October has been busy for the Hoard team. We’ve been working on 3 main things — two of which we will share in this dev update, the remaining one is a surprise that will be announced at Devcon4! 😉
To recap, in August we told you that we had completed our basic game SDK and gamer portal application. In September, we announced that our alpha version of the SDK was complete and we were looking for game developers to test it with their games.
This month, we worked on completing our SDK manager and testing it with a game.
SDK Manager
Our SDK Manager is a crucial part of our SDK as it enables us to onboard game developers who are not necessarily well-versed in blockchain technology. The user does not need to have any knowledge of blockchain, Ethereum or Solidity because everything is abstracted away. It simply requires them to select options by clicking on a few buttons.
It has the following functions:
- Connects games to an existing network (Robsten, Ethereum, our testnet, etc.)
- Deploy a testnet with all the Hoard contracts on your local computer or network.
- Automatically adds new games and new game tokens (both non-fungible and fungible tokens).
- Creates the configuration files for a game — the SDK reads this file and identifies where the game, contracts and tokens that exist on the network are located.
Testing it with Unity game
We then tested it with a Unity game. There were no issues and everything worked as intended. The only thing we could not do was trade game assets as this requires a proper exchange. This is something that is in the roadmap to be built.
Next steps: Wallet application
We are now working on building the wallet application for gamers to store their game items. We are building two alternatives with different kinds of authentication:
- The first is the most secure — where your keys are stored in a single location or on an external hard wallet.
- The second is where keys are stored on an authorization server. They are encrypted using some sort of encryption algorithm and the user will have to enter a password to access it. If they lose their password, it’s the same as losing their keys.
The reason for providing these two alternatives is because the types of people who will be users of the games created on our platform will be wide and varied. Not all of them will be familiar with interacting with the blockchain and understanding the security precautions or steps needed to secure their own private keys. We want to ensure that the game developers building on Hoard can cater to all sorts of gamers.
Community Update! 👫
Hoard participated in a handful of events throughout the month of October. Most notably Hoard was active throughout the entirety of San Francisco Blockchain Week. During SFBW, Hoard attended:
The Dfinity meetup
Hoard joined some Ethereum friends to chat with the Dfinity team about the progress they are making on a number of primitives that will be used throughout many next-generation blockchains, including Ethereum 2.0.
ETHSanFrancisco
Hoard community manager, Chris Robison, joined his brother and friend to build a blockchain game for the ETHSanFrancisco hackathon. Their project was a proof-of-concept of a Harberger Tax applied to a Pixel Map. The project was judged by Mr. Buterin, himself, and Evan Van Ness. The has received a fair amount of attention and was even cited in a recent blogpost by Simon de la Rouviere.
Polychain Capital Meetup
Hoard attended a meetup hosted by Polychain Capital to support many of our project friends, including Golem and Fluence. It was a great opportunity to chat with a number of users about the projects they are passionate about.
Epicenter
Epicenter was an interesting overview of the blockchain ecosystem. Many of the talks were around the “State of Blockchain.”
CESC
The most exciting session that came out of CESC was the daylong discussion surrounding Radical Markets. The topic is highly thought provoking, especially in the context of virtual economies in video games. Many Radical Market proposals, such as a Harberger Tax, are perfectly suited for a video game. Whereas implementing them in the legacy “real world” is far more difficult and friction-full.
Thunder Token Blockchain in Gaming Meetup
Our community manager, Chris Robison, was asked to speak with a handful of Ethereum and non-Ethereum project leads about the economics of video games. The group included a number of Ethereum core-developers/contributors.
Non-Fungible Summit
Hoard was proud to sponsor the first Ethereum Community Fund Non-Fungible Summit. Chris Robison spoke about Baking Utility into Non-Fungible Tokens and drew strong parallels between the economies of videos games and the cryptoeconomics of the larger Ethereum ecosystem. The content of his talk was later used in a spontaneous song, written by Jonathan Mann — better know as @SongaDayMann. Check out the video here!
Towards the end of October Hoard made their way out to Prague to participate in:
The Council of Prague: Fellowship of the Ethereum Magicians
The Council of Prague is a follow up to the last event the Magicians held in Berlin. The purpose of the unconference is to form “rough consensus” around standards and decisions around the Ethereum ecosystem and general commons.
DevCon4
This is still ongoing at the time of this blogpost. We will have more special announcements about our time at DevCon after it finished up ;)
For now… if you’re at DevCon this week, please come say hello! We are sharing a booth with our friends at OmiseGO.
Crypto Games Conference
Lastly, our lead dev, Cyryl Matuszewski, and CEO, Slawomir Bubel, went out to Minsk to attend the Crypto Games Conference. It was an awesome overview of a number of the projects in the space who have developed crypto-games or are on the verge of launch.
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