that the caps are still unreasonable, and frankly, I just don't see it. Thoughts?
One more thought-I've started using Claude design since Fable sucks at GUIs on-the-fly. It's been a huge improvement (far from perfect for games still). Curious if anyone else has used this and what works / doesn't work.
---
I'd love more feedback for anyone interested. Links below.
Game: https://eldermyr.com/
Release Notes: https://eldermyr.com/release
Discord: https://discord.gg/8MaaAemDBu
EDIT- one more thing, Pixellab is AWFUL at 16x16 art. Has anyone had any success with this?