I've written a bit here before about the games themselves. This time I want to talk about the process — specifically, the small decisions that turned out to matter way more than I expected once real strangers started playing.
The name that had to change
Pyramid used to be called "Ponzi Pyramid." It made sense to me as a builder — it's a self-aware joke about the shape of the mechanic, players joining and the structure growing until it collapses. What I underestimated was how that name reads to someone who's never talked to me, never seen the code, never heard the joke. A name is often the very first — and sometimes only — signal a stranger gets before deciding whether to trust something. Renamed it to Pyramid. Same mechanic, same collapse, same tension. Just without a name doing work against me before anyone even clicked play.
The dollar sign problem
All four games use a free, non-purchasable in-game currency — no deposits, no real money, ever. But the wallet still displayed a plain "$" sign, because that's just... what you type for currency, right? Except a dollar sign next to a number means something very specific to anyone reading it cold, and no amount of fine print three clicks away changes that first impression. Ended up labeling it explicitly as "in-game dollar" everywhere it appears. Small text change. Genuinely changed how the whole platform reads.
Watching real people break things I didn't expect
The first handful of real players surfaced problems no amount of my own testing did — someone not finding an upload button under time pressure, someone joining and never playing a single round, someone forfeiting mid-game for reasons I still don't fully know. None of these were catastrophic. All of them were things I wouldn't have found without actual strangers, with zero context, just trying the thing cold.
The night that made it feel real
One player found the platform, played a round, then didn't stop — 30 minutes straight on Pyramid alone, then more across two other games. No push notification pulling them back, no prompt, just choosing to keep playing. A few days later, that same country had multiple real users, because the first player referred a friend, who played three different games back to back without me doing anything at all.
That's the only kind of validation that actually means something to me right now — not a metric I can point to, just a stranger deciding, on their own, to bring someone else along.
What's next
Still building, still watching, still fixing the small things I keep missing. If you want to see what held someone's attention for half an hour with zero prompting:
Play Pyramid: Cube Engines Pyramid
Come hang out or share your own runs — genuinely enjoy hearing what people think, good or bad:
Discord: Discord Link
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