DEV Community: Jim L

Three tiny Roblox helper sites I shipped this month

Jim L — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:44:50 +0000

I keep a small habit of building single-purpose sites for the games my nephew and his friends actually play. Nothing ambitious — usually a codes list, a calculator or two, and whatever else saves a kid from digging through a dozen ad-choked wikis. Here's this round's three, in case the pattern is useful to anyone doing the same.

A fishing-codes tracker

The first, Be a Fish Bait, came out of a Roblox fishing game where the promo codes rotate constantly and most listing pages sit weeks out of date. It's a codes page plus a small reroll-odds calculator, kept deliberately light so it loads fast on a phone.

A dinosaur-park guide

My Dino Park is the dino-collection one. The loop is basically hatch, grow, sell, reinvest, so I bolted on a payback calculator that estimates how long a given dino takes to earn back its cost. That's the question everyone asks in chat anyway.

An Ice Tycoon 2 hub

The newest, over at icetycoon2.com, covers a tycoon game that's all about optimizing a production line. I leaned into interactive tools rather than static text here — a cost-per-upgrade helper and a codes list I re-check against the game most days.

None of these try to be encyclopedias. One game, one page, a working tool, then get out of the way. If you build small niche sites too, I'd honestly rather trade notes on keeping data fresh than read another "10 best" listicle.

I Compared 30+ Subscription Prices After Realizing I Was Overpaying by $240 a Year

Jim L — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 02:03:41 +0000

I added up my subscriptions in January -- Netflix, Spotify, ChatGPT Plus, a VPN, Adobe -- and the total made no sense until I checked what the same plans cost through a different billing region or a family split. Turned out I was paying full individual price on three things that have a cheaper legitimate path most people never bother checking.

That comparison turned into SubSaver, a small tool that lines up pricing across 30+ subscriptions side by side so you can see where the gap actually is instead of guessing.

Nothing here is a workaround or a grey-market trick, it's just regional pricing and family/duo plans that already exist but aren't advertised next to the regular checkout page. Once I saw the numbers laid out I moved two subscriptions and the 40/year gap mostly closed itself.

Built it because doing this math manually for even five services is annoying enough that most people just don't.

Six Small Roblox Fan Sites I Built This Year

Jim L — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:11:03 +0000

Over the past few months I have shipped a handful of small, single-purpose Roblox fan sites. None of them are trying to be everything -- each one covers exactly one game.

Paint My Keyboard

A companion page for the incremental/simulator-style Roblox game, with notes on upgrade order and what actually moves the needle early on.
paintmykeyboard.net

Anime Squadron Codes

A running list of active codes for Anime Squadron, checked and pruned as codes expire.
animesquadroncodes.com

Clean The Supermarket

Task-order notes for the supermarket-cleaning simulator -- mostly about not wasting moves.
cleanthesupermarket.com

Clean The Library Roblox

A shelf-lookup hub for the co-op library-sorting game -- type a book, get the shelf.
cleanthelibraryroblox.com

Storage Hunters Roblox

A value tracker and bid calculator for the storage-auction game Storage Hunters Open World.
storagehuntersroblox.com

Animal Hospital Anomalies

An anomaly checklist for the Roblox game Animal Hospital -- cross-reference which variant you have found.
animalhospitalanomalies.com

All six are solo-built, free, no accounts required. If you play any of these games I would genuinely like feedback on what is missing.

Building Tools for 3 Small Roblox Fan Sites in the Same Week (What Worked, What Didn't)

Jim L — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 05:53:26 +0000

Three different Roblox fan games shipped new content in the last couple of weeks, and instead of writing a guide for each one I ended up building a small tool. Here's the rundown, including the one that's still rough around the edges.

Squishy Dumplings: a trade calculator that needed real trade data first

Squishy Dumplings (the trading sim that launched on 2026-06-24) has a value list problem that's common to every new Roblox trading game: the community's early guesses about item worth are based on maybe a dozen trades total. I built a trade calculator at tradesquishydumplings.com/trade-calculator that lets you punch in what you're offering and receiving and see if the ratio lines up with what's actually been trading, not just what someone posted in a Discord tier list. It's still thin on data since the game is only a couple weeks old, so give it another stretch before trusting the ratios past the top 10 items.

Clean the Library Roblox: sorting 40+ books faster than trial and error

This one's a puzzle game where you sort books into the right section by genre and color code, and the genre rules aren't explained anywhere in-game. I mapped the actual sorting logic at cleanthelibraryroblox.com/book-locations after going through every book across three separate playthroughs. It cut my own clear time from around 6 minutes down to under 90 seconds once I stopped guessing which shelf a mystery-genre book with a green cover belonged on.

