A Note before you carry on reading, the tools in this project will be familiar to ones provided by a side chain. But for all intents and purposes at the time of this post, these sets of tools are meant to complement the Hive main chain and the HAF smart contracts that are being developed by @blocktrades and his team. This is NOT a sidechain announcement.
What is Project Hybrid and Why should anyone care?
Project Hybrid is a set of analytical and development tools that are going to be provided to Game developers with an emphasis on those who are going to develop on Unity and Unreal Engine. Before I go into details let's talk about what issues exist.
Problem 1: Connection of a game to the Blockchain and signing transactions
Creating a game is a very difficult job, the more complex your game is, the harder it gets for the developers and the creative team to keep up. Deadlines get thrown in the garbage, and incomplete products get launched. Add blockchain to the mix and now you have a plethora of problems that become overwhelming even for the most experienced of teams.
One option of course is to make Browser games powered by Web development tools and optionally several animation libraries. This is not an easy solution but is elected mostly because creating new tools is significantly harder for a blockchain. Using current tools and customizing seems to be the easier solution (I assure you this itself is a mountain to climb).
Another option the one that many Game developers use is to use an Engine to make a game. Unity and Unreal Engine are the most common ones, as well as other niche ones like Godot and Cry Engine. But the problem that arises from this is that you need to connect your game to a database and then feed information from that to a blockchain in the form of a custom JSON. Sounds simple right? Not at all, Unity for example uses C# as its main programming language and uses the open source .NET platforms to ensure that you can run your application with different hardware configurations. Now, this is not a major problem if you want to publish your build in WebGL which is essentially building and running your application in a player and opening that player on your web app. This is a practical solution, as you can launch your game on one page of your website and have the marketplace on another page. And then it is a simple game of pushing information into databases.
Things quickly get complicated when you launch your build in a separate app. How is your app going to talk to the blockchain? I mean you created a really nice game. But now your token is doing nothing. Your game is not connected to the blockchain, you are not minting anything from your app. You check with the blockchain and they say unity is another world for us, which to be fair it is. So let's take a well-known game developed on unity and see how they have combatted this issue.
Gods Unchained
Yes, Gods Unchained was built on Unity. For those who have played it (I have played a lot, LIKE A LOT) you come to love the smooth look of the game and its mechanics. This perspective is built from a combination of a very competent design team and the power of Unity. So let's talk about how they mint anything. For those who have played it, know that whenever you try to mint an NFT you are taken OUT of the app and onto a website to sign a transaction on the wallet of your choice. The experience can be a little jarring for people coming into web3 gaming. I mean everything was perfect until the NFT had to be minted.
Also, note their marketplace is on Immutable X along with many other games on the Ethereum Chain instead of within the app.
For those who are interested Unity has already incorporated tons of Decentralised solutions.
https://assetstore.unity.com/decentralization
Problem 2: Analytical tools
For anyone that has ever published a game on steam would know that you get access to certain analytics like UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) through Steamworks which basically checks the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. This one specifically checks whether specific links in your campaign are being clicked on by customers. Alternatively, you can connect to Google Analytics which shows you detailed information about the country the customer is playing from and the time. Useful stuff!!
You can also use third-party tools while building your game to get in-game data, or just program your own metrics (Skyrim is a good example of a game with great in-game analytics for the user).
But for a crypto game, things change. The whole reason why blockchain is so great for gaming is because of its immutable record-keeping. Once it is on-chain it is not going anywhere. But Game Devs are afraid to get sink their teeth into this because it is a whole new world for them especially if it is a language they are unfamiliar with. So how do you decide which analytics you want?
You can decide on in-game analytics that you as a developer will see either in-game or on a front end of your choice. The choice of metrics vary from publisher to publisher but the one that is the most important is user acquisition, user retention, and revenue earned. The last one requires privacy so the game owner may decide to use his bank records or a block explorer to keep track. There are other tons of user metrics that are very useful.
