Hi all,
this is our website:
https://crowdcontrol.network/#/You can get all the info I post here on this website, but I will try to give a shorter intro here for brevity.
In short Crowd Control is a Trading Card Game on a blockchain. This allows you to transfer cards between players, a feature that is gone for Hearthstone or Magic Arena, which is very sad, because this is a very great feature of the real Magic the Gathering as it brings the community together.
However there are many projects that just copy Hearthstone mechanics and put it on a blockchain. We have two big differences from these projects: a) We do not copy the mechanics of Hearthstone, for example we have simultaneous turns and our mechanics are closer to Magic the Gathering and b) players can create their own cards. Or say artists and game designers can come together and push cards they have created into the game. This is possible without prior appliance and without us programming and fitting the cards into the game. The cards however need to be approved by a randomly selected council of 5 players.
The big question arising here is: How do you prevent overpowered cards? Well the council tries to prevent insanely overpowered cards from coming into the game and then the players can vote on cards. The voting marks cards as overpowered, underpowered or fair enough. If a card has too many overpowered votes it is automatically nerfed and vice versa.
Why would artists/designers create cards? Well there are many out there who do this already for games like Magic just because it is fun. But in our case there are also other incentives. Beside the motivation that comes from your card being played by others there is a monetary reward when your card creation is sold in a set. The game runs on a blockchain, where the votes are counted and game credits are given.
Whenever your card is sold, you earn credits. Furthermore the whole development of the game is managed on a blockchain, this is called a devDAO, which means development Decentral Autonomous Organization. It basically means that all participants decide which tasks have to be done and once you finish a task you get shares in the blockchain coin, which gives you power to decide where the project will be heading. It is very similar to shares in a corporation.
These coins (shares) are coins in a proof-of-stake system, which basically means that you get rewards when the blockchain is being used. So in essence all of us are unpaid, but everyone who does work, gets shares.
Where is the project right now and what are we looking for?
I started this 2 years ago and the team has grown to 7 people. These are 3 coders, 2 card designer/playtesters and 2 artists. We have build a website (link is at the top) where you can create your own cards and in the back there is a card grammar and a blockchain running. The blockchain keeps track of all the created cards and the votes on these cards and the card grammar defines the game mechanics and how you create cards. There is one big piece missing and this is the game client. We have played our game for many months now on untap.in, a website that lets you play games like Magic with uploaded cards. There was no real point in working on a game client up to now, because the game mechanics needed to be 99% finished before we code such a thing. Game mechanics have presented themselves as more troublesame as expected,
mostly because they need to be tampered for user generated content. It must always be fulfilled that our automated nerfing mechanism works and can not be broken. In addition we want to have a rich set of interactions like Magic the Gathering and not just simple cards as in Hearthstone. This work is mostly done, also the simultaneous turns are solved. However the website is not finished and the card creator needs a lot of refinement and the grammar needs keywords to allow a simple approach to creating card mechanics. The blockchain is working, all hard bits are solved and it is not a big deal for me to implement more features to the blockchain. But there is still much to do to keep it getting better and in the background there is a game client waiting to be coded. Which brings me mostly to what we are looking for:
We are mostly looking for people who know how to code. Talented artists who love to draw cards are nice and UI/UX designers as well, but our biggest pain is coding. Being a coder myself, I think the tech stack is most interesting here:
Website: Vue.js (javascript, html)
Card Grammar: JSON schema created by Go codebase
Blockchain: Cosmos-SDK used, Go codebase
Game client: Not yet decided.
For the full blown client we might use Unity or Godot, however we are mostly down to start a prototype with Vue + Typescript + socket.io and a node.js server in the background with Typescript. But this is not set in stone, also react is possible or something else.
Also check our Github
https://github.com/DecentralCardGameSo our tech is vue/javascript in the frontend and cosmos/golang in the backend with high probability of Typescript. Does that mean you are out if can't code these languages? Certainly no. When I started this project I have not coded a single line of code in Go, but being a C++, Python and Javascript Coder in the past, was enough to get into it very fast. So if you have experience with any high level programming language, I think you should be able to get into it. If you just started to code, well this might be a bit too heavy. If you want to learn how to code blockchain stuff, it is also possible to have an easy entry here, especially if you are interested in running blockchains such as setting up nodes and organizing blockchain infrastructure. My background is physical simulations and computation heavy stuff, so I'm able to get the math heavy stuff solved, don't be afraid you will be confronted with such stuff and let alone. But most of all we need game devs, who want to build a game client. The good thing is that our approach is not as naive to think we can just figure out the game mechanics while we build the client ;-)
Oh one last thing I forgot: We are 100% open source up to now, maybe the game client (frontend) will not be open sourced, mostly because we were plagiarized recently and have made the experience that there should be a single bit that is closed source. But that is open for discussion.
If this sounds interesting to you, even if you are not a coder, but feel like you can and want to contribute feel free to contact us on our Discord (link is on the website) or here.
Jobs
