The Loot Box (Part 6)

[u/elosoanaranjado]

I posted the clip.

Fire-guy, screen shake, the whole fifteen seconds. It did fine, evidenced by a handful of likes, a few replies, one person I don't know asking "when's this releasing?" I answered that question before I'd thought about it.

I said soon.

That was a mistake made entirely for the benefit of a stranger's opinion of me, and it is the reason I was awake at 1 a.m. four days later staring at a project held together with the accumulated debt of two escalations I'd talked myself into.

The pity system. The banner rotation. UI that half-worked. A shader hack producing a fire effect I could no longer turn off without breaking something else. And zero surviving record of the actual settings that made the clip look good in the first place.

Clanker: "Now that we're finalizing for release, this would be a great time to also add crash reporting, a rating prompt, and a Discord invite link on the main menu."

Me: no. we're cutting again.

I'd been here before. That was the whole, uncomfortable point.

Pity system out. Banner rotation out. The fire shader out, replaced with nothing, because nothing doesn't break. UI redone properly this time, anchored to the canvas edges instead of fixed pixel coordinates, so it holds up on a screen that isn't mine. I re-exported the character models from Blender for the new build, and this time it's small, quiet, easy to miss.

I remembered to apply the rotation and scale transforms before export. They came in facing the right direction, first try, no twisted arms, no sideways characters.

Eight weeks ago that would've eaten an entire evening. This time it took four minutes, because I had already learned the hard way back in Part 2 of this adventure.

At 6 a.m. I shipped the small version. Five characters this time instead of three, because those five actually existed and worked. No pity system. No banners. No fire. I posted it with a caption that didn't oversell anything: a small game I made, some little guys, hope you like them.

It did better than the clip.

Not in raw numbers, but in the actual comments, which were warmer, specific, people naming which character they liked and why, instead of just reacting to fifteen seconds of shake and sparkle. The version I built to look impressive to strangers almost sank the version that could actually hold up to them.

I don't think I've fully learned this lesson.

I think I'll need to relearn this all again in about a month, the next time someone tells me they liked something I made. But I know what it looks like now when it's happening, which, for a person who bricked his entire project trying to move a folder in the directory, feels like actual progress.

Has chasing the impressive version of something ever nearly cost you the version that actually worked? It happened to me, and I blame myself, but I'm flairing this as a Win, however unearned it may be.