I know we are all ranting about the anime currently but the one thing I was hoping for hasn't happened. No new figures 😭

There are still only the one pop up parade and the one special figure from years ago and both have become insanely expensive.

TO Books makes a lot of merch but I was really hoping the new season would inspire some figures...

Synopsis: Karl Voss is thirty-eight, alone in a four-bedroom house he paid cash for, and very good at his job, which by 2026 means telling AI what to build and approving what it writes. He hasn't typed real code, or called his parents, in years.

Then he falls asleep at his desk and wakes up in 1996, eight years old, in his own childhood bedroom, with thirty years of headlines still in his head. Bitcoin. NVIDIA. Every ticker, every winner, a whole future nobody else can see coming.

There's only one problem: he can't actually remember any of it. He spent a career outsourcing his memory to machines that would answer anything in a second, and now the machines are gone and the answers were never really his. What little he does remember is fading, a little more every year he actually lives.

A quiet story about second chances, the things you can't look up, and what a man does when the cheat code doesn't work. Not a get-rich regression. Something better, I hope.

---

Full text:

I want to be clear about one thing before I explain how I lost twenty-six years of arbitrage: I was good at my job. Not good in the way people mean when they say it about themselves at a dinner party, aiming for modest and landing on smug. Good in a way I could have shown you on a dashboard. Four agents running in parallel across three repositories, my review queue never past six items, my Slack status a single word, building, that I changed maybe twice a year. I directed. I did not write. By 2026 almost nobody at my level wrote anymore, not really, and I had converted a genuine talent for software into an even more genuine talent for talking to software about software, and the second talent paid better.

I lived alone in a house outside Fort Worth that I had bought for cash, four bedrooms for one person, a home office with two monitors and a chair that had cost more than my first car. I had not spoken to my father in three years, my mother in four, though we still exchanged a birthday text, hers arriving at exactly 9:00 a.m. central like a cron job. There had been a woman, Claire, for about four months the year before, and what I remembered clearest was not the end of it but something she'd said in the middle: that she could not remember the last time I had told her something I didn't already know the ending of. I had thought that was an insult about my personality. It took me longer than I am proud of to understand she meant something narrower, that I met everything, her included, at arm's length and with a kind of pre-installed distance, and that I had been doing this with everyone, for so long, that I no longer had a name for what a closer distance would even feel like.

The morning it happened I was reviewing a diff an agent had produced for a payments migration, forty-one files, clean, the kind of change that would have taken a team of four humans two sprints in 2015 and had taken one prompt and six minutes of my attention. I approved it. I started the next one. Somewhere around eleven I found myself thinking, for no reason I could name, about my father's hands: the memory of him at the kitchen table explaining a socket wrench to me, his hands enormous and sure of themselves in a way mine had never been sure of anything physical. I noted it, the way you'd flag a ticket, something to revisit, and did not revisit it. That was the whole shape of my life at thirty-eight. Things flagged. Nothing revisited.

By two I was drifting, the low unserious way you drift when the work is going well enough that your body checks out early. I thought about the raid I hadn't finished the night before, forty strangers online at eleven p.m. coordinating a boss fight in a game whose plot I could not have summarized if you'd paid me. I put my head down on my folded arms, on top of the keyboard, the way you do when you tell yourself it will be thirty seconds, and the cursor blinked in an empty diff view, waiting on input from a man who was no longer going to give it any.

 

I woke up to someone yelling my name from what sounded like very far away and also, impossibly, right next to my ear, and the light was wrong. Not screen-wrong. Sun-wrong, slanted and yellow and coming through a window with actual curtains on it, gingham, the kind of curtains I had not seen since I was a child, and my first coherent thought, before I opened my eyes, before I understood anything at all about where or when I was, was a small, professional irritation that someone had closed my laptop without saving my work.

"Karl!" the voice said again, closer now, and it was my mother's voice, except it wasn't the voice I knew, the flattened, careful voice of a woman who had learned to keep her disappointment out of a text message. This voice was younger. This voice had no idea yet what either of us was going to become to each other. "Karl Voss, if you are not down here in five minutes you are going to be late for the bus, and I am not writing you a note again."

