Cosmicrafts DAO SNS Launch

My bad, and yeah this one is undercooked but it’s working now

It’s a Space shooter prototype from October 2024

The classic RTS still needs work to be ported on WebGL+Multiplayer, I estimate 3-4 months to get it ready and it’s on the Roadmap for Q3 2025.

It would be nice to have some funding to get a developer to help me and some marketing budget, not much really just enough to start testing targeted ads after launching on CrazyGames and Epic Games.

I’ve been thinking the same for the past year, why launch a DAO when the games aren’t fully operational on Web.

So here’s my reasoning for that:

The classic RTS works great on PC, fully-on chain with NFTs, Missions and all that stuff I’ve been bragging about nonstop, the problem is like @stdevelopr mentioned, nobody is going to bypass their OS warning of malware, which is why we should launch on Epic Games, I’d like Steam but crypto is banned for now.

I’ve spent the last 10 months working on multiplayer prototypes for WebGL (like the one on the website), because let’s face it… what if the classic RTS fails on all platforms, which is very likely without any user feedback.

So the solution I came up with is, learn how to make Web Multiplayer games FAST (Vibecoding, AI Art), so even if we fail with this one, we can continue producing more quality games that can compete in this crazy market.

I’m not a top developer like the guys you see out there, but everything you see on Cosmicrafts I did it myself.

Stuck at 90% loading for me…

Proposal 136443 Quick Review | LORIMER

Vote: NO (although I’ll hold off until tomorrow)

Am I reading this right? >75% VP to the developer neurons? In which case this isn’t a decentralisation sale at all.

Also I noted that the minimum amount to be raised is 100 ICP, which is also the minimum direct participation per participant. So all it takes is for 100 ICP, and 1 investor, for this project to launch and become showcased as an IC SNS?

I’m unclear what the aim is, but it looks like this needs rejecting unless I’ve misunderstood something (it’s late here, or early depending on how your look at it).

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Most likely browser cache, the website is a PWA and stores in temp files, have you tried with another browser?

Hi Lorimer,

The SNS Tool makes it look terrible, but before diving into conclusions, let’s check some facts about this.

I’ve been testing the SNS framework thoroughly for over a year now and I’ve documented the process in blogs and on the Github repo.

1- The SNS framework won’t let you push parameters that don’t decentralize the project, if it passes through the NNS means by nature its already decentralized, this by design but don’t take my word for it, @lara could help us with more details about it.

2- Iniitial Voting Power Distribution reflects that because SNS Participants have immediate availability to do as they please with their neurons, unlike the Developer Neurons that are staked up to 8 years and 2 years for Seed Investors.

3- I’m holding 8% of the tokens with a dissolve delay of 8 years, which is going to give me a starting voting power that allows me to manage the DAO and follow the Roadmap

4- All neurons have vesting period of 0 days, meaning anybody can lock-in more time to gain more Voting Power if they decide to. Direct Participants can quite well overthrow my Voting power by one third if we make the numbers 12% vs 8%.

5- The min of 100 ICP raised is designed so we get funding regardless of the outcome, which is the ultimate goal to fund development on ICP.

Ultimately, I’ve been around since Genesis, I onboarded thousands of users through the game and other NFT partnerships, I have always delivered and hope you can make the right decision wheter you want a legit and loyal project to stay on ICP.

I manually removed the “cosmicrafts.com” cookies/cache and now it is loading. Now I’m trying to figure out the game itself… thanks.

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Then in my opinion you should know better. Your attempt to explain this away with an inaccurate non-explanation is frustrating to say the least.

Any ICP raised in this launch will be under complete control of the priviledged principals specified in the yaml (the ‘Dev Neurons’). You need to do a much better job of doxing them and proving beyond any reasonable doubt that they do not at all belong to you. Even then, a small handul of principals is not enough to escape a reasonable possibility of a clique with highly co-ordinated and aligned incentives that are at odds with investors.

Forgetting about the actual formal distribution for a sec, even if you awarded dev neurons zero tokens and simply participated in the sale, there’s a reasonable chance you could easily give the appearance of decentralisation by participating from multiple wallets (given the extremely low minimum threshold for this launch to pass - 100 ICP).

SNS projects are treated as a showcase of what the IC ecosystem is about. In my opinion it shouldn’t be a vehicle to get maybe-projects off the ground. Most early stage projects will fail. It’s the few that will succeed. Unless we want the list of showcased SNSs to forever be largely a list failures and empty promises, the community needs to start taking these launches seriously.

You need to be able to deliver value straight away and hit the ground running, or you’re not really selling anything to the community but promises. The SNS system has had enough of those.

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Not sure if anyone else had the same problem but nothing I clicked did anything once the game opened up, aside from clicking on space ship where 4 options appeared, but did nothing.

