Eggforce Weekly Writeup #13: Betaftermath

One week of intense hatching later, what happened?

Eska Roy
Eska Roy
Nov 2 · 3 min read
Pictured: the many, many Beta testers of this first round

Hey, Eggfans.

This first round of Beta put unprecedented strain on the POA Network, but we got through it.

What happened through the game? What conclusions can we draw?


WAR AND PEACE

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First, there wasn’t a lot of fighting. Eggfarmers seemed content to stick on their land for a while.

Perhaps this is due to their own peaceful nature. Perhaps generating 64 Land parcels from the start didn’t create the scarcity required for competition.

Perhaps those bit-coin people are onto something

In an attempt to pin down the reason for the calm, we’re going to rethink land generation.

Current idea: each player gets a piece of Land on joining the game.

With up to 8 tiers per player, and each tier able to hold their own land, you’ll have to venture onto someone else’s territory if you want to maximise your production!

If this setup proves to be *too* competitive, we can add extra ways to create Land.

For example, spending a certain amount of RADs.


EGGSPONENTIAL GROWTH

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The math on RAD and Shrooms was meant to be conservative. Supposedly. So production wouldn’t balloon to infinity.

A few days in… We’ve got numbers in the millions to hundreds of millions.

Whereas we’re aiming for much more reasonable amounts, as pictured

Given that proper game rounds are meant to last for a month… Current numbers might be too generous.

The next version will have slightly lowered Shroom generation, and halved RAD production.


BETA STRUCTURE

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The idea was to run several rounds of Beta on POA, before the full launch on Ethereum+xDai.

(Ethereum will be used for the Treesury, aka the “bankroll”. The game proper will be played on xDai.)

However:

  1. getting people to use POA at all is no small task in itself.
  2. we’ve got some great feedback on the main game features
That is to say: click on things, watch numbers grow

Perhaps more importantly, in the Eggforce model, we don’t need to chase game balance obsessively.

If things don’t work out so well in round 1…

… we can tweak the numbers, and give it another go in round 2.

As the principal in the Treesury is never touched, there will always be a prize for people to compete.

The only concern should be to make it fun!


TAKING CARE OF TREESURY

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Moving forward, we’ll run a few more game tests. There won’t be any big prize, but feel free to spy progress on Discord, or through the main page.

Beyond that, there’s the Treesury smart contract to take care of. Building it (easy), testing it against any possible flaw (hard, and important as this contract will hold the funds).

Because Multi-Collateral DAI is coming on November 18th, there’s little sense rushing a release before that. Let’s see how the third-party moving parts settle: Compound, and the Dai <-> xDai bridge.

See you next time!

Eska Roy

Written by

Eska Roy

Chasing my lifelong dream of making snails/eggs themed games on Ethereum and POA

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