Hi HN! We're Rohan and David, founders of Temper (<a href="https://www.temperapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.temperapp.com</a>).<p>Temper is a desktop app we built to help gamers get more sleep by blocking games at night. You can set a schedule (eg. no games after 11pm) or set a daily time limit (eg. no more than 2 hours of gaming per day) and once you hit those limits, Temper will block you from playing more games until the next day. We know nobody wants to get blocked in the middle of a game and get an abandon, so unlike most blockers, Temper is game-aware and uses traditional computer vision (specifically, blob detection to identify elements) to ensure the block only activates once a game ends.<p>We started Temper because we're gamers ourselves (over 5k hours of Dota 2 between us!) and believe games are positive experiences that can help you de-stress and keep in touch with friends. But we also realized that we regularly stayed up late at night playing just "one more game" instead of getting a healthy amount of sleep. After surveying other gamers and looking at the research, we discovered this was a really common phenomenon, with international studies reporting that 9% of gamers overuse video games. So we decided to build Temper to help people (and ourselves) maintain a healthier relationship with gaming.<p>If you're a gamer who struggles with the same issue, please check us out and tell us what you think! It's Windows only for now and we support League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, PUBG and Hearthstone. We're adding new games every week so if you have any requests let us know.
I wrote a program which would take an initial seed password and run a number of sha1 iterations to get a digest back. I used it to lock myself out of websites such that I couldn't get back in without dedicating N hours of serial cpu time. In hindsight, I had invented my own proof of work system.<p>Never had that sort of addiction with video games, but I can understand it from that experience. I'd only fear that I'd quickly learn how to hack this tool and disable it whenever I wanted.
i'm at a loss here as to why people bother installing these kinds of apps (the focus time apps overall i mean) to prevent them from doing something?
if i have this on, can't i just simply kill the process through the task manager and be done with it?
genuine question here...<p>bearing that in mind, i'm curious to understand what was the rationale from YC to have them into the W18 batch from a business/revenue standpoint?
Do you really need computer vision to detect when someone is in a game? There are certain static elements on the screen in every game that you could probably just take a current screenshot and match against known images?
Any insight on how this will scale into a sustainable business? I'm an indie app developer and find that most of my ideas for new products die in ideation phase because they seem financially unsustainable. Maybe I'm thinking about it wrong?<p>Temper sounds like a feature in a larger app, not a business. Whats the next step?
Do you need computer vision to tell a have is running? Do you need an app to prevent you paying games? Did you start a for-profit tech company just to "help" people?
I was stoked for a sec. I'm a gamer who overuses video games, for sure, and especially late at night.<p>But it'd need to cope with my (evolving) Steam library. So far in 2018 I've spent meaningful late-night play time on half a dozen different games. Mostly single-player. Another year might see another pattern.<p>I look forward to hearing about your progress. Good luck!
I'm interested in what your thoughts, if any, have been to support MMO's. I think it'd be easy enough for folks entering and exiting instanced content to detect, but for folks doing something like crafting or gathering, which are generally repetitive tasks that don't change the field of gameplay much to demarcate a "done" step.
I'm a target user and installed Leechblock extension for that purpose to block op.gg<p>Really smooth download and config. Kudos. I like you don't make me register right away.<p>I was surprised UAC came up twice though.<p>Tangent: Recently I found that "3 games" a night really changed my approach to league and gave me more quality and less stress to start another game etc. etc.
couldn't you just look at windows processes and keep track of how long its running based on when a user starts the timer. Really wouldn't an annoying timer do the job just as well ?