It's week 7 of this and it's getting, candidly, way harder. Making progress is.. - more about game balance than it is creating new features - more about UX design than core content, - more about managing a product than just building my dream game. Which is fine, but the dopamine payoff is way lower so it takes real grit to keep pushing through, especially without a lot of players (we had almost 1k last week, but only a handful are still playing). So anyway, as usual, three parts: (1) player acquisition, (2) what I'm learning about vibe coding, and (3) actual gameplay updates (comments, as always). --- First, the numbers. I made a post on Hackernews (which I have since realized is against their rules) and I had an influx of nearly a thousand players. To my surprise, it was almost all positive feedback. A lot of people thought it was fun, and the only haters were those who hate AI, and didn't have a bone to pick with the game itself. So the stats that came out of that were ~800 players, 240 hrs of playtime, and my top players basically logged 30 hours in just a few days. Unfortunately that's just about ALL my players. So 4-5 power users are still coming back daily and that's it. Which gives me a stickiness percentage of around 2%. Now it's kind of hard for me to understand what to do with those numbers because I'm also advertising exclusively to people who do not care. So, is that high? Low? I have no clue. For anyone that has some actual experience (unlike myself), I would love to hear thoughts, strategies, and and conclusions on whether or not I'm doing OK on the user retention front. If not, it's probably better to call it quits by the 2-month mark. --- Second, the vibe coding experience. I think Anthropic raised the usage limits for the first few days to some ridiculous number, because I got an unbelievable amount of work done before the Fable 5.1 token reset. Since then, it's been very limiting. In many ways, Opus 5 does a great job coding, making art (ish), and everything else. But for communication and simply following commands, it's just painful. I have documented it multiple times doing the literal opposite of what I asked. For example, after very specifically designing a handful of GUIs in Claude design: Handed Opus the design spec I return to check on progress hours later. Opus claimed to have completed it. The design spec was not met at all. I push back and say "this looks nothing like the design!" Opus's verbatim quote: "it isn't a near-miss — it's a different layout. Same for the Forge and Warband ones, which I never opened at all." Like, what? Man, is that frustrating. Honestly I just need to know, has anyone not found Opus 5 to be infuriating? What are you doing right? --- I'd love some feedback for anyone interested. Links below. Game: https://eldermyr.com Discord: https://discord.gg/8MaaAemDBu