CSC — October Dev Update

Published in

Crypto Space Commander

6 min readNov 1, 2018

Hi Commanders!

First off, I do want to apologize for my absence these past few weeks. As I am sure you are aware Lucid Sight, our company, launched an ambitious project with Major League Baseball and while this has been a great success for us it did pull me away and kept me from providing the regular updates.

To get started I first wanted to touch on a few lessons we have learned from MLB Crypto Baseball and how this will affect the future of CSC. One of the benefits to launching MLB Crypto was the ability to test our scaling capabilities. We learned a lot from the launch of the game and our massive stadium event where we distributed over 40,000 NFTs in Ethereum wallets. From these launches we have now revised how we will be approaching off-chain logic and even have plans to create a “transaction free” marketplace. More details on this as we get further down the development road.

Pre-Alpha Results

Pre-alpha gave us a lot of data! A LOT! Thanks for everyone who played and reported issues / their experience. Here are a few of the high level items that we are tackling.

First thing we need to tackle is our UI / UX. This is something we knew was problematic going into pre-alpha but I just wanted to note that it will be updated.
The next thing we want to tackle is FTL travel. It was cumbersome and did not invoke the sense of discovery we were looking for. That said, we are re-evaluating how FTL travel is shown and engaged.
Multiplayer stability is another area that needed major improvements, and we are happy to say that this was the key focus of our development team for several weeks after pre-alpha, and the new system is much more robust and scales well.
Mining: LOTS of feedback on this. It’s safe to say this will get a lot of improvement on our next release.

The overall reception of the pre-alpha was positive and we want to thank all participants. Rewards for pre-Alpha will be distributed as followed, for every 10 units of ore you mined you will get 1 ERC-20 resource of that ore type. For every 1 unit of Trilite mined, you will get 1 ERC-20 Trilite.

So what’s next for CSC?

I started outlining everything I wanted to cover about CSC a few weeks back, including our current design and the changes we’d like to make. This outline ended up being 8 pages long, so I’ve decided to break it up into 4 Parts. This makes it easier for me to organize my thoughts and it allows me to provide up-to-date information because a lot happens each day that changes one aspect of the game or another. This first post will layout out some of the fundamental changes we will be making and provide our current roadmap for CSC.

Blockchain & Off-chain

One of the biggest takeaways we had from launching MLB Crypto Baseball was the amount of work required to provide a solution that can scale on-chain.

Our biggest issue this year came from trying to scale MLB Crypto Baseball’s on-chain elements. What we learned from this experience is that the ETH Blockchain, in its current state, is not prepared for the scale a popular game will bring. Lucky for us, we had planned and developed the majority of the game elements to occur off-chain. In hindsight, we now believe we should have had ALL game elements off-chain and had only handled ownership on-chain.

Taking these lessons learned from MLB, we have moved forward on a complete refactor toward how we handle on and off-chain actions in CSC. With these changes we will be able to bring a couple KEY benefits to players. I will review the top three benefits below.

One: mitigation of network GAS fees to perform routine transactions. While gas can be inexpensive 95% of the time, that 5% can really hurt a gamer’s experience. With this in mind we will be moving the initiation of crafting, refining of resources, and other game actions off-chain.

Two: onboarding users and game interaction with NFT & FT items will become much simpler. We will provide an onboarding experience that will allow initial interaction with our game without the need for Metamask, ETH, or any crypto software. Instead, new users will be able to onboard into the game universe and setup a crypto profile in our ecosystem through traditional login methods. At a later point, once the user is committed and engaged, we will provide walkthroughs and onboarding to setup an ETH wallet.

Three: removal of sales and transactions delays via an improved off-chain / on-chain marketplace. This change will most likely get a post of its own as it will dive into an impressive solution our engineers came up with to reduce 95% of the issues we had with the MLB marketplace. It will also provide bot resistance and place everyone on a fair playing field for limited time sales events.

Important things to note about our new system: we will still have and manage ETH contracts. While gameplay is off-chain ownership and transaction for ETH will still require on chain operations, all items will still be secured NFTs, and ETH can still be used for P2P and direct sales in our marketplace. While there is much more detail I could go into on this topic, I will leave it at this for now and will provide supplemental updates in future posts.

Next Alpha & Future Roadmap

In this section I want to touch on our current plans and our tentative timelines for the next releases of CSC. To start off with THANKS TO ALL in the community that participated in our pre-alpha. We gained a lot of great insights and have been making many changes to the game from the data we collected.

At this point, CSC is getting an overhaul, based mainly on the blockchain revamp, we have had to make significant changes across the board and even start over on some systems. But with these changes we expect a huge improvement in the overall user experience. That said, here is our new timeline and what you can expect in these future versions of CSC.

Important Note: These are ONLY the KEY items we hope to introduce in each milestone. Other features will also be added to these deliverables. (As this is game development, we expect there to be iterations that may cause delays and require us to update these timeframes).

Q4 2018 — Alpha 0.5: The primary goal of this alpha is to provide a sandbox playground for our Early Commanders to fly and test their ships. Additional / potential features include a small-group multiplayer sandbox, and/or semi-persistent systems. This build will be connected to MainNet and ship ownership will be required to participate.

Early Q1 2019 — Alpha 0.6: This build will introduce crafting & item systems. A lot of re-design and implementation work is being done on these systems to create a better experience for players. This build will also include an initial in-app marketplace using our new systems.

Early Q1 2019 — Alpha 0.7: Persistent systems and live marketplace will be introduced. Steam Early Access Build will launch to on-board new players.

Mid Q1 2019 — Alpha 0.8: Persistent item loss will be introduced.

Late Q1 — Early Q2 2019 — Alpha 0.9–1.0: Feature complete and on-going persistence.

Part 1 Conclusion

I think this is a good place to conclude and end Part 1 of my update post. Part 2 will be up early next week, followed by a Part 3 & 4. Below you will find a list of topics I will be covering in these future posts.

Thanks for reading and safe flying Commanders!

Upcoming Topics:

-Travel and the Universe (As seen in the image above, it’s MUCH BIGGER)

-Scanning

-Sandbox Build Details

-Docking and Multi-ship play

-Resource & Space Ownership

-Module & Seed Distribution

-Crafting Updates

-Items and Transportation Mechanics

-Farming, New Resources and Automation

-Ships, Fleets, Control and Command Systems