Clean the Supermarket: a map because the aisle layout resets every round

Clean the Supermarket (launched 2026-06-28) randomizes aisle placement each round, which makes a static walkthrough useless after your first clear. Instead I put together a map reference at cleanthesupermarket.com/map that documents the fixed landmarks (checkout, storage room, entrance) you can orient yourself by no matter which layout you get, plus which item categories tend to cluster near each one.

What didn't go so well

None of these three sites have meaningful search traffic yet since they're all under three weeks old, so I'm building on player feedback and my own playtesting rather than search data telling me what people actually look for. The Squishy Dumplings calculator especially will need a rework once trade volume picks up; right now it's closer to an educated starting point than a definitive pricing tool.

If you're playing any of these three and something in the tools looks off, that's genuinely useful to know before I put more time into round two on any of them.

I Built a Value Score Calculator for a New Anime Gacha Roblox Game (34 Units, One Patch In)

Jim L — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 02:38:43 +0000

Anime Squadron launched a few weeks ago and already has the classic new-gacha problem: the official patch notes list 34 units but say nothing about which ones are actually worth your Gems, Trait Shards, and Primal Cores. Every early tier list on YouTube is either a reaction video ranking units by vibes or a screenshot from someone's personal opinion with no math behind it.

The Value List Isn't the Same as the Tier List

This is the part most guides get wrong. A unit can be S-tier in raw combat power and still be a bad pull if it costs 40 Primal Cores to max when a comparable A-tier unit only needs 12. Primal Cores are the scarcest resource in the game right now (no reliable farming route past floor 20), so cost-efficiency matters more than ceiling power for the first month or two of a fresh account.

I built a value list at animesquadroncodes.com/value-list that scores each of the 34 units on power delivered per resource spent, not just raw strength. You can re-sort it by your current game stage, since the "best" early investment target changes once you clear floor 30 and Primal Cores stop being the bottleneck.

What Changed After the UPD 0.75 Patch

The 0.75 balance patch quietly nerfed two units that were dominating the value rankings (roughly a 15% cut to their skill multiplier) and buffed a mid-tier unit that's now genuinely worth pulling for. Static tier lists posted before the patch are already wrong, and there's no in-game indicator that anything changed unless you go read the patch notes directly.

The value list gets updated within a day or two of balance patches instead of sitting stale for weeks.

The Honest Downside

This only covers PvE progression value, not PvP team comps, and the scoring model assumes average luck on trait rolls. If you're min-maxing for leaderboard PvP, you'll want a squad-builder tool alongside it (still refining the synergy math on that one).

If you're early into Anime Squadron and trying to figure out where to actually spend limited resources instead of guessing from a random Reddit tier list, that's the gap this fills.

Two Tools for Side Projects: SEO Dashboard and Subscription Tracker

Jim L — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:33:09 +0000

Running four side projects at once means I have developed strong opinions about which tools are actually worth using.

Two that genuinely changed my workflow: consolidated SEO tracking and keeping a lid on subscription costs.

Multi-Site SEO Without the Spreadsheet Hell

For a while I was managing Search Console data across four properties in separate browser tabs. Fine with one site. At three or four you start missing things.

I switched to Multi-Site SEO (multisiteseo.com), which pulls GA4 and Search Console data from all connected properties into one view and auto-prioritizes which pages need work. The action queue shows the highest-ROI changes across all sites sorted by impact.

Setup took about 15 minutes per site. It reads from existing GA4 and GSC connections rather than requiring pixel installation.

Subscription Cost Audit Before It Gets Embarrassing

Side projects accumulate SaaS subscriptions faster than revenue. Analytics, hosting, email, error tracking, database -- suddenly 12 subscriptions and you cannot remember which ones you actually use.

SubSaver (subsaver.app) tracks recurring subscriptions, calculates actual monthly burn, and identifies overlap where two tools cover the same job. The annual vs monthly calculation is what I reference most.

What Both Tools Have in Common

Both solve aggregation. The tools worth using pull from multiple sources and surface one prioritized list.

Neither required much setup time, which matters when you do not want the tooling to become another project itself.

Universal Tower Defense X and Slime RNG: Two Roblox Guides Actually Worth Reading

Jim L — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:20:52 +0000

Two Roblox games I've spent way too much time on lately: Universal Tower Defense X and Slime RNG. Both are deceptively deep for what they look like at first.

