Project & Development Update #13

June 7, 2022

Good morning, pilots. It's time for more Citadel content in everyone's favorite medium, lots of writing!

In this post, we'll be releasing The Citadel Library of community docs and breaking down each of the resources it contains.

"Stay awhile and listen." 👇

🔸 The Citadel Library

Here: https://library.citadel.game/

What it's for

The idea of these resources is to ensure that The Citadel is not a “black box” to newcomers. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to understand as much of the project as they want. It is our hope that this will make it as painless as possible for pilots to start playing and contributing.

Who it's for

It depends on the resource. We expect that many of our pilots will be new to both Polygon and onchain voting systems. The Polygon section and the DAO Overview will help them set up and start voting. For pilots looking to create proposals and garner support, the Proposal Process, Specification of Powers, and Delegating Votes sections will be invaluable. For developers who need to find their way around the contracts and perform upgrades, the contract documentation and the sample proposals will speed up the process. What any pilot reads will depend on their role within The Citadel.

Why it's important ✨

The Citadel Library is important for roughly the same reasons as the Yellowpaper. As a community-led project, it's extremely important that we provide good resources to those who want to build, review, and deploy the future of the game. We believe that, while a good GUI and open source code are a great start, they are not enough to ensure a good contributor experience. Our goal is to allow pilots to get acquainted with the project, without having to spend hours reading guides or reverse-engineering what is already built.

In summary

The Citadel Library is our collection of project resources, of all types. Our goal is to maintain it as a source of answers to common questions, and guides for common tasks. Some resources are technical, and some aren’t. Unless you’re trying to prepare for gameplay immediately, there’s no need to read through it right now. However, if you’re looking for a piece of project information, there’s a good chance it’ll be there. We hope that it’ll be there for pilots when they need it, and that it can grow as a source of knowledge for the community.

🔹 Resource Breakdown

DAO Charter: Purpose and Principles (Draft)

• While the governance contracts and proposal process guidelines dictate how the DAO functions, the DAO charter declares why the DAO exists and what principles guide it.

• This is a draft prepared by the team that will be discussed on the governance forum and ratified via a proposal voted on by the community shortly after launch.

• The goal is to establish the vision we are all aligned on striving toward.

DAO Overview

• A concise overview of how the DAO works and links to relevant resources.

Organizing The Citadel ✨

• Rather than predefine an elaborate governance structure in a top-down fashion, the team has elected to create a minimum viable framework to see us through launch and focus on supporting community-led initiatives for building out the DAO.

• This document discusses some unique and interesting opportunities a DAO-owned onchain game presents, introduces important topics in decentralized organization design, and proposes a number of possible routes forward to spark our collective imaginations.

• While the Yellowpaper was written for technically inclined builders and players, this paper speaks to all those interested in building a decentralized game studio.

Proposal Process

• An explanation of how to submit proposals.

• The types of proposals and what the process looks like for each type.

• Rules and guidelines for proposal submission.

• Proposal templates required for a valid proposal submission.

Specification of Powers

• In an effort to establish a culture of transparency from the outset, this document is a concise outline of what powers and privileges exist and to whom they are granted.

Delegating Votes

• The voting power associated with each ship NFT can be delegated to another pilot you trust to vote on your behalf, and this article explains the process.

Encoding Transaction Data

• A key feature of the DAO is that successful proposals can execute code that performs actions decided by the voting members.

• This article provides technical documentation of how actions can be encoded in proposals.

🔹 "I Didn't Hear No Bell..."

Aside from what's already on the site, we have a list of resources planned for publication before launch. Most of them are already ready, but we're waiting so that we don't end up with a host of forks before the official version deploys.

• Sample Proposals / Template Proposals
• Generated Contract Docs (from the docs that are inlined with the contracts)
• Source for C.A.I.S.
• Source for the website
• Source for the game GUI
• Figma file for the GUI design
• Branding package
• Ship Art (compiled and organized nicely for community use)
• Misc. Musings

🔸 The Citadel Manifesto

"From the beginning, The Citadel has endeavored to contribute an example of what we believe a decentralized gaming project can be. Our ethos is encoded in the language of action:

We can expect more from founders.
We can care more about our communities.
We do not have to resort to trading integrity for attention.

Our vision is to adopt a different mindset than what's common in web3. This community is too important to be defined by scam artists, low-effort opportunists, and high-level grifters perpetuating vibes as value. We do not just need blockchain games, we need participatory game co-creation and co-ownership. As games continue to become more than just games, absolute control by the few over worlds populated and built by the masses no longer makes sense.

Power should vest in the players, and worlds should be governed by the multitudes that inhabit them.

The Citadel should be a conduit for the community, where players have a platform not only to play, but also to share, discover, learn, build, and govern."

— DAO Charter: Purpose and Principles