Problem 3: Cost
Let's be honest here. The only reason why there are so many games on steam is that it costs 100 USD to publish a game there, which gets refunded if you make a sale of 1000 USD. Low cost for a platform that will market your game for you.
This makes the swallowing of the heavy pill of hiring people easier, as you need to focus on creating a unique game. Now add Blockchain to the mix.
Well, each time you try to run the numbers it becomes a mess. You pay money to make a token and then pay some more to mint NFTs. And now you have to pay more to enable staking. Oh, you have a killer front end but now you have to hire an overpriced dev to code the back end. Note you don't need to do any of this if you know how to program and suffer through documentation.
Oh since you are launching on blockchain and not steam. Guess you have to hire some influencers for marketing.
So how do you make this profitable with this much cost? You charge it accordingly to the users, which is a pretty high cost to the user. Now you hope people like your game and hope your tokenomics are solid and that your token doesn't tank and this and that.
Enter Project Hybrid
Project Hybrid is my answer to all of the above problems and onboarding people on Hive. Imagine that you are a web2 person ignorant of Hive and see a neat game. You decide to play it. You download the app and run it to play it. You decide to sign up and enter your favorite username. Boop! your username is taken. So you add in a few zeroes and your account on the hive blockchain is created with a link, where you can access your keys. But you don't care about that. You start playing it with your friends and are having a blast and now that you are done, you get a notification stating you have earned X HIVE and to sign the transaction to transfer it to your HIVE account. You don't care, and sign off.
Then one day, one of your friends says that they have paid their house rent with the hive they earned from the game. Now you get curious and then get sucked into the world of Hive/crypto. Now you go back to the link, find your keys, and start making posts about how your friends suck at the game.
This is one of the goals Project Hybrid seeks to achieve for game developers making games whether WebGL or App. A smooth experience for the user to the blockchain, and all it requires is setting up configurations from an SDK (One of the tools of Project Hybrid) within Unity or Unreal Engine before launching your build.
There will also be a front end which will be launched with all the key metrics that as a publisher you want to track.
Another front-end marketplace for developers wanting to use NFTs with their games. This would be a combined marketplace for now.
The last and most important is going to be a training system for developers wanting to get into unity and unreal engine.
How much is this going to cost?
shrugs Money is not the objective here. Onboarding is. So cheaper than you expect.
Why Hive?
No Gas cost. No chance of a 51% attack or a Sybil attack succeeding. Actually decentralized. 3-second Block speed. This is enough for me.
When Launch?
Anywhere from 3 to 12 months. The life of a dev is simple, some days you question the spelling of your own name and the next the most difficult mysteries of the world seem like child's play. The more people help, the faster it gets done.
How can you help?
Spread the word!! Tools like these will bring publishers and game developers to Hive. And with them more people who love games.
This project will also require dev expertise from a Hive perspective. If you want to help drop me a message in discord (Spiritsurge#0222). There is no immediate gratification from this and it is a long hard journey.
If you want to invest. Please read very carefully this post. This is NOT a project that is looking to make a profit.
How can you bring your product into alpha testing?
Reach out to me on discord at Spiritsurge#0222
Where can you buy the Hybrid token?
There is no token as of this time, any projects that launch with hybrid will use Hive. So nothing to buy or hold.
Now who am I?
I am @spiritsurge, an Electrical Engineer who joined the crypto world in 2021 November through Splinterlands (My love of card games brought me to them). I am a long-time Hobbyist who got into Unity and Unreal Engine 4 in late 2014. I have made a lot of simple games over the years, but never published them due to my corporate job. I will be testing the tools of Project Hybrid on my own game @astralrevelation (a tactics-style RPG) which is being developed by @surgentgaming (which I am the founder of) over the course of this year. This will serve as proof of concept for this project.
You can find me on Linked in:-
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammad-hasan-akram-a81308140/
Yes, I am going in completely doxxed.
There will be a more detailed post with a whitepaper the next time I post
Discord