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Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

Well, as an entrepreneur who is 10 years into a venture where most of my mentors thought my time was better spent on whatever was hot at the time (big data?) I can say that the perception of rationality is, like all things really, very subjective.

I see something and they don't. I think I'm right and they think they're right. But I see what I see, and I want to go for it. I might end up being wrong, but ultimately the journey to that particular place is one of the sincerest forms of self expression I've found, and I can't do that as easily if I too heavily depend on the eyes of others.

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> ultimately the journey to that particular place is one of the sincerest forms of self expression I've found

This hits me hard, and thank you for expressing it.

I'm currently building a strange SaaS which brings me joy. I have no customers and a handful of people that have tried it out. I promote it here on HN every chance I get as I am shameless. It's called Adama ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ) and it started as a way to build online board games.

Now, I have no idea how to market it, and I'm still developing it on variety of fronts. My focus is super diluted and chaotic, and I try to reign it only to discover more shiny things.

The true beauty of life is that there no right way to experience it. When viewed through the lens of an artist, much is subjective. Who is to say my idea is bad? Well, yeah, it is full of silliness, but that's the fun of it. Perhaps, I am wasting my life, but what then is the point of life?

I've come to believe that faith (which I sorely lack in a spiritual sense) is an important part of being human. I have faith that Adama is a great way for me to spend my time, and I'm currently trying to embrace the creative side of life.

Hey, it looks like you're trying to do something cool and different.

Awesome.

May I ask that you check out some of these dead links that may be giving people a bad impression of you?

On here, [0], the link to [1] is dead.

Same with this[2], here[3].

There may be others.

Edit:

Now that I've had a chance to read a bit about what you're doing, I've got to ask, you talk about boardgames, have you built a really straightforward boardgame prototype?

Like one I could find online and understand as a complete project, preferably as an example or starter template for a new user?

It could be for a trivial boardgame, but an actual boardgame, so settlers of catan for example?

-[0]: https://www.adama-platform.com/pricing.html

-[1]: https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/02/25/early-access-launc...

-[2]: https://book.adama-platform.com/

-[3]: https://book.adama-platform.com/reference/history.html

Thanks for the heads up, I just deployed the reference and main site with fixes for the dead links.

I built the least straightforward board game: Battle Star Galatica ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti... ), and I've also made hearts.

My #1 problem at the moment is focusing, but I'll share the rough plan I am hoping to commit to for the coming weeks.

First, I am seeking a balance between low latency awesomeness and durability. I'm super not happy with the RDS implementation of how I persist game state, so I'm writing directly to disk with a periodic back-up and cold storage migration. I plan on writing about this more on the blog.

Now, this is the wrong priority from a business growth perspective, but it brings me joy.

Second, I am going to ship a new @web aspect where the Adama server can be a read-only web server for assets, json, and other fun things. This is needed for the IDE so assets (i.e. images) can be uploaded and attached to a document and then served publicly.

Third, for actually shipping board games, I'm de-prioritizing how I think about the WYSIWYG editor and focusing on just HTML via RxHTML. RxHTML is a new templating thing that I'm working on which I will post details about in the coming month, but the gist is that I can take a HTML template and then reactively bind it to a tree such that DOM updates are seemless and minimal. I intend to write a post on my own personal despair of dealing with modern JavaScript tooling.

Fourth, I am going to get the web portal online with just a text editor (currently evaluating code mirror) such that I can onboard people quickly with just their email and they can get to typing.

Fifth, with super minimal IDE, I can then introduce examples for a variety of games and applications which can be one-click instantiated.

Sixth, with one-click instantiation, I'll build a reflection base UI where people can send messages to a document and see the document with pretty printing. This will let people actually play a game in a sense as a developer.

Seven, I'll add rxhtml to the minimal IDE and then people could make reactive reports/UIs.

At this point, the vision can start to manifest of Adama as a roblox like website for board games. Now, it is worth noting or pondering "where is the customer in all of this?" and I'm currently the customer.

Firstly it's great that you've got a lot of enthusiasm for this and a roadmap.

> I built the least straightforward board game: Battle Star Galatica ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37111/battlestar-galacti... ), and I've also made hearts.

Sorry about that, I was being unclear, is this visible anywhere? Can I look at how you've done it?

In my experience authoring systems can fall into two broad categories:

1. You can think in them, so they're a useful space to prototype and if you're lucky the output is good enough to ship.

2. You can't easily think in them, but they have other positive qualities, they're performant for example, or target a wide array of platforms, so you sketch out ideas elsewhere and once you've worked out what you're trying to do, pull it in.

