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staminator
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itch.io Community » General » General Discussion · Created a new topic Launch week postmortem: solo browser TD — Product Hunt, a portal rejection, and a flagged Show HN (numbers inside)
On Friday at 3am I launched my solo game (a merge/synergy tower defense in vanilla JS + Canvas2D — no engine) everywhere at once. It's been about 2.5 days. Here's what actually happened, with numbers, since I always wish other devs shared theirs.
THE NUMBERS: ~100 players in 2.5 days (55 new on launch day, halving each day since), ~50 completed runs, ~23 hours of total play. Launch-day average session: 11.6 minutes. Day-3 average session: 80 minutes. Average death wave climbed 12.5 →25.7 → 33.8 day over day. And the hard one: D1 retention is 2%. Yes, two percent. Keep reading.
WHAT WORKED: A dev-humor angle ("tired of merging code? merge crystals") gave every post a hook that plain "I made a tower defense" never had. Product Hunt didn't rank high (first launch, no audience — expected) but the page converts steadily and the comments were genuinely useful. And itch was the easiest launch of all of them — uploaded a zip, themed the page, done. The community here has been the kindest by a distance.
WHAT DIDN'T: CrazyGames rejected the game pre-launch as "too close to existing titles," and my own telemetry just agreed with them: 2% of launch-day players came back the next day, while the few who stayed now play 80-minute sessions and reach wave 30+. Translation: the game is deep but the first two minutes sell it as another generic merge TD — my actual differentiators (paid resonance links where network topology is the strategy, a daily seed with one attempt worldwide, server-side replay anti-cheat) are all invisible until run two. A portal reviewer plays two minutes. So did most of my launch traffic. Same verdict, same cause. I'm reworking the first session before resubmitting anywhere curated. Also my Show HN got flagged within hours — likely because I shared the direct link around before learning HN reads that as vote manipulation. Don't do that.
WHAT I'D TELL PAST ME: Launch is a sequence, not a day — the page, trailer, and copy have already been reused three times on other channels. But the one thing you can't redo is anyone's first two minutes, curator or player. Fix your first session BEFORE the traffic arrives, because traffic you bounce doesn't come back for the patch.
Happy to answer anything about the anti-cheat design, Canvas2D perf, or the launch itself — and if you've launched recently, I'd genuinely love to hear how your numbers compared.
https://staminator.itch.io/resonance-merge-defense
Resonance Merge Defense is a merge-and-synergy tower defense: grow crystal towers, fuse them into higher tiers, and link elements together to ignite resonance fields — steam that slows and burns, conductive ground that stuns, ley lines that empower your whole network. The network layout IS the strategy.
Hold the Nexus against endless void waves. How far can you go?
✦ 5 elements, 15+ resonance synergies — placement and links matter more than tower tiers
✦ Daily Rift — one seed, one attempt, the whole world competes on the same board
✦ Global leaderboard — server-validated (runs are replayed deterministically, no cheated scores)
✦ Wheel of the Void — earn spins, gamble on run-changing boons
✦ Free, no ads, no account needed — works on desktop and mobile
Built solo in vanilla JS + Canvas2D — no engine.
Prefer your own tab? Play at resonancemerge.gg — same game, same leaderboard.