Age of Rust — Dev Update #5
This was a busy month, not just in terms of development, but some significant changes in where things are going with the blockchain-gaming community and what we are doing with Age of Rust. The next few months are going to be really busy for us, but also exciting as we adapt to the growing universe of games around us.
TLDR:
∙ Rustbits is moving to an ERC20 token.
∙ Age of Rust: Card puzzles 1 & 2 solved, 3 is unsolved. BTC puzzles 1&2 unsolved.
∙ Age of Rust will be moving from a text adventure to a 3D game.
∙ Communication updates are done through twitter and discord.
Rustbits: Migration in Q3/Q4
I’ve spoken about this on discord a bit and in the forums and I’ve come to terms with making a fundamental change with respect to Rustbits and that’s to move them from Counterparty to Ethereum. I know, I can hear the voices of despair in the counterparty gaming community even now as I write this. First, this was a tough decision that I’ve thought about for months. Some of you will remember the early discussions in the forums on making this an ERC20 token. At the time, there were a lot of early projects that had issues with ERC20 contracts and also Ethereum was going through fork caused by the DAO. That, plus the friendly community in the counterparty world made using counterparty a no-brainer. So that’s what we did, we put our tokens on the counterparty platform and moved ahead with the creative aspects of the game.
What we ran into afterwards created a bit a “Hmmm, that’s odd” moment when we found that exchanges were unwilling to even consider adding Rustbits because it was on Counterparty. It’s not that the exchanges disliked Counterparty as a whole, they just didn’t want to add it. Those that already Counterparty assets, didn’t want to add any more of them. It was disappointing to hear, but what came after was even more heart wrenching, we lost our listing on Coinmarketcap since the volume of the DEX (not just Rustbits), but all Counterparty assets on the decentralized exchange was less than $100K daily. On the day I went to check it, the volume of all counterparty assets on the DEX was $800.
After attending the Game Developers Conference this year, it was even more apparent that the blockchain game sub-genre had moved to Ethereum. With the likes of Enjin, Wax, and other platforms, it was an ERC20 universe at GDC this year. While Bitcoin and Counterparty were still represented in some way, there was no way to simple ignore where the blockchain gaming community was moving: Ethereum. I met with a lot of the developers, of not only the platforms, but also game developers like us to talk about the state of the industry, but why they had chosen ERC20 tokens as blockchain assets for their games. “It’s where players are at the moment”, was the basic consensus of things.
Developing the game on top of counterparty has been a breeze, we had absolutely no technical issues implementing token controlled access or other token-based functions. Players however have had a tough time getting their hands on both Rustbits and the cards due to the long chain of activities involved: Fiat to Exchange to Wallet to BTC/ETH to Exchange to XCP to Counterwallet to DEX to Game tokens. By moving to an ERC20 token, players will be able to directly trade tokens easier without as many hops.
So, we’ve started planning and designing the path for token holders to exchange in their Rustbits counterparty tokens for ERC20 tokens right around the end of Q3 this year. More details will come out about the process and timing as work on this effort progresses.
Age of Rust Crypto Puzzle Status
Alpha — 0.2 btc (solved)
Beta — Card Puzzle #1 (solved)
Beta — Card Puzzle #2 (solved)
Beta — Card Puzzle #3 (not solved)
Beta — 0.01 btc (not solved)
Beta — 4 btc (not solved)
Game play continues in the beta version of Age of Rust. The beta was launched in Jan and a large update took place in early March. While several players have finished the game and moved onto the crypto puzzle solving, others continue to share secrets and explore the game. A lot of the solvers and armchair explorers are in Discord, so we encourage you to join the Discord chat to meet and talk with other players.
Moving from Text to 3D
This was a big change in the project and it was made for a variety of reasons. A lot of players enjoy the retro-text adventure style of game play associated with the Age of Rust universe. We changed the UI and navigation a bit in the Beta version to provide a little more of 1.5D experience but players really wanted to move through the universe. Also, if someone didn’t do any PC-gaming in the 70s, 80s, or 90s; they were lost in trying to figure out what the game actually was. Many players enjoyed the 3D static images we created to visually show off some of the 3D universe and from that, more requests came in to make that more accessible. So there it is, we’ve started working on converting the Age of Rust universe from a text-adventure into a 3D game. You can see some of the work being done by following us on Twitter. However, you can see an example below:
Comm Updates
While we still keep our roots to the bitcoin community and try to reach out on all the platforms, it’s a bit tough to get the word out at times since there are so many places to connect. To stay up to date, follow us on Twitter and join us on Discord for updates, game information, and all things crypto-related.
Discord: https://discord.gg/tvD3GwV
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpacePirate_io
Age of Rust Beta: https://spacepirate.io/
About Age of Rust: https://www.ageofrust.games/
