BitGuild Portal Overview
The first of many updates from BitGuild’s Platform Development Team
Hi there! I’m Mikhail, Chief Technology Officer of BitGuild. Welcome to the first post in a series of updates aimed at keeping you informed on the inner workings of the BitGuild Platform Development Team. You’ll get sneak peeks, progress reports, and insights into the world of blockchain platform development from the people building the future home of all Cryptogames.
Let’s dig in.
Portal vision
Our mission is to create an open gaming ecosystem based on free trade. The Portal is the key element of this ecosystem, being at the center of all related activities. You can think of it as a carnival where people come to play games, socialize, brag, and exchange.
We are building a place for both players and game developers in the blockchain space to call home — a place where we can foster positive growth in the space. While we’re generally open to all sorts of games to be available on the portal, we do reserve the right to curate the selection. Integrating with us doesn’t necessarily guarantee us putting your game up there. Email bizdev@bitguild.com to discuss getting your game on the portal. We do this because we believe interesting and high quality titles are the key to gaining the attention of the gamer audience at large.
Integrating with the portal
So this all sounds great, you might be thinking — but why would you want to integrate with the BitGuild Portal? Here’s what it gives you as a game developer:
- An additional distribution channel for your game. Our main goal at that stage is to accumulate critical mass of users for the games on the portal. To bootstrap, we will do it via exclusive titles, partnerships and direct user acquisition. As a developer you will have some of that usage driven to your game.
- Additional game item pre-sale surface available to the larger audience to help you fundraise before launching the game. We cater to the developers on all the stages of development process, from early days through fundraising and onwards through to live game operation.
- Essential services available out of the box: item list, item exchange, transaction history, notifications, and more. It saves a lot of your time as a developer and allows you to focus on the pure game logic.
For these benefits, there is a price, but it’s trivial — all you need is to integrate PLAT as a payment method in all the places where you accept Ethereum, and support the display of PLAT prices in your UI.
See full documentation with code samples, links to SDK and code examples can be found at:
https://github.com/BitGuildPlatform/Documentation
Also join our developer community group to follow the progress and ask any questions: https://discord.gg/EJNgmD5
Portal v.1 and v.2 roadmap
Here’s a more detailed scope of the first few versions of the portal, to be launched in May and early summer respectively. The goal of the first version is to enable initial games to use the PLAT token as a payment method, provide some basic user info, as well as item inventory and chatroom support.
Portal v.1 scope:
- User accounts integrated with MetaMask. Eth and PLAT balances reading from the user account.
- Eth to PLAT on-chain converter to be able to make in-game payments.
- Game list, and support for up to 4–6 games in the next 3 months.
- Chatbox, as a unit on the right that should support usernames and moderation. Will be present on all of our pages.
- Simple game-to-portal integration via Portal SDK to make games support PLAT and prices in PLAT (see more info at the end of this post)
- Token inventory across all the games on our portal, a system to easily extend support, see below
Coming shortly afterwards will be an update that will focus on utility and usability, with the three main components being:
- Transaction history across all the games we power, also including user-to-user sends (transfers). This will also be used by the admins to check user history. In the UI, the idea is to show completed/pending/failed transactions for multiple games with descriptions (like “Crafting a shield — BitSociety — Pending”).
- Notification system based on transaction history: browser notifications if the user is not on the website, on-site notifications if they are. Badge pending transactions count, badge failed transactions.
- Item marketplace with categorization per game and in-game item categories. First version will support fixed pricing and expiration time with potentially more models to follow.
Other updates
- New Hires: We’re excited to welcome new members to our SF team: Jeff and Keith are joining to form the backbone of our portal/platform engineering efforts.
- Collaborations: Coming soon, our early thoughts on extending ERC721 with higher-level standards. we’d like to start a conversation on how can we unify some concepts that we start to be used in different games, so we can have better support for it from different services, such as wallets and exchanges.
That’s what we’ve got going on right now, and we look forward to showing you more as development efforts on the BitGuild Portal advance. Make sure to join the BitGuild community on Discord to discuss everything related to blockchain game development with fellow developers. You can also stay in touch with the player community for an instant and direct contact channel to your audience.
BitGuild’s mission is to revolutionize the global gaming industry by creating a platform for a brand new class of games that live on the blockchain. Blockchain games completely redefine the relationship between players and developers by facilitating full and true ownership of in-game assets, cheap & safe item trading, cross-game compatibility of items & currency, and more.