For some people, this is a non-problem, they've internalised a system well enough that they can do everything in one place.

If you can show what a prototype looks like, people can start looking at what you're producing and see where this fits in their toolbox of useful tools. Or they can point out gaps they perceive which you can look at and think about whether fixing those perceived gaps is within the vision of your tool or not. Maybe you're just not wanting to solve that use-case =)...

I would also suggest setting aside a day and showing what you currently have to some people who design games, either as amateurs or experts and see what feedback they give you. You may already have something they want to use, or you may find blockers that prevent them from using it. The mom test[0] may be useful here if you are collecting feedback to discern useful feedback from platitudes.

If you're not interested in doing this because you're building primarily for yourself, that's cool. I just think that this might be a useful exercise to work out if people would be more willing to engage with what you're building and what if anything might be holding them back from doing so =)...

- [0]: http://momtestbook.com/

You can look at it! However, it's a giant mess and out of date (changed a few language primitives)

http://jeffrey.io/bsg.adama.txt

This encodes all the rules for the backend. Basically, you will see a lot of tables and then control flow is by a state machine (#state_machine_label { /* code to run */ }) which then asks players via channels and await.

For legal reasons, I don't have the poorly done UI available. However, a neat design aspect is that I can have poorly written AI make decisions to play the game to test it.

My appreciation for the game has grown and depth of the rules has made me a beast.

I am in a strange boat since I'm trying to reconcile some of my insights with my passions. On one hand, I'm still in this process of describing the deep things my career has gave me ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31567549 ) and then having fun.

I'm trying to execute on a three strategy ( http://www.adama-platform.com/2022/02/24/open-strategy.html) where leg one is all about getting the SaaS stable and reliable.

Leg two is I invest into tooling for me to make games.

Leg three is where I get to making games.

I'm currently looking at what is the medium between Leg two and three. I had a plan of building a game engine specifically for board games, and I even made a WYSIWYG editor. I recently started to break off the WYSIWYG editor as a standalone component (which you can see at http://ide.adama-platform.com/solo/ ; click 'single item (and new)' to put a box up which you can drag around). It's made in Rust and very exciting.

I still loving have the WYSIWYG editor as a part of the leg two strategy, but now I'm focusing on just making HTML work using this new rxhtml thing I'm working on. I'm optimistic that rxhtml will be a cheaper investment than dealing with all the npm crap. I'm writing another essay on this in regards to the current mess that is the JavaScript. The thesis is that, at the end of the day, the front-end challenge is to make HTML with good UX which is then responsive to input and data changes. With a reactive back-end, it's very easy to turn the browser back into a dumb terminal.

The first product to build within the minimal IDE is a "The Crew" clone since my friends and I have exhausted both the space and sea version.

One thing that I've realized is how hard this strategy is. First, it is slow AF. Second, the gradient of difficulty of pitches; the SaaS may as well be rocket science and the IDE is currently vaporware (but I believe it will be more accessible) and if I just made a single game then people could play it.

Once I get some of the investments into a tidy shape that make me warm and fuzzy on the inside, I'll definitely focus on the various communities. Thanks for your thoughts. Also, I ordered the mom test book.

Ok, well it seems like you have a clear plan.

Just a heads up, the battlestar code is pretty large, so you might want to code / use as an example a simpler game and then if anyone asks if it can be used for more substantive games, point to the updated and working version of the battlestar code.

That way people can see:

- You have a working thing

- There's a nice entry point tutorial

- They have some example code to look at of more complex example for when they have to build something larger, which is super useful besides reference documentation that people rarely provide.

In fact lots of small examples of things are probably going to be useful for you, as lots of people you're going to be engaging with are going to want to copy / paste stuff.

Lots of luck and please post a Show HN when you're next releasing something!

Indeed, a key point is the definition of rationality. You can argue that everyone acts rational: they make choices based on some internal logic that makes sense to them at the time of decision-making. Whether that is the flip of a coin (Twoface) or even what seems most fun and chaotic to them at that moment (Joker).

As far as I know, the fact that the logic used needn't be consistent was already known from psychology (people can provide a motivation for their choices relying on arguments that cannot possibly have actually factored in to their decision-making process).

So that also applies to entrepreneurs, apparently.

I really appreciate this comment, thanks for sharing

there's a saying in trading: never lose money being right

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