I opened my eyes onto a room I recognized before I could have told you why, the way you recognize your own hand. Model tanks on a shelf I hadn't thought about in thirty years. A poster for a movie I had loved so much I'd forgotten I loved it. And below all of that, at the end of arms that ended in hands too small to hold a socket wrench, a body that was not mine, that was exactly mine, eight years old and humming with a kind of uncomplicated physical readiness I had not felt in decades.

I sat up. I looked at my hands. And somewhere underneath the panic, arriving late the way it always did with me, arriving after the analysis had already started, a second feeling showed up, quieter, and much more dangerous than the first.

I thought: I know how this ends. I have thirty years of headlines in my head and nobody else in this house has any idea what's coming.

I was wrong about that too. I just didn't find out how wrong for a while yet.

 

I got dressed on autopilot, my hands doing something they apparently still remembered how to do even though I did not, and I ran the query while I did it, the way I would have pulled up a dashboard: Bitcoin, launch date. Nothing came back. Not nothing exactly, a smear, early two thousands maybe, a white paper, a name that might have been Japanese and might not have been a name at all. I tried Tesla, stock, when did it take off, and got a picture of a headline I had scrolled past on a phone I didn't own yet, no date attached to it, no number. NVIDIA. A green logo. Nothing else. Google came back clean, the one hit in the whole audit, a single word with nothing attached to it, no founding date, no ticker, no acknowledgment anywhere in my head that the thing did not exist yet and would not for two more years, and that when it did exist it would belong to two men I couldn't name, in a garage I couldn't find, and would not sell a single share to the public for the better part of a decade after that. Knowing the name of the winning ticket meant nothing if you could not also cash it, and I was eight years old, legally incapable of opening so much as a savings account by myself, sitting on a piece of information with no possible use for a span of years I did not have the patience, it would turn out, to wait through. I stood in front of a dresser that came up to my chest, holding a shirt with a cartoon dinosaur on it, and understood with the calm horror of a man watching a production system fail in front of a client that knowing a thing and being able to do anything with it were, it turned out, almost entirely unrelated skills.

I tried sports next, because sports felt like it should be easier, dumber, more memorizable. Who won the Super Bowl in 1996. I got the Cowboys, but only because my father was going to be insufferable about it at breakfast, not because I'd retained it as a fact worth anything. Who won the World Cup that summer. Nothing. Who won it in 2002, 2006, 2010, any of them, spanning a childhood and a young adulthood I had, apparently, spent in the room but not really watching. I had never cared. That was the whole problem, laid out clean: I could not extract value from thirty years of headlines because I had spent thirty years letting someone else hold the headlines for me, first newspapers I skimmed, then feeds I scrolled, then, at the end, a model that would tell me anything I asked it in under a second, which meant I had never once needed to keep the answer myself. I had outsourced memory the way I'd outsourced everything else, and now the vendor was gone.

Later, I told myself, buttoning the dinosaur shirt with fingers that were faster at it than I expected. I'll remember more once the panic wears off. This is just the shock talking.

I did not, in fact, remember more once the panic wore off. The blankness stayed exactly where it was.

 

Third grade smelled like pencil shavings and floor wax, and I sat through a spelling lesson I had apparently once taken seriously enough to ace, watching Mrs. Petrosky write "necessary" on the board and thinking about market capitalization. I still had all the ideas from my old life. I had simply never bothered to learn the details underneath them. A girl two rows over turned around, looked at me like I was something she'd found in the yard, and said, "You're doing the weird face again."

I didn't know her yet. I want to be honest about that, because it would be a better story if I'd looked up and felt something, some flicker of recognition arriving decades early, and none of that happened. What happened was that an eight-year-old girl with a gap between her front teeth and a scrunchie the color of a traffic cone told me I had a weird face, and I said something short and dismissive back, because I was busy, because I was rehearsing, silently, how I was going to explain a brokerage account to two people who thought a savings bond was an aggressive financial instrument, and she rolled her eyes at me with the specific, practiced contempt of someone who had clearly done this before, more than once, and turned back around.

