dumbgamelab

42 of those taps were in the Android app. The app's webview doesn't have navigator.share, so the button quietly copied some text to the clipboard and showed nothing at all. From the player's side it just looked dead, which honestly it was

I only ever tested share in a browser, where the share sheet pops up fine. About 60% of the real shares came from the app

Last week I fixed what I thought was the cause (the link tail was getting stripped before the analytics read it) and it was still zero after that. So there were two bugs

The app gets the native share sheet in the next build

If you tapped share in One Life and nothing happened, that was on me. The browser version works fine on a phone https://dumbgamelab.com/play/one-life/?lang=en

Similar games apparently get around 35%. I figured the button was in the wrong spot, so I spent a while moving it around the screen. That wasn't it

The first session had a fullscreen ad popping up 1 minute 20 seconds in. By the time anyone got to the rewarded button they were already annoyed, or they'd already closed the app. Now the first one doesn't show until after the third order is done

Pretty obvious looking back. People here complain about exactly this all the time

(the game is Slime Making Simulator on android, I made it)

I scored my hand-drawn camp a 5.7 when I held it up against screenshots of a farm game that sold well. Then I switched the whole thing to toy-looking 3D and the score went down to 5.2, which is worse than where I started.

It took four rounds to get it to 6.8 and then 7.7. The biggest fix was a dumb one. Empty farm plots looked like holes dug in the ground, so I filled them with grass blades and tiny flowers

It's free in the browser if anyone wants to look. Do the empty plots still look like holes to you?

Backing out of Idle Internet Cafe Tycoon on iPhone and the OS would kill the web view a bit later. GPU memory never got released

my fix was a setTimeout for 8 s after the app went to background

It never ran on real phones. JS gets frozen the instant the app backgrounds, so anything sitting in a timer is just stuck. Shipped it anyway without knowing, crash reports kept showing up build after build

Now the release happens right in the same call that handles going to background

The game itself is a little PC bang tycoon, rows of computers and customers, it runs in the browser and on Android/iOS

Found that out the hard way. The intro globe in our game crashed on slow phones because a late frame pushed the animation progress under 0, the ease-out made it a big negative number and the radius followed it down. The gradient call errored and the start screen never came up.

Desktop never showed it once. Only an error report did

(it's the opening of One Life: Reborn Simulator, a free browser game we made where your birth country is rolled from UN 2024 birth numbers)

The share link carries a birth seed (?s=) so your friend starts on the same birth you got. On load the game wiped that and the utm tail out of the address bar so it looked tidy. Analytics loaded a moment later, saw a clean URL, and logged every shared visit as direct

We nearly cut the button over it

Second bug on top of that one. Sharing from inside the itch or CrazyGames iframe handed the friend the portal's internal iframe URL, so they landed on some bare embed page.

Now the real address goes to analytics before the cleanup runs, and shares always use the public URL. Game is One Life: Reborn Simulator, browser, your birth country gets rolled from UN 2024 birth tables and you live that one life out. I made it

https://playgama.ai/play/7hersnnnxaqs5l

your birth country is rolled from the UN 2024 birth tables over 124 countries, so where you land is weighted by how many babies are actually born there. then you live that one life out. no restarting the same character. no account.

i built it. last week someone told me nothing in it was proportional and they were right. every prop had its height typed in by hand on its own scale, so the radio on the back wall was 56cm, the bicycle 73cm, and the cat was as big as the dog. the main character card got measured separately and came out 9% bigger than everyone else. now it all reads off one real-cm ruler and the build fails if a size drifts.

it has ads. two are optional reward ads and one full-screen ad plays when you die. nothing to buy.

Not sure if a prototype is ok here, it's pretty rough

I made a 3v3 gem-grab shooter that runs in the browser, Chichi Brawl. The other team is an AI that trained on about 180,000 matches against itself, with reaction time capped at human speed (0.2s or slower). Only 3 characters and one mode so far. I'm trying to get 30 people through 10 matches each to see how often humans actually beat it, results are anonymous and there's no account. Mostly want to know if it felt cheap and what confused you in the first match

This is a 3v3 gem grab shooter that runs in the browser, no install and no sign up.

The bot learned by playing about 180,000 matches against itself. Its reaction time is capped at 0.2 seconds or slower, so it can't win on twitch reflexes alone. This link always puts you against the strongest generation it has

https://dumbgamelab.com/play/chichibrawl/?ht=1&lang=en

It's a prototype with only 3 characters and one mode, so expect it to be rough. I'm trying to get about 30 people to play 10 matches each and see how often humans actually win. Results are counted anonymously, no account and no personal data.

Mostly I want to know if it felt fair or cheap, and where the first match lost you.

Good luck

Up front: it has ads. There are two optional reward ads, plus one full screen ad when your character dies. Nothing to buy, and you don't need an account

You get born in one of 124 countries, weighted by the UN 2024 birth tables, and you get one life. No restarting the same character

My favorite bug so far: a kid born in Congo got told The Tiger and the Dried Persimmon by their grandparent. That's a Korean folk tale. Almost all of our culture text was written in Korean first, so for a while people born anywhere got Korean neighbors carrying barley tea kettles and Korean stews for dinner

We ended up writing culture text for each country separately. The Congo persimmon sentence is now a test case, so if it ever shows up again the build fails

https://playgama.ai/play/7hersnnnxaqs5l

Bug list was 335 the night before. Next night it was 334

That's a full day of work for -1

Most of the new ones were filed by the crash reporter, which opens a fresh ticket every time the same error shows up again. One bug can turn into several of them

That same day someone asked me why I keep piling things up and putting them off. I had no answer then and I still don't

I make an idle game about running a PC bang, and I've been playing one on my own to-do list where the number won't go down

It's a Godot game, separate from our main one

The crash reporter was supposed to read the game's own version number and attach it. There was no version number set anywhere in the build config, so every report went out blank and showed up as ?

We couldn't tell which build any of them came from.

The same Godot error, "Condition !_ensure_cache", came in as 4 separate reports because nothing could match them to the same build

The empty field was right there in every report and I didn't look at it for way too long

Now the build stops if the version number is missing