San Francisco-based Endless Nameless has released a developer sandbox for CryptoKitties called Cheshire.
Like many studios, Endless Nameless has released a dApp to capitalize on CryptoKitties’ success – in this case KittyRace. It went on to enjoy a couple of weeks at the top of the blockchain gaming charts.
In a blog post on Medium, the studio commented:
‘A significant proportion of our engineering effort was spent mimicking CryptoKitties’ API and smart contracts in our local development environments’.
Its response? Open up a sandbox for other studios in a similar situation.
Based on the local implementation of CryptoKitties, the system developed for KittyRace used a local Ethereum testnet running slightly modified versions of the CryptoKitties' smart contracts via Truffle Framework. This was combined with a local HTTP server running a minimal implementation of the web API and a framework for seeding the system with realistic data.
The result was Endless Nameless could simulate KittyRace scenarios with the same outcomes it would encounter in production, directly helping to polish the game before release.
To spur the growth of CryptoKitties and other NFTs, and to spare other developers from duplicating the workload, Endless Nameless has extracted and open-sourced these tools and patterns into a standalone package called Cheshire.
As the blog says, ‘Cheshire is what we wished existed when we started KittyRace’. This local implementation of CryptoKitties is intended to give developers the flexibility and control needed to rapidly iterate on a dApp.