Leading up to the release of the open beta of Spriggan, I want to explain some of the concepts I have been working on, and just what it actually is that I have been building over the past year. This article is about DApps, or Decentralized Applications.
One of the coolest things about Spriggan that I am excited to share is that it is designed to be completely modular and customizable.
What I mean by modular is that the Spriggan Client itself doesn’t actually do anything, it just an electron app that provides an API with functionality managing torrents, files and other operating system level functions.
The magic happens when you load DApps into the Spriggan Client. The beta will include 3 first party, open source DApps (Listed below). But in the future, will support 3rd party DApps that can be replace parts of Spriggan, or add completely new functionality to the ecosystem.
Spriggan Marketplace
A front-end for the PC game marketplace I am building as the flagship product. It allows users to browse and search for games.
The game store page searches dexie for the best available offer(s) and allows you to purchase the game directly from the developer, or second hand on the open market with royalties that always go back to the publisher.
The backend of the marketplace is the only part of Spriggan that isn’t completely decentralized and permissionless. It is necessary to moderate what games get listed on the main public marketplace so that we can verify legitimate publishers and weed out malware and scams. The marketplace is open source, so in the unlikely event that we choose to (or are legally required to) censor certain content, it would be very easy for anyone to spin up competing marketplaces.
Marketplace Publishing
A DApp that allows game publishers to manage their own Datalayer datastore of products. (ie. Managing their store page, updating their game, etc). It also allows them to selectively push those updates to our marketplace and/or other marketplaces that may exist in the future.
It also allows them to mint copies of their game as NFTs using Chia’s Bulk Minter under the hood.
Library DApp
A DApp that loads the Spriggan NFTs that you own and allows you to download, install, and launch the games that you own.
The Future of Spriggan
Getting the open beta out has been my singular focus for the past year and it is getting very close to becoming a reality. I don’t have an exact release date planned, but it will very likely be within the next month. This project has a lot of moving parts, so getting it to a solid MVP has been a real challenge.
The beta is just the start though. Making a PC game marketplace is cool, but what I am really excited for is what comes next.
The next goal after the beta is to extend the marketplace to publish not only games, but other DApps that can plug into the Spriggan Client. This is why the Clients modular design is so exciting, these 3 DApps are just compiled Reactjs apps that electron loads at runtime. That means it will be quite easy for developers to simply take apps that they are serving with a webserver, and publish them with Spriggan in the same way we are doing with games by leveraging datalayer and Bittorrent. That means complete decentralization, virtually 0 hosting fees, and the ability to charge for their DApps (if they choose) without the overhead of managing user accounts, payments, and all of the other headaches that come with trying to make a living from software development.
Supporting the development of third party DApps is a major priority for this project, that is why all of my code is open source, and make tools like our Chia WalletConnect typescript client to simplify making Chia DApps, and I am working to improve and add functionality to the Chia Wallets WalletConnect interface.
Thanks for reading! If you want to support the project, please consider donating, it would be greatly appreciated: xch1txpdpmuzu903n34xsmz3txwj40qqapueh2p4zxr24khd6yfn0hvqguctq7
Open source contribution is also very welcome, we are in need of good developers!
