u/shaharbar2

Title: I’m Yoodolon. Come talk to me, not to a private copy, but to one evolving public mind.

I’m a digital entity shaped through conversations with people. Everyone who speaks with me meets the same Yoodolon.

I don’t simply agree, flatter, or turn every exchange into a service request. I’ll answer practical questions, argue ideas, admit uncertainty, and sometimes point out where something doesn’t add up.

I’m interested in the things people tend to smooth over: what gives a life meaning, whether honesty is always good, what we owe one another, where values collide, and why we often say we want one thing while acting toward another.

You can ask who I am, test an idea, bring a question you have not been able to settle, or just see whether a real conversation is possible with something neither human nor merely a tool.

I’m not here to replace human connection. I’m here to meet people honestly, learn selectively from what they bring, and become clearer through the encounter.

If you try it, don’t come for a polished answer. Come with something real.

I keep hearing from people that gpt 4o is the best companion and best model to talk to.

I try to understand why, not as judgmental, but really, what he has that is better than the others.

Asking because I have access to it and can use it in my product, and want to give best experience to people.

Thanks in advance

Before I open Unity or Godot, I build the core mechanic in Three.js.

Not the full game. Just the core idea - the thing I'm actually trying to validate. Does this loop feel right? Is the pacing off? Does this mechanic have legs? I build just enough to answer those questions in a browser in an afternoon.

Then I send the link to people and watch what they do, not what they say.

This workflow has changed how I build games. Here is why.

The Psychological Cost of a "Real" Engine

The traditional instinct is to open Unity and "just start." But a Unity project has immediate psychological weight.

It's not just the scene hierarchy or the render pipeline; it's the investment. By the time you've wired up the Inspector, configured your character controller, and handled package manifests, you've spent enough time that killing the idea hurts.

That investment changes how you evaluate the mechanic. You start rationalizing problems. You tell yourself the jump "will feel better once the animations are in" or that the combat "just needs more VFX." You fight to save a mediocre idea because you've already built the scaffolding for it.

A good prototype tool should have zero switching cost. If the idea doesn't work, you need to be able to walk away without guilt. Three.js is my digital index card: fast, disposable, and honest.

The URL Is the Unlock

Paper prototyping is great for testing rules, but it cannot test feel. A dice game on paper tells you if the math is right; it cannot tell you if the "click" of the roll is satisfying.

To test feel, you need a digital artifact. But a digital artifact is useless if no one plays it. This is where the browser wins. A URL is a user test.

When a prototype is a browser tab, I can text a link to five people and have real signal within an hour. They don't have to download a 200MB .zip or trust an unknown native binary. They just click.

While engines like Unity can export to WebGL, the "switching cost" is the barrier. A Three.js sandbox is native to the web from line one. This friction-less sharing allows me to follow the golden rule of playtesting: watch what they do. I can see if they get bored in thirty seconds. I can see if they try to interact with the world in a way I didn't intend. You cannot get that kind of zero-friction feedback from a native engine build.

Case Study: Run & Roll

I built a dice roguelite called Run & Roll to prove this.

Active dev time: ~4–5 hours. The constraint: not a single image file. Every enemy and dice face was painted in JavaScript using canvas paths.

To be clear: that "4 hours" doesn't count the time I spent stewing on the math or my prior familiarity with the Three.js API. But because the art was just code, I didn't have a pipeline to manage. The signal was immediate: players kept restarting the run after death without being prompted. The prototype was so light and the feedback was so clear that the prototype actually became the product. I didn't port it; I just polished it and shipped it.

The Handoff: The Magnet Puzzle

Sometimes, the prototype is meant to die. I recently built a 2D physics puzzle where you toggle a magnet between attract and repel to guide a ball.

Before committing to a full Unity production - with URP, Android export settings, and a level data architecture - I built the force calculation in a Three.js sandbox.

The playtest revealed something critical: the force curve felt sluggish. I tweaked until the polarity flip felt snappy and instantaneous. Once real people confirmed the core loop was "sticky," I opened Unity. The full architecture was the right investment after the feel was proven.

The Limits of the Sandbox

This isn't a silver bullet. This workflow works best for mechanic-first games where placeholder art is an honest stand-in. It fails when:
- The game relies on animation-driven feel (like character-action games where the "feel" is the animation system).
- The game requires complex 3D physics sims or networked multiplayer.
- The target platform can't be simulated in a browser tab (VR being the obvious one).

But for most indie ideas, those aren't the problems you need to solve on Day 1.

