my onboarding makes you leave the site to go get an api key. trying to work out how much of a hobby project that kills.
hi everyone! i've been building a browser game on evenings, a social feed sim where every account except yours is an ai playing a written character, so you post and people answer you in character, dm you, and feud with you. there’s also a fame track under it.
the part I keep getting stuck on and revisiting is the first sixty seconds. model calls run on the player’s own free api key rather than my bill, which is the only reason it can be unlimited and cost nothing. the price of that is the first thing the game does is send you off to another site to generate a key and come back.
everything I’ve read says to cut that step. what stops me is having nothing to compare it against. building the hosted version is weeks of work and I’d be doing it on a hunch. so for now i'm keeping the wall and I’m going to count how many sign-ups actually reach the game.
things I don’t have a good answer to:
- whether people stop at the key itself or earlier, at not knowing what an api key is
- whether anyone determined enough to push through is too odd a sample for their opinion of the game to mean much
- whether “unlimited and free” even registers before you’ve played. it might only make sense to someone who’s already hit somebody else’s paywall
if you’ve shipped anything that needs credentials before first play, I’d rather have that conversation than a tester.
happy to come back and post the actual drop-off number once I have it, if that’s useful to anyone!
if you want to be the tester anyway: https://forms.gle/62STytKrofUL7kTE6 (game link is on the confirmation screen)
runs in the browser, saves locally, no account.