u/toujourspluss

i was thinking about the ishval arc again and how fmab handles roy mustang. dude participated in a genocide. the show doesnt pretend otherwise, doesnt give him a clean redemption, he just carries it for the whole series. every time he talks about becoming fuhrer you remember what he did to get there.

most shonen wouldve made him a pure hero or a pure villain. fmab just says here's a guy who did something unforgivable and is now trying to make the system less evil from the inside. and it never tells you if thats enough. honestly i think thats why the show aged so well.

scar is the same thing from the other side. he killed innocent people too and the show still makes you understand him. nobody gets to be clean in that story.

anyone else feel like fmab handles moral greyness better than almost any other anime?

so i spent a month rating my motivation 1-10 before every work session. thought id see the classic pattern, high motivation = good session, low = waste of time.

the data was basically noise. some of my best sessions happened on days i rated myself a 3. and the days i felt super motivated? i spent half of them reorganizing my setup or reading productivity articles instead of doing the actual task.

the only thing that actually correlated with output was whether i had one clear next action written down before i started. not mood, not energy, not even time of day. i put the tasks in beedone and the mood ratings in a plain spreadsheet, and guess which one turned out useless.

i think motivation is overrated as a predictor. readiness is a feeling, not a signal. anyone else ever tracked something that turned out to predict nothing?

had the steam deck for a while now and my gaming habits have shifted in a way i didnt expect. i used to think i was a long-session kind of gamer. boot up something big on the weekend, play for hours, get lost in it.

the deck kind of rewired that. because its so easy to pick up and put down, i find myself doing 20-30 minute sessions way more often. a quick run in a roguelike before work. half an hour of a jrpg in bed. a couple of races here and there. and honestly the total amount of gaming i do has gone up, not down.

its weird because i used to feel like short sessions were pointless. like if i couldnt dedicate an evening to a game it wasnt worth starting. now short sessions feel like the default and the long marathons are the exception.

anyone else had their gaming style change after getting a deck? or is it just me who used to be weirdly gatekeeping about session length

ive spent the last year adding game mechanics to what is essentially a to-do app, and the results have been really counterintuitive. figured this sub might enjoy the design lessons, both the ones that worked and the ones that blew up in my face.

what worked:

• xp tied to actual completion, not to opening the app. people who game the system by just checking in quickly run out of meaningful actions fast, so the leaderboard effect stays honest.
• streaks that forgive. the moment a streak punishes you for a bad day, people abandon the whole system. giving a small recovery mechanic kept users coming back after a miss instead of rage quitting.
• rewards that are decorative, not functional. when rewards unlock actual features, people min-max and complain. when theyre just cosmetic flair, theyre a nice pat on the back with zero balance drama.

what blew up:

• giving users the ability to customize their own reward system. sounds great in theory, everyone designs something different, in practice it was analysis paralysis and most people just never touched it.
• showing weekly stats too prominently. turned out people felt judged by their own numbers and opened the app less. we had to bury the stats behind a tap.
• punishing missed days with any kind of visual consequence. even a small red x on the calendar made people feel guilty enough to stop opening the app entirely.

the biggest lesson honestly: gamification in a productivity context is a warm-up and a cool-down, not the main event. when the game becomes the point, the actual work suffers. when its just a small layer of positive reinforcement on top of a boring habit, it quietly does its job.

curious what mechanics other people here have found that work or backfire in their own projects. also if anyone knows good reading on when extrinsic rewards start killing intrinsic motivation, drop it below.

reached the part where every opponent has a counter for the dempsey roll and honestly i respect that the manga doesnt pretend its unbeatable. but it made me realize something. ippo's entire style is built on that one move. when it doesnt work he just takes punches until he finds an opening. thats it.

everyone else in the series has layers. takamura has his jab, his uppercut, his ability to just decide hes going to win. miyata has counters on counters. even sendo has like three different ways to hurt you. ippo has the dempsey roll and a stupid amount of willpower. thats the whole build.

its actually kinda beautiful in a sad way. the move is a reflection of him. he puts everything into one thing and hopes it carries him. when it stops working you can see the panic. he doesnt have a plan B. he just believes harder.

idk if morikawa did that on purpose but its probably the most consistent character writing in the series. the guy who never learned to adapt. even his fights against boxers who figured him out are basically him refusing to change.

anyone else notice that or am i overthinking a 30+ year old boxing manga lol

when i first got testers for my app i was so paranoid about retention that i shipped something new every 3 days. new quest types, new reward tiers, custom themes, a whole social layer. thought theyd love it honestly.

one of my testers actually told me to stop. said he just wanted to check his daily habits and level up without having to browse through menus. another one said she picked beedone over the competition becuase the core loop was simpler not because of any extra feature.

so i stopped shipping for two weeks. just fixed bugs and made the existing quests smoother. retention went up. go figure lol.