Universal Tower Defense X Breakdown

UTDX is a tower defense where the meta shifts dramatically based on which towers you prioritize in your early game. Most new players stack the cheapest towers and hit a wall around wave 40 where enemy speed outpaces damage output.

The trick is investing early in one high-DPS tower rather than spreading resources across five cheap ones. The math works out significantly better — one buffed tower clears waves that five basic ones struggle with.

The wiki at universaltowerdefensex.org has the current tier list and the wave-by-wave spawn tables, which matter a lot for positioning. Boss waves have predictable pathing that you can exploit with the right tower placement.

Slime RNG - What the % Numbers Actually Mean

Slime RNG is a luck-based game, but there's strategy in the item and biome selection. The percentage displayed isn't exactly your odds per roll — it's weighted against a luck multiplier that changes per session.

The guide at slimerngguide.com explains the actual roll math and which items genuinely improve your odds versus which ones look good but have bad synergy with the main luck pool.

One thing that trips up players: the "rare" biomes are not actually rarer to unlock than standard biomes once you have the right loadout. The guide covers the current unlock order.

Why Both Games Reward Patience

What these two games have in common is that early game decisions compound. A misplaced tower in UTDX or a wrong item slot in Slime RNG creates problems 30 minutes later that feel random but aren't.

Reading the mechanics before starting saves more time than grinding experience would.

Both games are updating regularly in 2026. The guides above track active codes and patch notes so you don't have to monitor five different Discord servers.

Sell Lemons Roblox Guide: How the Ascend System Actually Works

Jim L — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:06:13 +0000

Sell Lemons is a Roblox tycoon built by BloxByte Games where your goal is to squeeze every cent out of a lemon stand and eventually ascend to unlock permanent multipliers. The core loop sounds simple but the progression math trips up most new players.

What Ascend Actually Does

Ascending resets your cash and upgrades but gives you a permanent income multiplier based on how far you've progressed. The mistake most players make is ascending too early - the multiplier reward at 10x cash is significantly worse than waiting until 50x.

The Sell Lemons ascend calculator at selllemonscodes.com runs the actual numbers for your current multiplier vs projected earnings, showing you exactly when the break-even point is. It saves about 3 hours of guessing.

Offline Income Matters More Than Active Play

The offline income system is surprisingly well-tuned in this game. If you set up correctly before logging off, your passive generation overnight can outpace an hour of active clicking.

Key upgrades to max before any session break:

Auto-Squeeze (passive generation)
Upgrade Multiplier (applies to all income sources)
Storage Capacity (offline income caps at storage limit)

The offline earnings calculator at selllemonscodes.com estimates your income for a given time away based on current upgrades.

Early Game Bottlenecks

The consistent early bottleneck is players spending on wrong upgrades in the first 10 minutes. The cheapest upgrades have terrible ROI compared to saving for mid-tier options.

Quick early-game priority:

First 3 levels of Squeeze Speed
Unlock Auto-Squeeze (the turning point)
One level of Storage
Then alternate Multiplier + Auto upgrades

Codes Status

Sell Lemons has launched recently and doesn't have active codes yet - selllemonscodes.com tracks status and will update when codes drop. Better to bookmark it than check every Discord channel.

BloxByte Games releases updates fairly regularly. If you're starting fresh, the ascend timing is the biggest single optimization available.

I Built 4 More Niche Roblox Guide Sites This Week — The Workflow Behind It

Jim L — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:00:24 +0000

Built four more niche Roblox game guide sites this week. Running the same playbook I've been testing. Here's what the actual build workflow looks like now that it's gotten faster.

Why Roblox guides keep working

Two structural reasons this niche stays viable:

New games launch constantly. Roblox developers ship new experiences weekly. Many get real search traction before any dedicated guide site exists. There's a 5-10 day window where you can be the only indexed result for a game's core keywords — you rank by default while the game is hot and players are actively searching.

Search intent is simple and predictable. Queries like "[game name] codes", "[game name] how to play", and "[game name] guide" are pure functional searches. Players want specific information. The bar for being the useful result is "answer the question clearly" not "compete with Wikipedia."

The four games this week

I built guides for:

A Roblox trading game where players swap collectibles through a value ladder system
A keyboard customization game with color unlock mechanics and a code redemption system
A sorting puzzle game with a library theme and key-based level progression
The supermarket variant of the same sorting genre — same developer, different map

Same template across all four: home page with overview and active codes, how-to-play guide, FAQ covering questions I found in community searches, and (where relevant) a level walkthrough.

