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Nick Balyanitsa
Nick Balyanitsa

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Space Frontier Game

#vibecoding #experimental #sounddesign

ABOUT THE GAME

Space Frontier is a game about building a thriving sci-fi settlement.

The main goal of the player is to create a robust infrastructure, which would allow the settlement to thrive and ultimately reward the player.

This is done by forming strong relations with NPCs (role-playing aspect) and maintain and manage the city layout (city builder aspect).

City Building View

Dialog view

Inspirations

The idea came from a mix of old-school 'sierra' city builders and 90-00's RPGs (like fallout2 and NVN).

The core loop could be defined by the following statements:

  1. collect daily rewards from the buildings.
  2. hire agents.
  3. wait for them to offer help (this happens over time, in a form of a quest/dialogue)
  4. use these agents+rewards to fix deteriorated buildings and create new ones.

The very basic version of it is implemented in current version, but there are tons of ideas that didn't make it yet.. e.g.

  • not only fix but improve builings.
  • have your agents progress (every job done gives XP, essentially making them more efficient and 'unlocking' better quests). Since Agents are NFTs this essentially means upgrading the tokens.
  • symbiotic placement - correctly placed buildings in proximity creates a positive (or negative) effect on daily reward yield.

The above can be considered as my personal roadmap :)

Tech

Obviously the client is WebGL Unity app, that uses ThirdWeb gaming SDK.

The backend is a node express app, with a combination of off-chain and on-chain data.

Off-chain:

  • In order to not make the client to sign every transaction, the game balance is currently stored off-chain. This balance can be withdrawn to your wallet.

  • Quest allocation is also calculated, assigned and stored off-chain.

  • Reward calculation is calculated and assigned offchain.

On-chain:

  • The main on-chain integration is NPC's. You buy the NFTs in-game, and they appear in your city as NPC's that are linked to the quests that are generated over time.

Important note:
Given the turn based nature of the game, it was designed with having most of it on chain. This means:

  • every turn is a transaction signed by the user.
  • quest allocation and taxation are contracts that are executed through a cross contract call, within 'turn' the transaction.
  • game balance is managed by custodial wallets, (allowing to seamlessly use it, without signing a tx every time you want to do something, but leveraging the security of blockchain).

Once again, this is the likely roadmap for the tech part!

TEAM

I'm a game developer with embarrassingly big number of years of professional experience in the field. Have been involved in a multitude projects with massive user base. Recently I started to be heavily involved with blockchain with a multitude of tech, both EVM and WASM.

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