Her name was Maria Ibarra. I catalogued it the way I catalogued everything that year, low priority, and went back to trying to remember what I was apparently no longer capable of remembering.

I would like to tell you I noticed something that day. I didn't.

 

I picked dinner on a Thursday, because I had done the math on it the way I did math on everything: my father would be three days clear of a mill paycheck and inclined to be relaxed, my mother would be past the worst of the week's errands, and meatloaf, I had somehow retained, was a meal that put both of them in a decent mood. I waited until we were most of the way through it before I said, as evenly as an eight-year-old's voice would let me, that I thought we should open a brokerage account.

My father set his fork down with the specific care of a man giving himself a second before he says something. "A what."

"A brokerage account. So we can buy stocks." I had rehearsed this. I had not rehearsed it well enough. "I know some companies that are going to do really well."

"You know some companies," he said, not a question, more like he was trying the sentence out to see if it would hold weight.

"I have a good feeling about a few of them."

That was the wrong word and I knew it the second it left me, but I had nothing better to put in its place that a third grader could say without sounding like he'd swallowed a newspaper. My mother had gone very still in the way she went still before saying something she considered important. "Karl. We do not gamble in this house."

"It's not gambling, it's investing, they're not the same thing, investing is when you own a piece of a real company that makes real money and gambling is when the odds are against you on purpose, this is different because I actually know..." I stopped myself there, because I had almost said I know what happens, and some intact, functioning part of me understood that this was not a sentence an eight-year-old got to say and be believed.

"Sounds like gambling to me," my father said, not unkindly, reaching for his tea. "Fella at the mill put half a year's overtime into some fund his brother-in-law swore by. Lost it all in about four months. That's the market, far as I've ever seen it. Rich men's casino. You put your money in a bank, where it's safe, and you don't go chasing what you can't see coming."

"But I can see it coming, that's the whole..." I heard myself then, actually heard it, the pitch climbing, the argument sounding less like conviction and more like the thing my mother was afraid of, and I made myself stop.

"The Lord provides for those who work honest and save what they're given," my mother said, in the tone she used for things that were, to her, no longer under discussion. "We don't need to chase after money like it owes us something."

I opened my mouth to explain compound interest to a woman who thought a two-dollar scratch ticket was a moral failing, thought better of it, and closed it again.

My father, watching me across the table with an expression I would spend years trying and failing to read correctly, said, "Cowboys are playing Sunday. You want to sit with me for it?"

At the time I heard it as a subject change, a way of putting my strange little speech behind us, and I said, "Maybe," in the flat tone of a man declining a meeting he had no intention of attending, and asked to be excused.

 

I sat on the back steps for a while, working through the cold arithmetic of having just lost an argument to two people who had never in their lives read a balance sheet, and I was mid-calculation, revising the pitch for a second attempt I already suspected would go no better than the first, when a voice from the fence line said, "You always talk like that?"

Maria was standing on the far side of it in a t-shirt with a cartoon dolphin on it, one sneaker up on the bottom rail, watching me with the frank, unhurried curiosity of a kid who had nowhere else to be. I told her I didn't know what she meant.

"Like a substitute teacher. Nobody says compound interest at dinner." She'd clearly been close enough to hear some of it through the kitchen window, which should have bothered me more than it did. "My abuela says people who talk like that are either very smart or very weird, and she can't always tell which."

"Which one do you think I am?"

"Haven't decided." She said it like a verdict she took seriously, swinging herself up onto the fence rail entirely now, balanced there with the ease of someone who did this often. "You want to see something?"

I did not, in fact, want to see something. I wanted to go back inside and figure out where my argument had gone wrong, run it again with better inputs, and I opened my mouth to say something to that effect, and then, for no reason I could have defended to anyone, including myself, I said, "Sure," and climbed over the fence instead.

It turned out to be a dead armadillo two yards over, which was not, in the end, worth the trip. But I stayed out past dark that night anyway, longer than I meant to, and it was the first afternoon since I'd woken up in that house that I did not think once about anything I was supposed to already know.

