Back to (Virtual) Reality - Building the game is playing the game

After a major fuckup thinking a job would be a good idea, I confirmed i truly do hate working with other people and my life is my solo-dev journey on the Jinni self-actualization game

Self-Actualization Progress

Now that the full game prototype is *almost* complete I’m going to start tracking core life metrics that cant be tracked in-game and posting before/afters of my avatar in every post. I’ve gone to the sauna at least an hour a day for the past month (end of July + early August) and its really becoming a habit and my skin is fucking radiant like the 🌞.

On my hiatus

I quit my job that i had started in March beginning of last week because it was not fullfiling its original purpose of giving me stability and a salary to build Jinni without pressure to monetize. I had started really hating working with them (esp because they didnt want to pay me), i didnt feel like i could even do work there, and was wasting so much time trying to push before their launch but then they kept delaying (to their own detriment the onchain evidence would seem to tell). I could really feel how much life energy they were stealing from me because omg they were so annoying and useless. Even though I quit last week it took them almost 2 weeks and me coming back just to curse them out before they got it through their heads I as done with them.

As soon as i quit last week i felt way happier, less irritated, more inflow, etc. Felt v similar to when I fired everyone and shutdown my last startup Debt DAO early last year. After just a couple days of going back to building Jinni fulltime and i felt fucking great. Two weeks later and I feel light, airy, and in flow again. Taking a couple months break turned out to be great either way because some of my technical issues magically resolved themselves like Android Health library getting fixed, Expo updating to the latest React Native with major upgrades, and bumping into a real (non-crypto) dev that fixed my AI pipeline blocker by simply….adding a library I refused to use before lol.

So I’m back to full time art making and game development. I’ve made a ton of progress in two weeks even when just getting back into the codebase and game dev mindset. Im headed to Japan again in a couple weeks to chill with the two art collectives i’ve found there (so far 😈) and blast through features before going back to popup cities in Thailand in October and hopefully do a soft launch for the game with communal jinn.

Next dev update post I’ll try to go back to my original format where the main section is a thought piece instead of this boring life update / excuse for no progress. I’m thinking I’ll go with pro-social psyops but might describe my strategy Japan, brand IP, and monetization strategy to make it clear to players while onboarding that I’m not going to sell their data (which would mean selling my data! and I have the most data on the platform). Could also explain my popup city GTM strategy but i thinks it better to write that while im in Thailand rather than before.

Game Updates

• Got AI image editing for your tamagotchi evolution to work. Full AI pipeline and MVP technically working. Concept and architecture is built, now its technical + prompt engineering, code cleaning, product development, and distribution at pop-up cities.

• Deployed my React Native app as a website so I can side-load it onto iPhones as a PWA (so convoluted lol). Havent gotten PWA working but thats one of the small product dev things to figure out. PWA is very important for retention and continuous gameplay but people can still play on mobile without it.

  But cool I still have one codebase for a native Android app and a my webapp. I had already designed codebase for this so actually didnt take much except some project-level config.

• My hosted Neo4j database got deleted bc i hadnt used it in almost 6 months. Data structures have changed a lot since Neo4j is unstructured and doesnt have migrations like SQL so actually a good reset / cleaning. Great reason to keep backups and also good to test that my backdated importing will work for new players when i re-onboard again.

• Updated content on the marketing site. Still not great but a lot happier with the copy and vibes

• My cute pixelated tamagotchi base model that all players evolve from is either too cute or too pixelated and does not actually get edited. Although it was selected by popular vote in the private players chat (DM me if you want to get added) I will unfortunately be forced to find a new base model that is higher resolution to be edited by DALLE. Might be an issue w ith my AI pipeline which i havent fully tested since getting the DALLE API call to work and is still very hacky

• Going to be posting more ongoing product/dev/UI stuff on Farcaster. I think its good to start being a bit more public. People like the game, apparently people like this blog, people like me, no reason to share them all more

• Participated in the Zuzalu Q2 Gitcoin round. I didnt do any marketing/sales around it like i did last time because i didnt care and i havent been working on the game. Also forgot to update copy on my profile my before I submitted so not even best presentation possible. Still ended up in top 10 projects again (out of 30) with 1.6 ETH (~$4,000 today) in total donations and matching. Pretty good for a solo dev that hasnt touched the project in 4 months and only messaged like 5 people to donate lol.

• Had my first contributor to Jinni codebase from another resident at ZuVillage Georgia!

• Finally got AI pipeline fully working. Was actually fixed by the contributor, he made the fabulous insight that I could just ….import a library! I was really trying to avoid that and have complete manual control over my AI interactions because they are so core to the game. But at the same time its not so core that im building my own AI models and it being blocked on the final and most critical game logic was

• Got re-confirmation from Apple that I’m banned from creating a developer account so i cant even submit my app to the app store so they can reject me there like a normal app does lol

• Asked one of my favorite crypto artists Elco to do some avatar concept designs and artsy stuff. Video of moodboard I sent him. He’s still cooking on the artwork. Not feeling like doing user testing on branding. Just going to go with own aesthetic and intuition and if people dont fux they can not play.

I think thats it but thats pretty good for 2 weeks back including this post.

Next Steps

• Get PWA working now that webapp is live. Spent a couple days trying to get it ready but having issues with JS bundling/package imports on web with service worker files and stuffs. Basic annoying stuff as always.

• Test and improve prompt engineering to refine avatar evolution now that pipeline is working

• Get webapp onto a custom domain app.jinni.health. For some reason netlify isnt working, might be because i already have a netlify site deployed at jinni.health. AI gave me what seems like an overly complicated work around but ill try it. I could just roll my marketing site into my app and resolve the issue once and for all while also improving UX and SEO but also takes more effort so lets see.

• Get jubjub NFC cards working on mobile web so i can do onboarding for iPhones. Should be small logic change and I know its possible because of jubmoji.quest and already have some tips from them so not super worried about it.

• Push updated app to Android App Store so they dont delist my app after 5 months of inactivity (again perfect timing coming back to game development)

• Get server and database spun up again for user testing the new working version of the app!

• Run through game and make sure data structure’s are still valid/consistent for communal Jinn before I start developing the UI

• Make UI/UX wireframes for communal jinn to user test with in Japan and Thailand before building

• Find some more grants to apply to. Ideally not on Gitcoin to expand reach and get buy in from specific communities that will use my game.

• Going to integrate Farcaster sign-on and have sharing ur jinni image / evolution summary as a frame. Hopefully can make frame so that other people that have signed-in with Farcaster can just recast and it will auto populate with their jinn. Would be dope to make channels have communal jinn but that seems kinda weird so not going to prioritize that.