October 21st, 2025 Let there be weird! By Jeffrey M. Barber

My office is finally set up in a new fashion with a low desk so I can sit on the floor, kneel, sit on a stability ball, and stand. My ultimate goal is to cycle between these four positions in ~15 minute chunks as I get things done. Furthermore, I’ve now embraced the way of just using a laptop as I can get things done anywhere. It’s been a long time coming.

As such, I’ve recently fixed the migration code and updated adama-core with updates for limited (2-4 dimension) vectors and matrices. I aim to polish these over the coming weeks, but Adama is going to get weird.

The reason is that I’m focusing my efforts around fun games and will be 100% dedicated towards building a game studio as a solo operator. No cloud nonsense until the demand rises. The features shipped in Adama will not be hypothetical, but instead based on needs of shipping a handful of games.

The current vision is creating a studio focused on creating games that are split screen by default with potential for medium scale multiplayer. Instead of having a platform, I’ll finish the solo mode that embeds easily so the game client can self host.

From there, the goal is to move broadly and never go down a deep rabbit hole of some feature and just ship games. This means, the games will look like “real time board games” as I will leverage generative AI to create assets. Furthermore, the client is going to a thin client leveraging the Adama stream to power everything, and instead of trying to solve every problem possible, I’m going to solve hyper specific problems that are opt-in.

For example, the top left of the screen is a player status showing things like HP or MP, and this both configured and updated via the stream by the present of you.status which is a list of Status objects containing a name, value, total, etc… So, I’m in the era of “config based data driven” design EXCEPT the data is a stream, and that makes a world of difference.

I’m able to move fast broadly and push most of the concerns to Adama around game play which means I’ve already got a scripted environment with hot-reload. Plus, I can update gameplay as I play the game, so I’m having all sorts of fun. However, this means that I’ll be importing some weird things into Adama like height-fields and dungeon maps. Instead of trying to make Adama super duper general like I have been, I’m going to introduce versioned concepts as I ship games which are then available to the next game.

Shipping broadly means getting something that is good enough and moving on. For example, I currently have the “smooth” terrain system that renders a height-field as in with a single color or a single texture. Could I do more, yes? Will I… probably not until a game demands it.

Stay tuned for updates on the game and a radical shift in this site.