Orbiter 8
A fun game dapp for Ethereum
Having been busy working on the game and the company, I nearly forgot to tend to this profile. So much has happened since the last update, I'm excited to write this summary.
Partavate is now two people. I recruited another tech minded co-founder, Arthur, who left Facebook last year to joined me full time at beginning of this year.
This January we released the third demo of our four planned milestones on the road to a beta. We simply called it Demo 3. A list of new features and a link to the demo itself can be found right here:
In February, we partnered with Rix Studios to create Polydice for the 2022 EthDenver hackathon. Polydice are NFT dice you can own, trade, and roll. The rolls are performed by the NFT contract itself. Like Orbiter 8, the images are parametrically generated SVGs. For our efforts in the hackathon, Polygon Studios awarded Polydice a bounty prize of $500. We have since released Polydice to Polygon's mainnet and you can check it out right here:
In March, we were awarded a $5000 grant by Polygon Studios to support the release of Orbiter 8 on their network. This grant was paid in USDT. It took some time to setup our Coinbase business account and only recently made our very first deposit into our company bank account. Thanks to Polygon Studios, we can finally start paying the server bills from company funds.
In May, we entered Orbiter 8 into the Moonriver Grants hackathon. We won two prizes. The first was a community voting pool with quadratic matching. We also won the first place prize for best game project. All total we won 420 MOVR tokens. Unfortunately, with the decline of the markets in general, these tokens devalued considerably before we collected them. In April, MOVR tokens were worth as much as $84. At the time of this writing, MOVR tokens are now worth less than $11.
That same month, we hosted a booth at the DygyCon 9 virtual conference and gave out free Polydice. The event was more successful than anticipated and resulted in a significant boost to our otherwise modest follower counts.
We also applied for and were verbally awarded a $10,000 grant by Harmony Networks. However, after experiencing a steep decline in the value of their token, Harmony rolled back their promise.
In June, we stepped away from grants and took at look at VC options. I attended an "investor speed dating" event in NYC hosted by the Blockchain Game Alliance. Much to my disappointment, only one of the investors seemed to understand the intrinsic value in the game design. Ultimately, I decided not to follow up with anyone from the event.
Also in June, we reached out through a referral to a16z. Much to our surprise, the team we spoke with at a16z immediately saw the value in Orbiter 8's design. We decided to work up a pitch and progressed through several meetings with a16z when they finally let us off the hook. We were told that our concept was great and that they believed in our capacity to build the product. However, it was too early for them and they encouraged us to return once we hit our next milestone demo.
Despite the praise and validation, we were still without funding. We had hoped to self-fund through the sell of personal stocks and cryptocurrencies. However, with markets as low as they were, neither of us felt it was a good idea to sell any of our holdings. It was time to re-evaluate our plan. I picked up a part time contracting job and Arthur applied to a few full time roles. Times were very uncertain.
In July, something changed. We heard back from the grant team at one of the networks that we had applied to several months before. We took the meeting and ended up agreeing to participate in their upcoming hackathon. Arthur and I took the hackathon as an opportunity to explore a technique called bridging that allows tokens to be moved from one network to another. We created a standalone proof of concept demo showing an Orbiter 8 ship NFT being transferred between the Moonbeam and the Bobabeam networks. We won first place and were awarded $3500 worth of Boba tokens. Additionally, we were beyond flattered by the kind words and excitement expressed about our project. So much so, that I captured it here in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSM1PqMs8c
By August, I was already working part time on the side and Arthur was interviewing for a full time position at Algorand which he ultimately accepted. We revisited our ownership share agreement and made appropriate updates given the change in our level of committed hours to the project. But, most of all, we both agreed that the game needed to be released in one form or another.
In August and September, we've been working on a new strategy inspired by the demo we produced for the Bobabeam hackathon. I'll have to talk more about that in a future post.
Approximately 2/3 of the way through a significant client code refactor. While not yet feature complete, fundamental rendering of the game map is back online. As of today, we're on track for a ~10% code complexity reduction and ~90% performance gain. Additionally, we should be able to release the new client code without needing to modify the existing Ethereum contracts allowing us to improve the Demo 2 experience while still on the path to Demo 3.
Title says it all. Partavate Studios is now an official member of the Blockchain Game Alliance. The announcement tweet can be viewed here:
We're still in the shadows of some really big players (Ubitsoft, Atari, etc) so retweets and likes are welcomed!
This month I completed Demo 2, the second of four planned demos to reach an MVP state wit Orbiter 8. The demo can be found here:
In addition to the demo, I've updated the website with more details on the 4 milestone demos:
The new update includes a link to our latest social media addition, our subreddit which can be round here:
Everything is moving slow, but everything is moving.
Pausing from game development for a moment, I launched basic websites for http://Orbiter8.com and http://Partavate.com
Both sites have Twitter accounts and Orbiter 8 links to a mailchimp mailing list signup form as well as a Discord chat channel setting the foundation for launching future marketing campaigns.
This date marks the first Orbiter 8 demo release to the Ropsten test network. This first demo providers gamers the ability to move from one star to another, effectively navigating the game's map. This demo also provides an ever-expanding dynamically-generated solar system, one of Orbiter 8's key features.
There are 3 more demos on the roadmap to MVP.
From June 1st to June 3rd I hid away in a hotel room in Mukilteo, WA teaching myself the fundamentals of Solidity development. After reading books, tutorials, and documentation for several days I was able to begin prototyping the game vision that has become Orbiter 8.
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