Introducing Orbiter 8

I am a little late in introducing my latest project as I have been working on it for well over a year. However, after all of this time, I’ve never written a blog post about it. Orbiter 8 is a Web 3 game dapp (decentralized application) designed to run on the Ethereum blockchain (a decentralized application platform). A wide range of influences have guided me into the current design, making it something of an intersection of various key interests. This post dives into “what” Orbiter 8 is and touches into some of the reasons why it is the way that it is.

It’s a space game.

Orbiter 8 is a space trading game set in the year 2140. The game plays out across the whole of our galaxy. Players will move from star to star in their Orbiter 8 series ships and conduct intergalactic trade to earn sweet, sweet credits. Those credits can then be used to buy larger shipping containers as well as weapons and armor. In addition to trade, players will be able to blow each other up.

In order to trade stocks, you need to have a brokerage account, visit https://www.stocktrades.ca/ to get one.

It’s a blockchain space game.

Orbiter 8 runs on the Ethereum network, which is a distributed public ledger. To record things in a ledger, the network has to put entries “in order”. You can imagine why this make sense for financial transactions. It is also useful for keeping track of which order players take turns in. In Orbiter 8, gameplay is throttled by the speed at which the network can process transactions. Thus Orbiter 8 is a turn-based game where you don’t have to wait on anyone else to take your next turn, but you do have to wait on the network to record your last turn. This is leading to a casual style of gameplay.

Because Orbiter 8 runs on Ethereum, each turn will require a small micro-transaction to be processed by the network. This fee is built into Ethereum and the money goes towards the miners who run the nodes that sustain the network. Some designers of Web 3 dapps include additional fees that go to themselves, as authors of the dapp. While I have no issue with that model, I’ve chosen not to include any such fees in Orbiter 8.

It’s a pure-blockchain space game.

The ethos behind not charging fees goes much further. With Orbiter 8, I would like to design a dapp that strives to follow the “unstoppable code” mantra that you often hear discussed in the distributed ledger space. What this means is that all of my core gameplay will exist within the code that runs on the Ethereum network. This will provide the “logic” and store the game state, but players will need a graphic interface to represent the data and provide menus to interact with the contracts. This is the game client.

I am building the Orbiter 8 client to be a standalone Web app. By standalone, I mean that you do not need to access the client over the Web itself. I intend to design it so you can put a copy on your hard drive, on a USB stick, or anywhere and it will work. In the true spirit of an unstoppable distributed application, we can release the game client on an immutable storage space such as the Interplanetary File System. However, although the client can be run from anywhere, I do plan on providing a website that will serve a copy of the game client and other Web 2.0 content.

One way to imagine this paradigm is to use the familiar game of chess. The part of chess that makes it a game are the game board restraints and the rules of the game. You can thus imagine the those rules being managed by smart contracts that record each turn to the the distributed ledger. Taking turns would require sending specific message to the contracts for the game. The game client makes it easy to send those messages by showing the user a graphical representation of a chess board and allowing human friendly user interfaces such as being able to click and drag a chess pieces to a new place on the board.

This paradigm means that anyone could potentially build a totally different game client that interacts with the exact same game – including myself. The client I am building today, designed to run in a web browser, uses simple vector images and provides attractive but rather simple graphics. I could potentially rebuild the client entirely using an advanced game engine such as Unreal or Unity without having to make any alterations to the fundamental game itself.

It’s also going to take a while.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, I’ve been working on Orbiter 8 for more than a year. I have broken the concept down into 4 achievable milestones that, once complete, should get me to a “beta” version of the game. I plan to release a public demo for each of these milestones and I released Demo 1 of 4 in Janurary of this year (it’s buggy, but it works). I am actively working on the second demo and have made a lot of progress. I hope to finish and release Demo 2 before the end of this year.

I don’t intend to do it alone.

To be honest, I have already had a lot of help. An artist and friend Walter |2| Costinak provided all of the branding behind Orbiter 8, including the name itself. I’ve taken |2|’s design direction to heart which includes keeping the graphics and interfaces as clean and simple as I can. I’ve also had a few friends and colleagues offer help structuring my code and have even provided pull requests along the way. I have so much appreciation for the support and it has encouraged me to see this project all the way through.

However, I believe this project may be more than just a one off. I am deeply interested in what can be done with Web 3 dapps and have been looking into recruiting other creative and establishing a studio. |2| already named it Partavate. Perhaps I’ll have more to post about that in the future.

You’re invited to ride along.

I’ve started setting up ways to communicate about the progress of the game. First there’s the official Orbiter 8 website. There you will find a link to the Orbiter 8 Twitter account as well as an invitation to join the Orbiter 8 Discord group. I have also setup a form to collect email address for a newsletter which I have not started sending yet. You can find that form near the bottom of the website’s homepage. Not only are these good ways to keep tabs on me, if that’s what you’re into, it’s a great way to support me, also – if that’s what you’re into.

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