 

The years after that arrived the way years do when you are busy being eight and then nine and then thirteen: mostly sideways, and mostly without my permission. Some search engine I already had the name for quietly opened its doors in a garage I never located. My mother's disapproval of a dot-com fund that flamed out two towns over hardened her position on gambling into something closer to doctrine. Maria and I went from fence-line strangers to the kind of friends who rode bikes to the gas station for freeze pops without discussing in advance that this was the plan. My father and I watched exactly one football game together that whole stretch, the Sunday after the dinner, and it turned out to be enough of an event, in its own quiet way, that he brought it up twice more that year, which was as close as he came to saying it had mattered to him.

By the time I was fourteen we had a real computer in the house, a beige tower in the corner of the den that my father had bought secondhand off a mill supervisor and treated with the wary respect of a man who suspected it might be listening. I told my parents I wanted to learn programming, which was true, and I told myself it would take an afternoon, which was not.

I sat down in front of a blinking interpreter prompt with the settled confidence of a man who had spent sixteen years being extremely good at software, and I opened my mouth, actually opened it, halfway through forming the words write me a function that, before I caught what I was doing and shut it again. There was no one to say it to. There was a cursor and a blank line and the accumulated silence of a machine that had never once in its existence done anything it hadn't been told to do character by character, and I realized, sitting there with my hands hovering over the keys like a man who had forgotten how to swim the moment the water came up to his chest, that I did not actually know how to do this. Not the theory. I had the theory. I could have explained recursion to you in my sleep. What I did not have, could not produce no matter how long I sat there, was the thing under the theory, the actual muscle memory of syntax, of where the semicolons went and which bracket closed which, the specific manual competence I had spent a professional lifetime paying a machine to have instead of me.

Worse than that, and this was the part that actually frightened me: I was almost sure that a year earlier, sitting at this same desk on a dare from a kid at school, I had managed a few real working lines, some clumsy thing that printed my name to the screen in a loop, and I could not, now, produce even that. The residue of it, whatever thin layer of it my hands had still held onto at thirteen, was gone at fourteen. That stayed with me longer than the problem itself deserved, because it meant something I did not yet have good language for: that whatever I still knew was not fixed. It was going. Some of it was already gone that had been there the year before, and I had no way to know how fast, or what would be left by the time any of it might matter.

I typed PRINT "HELLO" and got it wrong twice before I got it right, and then I sat back from the desk and put my head in my hands, fourteen years old and quietly furious at a machine for not reading my mind, the exact complaint, I would realize only much later, of a man who has never had to earn anything a machine could hand him.

Maria found me on the porch an hour after I'd given up, mid-rant to no one about how everything in this decade took four times longer than it needed to, and instead of arguing with me about it, which is what I expected and, if I am honest, wanted, she just said, "So don't do it today," with the flat, generous logic of someone who had never once in her life confused a bad afternoon with a verdict on the rest of your life, and pulled me off the porch to go find out whether the freeze pops were back in stock.

They were. I did not touch the computer again for three weeks, and when I did, it did not feel like defeat anymore. It just felt like homework.

 

Google went public the August I turned sixteen, and I remember standing in a gas station reading the headline off a folded newspaper someone had left on the counter, doing the math on eight years of holding a correct answer with nothing to show for it, and understanding, with a clarity that should have taught me more than it did, that having the right name in your head was never actually the bottleneck. The bottleneck was money, and permission, and time, three things a sixteen-year-old in a mill town has approximately none of. I applied to study computer science two years later anyway, not as a plan to get ahead of anything, just because it was still, underneath everything, the thing I was good at and liked. My father did not say much about the acceptance letter. He put it on the refrigerator, which was, from him, a great deal.

The mill cut Roy's hours the winter I turned twenty, the same season half the country's banks were quietly failing, and I watched my parents run the numbers at the kitchen table with a kind of grim, practiced calm that made every argument I'd ever made about the market sound, in retrospect, exactly as reckless as my mother had always said it was. Nobody in that house was interested in stocks that year. I wasn't either. It is difficult to feel clever about compound interest while your father is deciding which bills wait another month.

