How I enter FOCG

I was brought into web3 by my previous boss. At first, I agreed with the idea of transparent, decentralized, permissionless, believe it’s the future of the world. So I’m eager to find new project to meet my curiousity.

It was around June of 2023, someone sent the mud.dev in wechat group. I open it and I’m attracted by it. A framework to build complex on-chain application. That sounds so cool to me. As a solidity developer, I really think solidity is too limited for development. Logic that can be implemented in a single line of code in a traditional language requires a lot of lines in solidity. If we can build a complex application in solidity, more logic will be on chain, and the web3 will be more decentralized.

Then I follow more resources, find the ETHGlobal Autonomous World Hackathon. There are so many project using MUD framework, and their ideas are new to me. Suddenly, I felt i’m out of date and decide to do a project using MUD.

Story of Autochessia

What kind of game should I make? As old Dotaer, I immediately thought of auto chess, which is very close to me and technically feasible. So I went to the ETH ShangHai hackathon with some like-minded friends and was honored to win the award.

Project at hackathon is really simple, there’s no game framework, no animation, no UI design, no composability, which let this game looks far from the real dota auto chess. We think of something to add, but it’s very slow.

Then there was the Autonomous World Assembly, a grand event at Devcon. Muslims traveled thousands of miles to Istanbul for pilgrimage, and we, the aligned Ethereum developers, also went to Istanbul. That week felt like the week with the strongest faith and confidence. Everyone in the hacker house was talented, and the keynote speeches were more exciting than each other, making people feel that the autonomous world was right in front of us.

At the meantime, Loot Realms start a grant program to support on-chain games. As the web3 is full of innovation and eager for innovation, it feels that there are some things that should be done by default, such as raising funds, going production and issuing token after winning the hackathon. Someone said you should do this, others asked if you had considered that, or maybe I really wanted to do something great, so I continued to move forward.

I wrote a proposal to apply for grant and find people to vote. This is simply hell for a 90% introverted person. I act as a bot to add contact and sent some sincere but boring words, expect nothing but finally got selected. I was very excited that day, but the situation later seemed not so simple.

Development progress is the first difficulty. At that time, everyone in team has a full time job including me. I was too tired to write other code after work. Week has passed one by one, but the progress is 0. After a period of internal consumption, I quit my job and decide to do it full time. I sent a confident Twitter, but it seems that I never twitter anything until this article.

In the next months, we focused on development and product, but lost all ambition on the eve of the test. And I can now calmly consider it a silence and summarize the reason.

Reason For Silience

Incentive

Financially, I was too idealistic, focusing solely on the vision while overlooking others’ need for short-term financial returns. So gradually it became a one-person development and didn’t recognize it a problem it in time. In terms of product, I pursue too much perfect to delay the test once and again until my spirit was exhausted without any positive feedback.

These problems are essentially execution problems. Doing Project needs passion, a short hackathon can be achieved by passion, but it is not possible in the long run. I don’t know how to build an incentive mechanism at that time.

Not A Degen

For a long time, I am a risk-averse person. I never buy memes and only hold a small amount of mainstream assets, so the market has almost no impact on me. Naturally, I have never understood the needs of most crypto users and the logic of making money. I regard web3 as the next generation of the Internet and fantasize about nonexistent users. When most of the narratives faded and only PvP remained in the market, it collapsed: This may not be what I want to do.

Communication

I’m used to writing code by myself and is 90% introverted in my past life. So I’m a little timid to chat with people, even for sending messages via im. This led to a very delayed knowing of information, bad effect to collaboration and personally mental exhaustion.

End

This experience occured from my intest and ended due to relying too much on interest. I always buried my self in technical stack, only follow my interest to do things. Now I realize the importance of things beyond technology.

Well, I don’t have very valuable lesson too share, just learn more about myself. That’s enough for this experience.