I tried with Host, Client and Server modes. Nothing other than a static space background.

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The Multiplayer server crashed, it was DDOS attacked while I was sleeping

I fixed it with a new version, it should work now

Also, well the proposal got rejected but I’ll keep building

DFINITY rejected the proposal due to multiple issues, including but not limited to:

  • Tokenomics parameters are not sufficiently motivated or detailed.
  • The developer and seed team retain excessive voting power (+60%) post-launch, limiting decentralization.
  • The core game application is hosted off-chain, which raises concerns about genuine decentralization.
  • There is minimal user engagement and insufficient demonstration of product-market fit.
  • Security aspects have not been adequately reviewed or documented.
  • Codebase complexity and quality (8k lines of “spaghetti code”) present significant maintainability and security concerns.
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(post deleted by author)

Hey just wanted to give some feedback things that noticed trying your game.

I was able to get the game to work. I tried it for a bit and theres definitely some interesting things going on.

I noticed that when the game is loading the start game button is very small and at the bottom of the screen, its possible for the user to miss the game has loaded which might explain some of the other comments here.

I would recommend just starting the game without another click to remove friction and just get people playing. (Just give them the ship) don’t ask them to mint it, when people join for the first time just reduce all the friction for them to start playing right away.

My other feedback is that there’s really no interface to play on mobile, I know you’re going for pc game feel and you probably don’t like mobile games. Just something to consider because youre losing a lot of users if they happen to be on their phone when they try the game.

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Constructive feedback like this is always welcome,

The screen after a loading bar is confusing even to myself, I rushed it. The thing about this is that browsers won’t allow audio to be activated unless the user interacts with some kind of button or the keyboard, so I was searching best practices most common solution is to have a main “Start” or “Play” button after the game loads so the browser activates the audio.

I 100% go with the idea of jumping straight to the gameplay after it loads, it doesn’t give time the user to leave if the game is exciting and engaging, I just have to figure out the audio warnings, it’s a common issue on web games.

The mobile version is a go, I think cross Web/Mobile games are compatible because you don’t need a super computer to run them, but on ICP we still don’t have a mobile solution for games. Boom DAO was supposed to finance the development of the ICP.NET tool for mobile but they decided not to move forward with it.

I think the focus from now on is to early validate with our current community and then launch on multiple platforms like Crazy Games and AppStores when the core loop gameplay is completed.

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I think working on testing the game on Web2 platforms is a sensible approach to make sure you nail the gameplay mechanics, we started doing that for Cubetopia recently using Poki dev testing and its been quite eye opening. They have an entire system that records players gameplay so you can clearly identify where people are getting confused and quitting.

I know you’re super passionate about Cosmicrafts so I hope you can keep building and make it to the SNS if that’s what you still want. And for the record I checked out the code, and from what I could see it was pretty well organised, I’m not sure I would personally call it “spaghetti” code, there’s much, much worse out there…

Maybe it would be easier to keep your code clean if you just tried to launch with a landing page only? Is that what people want? :^)

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Hey mate, you understand the struggle and the technical difficulties. We share the same passion of building the next big thing, on my end there’s still a ton of work to do just to get the game ready for these Web platforms, we know we need that extra exposure outside the ICP community if we want to create a self-sustainable business that doesn’t depend on the crypto market to be profitable (just like any other).

We also know that in order for our games to succeed we need to have the right tools and platforms. For example Secure WebSockets for multiplayer, icpnet for mobile (if using unity), etc.

Thanks for taking the time to read the code, I used to have a multi-canister architecture but intercanister calls were killing the UX, which is why I migrated to a single canister and tried to organize it as best as possible, following other top ICP open source projects on Github.

A subnet of 13 nodes will not be sufficient for a successful game with thousands of active users, which is why we require to upgrade to the SNS subnet and get that extra computational availability, this has been proven by ICP Swap. Imagine 30+ seconds just to mint/transfer/upgrade an NFT and with the possibility of failure, when it takes a fraction of a second on any other web2 game.

It’s unfortunate that the organization that incubated Cosmicrafts, invited us to pitch their investors in Zurich (some of them billionares by the business cards I got), and supported us for years turn their back with these offensive statements, minimizing all the hard work that has been put into it, while supporting and allowing some criminals to siphon funds out of the technology they’ve built.

I’ll keep working on cleaning up the code and revise each of their points to get fixed just, although this makes me wonder if legit and ambitious projects are still welcome in the ecosystem.

Regardless of that, you know my community is your community and we will continue to root for Cubetopia. btw your new game modes look :fire: keep it up! that’s another win for out there and you know it

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Lori come on,

I know you want the best for ICP, I respect your work but let’s cut the decentralization hypocrisy, this is a liquid democracy, you have the choice to have more voting power and rewards or have liquid tokens.

