Vault is an ad-free gaming guide site built on one idea: being stuck isn’t all-or-nothing, so the player should choose how much a guide gives away. It reached 4,900 users in its first eight months with zero ads.
Solo: product design, content & engineeringWeb (Next.js, Supabase)Live, actively published
Guide sites give you the whole answer when you wanted a nudge, buried under ads, autoplay video and paragraphs of SEO preamble, while you’re stuck and frustrated.
Constraint
Solo, no ad revenue by choice, and the window that matters is a game’s first few weeks, before anyone else has coverage.
My role
Everything: product and content design, the publishing pipeline, and the front end.
Key decisions
01: the reversal
Progressive detail, not progressive disclosure
The first build hid hints behind accordions and blurs you clicked to reveal. It shipped, and it was wrong. It treated help as a reward, and at the lowest level the page collapsed to an intro paragraph. Now every step is always visible, and the hint level changes only how much each step tells you.
None
The fight changes significantly at 50% health. Figure out what triggers it and how to respond.
Nudge
At 50% he teleports to center. Something spawns that you need to deal with before focusing him again.
Bigger Hint
At 50% he teleports center and summons four clockwork minions. Kill the minions first or they’ll heal him.
Full Guide
At 50% he teleports center and spawns four clockwork minions. Kill them within 10 seconds: they heal him at 2% per second. His pattern also switches from targeted shots to a radial sweep. Stay in melee range during this phase.
The same boss phase at all four levels. Same facts, more specific each time.
Trade-off: every section has to be written four times, about four times the content. That’s only affordable because guides come out of a pipeline that pulls the facts from sources and writes all four levels from them.
02
One control for the whole page
A hint control on every section turned one decision into twelve, for someone who was already frustrated. Now a single segmented control sets the level for the whole guide, and it remembers each user’s choice, so spoiler-averse players are protected by default.
Trade-off: you can’t mix levels across sections. One fast decision is worth more than that flexibility to someone stuck mid-fight.
03
Zero ads, promised publicly
It’s the one advantage the big sites can’t copy. IGN or Game8 could build a hint system next quarter, but they can’t drop the ad stack their business depends on.
Trade-off: there’s no revenue model yet. A supporter tier or sponsorship is the likely path. It’s the biggest open question about Vault, and I’d rather say so than hide it.
04: from the data
Title guides the way people search
Pages ranking in the same band in search got very different click-through rates. The winners were titled the way people type (“burhum puzzle”), and the losers used formal lore names (“Elowen: Witch of Wisdom”). New titles lead with the search term.
Burhum Maze7.96% CTR · pos 6.4
Areciel: Witch of Strength6.02% · pos 6.2
Bari: Witch of Kindness2.60% · pos 7.6
Elowen: Witch of Wisdom2.09% · pos 7.3
Caveat: this only holds for pages already ranking 6–8. The site-wide 1.68% CTR is normal for an average position of 11.7.
Outcome
From January to August 2026: 4,900 users, 51.4K search impressions, 862 clicks and 252 guides published. The launch post reached 134 upvotes and 12,000 views. I answered people’s questions in the thread first and linked the guide only as a follow-up.
An assumption the data broke: I designed for phones, but 60% of traffic is desktop, mostly people reading on a second monitor. That makes keeping the hint control in reach on desktop more important than I planned for.
Next: track which hint level people pick and whether they step up. A 26-second average session could mean they found the answer fast or gave up, and every future hint decision depends on which.