The build sequence

Phase 1 — Research (15-20 min)

Check if the game name gets Google Trends movement. Look at active player counts on the Roblox platform page. Run a quick search to see if any existing guide sites are already indexed for the core keyword. If CCU is in the thousands and there's no dedicated guide site, it's worth building.

Phase 2 — Content (25-30 min)

Core content sources:

Playing the game for 15-20 minutes to understand actual mechanics
Reading community Discord and Reddit to find what players are confused about
Checking game page comments for recurring questions

The FAQ is highest-value because it covers the specific questions that generate long-tail search volume — things like "why can't I access level X" or "what does the key unlock."

Phase 3 — Deploy (15-20 min)

Static site deployed to Cloudflare Workers or Pages. Custom domain registered same day. GSC verification done on launch day. Sitemap submitted. IndexNow ping sent to start the crawl immediately rather than waiting for link discovery.

Total time per site: around 1 hour when content is straightforward.

What actually speeds up indexing

Three things that make a real difference for early indexing:

IndexNow on launch day — signals the crawl immediately instead of waiting for a backlink to trigger discovery
Legitimate backlinks within the first week — platform content (Dev.to posts, blog articles, etc.) that points to the site gives crawlers a reason to verify it's real
Clean technical setup — no broken pages on day one, sitemap properly formatted, canonical tags correct, no duplicate content

What I'm watching

GSC impressions usually show up within 24-72 hours of launch — that's confirmation Google crawled the page. First organic clicks come in week 2-3 for low-competition queries. The actual test is whether the content depth is good enough to hold the position once the game's novelty fades and other sites appear.

Will follow up with 30-day data once I have something worth sharing.

I reverse-engineered a Roblox incremental game's upgrade math -- here's what the payback formula looks like

Jim L — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 03:51:02 +0000

Paint My Keyboard launched on Roblox in late May and hit 9.8 million visits inside a month. The game is an incremental: paint keys, earn cash, buy upgrades. Standard loop, executed well.

The part that interested me was the upgrade decision layer. The game shows costs but not payback time. That is the metric that actually matters, and it is missing from every in-game UI I have seen in the genre.

The payback formula

Payback time = upgrade cost / income increase from the upgrade

The complication is that Paint My Keyboard has two types of income increases:

Roller upgrades change your passive income tick rate
Paint tier upgrades multiply the value of your painted keys

These are not directly comparable. A roller might say "+15 cash/sec" while a paint tier says "2x multiplier on painted keys." To compare them you calculate what the 2x actually does to your current income, then compute payback time for both.

Building the planner

The math:

Roller: payback = cost / (roller_bonus)
Paint tier: payback = cost / (current_income * (tier_multiplier - 1))

When ranked by payback time, it becomes obvious which one to buy next. It is not always the cheapest option and not always the highest multiplier.

The codes situation (honest take)

Paint My Keyboard has no verified codes yet. The game is new and the developer has not run a code campaign. I built a codes tracker that stays empty until a code is confirmed -- less exciting on launch day but more useful when a code actually exists.

The traffic data

Stats as of June 27, 2026:

9,790,000 visits
132,064 favourites
98.1% rating
20,712 concurrent players

The 98.1% rating is unusually high for an incremental. Most sit in the low 90s. Sustaining 98% at nearly 10 million visits signals the game is well-tuned for its audience.

16 Roblox Game Fan Sites with Free Codes and Tier Lists (June 2026)

Jim L — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:45:04 +0000

If you play Roblox, these 16 independent fan sites have free codes, tier lists, and guides updated regularly:

Nuke for Brainrot Hub

Free codes and guides for Nuke for Brainrot Hub players. Updated when new codes drop.

Slime RNG Guide

Free codes and guides for Slime RNG Guide players. Updated when new codes drop.

Survive Zombie Arena Codes

Free codes and guides for Survive Zombie Arena Codes players. Updated when new codes drop.

Universal Tower Defense X

Free codes and guides for Universal Tower Defense X players. Updated when new codes drop.

Block Tales Guide

Free codes and guides for Block Tales Guide players. Updated when new codes drop.

BrawlRNG

Free codes and guides for BrawlRNG players. Updated when new codes drop.

HorseRNG Guide

Free codes and guides for HorseRNG Guide players. Updated when new codes drop.

