
Launch HN: Temper (YC W18) – Get more sleep by blocking games at night - hanrelan
Hi HN! We&#x27;re Rohan and David, founders of Temper (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.temperapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;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&#x27;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 &quot;one more game&quot; 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&#x27;re a gamer who struggles with the same issue, please check us out and tell us what you think! It&#x27;s Windows only for now and we support League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, PUBG and Hearthstone. We&#x27;re adding new games every week so if you have any requests let us know.
======
emerged
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.

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.

~~~
hanrelan
Haha that's a really clever scheme

------
laurentb
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...

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?

~~~
DanHulton
Oftentimes, having just _one_ step in the way of something is enough to break
the habit. Like, move the cookies off the counter and into the cupboard above
the fridge even works.

This is just another application of that.

~~~
vtange
But then why not just make the shortcut to the game inconvenient to access
(hide it in a folder in a folder in a folder) or just plain uninstall the game
(adds the extra step of reinstalling to play).

~~~
undersuit
1) Windows Search puts all my applications just a few keystrokes away,
regardless of shortcuts.

2) It's not about abstaining from the game, its about playing a healthy
amount. Reinstalling the game daily isn't going to teach you not to play all
night, it's going teach you to not uninstall the game every night after your
session.

~~~
laurentb
and killing a process in the task manager is easy enough for anyone who games
enough to see this as a problem...

I can edit my hosts file to point facebook.com to 127.0.0.1 in general, but
it's even more trivial to get rid of it when i do want to check facebook (not
that i crave it that much anyway)....

------
matchbok
How in the world is this a potential business? Has YC gone down the drain?

Dear lord. This is a clock for christ's sake.

~~~
krapp
An app that only sent the word "yo" was once valued at $10 million and hyped
as a revolutionary new paradigm in communication.

I can't even be surprised anymore at the things people will throw money at.

------
nuggien
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?

~~~
hanrelan
We tried matching against known elements (template matching), but
unfortunately that didn't hold up well given the large number of resolutions
games support.

One problem is that the elements themselves don't necessarily scale
proportionally. For example, if you have a button with some text in it and you
reduce the resolution, often the game will keep the text larger but reduce the
padding around the text. This makes template matching tough.

We found blob detection works pretty reliably and uses minimally CPU, but
we're not CV experts so if anyone has other ideas we'd love to hear them!

~~~
clemmakesapps
It would be nice to see a metric for performance impact of this blob detection
so that gamers with less beefy computers don't have to compromise their
gameplay settings to accommodate for this app

~~~
hanrelan
We don't have official benchmarks, but you shouldn't see much of an impact at
all since we only do it once a second and on a small portion of the screen. If
you do notice a difference please let me know.

------
kylestewart
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?

Temper sounds like a feature in a larger app, not a business. Whats the next
step?

~~~
hanrelan
We could expand to mobile which includes a large number of gamers. We also
think there's more to be done around the area of healthy gaming in general
(eg. avoiding toxic games).

Another thing is we've had some people ask us for tools around
Facebook/Netflix/YouTube, but we're focused on gaming for now.

~~~
kylestewart
I'm starting to see the vision a bit. A holistic solution to creating a
healthy balance of things like Facebook and video games could become a
sustainable business. Headspace might be a good company to learn some ideas
from. They seem to be doing really well selling "peace of mind".

Good luck!

------
Y_Y
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?

~~~
foxbarrington
The computer vision is not to detect if the game application is running, it's
to detect if the game application is running and the user is in the middle of
a "match". In other words, if the application can be shut down without
negatively impacting the player's stats or team members.

I don't think that whether or not someone "needs" an app for self-control is
the question. It's whether or not outsourcing that self-control is useful.
I've seen many comments from people who get benefit from blocking HN, reddit,
and FB for specified periods of time.

------
jholman
I was stoked for a sec. I'm a gamer who overuses video games, for sure, and
especially late at night.

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.

I look forward to hearing about your progress. Good luck!

------
belthesar
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.

~~~
hanrelan
This is a good question and something we've been thinking about. We don't have
a good answer for non-episodic games, but it might be something along the
lines of slowly graying out the screen after you pass your cut-off.

------
Cilvic
I'm a target user and installed Leechblock extension for that purpose to block
op.gg

Really smooth download and config. Kudos. I like you don't make me register
right away.

I was surprised UAC came up twice though.

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.

~~~
hanrelan
Thanks! David put a lot of effort into making the config really intuitive so
he'll be pleased to hear that. The UAC is once for the installer and once for
the app since it requires admin privileges to apply the block.

~~~
Cilvic
I don't know spefically about your internals, but you could try to install
with user rights only (= no UAC) and then only do UAC when you need the block?

~~~
hanrelan
If I remember right the reason the installer needs admin rights it to be able
to kill and overwrite a previous installation of Temper

------
rapfaria
How are you going to block a CIV 6 game? ;)

~~~
hanrelan
We have some ideas for dealing with single player games like putting an
overlay over the screen or slowly grayscaling it, but we've decided to focus
on multiplayer games for now. I also kind of like this Tolstoy idea...

------
cdiamand
Any advice on how to get started with computer vision / blob detection? Is
there any good open source software to play around with?

~~~
hanrelan
We're using AForge.NET but OpenCV is great too. This was a pretty useful
tutorial:
[http://www.aforgenet.com/articles/shape_checker/](http://www.aforgenet.com/articles/shape_checker/)

~~~
cdiamand
Thanks for sharing!

------
growt
You could just detect key presses. For most games 30 seconds without wasd or
1234 means you're in a menu.

~~~
hanrelan
We do use that for idle detection (so we don't count it for your total played
time). But for the end-game detection we need to be more accurate because we
don't want to accidentally trigger in the middle of a game (maybe you're
waiting for a respawn and stepped away from your comp while dead) and we want
to immediately trigger when the game ends so you can't queue for the next one.

------
codegladiator
Do you do the computer vision part on the end users machine or your server ?

~~~
hanrelan
End-user's machine. The images aren't saved and never leave your machine

------
angryasian
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 ?

------
sparrish
Please add FortNite

~~~
hanrelan
That's next on our list!

------
clemmakesapps
Neat idea! Is there a mac version in the works?

~~~
hanrelan
Not at the moment - we're focused on Windows and increasing the number of
games for now. But we'll definitely keep it in mind

------
baby_wipe
How hard is it uninstall and reinstall?

~~~
hanrelan
It's straightforward using standard Windows add/remove. However if you
uninstall while blocked, you stay blocked until you reinstall, so you should
only uninstall while not blocked if you want to get rid of the app. If you do
happen to uninstall while blocked and want to remove the block contact me and
I can tell you how to do that.

------
JohnJamesRambo
>9% of gamers overuse video games

This seems low.

