u/DieguitoD

this one has been fighting me over its camera for about a week.

It started as a plain top-down view, roughly the way GTA 1 did it (video from the left), where buildings lean away from the middle of the screen to fake a bit of height. That was fine until people kept telling me the big towers didn't feel tall, which is a bit of a problem when the entire point is that you're a bird flying over them and occasionally into them. So I built a second camera (right video) that tilts the city and turns with you, so the bird always points up the screen, and now I honestly can't tell which one is better.

The video is the two of them side by side. Every time I watch it I change my mind. The top-down one lets me see what's coming so I can plan a run and line up a drop, but the towers still read flat. The tilted one feels much nicer to fly and the buildings finally look like buildings, except I see less of what's ahead, and I have no idea if the rotation gets sickening after 90 seconds because I've been looking at it far too long to be a fair judge of that.

So the question isn't really which one looks nicer in a screenshot. It's which one you'd stop noticing after 30 seconds, because that's the one I should keep.

Having fun working on this mini game. It's Tetris, except the blocks are keys and every single one has exactly one home. Drop the A on the A. The Z on the Z. You get it. Miss the spot, and that key turns into a useless gray brick that just sits there, bothering you until you explode it.

You can play it here: https://diegodotta.itch.io/qwertys

Wanted to share something useful for folks here who are about to build their next thing.

Before writing a single line of code for what eventually became Bird Rise, we tested five alarm ideas with Meta ads against each other. The lineup was:

• Social Alarm (wake up to secret messages from friends)
• Future Self Alarm (record a message your future self will hear) ← my favorite
• Quotes Alarm
• Sexy Voice Alarm
• Bird Alarm ← the boring control I threw in to make the others look good

I was emotionally invested in Future Self. I'd even dug up research on human voices waking people better than beeps. It was going to win.

The birds won. Not by a hair.

I built the boring one. That app is now my best-performing product, by a wide margin, against everything else I've built in 10 years.

The thing I almost missed: I came very close to dismissing the test because the iPhone already ships with a bird sound. "Why would anyone download an app for this?" Almost talked myself out of the data. Glad I didn't.

What I'd tell anyone here: the cheapest test you can run before building anything is to put 4-5 ad creatives in front of a cold audience and see which one strangers actually click. Cost me a few hundred bucks. Saved me months of building the wrong thing.

If anyone wants to know how I structured the test, the budget per variant, or what metrics I measured, happy to answer in the comments.

(I wrote the long version about why I think the bird kept winning afterwards too, here if you want it: https://diego.horse/the-early-bird-caught-me/)