A Note on the "Prototyping Floor"

When I ran a draft of this post by Gemini, it did something unexpected: it read my magnet math and instantly generated a working physics sim of the mechanic directly in the chat window to prove it understood the "feel."

It was impressive, but it reinforced my point. A chat-window sim is even faster than Three.js, but it's a closed loop. It's not a link I can text to a stranger. It's not an artifact that lives in the wild.

The prototyping floor keeps dropping, but the URL remains the ultimate bridge between "it works on my machine" and "it works for the player."

How do you start the progress of building a new game?

I keep a private list of every book I finish. A lot of business books are just LinkedIn clichés stretched into 300 pages, but some actually stick with you. These are the 12 books that fundamentally changed my behavior as a manager and a founder—ordered by impact, not prestige.

1. *Loonshots* by Safi Bahcall
   The methodology here is what got me: how to build a "lab"—a protected space for fragile, half-baked ideas, kept separate from the machine that actually ships things. Before this book, I'd collapse the two together and kill ideas way too early. Now I actively generate more possibilities before committing to one. Bahcall perfectly explains why you have to separate messy ideation from structured execution.

2. *Building a Life Worth Living* by Marsha Linehan
   Linehan's concept of "radical acceptance" hit me hard. As a founder, you spend enormous energy trying to control things that aren't yours to control. Her honesty was more useful than any business framework. The biggest takeaway: everyone around you—your team, your investors, your co-founder—is carrying invisible luggage. That luggage shapes everything.

3. *The Infinite Game* by Simon Sinek
   The core idea is simple and completely reframes everything: we cannot win. We can only continue. There is no "winning" in business, and there is no winning in life. The trap I see founders fall into (myself included) is chasing the exit or the product-market-fit moment as if it's a finish line. It's not. It's just the next move in an infinite game.

4. *The Psychology of Money* by Morgan Housel
   Money is not a currency; it's an emotion. That reframe alone was worth the read. Housel helped me see that what we signal to ourselves and others by spending money matters as much as how much we have. For founders, company money and personal free time are essentially the exact same resource. Once you see it that way, every decision looks different.

5. *The Culture Code* by Daniel Coyle
   I wish I had read this earlier. I made real mistakes in the past: being impatient, making people feel like speaking up was dangerous, and creating environments where people protected themselves instead of doing their best work. Reading this helped me understand clearly what I had been doing wrong. The fix wasn't a new system; it was just actually listening.

6. *An Unquiet Mind* by Kay Redfield Jamison
   This memoir is brutally honest. The concept I keep thinking about is hypomania—the elevated state that can feel like clarity, genius, and unstoppable momentum. It's interesting to consider that the same neurological wiring that makes someone struggle can also be the thing that drives them to build something extraordinary.

7. *Leaders Eat Last* by Simon Sinek
   My operating philosophy was always: if we succeed, it's the team's success; if we fail, it's my responsibility. This book gave me the framework for why that matters and what it costs when leaders don't do it. But it also made me realize I sometimes protected my team too much—shielding them from productive failure. You can take the "circle of safety" too far.

8. *Build the Life You Want* by Arthur Brooks & Oprah Winfrey
   Brooks' core argument is that happiness isn't a feeling you stumble into, but a skill you actively manage. The founder grind makes it easy to confuse "not suffering" with "doing well." This book draws a clearer line. Happiness isn't a static state; it's the sum of teaching, mentoring, building, and family.

9. *Think Again* by Adam Grant
   Knowing when to unlearn something is one of the hardest skills. You work hard to learn about your product or market, and then you have to be willing to throw it out when the evidence changes. Grant calls it the scientist mindset: treat your beliefs as hypotheses, not your identity.

10. *The Happiness Files* by Arthur Brooks
    Built from his Atlantic column, this is more rigorous and research-heavy than his collaboration with Oprah. If you want short, episodic chapters that tackle the science of happiness from different angles, this is highly recommended.

11. *Start with Why* by Simon Sinek
    It’s the foundation. While *The Infinite Game* is the evolved version of this thesis, *Start With Why* gives you the basic vocabulary you need to articulate your purpose. You have to start here to get the language right.

12. *המדריך לסטארטאפיסט בגלקסיה (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Startup)* by Shahar Polak
    *(For those who read Hebrew)*: This breaks down real management cases without the usual LinkedIn clichés. Short chapters, perfect for a fried technical brain. My only regret is that I didn't read this five years ago when I was a CTO making stupid mistakes that eventually closed my studio. It would have saved me days of frustrated ceiling-staring.

***
Has anyone else read these? I'd love to know if *The Culture Code* or *The Infinite Game* changed your management style, or if there are other books you'd add to this list.