kinda makes me wonder if we overestimate what early users actually want

tbh i really thought a save-for-later button would fix the guilt. like, hey you can pause without failing.

but every time someone hit it, their brain heard "dont worry, we're done today". i do the same thing in todoist. i just move tasks into another list and pretend i’ll come back later. in beedone it got worse becuase the button basically paused the whole quest and turned into a tiny escape ritual.

so i changed it. later is now just a smaller next quest, not a dead end. still a save, but it drags you back in the same day. idk if that sounds dumb but usage got way less avoidant... people actually started again instead of negotiating with the clock lol.

for months i described my app as a gamified todo list. quests, xp, streaks, the whole thing. when people asked what it did i said 'it makes productivity fun'. that was my pitch and i repeated it everywhere.

then i actually started reading support emails. not the bug reports, the rambling ones people write at midnight. and a pattern showed up. users kept saying things like 'this is the only app where i dont feel guilty when i miss a day' and 'it feels like a game but without the pressure'. nobody mentioned xp. nobody talked about the quests.

i built the gamification thinking that WAS the product. turns out the product was the absence of guilt. the game stuff was just the delivery mechanism. kind of like how habitica sells you the whole fantasy but the thing people actually love is showing up to a party that expects them.

so i rewrote how i talk about the app. the store description, the landing page, my replies to users. instead of 'make productivity fun' it became 'the todo app that doesnt punish you for missing a day'. the app code barely changed. but the people who found it through the new description started staying way longer. my retention curve looks different than it did three months ago, and i didnt ship a single new feature.

the app is beedone btw. not the point here though. the point is your users already told you what your product actually is. you just have to stop talking long enough to listen.

losing to someone who is clearly worse than me tilts me way more than losing to someone way better

like when i get washed by a genuinely good player i just nod. ok. they were better. thats fine. i learn stuff.

but when i lose to the guy doing the same flowchart jump-in into throw loop for the 6th time and i KNOW the counter and i still eat it every single round? i sit there staring at the screen like it personally insulted my family.

i think its becuase when you lose to someone good you can tell yourself it was a skill gap. but losing to the flowchart means you had the tools and just. didnt use them. thats the part that stays with you for the rest of the night lol.

anyone else find this? or am i just the only one whos ego cant handle losing to ken players

honestly this one caught me off guard. my app is a gamified todo thing, and it had a settings section where you could tweak everything. rewards, xp rates, colors, notification timings. i thought power users would love it. spent like two weeks building that panel.

nobody used it. i mean less than 1% of people even opened it. and the worst part, the people who did open it usually closed the app right after. they got lost in the options and never made it to an actual task.

so i deleted the whole thing. set one default config and made it the only config. if someone really wants to change something theres a hidden advanced section but you have to dig for it.

engagement went up like a third in the first week. the app is called beedone btw, not really the point here. i think the choices were creating a fake sense of work. people felt like they were doing something by tweaking settings. same reason i spend an hour organizing my desk when i should be writing.

feels obvious in hindsight. kinda like how notion lets you build a whole second life in your workspace before you ever write a word.

anyway. has anyone else killed a feature they were proud of and watched the numbers improve

When i first built BeeDone, the UI was honestly pretty rough. Just buttons, no animations, no onboarding flow. I was embarrassed to show it to anyone.

So i spent like 3 weeks polishing everything. Colors, animations, smooth transitions. felt good about it.

Then i showed a friend the original screenshot and they said "wait, that version actually looks easier to use."

turns out all the polish I added just created more friction. People didnt need it to look pretty, they needed it to get out of the way.

Kinda wonder if other devs have had this experience — where your "improvements" actually made things worse?

every rewatch i end up feeling worse for zoidberg. dude is broke, lives in a dumpster, everyone laughs at him, he never gets the girl, and he still shows up to work every day like its fine. honestly thats the most realistic depiction of adult life in any cartoon. fry gets to be the hero, leela gets the arc, bender gets the jokes, and zoidberg just exists to be humiliated and somehow keeps going.

the show never lets him win and he never really breaks. even when something finally goes his way it falls apart in like five minutes. is that supposed to be inspiring or just depressing lol.

idk maybe im reading too much into a cartoon about a lobster doctor. but does anyone else find themselves defending zoidberg way more now than when they were younger

so i did the full quantified self thing for about two months. sleep, mood, focus, water, caffeine, steps, screen time, the works. apple health plus a couple of trackers. i had dashboards for everything. the wierd part is i wasnt actually doing anything different. i was just really well informed about not doing it.

i think my brain started treating the logging as the task itself. open the app, log the mood, admire the chart, close it. felt productive. zero output. i kept this up in beedone too until i noticed the people who logged the most quests were often the ones finishing the least. the data was the comfort, not the work.

anyone else ever catch themselves measuring instead of doing. how do you break the loop

spent like 3 weeks on the reward layer of my productivity app. xp bars, levels, unlockable themes, confetti bursts. i was sure that was the hook that would bring people back every single day.

