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art‐peace: Project Summary

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Brandon R edited this page Aug 1, 2024 · 3 revisions

Project Overview

Goals

art/peace is a collaborative and competitive art game. One of its primary goals was to bring a fun dApp to Starknet, which would spur contests, bring together communities, and increase usage of the network. Another of the projects goals was to bring people from different blockchain ecosystems together to peacefully ( or unpeacefully ) build and compete. We wanted the app to feel degen-y and tie in crypto-native ideas.

art-peace-animation-extended.mp4

Repository

art/peace

This repo contains all parts of the art/peace app including:

  • Frontend
  • Backend
    • Multi-part backend server used to query/store app data
    • backend service: Main API users query from
    • auth-backend service: Specific API used for authorized access
    • consumer-backend service: API used by the indexer to store data
  • Indexer
    • Apibara indexer for monitoring Starknet events and forwarding to the DBs
  • Databases
    • Redis: In-memory DB used to store the compressed Canvas data for fast retrieval
    • Postgres: DB for storing general data used for analytics, frontend, and backend.
  • Docker
    • Docker and docker-compose setups to allow easy testing and deployment of the app
  • Helm/Infra
    • Helm charts used to manage the full app and all its parts in GCP

Assessment

Outcomes

Metrics

Repo

  • PRs Merged : 127
  • # contributors : 40

Attracted contributors from the "Starknet Africa" ecosystem, and on-boarded a lot of frontend devs.

App usage

The following stats represent usage over the 4 days the app ran.

  • Transactions : 22,000
  • Avg cost / Tx : $0.0005
  • Active accounts : 1000
  • Pixels : 60,000
  • Avg cost / Px : $0.00015
  • NFTs minted : 500
  • Quests done : 1500

It's worth noting the app ran during EthCC, so there were people who said they didn't have as much time as they would've liked to play.

The app maintained its spot as the fourth most used contract on Starknet by TPS, only behind Influence, Ethereum, and STARK tokens. During the night, the app briefly passed STARK token contract usage.

Socials

X

There was some impact on community members' social media, like the "Ducks Everyone" faction having a "viral" moment fighting The Void. Also, a lot of the Turkish community came together on X to build their flag.

Discoveries

  • Super cheap and fun games are feasible on Starknet.
  • Importance of community interaction and giving them alternative ways to engage on Starknet.
  • Using "Pending" transactions for indexing optimistic frontends is very important for focg.
  • There are ways games can use sub-blocktime timers if the time can be provided by the user.
  • We lack a really good "Sign-in with Starknet" equivalent to "Sign-in with Ethereum".
  • Personal learnings: This is the first time I've focused heavily on contract-level optimizations to make the game super cheap.
    • Only store what is needed to compute the future state on-chain.
    • Ex: Pixel colors didn't need to be stored onchain, only an event and timer were needed onchain.

Goals

  • Bring fun dApps to Starknet
    • Received very good initial feedback from the users on the game being fun and engaging. Everyone wants to know when the next iteration will be.
  • Bring together communities
    • Good: Some communities like Influence, Ducks Everywhere, Argent, and countries like Turkey and Nigeria came to build on the app and could showcase their community and art to others on the same canvas.
    • Bad: Many of the communities/factions we had worked with prior to the app launch didn't seem to join the four-day event.
  • Increase network usage
    • The stats above speak better to this, but it seems like this goal was achieved.
    • Providing people with multiple fully onchain interactions at a negligible cost over the course of the 4-day event to place pixels, mint NFTs, do quests, etc., causes them to internalize our ecosystem's tooling and makes them more used to using the blockchain.
  • Bring together different blockchain ecosystems
    • We mainly failed on this goal, as we couldn't secure any partnerships with other chains for them to participate.
    • A big part of this is they needed their users to download and use Starknet wallets to interact with the app.
  • Degen-y and Crypto native
    • Good: Through quests, NFTs, and rewards we were able to bring some degen vibes to the app. One good example was the spread of the void and the fight from Ducks Everywhere.
    • Bad: Not all degen nature went to building art, but some people just placed random pixels all around the canvas to complete some quests.
  • Developers growth
    • Through community calls, office hours, and issues in GitHub, this project was able to teach and onboard many developers, especially from the Africa ecosystem. The people there share the projects they are working on together and try and tag-up on GitHub issues.

This project also brought artists together to showcase their artworks on Starknet.

Future

Going forward, the project will continue to stay in maintenance mode.

We will occasionally run more iterations of the game with spacing between them to allow users to get hyped for another fresh canvas.

The project will continue under StarkWare, and the infrastructure will continuously be live through keep-starknet-strange's GCP. Future goals will be similar: bringing together communities, giving people fun events onchain, driving usage of the network, and getting people used to interacting with the blockchain.

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