Moonstream continues to help blockchain games grow healthy economies. The difference is that we’ve tested our theories and now know what works.
Moonstream has been in experimental mode until now. This is why we have so many products, projects, tools, and technology. It is why we have 109 repositories on GitHub.
For the last year and a half, our experiments have revolved around web3 games and web3 economies. We’ve been working with projects like Crypto Unicorns, Crypto-Guilds, Game7, and have started working with MetaBoy. Through that work, we have found a use case that generalizes to every web3 gaming project that will ever exist:
Web3 games will use Moonstream to reward players for their in-game accomplishments.
Web3 is starting to recover from the effects of the FTX meltdown at the end of last year and we are seeing new web3 gaming projects arise at an increasing rate. Every one of these projects can use Moonstream.
Realizing this potential will require us to combine four of our existing features into a cohesive whole:
- Query API
- Leaderboards
- Dropper
- Signing servers
Our tools will now be presented simply as:
- Analytics
- Leaderboards
- Drops
Our goal is to combine these features into a single, focused product and grow its adoption. To achieve that we are first working on making our tools self-serve so that our users can set them up and start using them right away.
Core Loop
The three tools represent the core loop inside a game economy:
- Analytics – gather player activity on and off-chain. Get insights of which game mechanics work and which don’t.
- Leaderboards – assign point values to player activities. This automatically creates and maintains a leaderboard for these activities.
- Drops – assign rewards to leaderboard positions. When a leaderboard event is completed, the rewards are automatically distributed to players.
Those features are already live. However, we are adding new functionality and automation for better user experience. Each component in the core loop should be self-serve as a standalone feature.
New additions
Some things at the top of our list of new additions to our core tools include but are not limited to:
- Analytics for smart contracts.
- Historical crawl automation.
- Google Sheets integration for both Analytics and Drops.
- Adding UI to create and manage leaderboards and drops.
- Expanding the types of tokens that can be dropped as rewards (ERC20 transfer, Terminus mint, ERC721 transfer, etc.).
- Adding Drops workflows (player-funded, game-funded, etc.).
- Adding a signing server for users to sign off on their drops and manage their signing servers from the Moonstream UI.
Developer Experience
Moonstream’s success depends on the ability for programmers to integrate with our contracts and APIs. This means these three things are now at the top of our priorities:
- Documentation
- Tutorials and how-to guides (text and video)
- Client libraries
Programmers doing technical integrations with Moonstream.to should experience ZERO frustration.
What about the rest of our tools
Our product is built on top of some of our other features: moonworm, Terminus, Inspector Facet. Drops also fit well with all of the on-chain game mechanics we have built like Garden of Forking Paths and NFT Inventory.
We will continue to maintain Moonstream-built tooling that lies on the critical path of our product (e.g. moonworm). And we believe in free software. Most software we build is released publicly and licensed freely. The only exception is our security-related code, which we keep private.
Public good projects include:
- moonworm – Code generator. Used to generate smart contract crawlers, command interfaces for smart contracts, and bots.
- Terminus – Decentralized access control protocol, builds on ERC1155. Also used by games to represent items and achievements.
- Inspector Facet – Used to inspect deployed EIP-2535 Diamond proxies.
- Node balancer – Used to distribute JSONRPC requests across multiple nodes. Improves reliability of node infrastructure.
- On-chain game mechanics – GoFP, Inventory, etc. Composable game mechanics that can be used by on-chain games.
- checkenv – Used to deliver configuration to servers and workers.
Fully on-chain gaming
Web3 gaming is evolving very quickly, and we need to keep our hands in the game to ensure that our product will continue serving the needs of web3 game developers into the future.
For this reason, we will continue our efforts on fully on-chain gaming. These efforts will be focused on Great Wyrm and on deploying game mechanics we have created for Great Wyrm into other web3 game worlds.
This is something that we have seen prior success with in the form of Crypto Unicorns: The Dark Forest, a fully on-chain game we ran at the beginning of 2022 that created close to 2,000,000 transactions on Polygon mainnet and generated millions of dollars of value in the Crypto Unicorns game economy.
Our research efforts will feed into our developer relations. By dogfooding even advanced features of our own product, we will make adoption and integration easier for our users. We will do this by creating resources for Moonstream users analogous to the Open AI Cookbook for OpenAI users.
To keep track of our product updates, consider joining our Discord server and following us on Twitter. After all, using Moonstream.to in your web3 game development saves you a lot of time and effort!