turns out almost nobody cared. maybe 2% of users ever opened the rewards screen twice. the thing that actually kept people around was way dumber. a checkbox and a number that goes up when you do the thing.

i had tried habitica and todoist and a bunch of other apps before building mine, and i thought the game layer was the whole point. turns out the point is just not feeling like a failure the day after you skip. the rewards were decoration. i kept them but stopped pretending theyre the main event.

kinda funny cause the retention came from the most boring feature in my app. built beedone around the rpg stuff and the checkbox carried it. anyone else build something they were proud of and users just ignored it for the boring part

every saturday i walk into the grocery store with a whole plan. i buy the lemongrass, the fish sauce, some random vegetable i saw in a cooking video. im convinced this week is the week i finally become a person who cooks properly

then monday comes and i eat rice and eggs for the third night in a row

the gap between the person who does the shopping and the person who does the cooking is genuinely two different people. the shopper is ambitious. the cook is exhausted. they dont talk to each other

i have a jar of gochujang thats been in my fridge since february and i keep buying things that pair well with it like im ever gonna open it

anyone else feel like their grocery bill is basically a donation to a fantasy self

i shipped a new version of my app every week for months. then i stopped and retention went up

for the first few months of my app i shipped something new every single week. new features, new quests, balance changes, whatever. i thought constant improvement was how you keep people hooked.

then i had a busy month and shipped almost nothing. two small fixes, thats it.

and retention went up. people were using the app more, not less.

i think constant updates were actually breaking the habit loop. every week the app looked slightly different. new buttons, new menus, rebalanced xp. users had to re-learn things they already knew. it felt like work.

when i stopped, the app became boring in the best way. predictable. they knew where everything was and could just do their tasks without thinking.

i kept telling myself this was the standard. notion keeps adding stuff every month and people love it, so i assumed the same applied to my users. turns out my users wanted the opposite. stability.

ive been running the app for a while now and the biggest retention jump didnt come from a feature. it came from me sitting on my hands.

beedone is the app. still shipping but way slower now. one meaningful thing a month instead of four half-baked ones.

anyone else found that shipping less helped more than shipping more?

its getting ridiculous honestly. everytime something new drops i tell myself ok just the first episode, see how it is. then im 3 episodes in and something else catches my eye and the cycle repeats.

netflix alone has 6 series i started and abandoned around episode 4-5. some of them were actually good, i just lost the thread from switching too much. theres a weird guilt about it, like the show is sitting there waiting for me to come back but i know i never will.

i keep telling myself ill get to them on the weekend. weekend comes, i rewatch the same old episodes of something ive seen 10 times. anyone else have a graveyard of half watched seasons or is it just me

i spent months scared to raise my app price. it was 2 bucks, basically nothing. every time i thought about it i pictured all the users leaving and the reviews turning angry.

finally did it last month. moved it to 4.99. braced for the worst.

churn went down. like noticeably. the people who stayed are more engaged too. i think the cheap price was attracting people who'd download anything and never open it again. at 2 bucks it felt disposable. at 5 it feels like something they chose. same reason i actually finish books i pay for but abandon the free ones on my kindle lol.

i keep going back and forth on whether this is a real signal or just noise. my data nerd side says give it another month. the app is called beedone btw, gamified todo thing. not the point here.

has anyone else seen pricing changes flip their user behavior in ways they didnt expect

I first watched FMAB when I was like 16. The homunculi were just the bad guys to me. Evil things that Ed and Al had to beat.

Now im in my late 20s rewatching it and its a completely different show.

Wrath is the biggest one. He was a homunculus who chose to be human. He couldve just followed Father's plan but he decided to live and die as a man. Watching him say "I am no homunculus" before his final fight hit me way harder than I expected.

Envy's death scene is brutal. The way they transform into this tiny pathetic creature and just... give up. Not because they were defeated but because they realized they had nothing. No identity, no purpose outside of being what humans created them to be.

Sloth is literally so tired of existing that moving is agony. Gluttony is just a hollow creature that doesnt understand anything. Lust has that moment where she hesitates before killing Mustang because she was starting to feel something.

The thing is, none of them chose to exist. Father created them as tools. Theyre not evil, theyre just... broken things that were never given a chance to be anything else.

I dont know if this is just me getting older or if the show is actually that deep. Anyone else have a completely different read on the homunculi as an adult?

noticed something wierd when i flipped the dashboard in my own app. the people with the longest streaks werent necessarily the most consistent — they were the ones who never missed a day which is nice but kinda rare. the more useful signal was bounce-back. how many days between a skipped day and the next one.

i use this approach loosely in beedone but honestly the idea originally came from habitica where losing a day felt like a full reset. making the recovery visible instead of the streak actually reduced the guilt of skipping for me.

curious if anyone else tracks something other than streak length that feels more honest about real consistency