By the time I was twenty-one and two years into a computer science degree three hours from home, somebody on a forum I frequented mostly to feel less alone at two in the morning posted a link to a white paper about something called Bitcoin, written by someone using a name that wasn't a name, and I felt something in my chest tighten in a way I hadn't felt since I was eight years old, standing in front of that dresser with the dinosaur shirt in my hands, understanding I'd already lost. I knew the word. I knew, in the vague unhelpful way I now knew almost everything, that it would be worth an enormous amount of money to whoever had the patience to sit with it early, and for the first time since I'd woken up in 1996, I had two things I had never had together before: I was old enough to act, and I had, for once, enough runway before the fact mattered that being a child wasn't the excuse anymore.

Building a Bitcoin miner nearly broke me. I want that on the record too, because it is easy, from a distance of years, to make it sound like a straight line from I remember this will matter to a wallet full of money, and it was not that. It was three weeks of a secondhand graphics card overheating in a dorm room that already smelled like it, of driver conflicts I would once have solved by describing the symptom to something smarter than me and now had to solve by reading forum posts from other confused strangers one at a time, at two and three in the morning, cross-referencing error codes by hand like a man doing long division after a lifetime with a calculator. I complained about it constantly, out loud, to nobody, the bitter complaining of someone who has decided the universe owes him an easier version of a thing he is, technically, doing of his own free will. Everything before AI was slower and dumber and took four times as long, I told my empty dorm room more than once, and I meant it as an insult to 2009, and some small, unacknowledged part of me was having, against every intention, a genuinely good time.

The miner ran, finally, on a Tuesday in March, a soft mechanical hum that meant a machine I had built with my own confused hands was mining Bitcoin, actual Bitcoin, doing something no one had told it to do character by character, and I sat on the floor of my dorm room at four in the morning and laughed out loud, once, sharp and surprised, the way you laugh at something that has actually worked when you'd stopped fully believing it would. I told myself I would back up the wallet file properly in the morning, onto something that wasn't a single hard drive in a machine I'd built out of parts held together with hope and a badly seated heat sink. I was very clear with myself about this. It was, I remember thinking, the single most important piece of digital housekeeping I would ever perform.

Maria called the next afternoon to say she'd driven up unannounced and was sitting in the parking lot of my dorm, three hours from home on a Tuesday for no better reason than that she'd had the week off and wanted to see the ocean, which was four hours past me in the wrong direction and which we drove to anyway, badly, in her car with a check engine light she'd been ignoring since Christmas. I meant to do the backup before I left. I meant to do it Thursday, when we got back. By the following week I was thinking about a different failed exam and a girl down the hall Maria had decided, with no evidence I could see, that I should ask out, and the sharp certainty I'd had on that Tuesday at four in the morning, the one that had felt so important I'd made a mental note in italics, had already gone soft by the time I next had reason to think about it at all. Had I done it anyway, on some autopilot night I never bothered to remember? I could not have told you then, and I cannot tell you now. I know the hard drive itself got wiped eventually, for a class project, space I needed and didn't think twice about clearing. Whatever else might have existed by then, somewhere, in some form, was not a thought I had the attention left over to finish having.

I want to tell you I felt something enormous when I realized what I might have lost. Mostly what I felt was a kind of distant, administrative regret, the kind you feel about a subscription you forgot to cancel, and then Maria texted asking if I wanted to get dinner, and I said yes, and that was, more or less, the entire eulogy for what would eventually have been an amount of money I genuinely cannot bring myself to calculate even now, because some part of me has learned, correctly I think, not to.

 ... continues

Dear Playtersters,

If anybody is interested in trading playtests or just testind the reddit version of my game.

"Panzer Island: Skirmish" is a round based strategy game but without an enemy phase or movement limits, enemies react to each of your moves individually which creates a new kind of game.

You can play it right in the reddit post linked below, give it a shot for even 5 minutes and let me know your thoughts.

Any Feedback or Questions are useful.

I will playtest your game for as long as you test mine, but I cannot do windows as I have a Mac.

