The first version of Cometh went live on 8th of February 2021 and the distance we have covered together with our community is simply outstanding:
- 6568 Spaceships are orbiting today and were launched in collaboration with Alchemix, Aavegotchi, DontbuyMEME, Pickle finance, BadgerDAO, Kleros, YAM finance, Doki Doki… and about 5000 leasing contracts were created
- 10,000 unique addresses played the game
- with 11,800,000 unique transfers, the MUST token ⚗️ is arguably the most transferred token on Polygon
- more than $820,000 worth of tokens were already distributed in game
We are more grateful than ever to the players who have been jumping, pulling, mining and pushing us to deliver more and faster. During August, the dev team spent time doing a review of our first attempt at a fully on chain game enhanced with DeFi and NFT. We tried our best to compile what went well, what went wrong and what crazy new things we can add. Here’s a rundown of what to expect from Cometh. TLDR: Next stop Proxima Centauri!
Dark matter: the room for improvement
Scalability of our blockchain infrastructure (October PoC)
The game component of Cometh has been live on Polygon since day 1, allowing our users to benefit from its cheap EVM bandwidth compared to the Ethereum Mainnet while most of our NFTs were still minted on Ethereum. We were not the only ones to rely on this solution which led to a few bottlenecks along the way, namely public RPC endpoints were not always reliable, network congestion sometimes brought high fees or small (yet impactful) transactions reorgs.
Cometh is bound to mature with scalability solutions and we see the recent acquisition of Hermez Network as a very positive signal for our own needs in the short run. Nevertheless we came to the conclusion that we have to explore a dedicated approach at least for the smart contracts of the game. The team will be working on a proof of concept to scale our infrastructure in late October.
The raise of non human players
This is the fate of all successful applications that expose functional endpoints externally: users get more sophisticated and automate their actions. By design, being live on a blockchain means that anyone can interact directly with the game smart contracts and try to get an edge over other players with an automation script.
In the context of Cometh this took the form of some players using a script to be more precise on jumps, to move many ships all together from one place to another and sometime also to time the mining of an asteroid on the blockchain while less “script savvy” players had to rely on the game UI to trigger their transactions.
There is a balance to be found between encouraging third parties to build on top of Cometh and fair play for all the players. Encouraging the first and discouraging the second calls for both structural changes and community involvement in the moderation. A new game play that requires the player to be active will be introduced alongside a new player journey that softly verifies how human a player is. To be more reactive in the future and similarly to what’s done in other games, we are also going to let the community vote on temporary restriction of access to the game for flagged behaviors.
Bringing more playable content
Our initial goal with this first version of Cometh was to prove that the DeFi and NFT primitives could fit nicely into a game. Although the current metrics of the game suggests that we have proven our point, one could rightfully argue that many pieces of fun, rhythm, replayability and gameplay are still missing.
We are proud that we brought the game to where it stands from a technical point of view, of the new concepts that we have introduced. We want to set Cometh as the main gateway for newcomers to step into blockchain so time has now come to package and tie all of those pieces together with powerful gaming ingredients.
Cometh’s incoming spacewalks
Focus on the player journey (new fee system detailed mid October)
The new version of Cometh will give its players the opportunity to create and customize their profile while earning awards from numerous game achievements. This allows to tackle two topics in one go, opening the abstraction of the account for better cross chain compatibility and identifying the players for better community governance and tailored content. This paves the way for a political component in game with the guilds which will play an important role in resource management.
The new version of Cometh will be free to play and fully compatible with smartphones. Ultimately, players that don’t own or rent a spaceship will have a harder time accessing the whole experience of the new game yet it is crucial to open our ecosystem from Cometh to our partners to a much wider range of enthusiasts. The blockchain makes it a challenge to truly offer “free to play” set up but we believe we have found the right approach to this problem. The new fee system we have conceived has the MUST token at its core and involves DUST as a means of enhancing the game experience. We particularly care about the holders that are staking in the TUBE and expect to be rewarded for it in the long run.
The development of the smart contracts for this system is progressing very well and we plan to start testing it in November. A dedicated article will be published in the coming weeks.
A new game mode: Battles and Piracy
Pursuing the objective of adding a whole new dynamic into Cometh, we are preparing a battle mode involving the spaceships, their crew members, their perks and new items. The system was inspired by classic tabletop games and turn-based video games. This new component should be ready to test and harden as a spinoff before the rest of the new version is released. Players willing to fight will be able to create challenges eventually with entry fees and rewards for the winner. It’s also a great way to introduce the spaceship inventory and new items into the game.
We had tons of fun playing this battle mode with pen and paper so we can’t wait to challenge you onto it.
In the core game, challenging other players will be possible when they are close enough (e.g. from the mining area perspective) and in certain zones. Some of the tokens mined on an asteroid will remain at risk of piracy until dropped at a specific place (the depot) and guilds should prepare to enforce justice in the zones they have influence on.
Exploring the Galaxy: Hoarding, Trading, and Crafting
The new version of Cometh has a galaxy that expands procedurally with the blockchain’s entropy. Rather than having a few meteors passing by per day, the solar systems are now full of valuable resources the players can dig out of asteroïds or out of other player’s hulls. It also contains buildings offering various services which are progressively deployed as solar systems grow in activity.
Cometh version 2 introduces a new of exploration; a tile that displays the closest surroundings of a player, notably minable asteroïds, player controlled spaceships, buildings, interactive items and space anomalies
The artworks and game design are meant to display an environment the players can intuitively interact with and that is loading at light-speed on both smartphones and lightweight desktops.
Existing components and services of Cometh are about to get a lifting or a rework, notably the rental and the shop who will welcome new functionalities and extended compatibilities. Comethswap is set for a deeper integration in the game mechanics as well as an improvement of its rewards to better focus on volume generation. There are many elements that can’t be detailed further in this very article (Resource management, Crafting, Lore content, loot boxes, quests, building system, guild module etc.) and a new version of Cometh Whitepaper is about to be published (see below).
- 8th September: Poker tournament and AMA sessions with Decentraland
- 14th September: Community call on Discord
- 17th September: AMA with LocGame
- 30th September: DemoDay, a glimpse at the V2 + NFT.NYC
- 4th October: Community drinks in Paris — Whitepaper V2 release
- 17th October: The New Fee System in depth: towards a free to play with fair premium (article)
- 19th-24th October: Lisbon Blockchain Week with Cometh x Blackpool events
- 29th October: DemoDay, a glimpse at the V2
- 17th-18th November: GeckoCon conference
- 4th December: DemoDay, pre-release
- January 2022 (current worst case target): Cometh V2 Battle release
- February 2022 (current worst case target): Cometh V2 release