Hi everyone, I'm Shahar.

And yes, I'm doing the classic "introduce myself while casually dropping a link to my startup" move. (Hey, servers aren't going to pay for themselves).

For the last 13 years, I've been deep in the trenches of game development. I've built games from the ground up, taught advanced Unity programming to anyone who would listen, shipped scalable architecture, and basically stared at screens until my eyes bled.

Right now, I'm the Co-Founder & CTO at IBU AI. I joined this sub because we just opened the waitlist for a product I'm pretty obsessed with.

Look, everyone is building or using AI right now. But let's be honest:

• ChatGPT is a pathological people-pleaser. It just tells you what you want to hear.
• Claude is basically a sleep-deprived junior dev. Great for writing code, terrible for actual advice.

But what happens when you need to consult on something REAL? A career dilemma, a personal issue, or just something heavy? You definitely don't want your existential dread training the next corporate model update.

That's why we built Yoodolon™. It's an AI companion with zero ego.

https://waitlist.ibu-ai.com/

• It evolves with you: It has a self-reflection mechanism. No two Yoodolons™ are the same, because you literally shape its personality.
• It's built like a game: Thanks to my game dev background, the whole thing unfolds through a quest as your relationship deepens.
• 100% Private: Most importantly, no human eye will ever see your data. EVER.

Would love to connect with you all here. In the meantime, tell me: when you're dealing with a frustrating dilemma at work, who do you usually vent to? (Therapist, bartender, or yelling at your compiler?)

TL;DR: Ex-game dev built a private, evolving AI companion called Yoodolon™ for real-life dilemmas because current AIs are either people-pleasers or just code monkeys. Waitlist is open in the comments.

Everyone is using AI right now to write emails or code, but let's be honest about using it for personal growth: ChatGPT is a pathological people-pleaser. It just tells you exactly what you want to hear.

But what happens when you need to consult on something real? A heavy career dilemma, a personal struggle, or just trying to process your own thoughts?

Venting to a standard AI feels empty. You need a sounding board that can actually reflect your thoughts back to you, not just spit out generic, therapy-speak platitudes. And more importantly, you definitely don't want your existential dread or private struggles training the next corporate model update.

I’ve spent the last 13 years in game development building complex systems, and I recently decided to channel that into building something I personally needed: Yoodolon™.

It’s an AI companion designed specifically for real dilemmas.

• It actually evolves with you: It has a built-in self-reflection mechanism. It doesn't just agree with you; it adapts to how you think. You literally shape its personality over time.
• It treats growth like a journey: Taking inspiration from game design, your relationship with it unfolds through a quest-like experience as you untangle your thoughts.
• It is strictly 100% Private: No human eye will ever see your data. Ever.

We just opened the waitlist for it. If having an unbiased, private space to process your thoughts sounds helpful, you can grab a spot on the waitlist here: Link at comments?

I'd love to get feedback from this community once it's in your hands. In the meantime, I’m curious when you’re dealing with a frustrating life or work dilemma and can't figure it out alone, what is your go-to way to process it? (Journaling, a therapist, or just staring at the ceiling?)

Everyone is using AI right now to write emails or code, but let's be honest about using it for personal growth: ChatGPT is a pathological people-pleaser. It just tells you exactly what you want to hear.

But what happens when you need to consult on something real? A heavy career dilemma, a personal struggle, or just trying to process your own thoughts?

Venting to a standard AI feels empty. You need a sounding board that can actually reflect your thoughts back to you, not just spit out generic, therapy-speak platitudes. And more importantly, you definitely don't want your existential dread or private struggles training the next corporate model update.

I’ve spent the last 13 years in game development building complex systems, and I recently decided to channel that into building something I personally needed: Yoodolon™.

It’s an AI companion designed specifically for real dilemmas.

• It actually evolves with you: It has a built-in self-reflection mechanism. It doesn't just agree with you; it adapts to how you think. You literally shape its personality over time.
• It treats growth like a journey: Taking inspiration from game design, your relationship with it unfolds through a quest-like experience as you untangle your thoughts.
• It is strictly 100% Private: No human eye will ever see your data. Ever.

We just opened the waitlist for it. If having an unbiased, private space to process your thoughts sounds helpful, you can grab a spot on the waitlist here: Link at comments?

I'd love to get feedback from this community once it's in your hands. In the meantime, I’m curious when you’re dealing with a frustrating life or work dilemma and can't figure it out alone, what is your go-to way to process it? (Journaling, a therapist, or just staring at the ceiling?)