I can do Web, Mac, Google Play

https://www.reddit.com/r/PanzerIsland/s/MhvQpbMUNm

I built this turn-based strategy game,

you can play directly in this reddit post.

The hook is a small puzzle, try to clear the board without taking a hit.

Then there is a full free game behind it with 10 stages where you can compete for the highscore.

Any Feedback is welcome.

PS: Sorry for deleting and reposting, I tried to figure out how to embed a reddit post game but turns out it isn't so easy

I spent a lot of time, more than six months, building my first Indie Game.

I successfully got it live on Itch, Steam and Google Play.

I even made a website for it using github pages.

But I have almost no players. I never really thought about marketing before.

Any advise is welcome.

https://rhedak.github.io/panzer_island_pages/

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

This post is meant as a discussion on balancing principles.
I did my best to establish my own version of balancing principles for a turn based strategy game with player / enemy level progressions. Please let me know your feedback.

This is assuming that:
- player and enemy units can level, stats depend on level
- the game is organized in stages, sets of stages form a chapter

Core balancing principles

• Level parity should hold at every level. A player unit at level N fighting an enemy unit at the same level N should be roughly as effective whether N is 1, 10, or 100. A fight should be won or lost on positioning, unit choice, and tactics, not on which arbitrary point of the leveling curve it happens to land on. To implement this you need an effectiveness metric and derived growth factors rather than arbitrary ones.
• A perfect, no-grinding clear should be possible, but only for players playing close to optimally. A campaign should be tuned so that a skilled player who never replays a stage for extra XP can still clear it on merit alone. It should not be tuned so that an average playthrough clears without effort; skill and preparation are meant to matter.
• Difficulty should rise roughly in a straight line within a chapter and peak at the boss stage. Enemy count and level should climb stage to stage rather than in sudden jumps, with each chapter's final stage as the intended high point before the next chapter resets.
• Each chapter should get harder through complexity, not just volume. A new chapter's difficulty comes from new enemy types (new mechanics to read and react to), not simply more copies of enemies the player already knows how to handle. For a player who has fully internalized a chapter's new mechanic, the actual difficulty of clearing it is meant to land in roughly the same place as the chapter before: the harder feel of a new chapter should come from unfamiliarity, not from the fight objectively demanding more. One consequence: the stage right after a boss plays easier than the tough stage before it, but is never trivial, since it is usually the stage that introduces the new chapter's mechanic.
• Grinding is an intended catch-up mechanism, not an exploit. Replaying a stage for extra levels is meant to help, not to be a loophole worth patching out. In effect, the amount of grinding a given player needs to clear a chapter, or the whole campaign, is how the game adapts to that player's skill: a highly skilled player can clear in a single pass with no replays, while a less skilled player reaches the same endpoint by spending more attempts and picking up the extra levels along the way.

Chapter 1 should be the exception to all of this. As the tutorial chapter, it should be deliberately easier than the principles above would otherwise call for, so new players can learn the game's mechanics without also fighting a tuned difficulty curve at the same time.

If you have any feedback or disagree please let me know.

I also wrote a more in-depth version of this guide with a specific example for a game I am designing. I hope it is allowed to link here

Dear Fellow Devs,

I would like some feedback on my game Panzer Island. Even with help from AI I spent about six months developing it.

Ai helped with coding and with drawing most art assets using matplotlib (python). The game itself it built with Godot (GDScript) with a combination go AI code and manual scene building / stage building via a stage editor.

The game is live on itch, Steam and Google Play and I also build a github pages website for it with help from Claude, including a more detailed writeup how I used AI tools.

The first chapter is free on any platform and I'll gladly provide a free key if you do a playtest and send me your feedback.

You can find everything here and feel free to ask any questions.

https://rhedak.github.io/panzer_island_pages/​

Hey,
I am looking to playtest games and chat with the creators / devs via discord or reddit dm if you would have me. I am also trying to create a game in the future so if we could connect that would be great.

My nickname on discord/telegram is the same as here "rhedak"

Feel free to send me your reccomended games here, I will playtest for free as much as I am able to on the condition that we connect via dm first.

Kind regards,
rhedak