BedWars Roblox Hub

Free codes and guides for BedWars Roblox Hub players. Updated when new codes drop.

Mini War Roblox

Free codes and guides for Mini War Roblox players. Updated when new codes drop.

Maple Hospital Roblox

Free codes and guides for Maple Hospital Roblox players. Updated when new codes drop.

MonkeyBombTag

Free codes and guides for MonkeyBombTag players. Updated when new codes drop.

BiteBYNightRoblox

Free codes and guides for BiteBYNightRoblox players. Updated when new codes drop.

Kaiju Alpha Guide

Free codes and guides for Kaiju Alpha Guide players. Updated when new codes drop.

Build A Ring Farm Codes

Free codes and guides for Build A Ring Farm Codes players. Updated when new codes drop.

Sell Lemons Codes

Free codes and guides for Sell Lemons Codes players. Updated when new codes drop.

Trade Squishy Dumplings

Free codes and guides for Trade Squishy Dumplings players. Updated when new codes drop.

All sites are fan-maintained. No signup required to use them.

I Tracked Traffic Across 6 Roblox Fan Sites for 40 Days — Here Is What the Data Shows

Jim L — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:52:45 +0000

Back in early May I started registering domains for Roblox game fan sites. The goal was to test whether EMD (exact-match domain) sites with specific, first-person content could rank without a heavy backlink push. Six sites, 40 days, here is the actual data.

Why Roblox specifically

Google's March 2026 core update penalized thin game guide content pretty hard but left dedicated fan sites mostly untouched. The pattern I noticed: sites with tool pages (calculators, code trackers, value lookups) held positions while pure wiki-style sites dropped. Roblox has a steady stream of games with high search volume and underserved SERP real estate.

The six sites

All six follow the same structure: an EMD domain registered within 24 hours of deciding a game was worth targeting, a tool page as the flagship piece, and spoke content covering the specific questions that show up in autocomplete.

Roblox creature battle (Kaiju Alpha tier)

XP grind optimization is underserved in most creature battle games on Roblox. The level 35 inflection point -- where build diversity starts mattering and generic advice stops working -- was generating autocomplete suggestions with no dedicated page answering it. I targeted that specific question.

Hospital roleplay simulation (Maple Hospital tier)

Consistently top-visited games on Roblox often have the worst documentation. Hospital sims are a good example: complex job role systems and karma mechanics that the game never explains. The search volume exists but almost no dedicated sites cover it.

Tower defense with unit comparison gaps (UTDX tier)

Tower defense games live on unit comparison data. DPS calculators, cost-efficiency ratios, upgrade breakpoints. I reverse-engineered the damage formula on one game and the DPS calculator page became the highest-traffic page on the site within two weeks.

RNG gacha with pull probability questions (Slime RNG tier)

Gacha mechanics generate constant search traffic around probabilities. "What are the odds of getting X?" queries are high-volume and specific. The luck calculator page alone drives most sessions on the site.

Codes tracker (Sell Lemons tier)

Active code lists with expiry tracking are evergreen Roblox content. The key differentiator is accuracy -- codes that expire get flagged immediately rather than staying on the list for weeks. This site launched most recently (mid-June) so it has the fewest data points so far.

Trading value calculator (Trade Squishy Dumplings tier)

Trading games need value calculators more than any other Roblox genre. The mutation multiplier problem (where the same item is worth 3.5x with a mutation) makes manual math slow. A calculator page that handles multipliers automatically tends to see high dwell time.

What the data shows

Across all six sites:

Indexed: 7 to 14 days post-launch (IndexNow accelerated this significantly)
First impressions: appeared in GSC before any external backlink was live
Tool pages: 2 to 3 minutes average dwell time
Pure text pages: 35 to 50 seconds average dwell time

The dwell time gap was larger than I expected. Users on calculator and code tracker pages behave differently from users on guide pages -- they interact with the tool, check a result, and often return on the same session. GSC queries on tool pages skew more transactional.

What did not work

Generic beginner guides with broad scope got the least traction. Pages that answer one specific question clearly outperformed pages that tried to cover everything.

The "complete guide" format I tested on two sites got crawled and indexed but showed poor engagement signals in the first 30 days. I have since rebuilt those pages around specific questions instead.

What's next

The 40-day window closes for most of these sites in the next two weeks. Mid-tail keywords should start moving in the top 10 range. I will post a follow-up with 6-week numbers.

If you're curious about any specific site or the EMD selection process I used, ask in the comments.