I doxxed the Seed investors on this thread, I already mentioned they are Anmi Capital and 2Link, they contributed on 2021 and 2022 to the ecosystem, they are invested on heavily on ICP as seed investors, Anmi Capital took Dominic to China to meet with more investors on pre-genesis.

They also are invested on different projects like Origyn, ICP League, ModClub and Cosmicrafts

I already explained that the 100 ICP threshold is to be on the SNS regardless of the outcome, no dapp with thousands of users can thrive on a 13-node, no video game can thrive on 8~45 second intercanister calls, maybe DeFi but we’ve seen on other projects how slow can be.

I take the feedback on the excessive voting power of dev neurons, but also give me a break, it’s a 2 line code fix just to lower our voting power with lower-time dissolve delays if that’s a reason not to support our SNS.

We’ve been showcased the IC ecosystem since 2021, participated on different hackathons like DSCVR and Supernova, we’ve got 2 DFINITY grants (last one in 2023) it’s not an early stage project, I have not promised anything that I haven’t delivered if you look at Cosmicrafts history, unfortunately some people tend to forget based on their personal interests.

I’d like if to see if you can prove me wrong on this.

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I don’t like late stage projects. I like early stage projects. Don’t like VC-backed projects unless they’re giving away free airdrops (for whatever reason, lmao). I like Web3 games where we buy/mint :poop: coins and jpegs on some scrappy project and we collectively build IP that may or may not become a blockbuster. Don’t like projects looking to raise funds to “build blockbuster”. Basically, Web2 equivalent would be “ITCH.io” games or small/niche devs with small but supportive community “donating”. Like being part of the “Minecraft community” before “VC buys out DEV”. Unfortunately Ethereum was abit too late on that, wonder in an different universe what it’d be like if Minecraft went a different route. Hopefully you get the picture of the sort of execution I’m talking about, you’re basically competing with the likes of: https://gameoffthegrid.com/#about, IMO. But if feels like “LARGE STUDIO VIBES” without the “LARGE STUDIO VIBES”.

I’m just not a fan of the whole “Kickstarter in name only” game development. After examining the ICP ecosystem, IMO, SNS launchpad doesn’t feel like a good approach for web3 gaming (atleast how I look at it), not the right target audience, IMO: ChatGPT - Web3 Gaming Business Model The issue with front loading capital injection into gaming projects is that it’s pretty risky and its very difficult to align incentives. Alot of really great gaming projects seem to have happened by accident.

Who is your target audience? ChatGPT - Web3 Gaming Vibes

Figure out your target audience, IMO… SNS launchpad crowd aint it. I’m not it. But not trying to discredit just providing a perspective.

Understandable, I’ve got the same feedback from other investors, VC-backed and late stage projects are not as attractive as grassroots, specially around Web3 where most people expects huge returns after the TGE.

Building IP collectively is very attractive, we’ve seen that eg. with BAYC how NFT holders can use that IP for their own businesses like branding restaurants or mechandise, it also comes with a touch of exclusivity because you need to be invested in the project in order to hold those rights.

(IMO) Becoming a Blockbuster can happen in 2 ways
1- You become a sensation from the start, your content goes viral for a short period of time
2- Through consistency, you continue to build your brand

The second is the most profitable and reliable way to achieve this, content creators know this for decades since YouTube, while the first is mostly out of luck and great marketing.

I’ve done my best to make Cosmicrafts look like a AAA game but can’t compare 2 or 3 underpaid devs against big studios like Rockstar Games or Blizzard-Activision, where they have hundreds of people, each one of them working on a small part of the pipeline. They create and dump games left and right, they can afford to do that in order to dominate.

The gaming industry is on a rampage against NFTs and crypto, if you would see the Reddit feedback on Web3 gaming is disastrous, not only they dislike it, they automatically flag it as a scam.
See that for yourself.

In addition to that, last year I reached out 50+ gaming publishers, I shared that list in an interview with DFINITY and their feedback. Same issue, none of them want to be part of Web3.

ITCH.io Epic Games and Crazy Games would allow you to publish your game on their platforms, but they state that your game can’t be centered around Web3 economy, to not have a platform for the users to trade tokens and NFTs because it doesn’t benefit them at all.

The solution I’m offering here is to wash out the Web3 stigma out of Cosmicrafts by leveraging the capabilities of the Internet Computer, like reverse-gas fees and remove the need to use an external wallet, providing with a native Web2 experience.

The SNS launchpad was never meant to gain users, it is meant to fund the project and have actual marketing to reach out our target audience, in addition to have the canisters hosted on a larger subnet.