I think that never (ever?) has there been a game with such rapid development and iteration, at least in my (limited) experience. I have generally considered game design and development to be slow and tedious, and that as both a game player and a person who has tried to help people build games before.
But since @hivetrending mentioned his brilliant idea to me, not more than three months have past. About a week to get the steemnova game repo forked, working and live, about 8 weeks of testing universe, and now slightly more than two weeks "live" at the time of writing.
Indeed, from our first "podcast" called State of the Moonion, occurring on April 12th, the Pink Moon, which announced that there would be a game, until now - there has not even been another full moon. Join us for the May 12th's Flower Moon State of the Moonion event, which occurs monthly moonly.
Some of this all has to do with philosophy, some of it has to do with skill sets and experience. I will toot horns that deserve to be tooted, and @hivetrending is an amazing developer, and his dev log of the first week does not even begin do justice to all the things that have been done (by him).
He is clearly motivated, and having fun - maybe even as much or more fun than the rest of us. Because, I don't know how to say this (it still boggles my mind), but all these "little things" he is fixing - literally existed in steemnova for the life of that project. How did we ever manage?
On-chain rewardification
The first mission, entitled Mission: Attack!, is complete. Hard to say if it was a success or failure at this point, but it was such that 13 accounts got on-chain rewardification of more than $1 dollar worth of upvotes, and one team collected the ACS bounty of 1500 pizzabits.
I may have missed some within the 24 hour window (2 that I know of), especially at the end, and it was the case that there were some "work flow" issues to work out in terms of "validation". Some users tried to apply to more than once, we had some trouble with the battle report links from keychain mobile users, and users with reputation under 45 were not notifying me - but all these things were important lessons to learn - for iteration.
All in all, I consider this a "successful first test", and further missions are "coming soon".
More rewards?
We are working on (soon to be testing) a "new" type of on-chain rewardification, and this work is going to hold me back a bit from Mission #2, but once complete it should be quite interesting, and not require players to actually create posts on chain for this new type. Missions will continue afterward, and "soon" I will announce what we have been working on, I am quite excited about it.
It is something that is quite easy, intergrating into one of the incredible new developments created by @hivetrending, that is sure to have many uses in this game, and other games in the future. Let's just say, "soon" it will "pay" to set a record in MOON!
Tokenomics
While this is, and remains, a free game, (you can use my eco account as a metric of how a player who has not deposited PIZZA is able to "keep up", even without much raiding), still there was a "pay to win" aspect that came with the codebase, and we adapted a (brilliant) plan to it, involving the long-standing, widely held and low inflation PIZZA token.
So far @moon.deposit account has amassed an incredible quantity of PIZZA tokens, something that makes my eyes water a bit when looking at, something like "high expectations" for this fun side project with a small and voluntary team.
While this is an enormous quantity of PIZZA (number 1 on the richlist!), we have only announced "some details" about what will be done with it, especially that a portion of it will be used as "End of Season Rewards". I believe that number will be 50%, according to the tokenomics litepaper discussed in the first State of the Moonion event. Make sure to attend the upcoming event if you want to hear more unannounced details being discussed.
Another relevant decision, regarding the @hive.pizza community and approved by stakers in the PIZZA + Moon Discord, was to put up a sell wall to avoid and channel any exuberant speculation.
At the time of writing, over 8500 HIVE of that sell wall has been sold, and ALL OF IT has been (and will be) powered up!
As these numbers grow, there may be more and more questions and pressure to "announce already" what will be done, exactly and explicitly. We do intend to "spread it far and wide", and I wrote as much as I could in response to a very good feedback from @pharesim about this very issue.
We are building for Fun
and for long-term Fun at that
Finally, I would like to mention about "win condition", which is announced and widely known as "gravitron 1". This will trigger "End of Season Rewards", and the creation of a new universe. But its important to note, that this doesn't mean that this universe will end.
We plan to keep this universe rolling, especially to test "late game". But rewardification and new player integration will stop for universe 1 at that point, and will be focused on Universe 2. We are also considering (probably highly considering at this point), a limited window with which players can send unused pizzabits (such as those discovered on expeditions or won in bounties) over to the new universe.
At some point into the future, after sufficiently testing the late game and possibly iterating ideas for a "later" term win-condition for a future universe, we may put some "condition" on Universe 1. A certain amount of PIZZA deposited between all active players per month, perhaps. After all, there are some hosting costs associated with each universe. These are all ideas at this point, we will have plenty of time to "see how its all working out, when we get there".
In conclusion
If you are currently playing MOON, I hope you are enjoying it. Its based on one of my most favorite games of all time, one with which I have a lot of fun memories, a game that is - at the same time - math-based, strategic AND social.
If you have not yet tried MOON, fear not - a lot of fun can still be had, and being at the top of the "leaderboard" is not "the only way to win" - in fact the game has a robust "noob protection" and "inactive player" system that makes joining a bit late possibly as much fun or even a bit more fun than competing all at once with the big boys. So feel free to register and try it out, completely free.
You can get more information about the game in my recent interview with @abrockman on the EMP-community podcast.
Questions, comments, concerns? Let me know, down below!