Vampiro Life - Build in Public: Entry Four

Hey everyone,

Quick update from the crypt.

This week was about improving the path from signup to actual gameplay. We had people creating accounts, but too many were getting friction before their first real session.

What shipped

• Referral system backend and frontend wiring
• EmailGuard checks during signup to reduce disposable-email abuse
• Settings page upgrades with plan and credits visibility
• Campaign defaults in profile so players do less repetitive setup
• Security hardening for credits RPC access

Why this mattered

One of the biggest lessons from the last updates: users do not judge your architecture first. They judge whether they can start playing fast.

So we focused on reducing decisions and making account state visible:

• Players can see credits and plan status in one place
• Campaign creation inherits defaults from profile settings
• Referral links now flow from signup through to account attribution

That gave us a cleaner onboarding flow and fewer "what do I do now?" moments.

Security and trust work

We also tightened one important backend surface:

• The add_credits RPC was restricted to service_role access only

This is one of those changes users never celebrate directly, but it protects the economy and prevents very expensive surprises later.

Lesson learned

Growth features and security features should ship together.

Referrals, credits, and onboarding logic touch revenue and trust in the same path. If those are split too far apart, you get either fragile growth or safe but slow product iteration.

What is next

Now that onboarding is healthier, the focus moves back to gameplay depth:

• Quests reliability
• Better world-building flow
• Stronger action-to-consequence loops during chat

As always, still solo, still nights and weekends, still shipping.

Try it at https://vampirolife.com and tell me where you still hit friction.

• Rodrigo