Project & Development Update #15
September 2, 2022
Good morning, pilots. The best thing since sliced bread has arrived. In other words, the next project update is here.
We'll start with our usual overview of progress and current team focuses. From there, we’ll share some news about our new audit partner and our attendance at a large upcoming conference. We’ll wrap things up by discussing the Citadel Gaming House, the playtest timeline, and our new team member.
To keep everything spicy, we'll also be devoting an entire section to sneak peeks of the GUI, ship hangars, ships, and marketing concepts.
Let's dive in. 👇
🔹 Progress
- Added additional endpoints to the construction bay backend to power in-game token valuation
- Decided on the final style for the GUI (Check below!)
- Added zoom and pan features to the map
- Added parallax for map layers
- Adjusted the map so that it expands edge-to-edge, regardless of aspect ratio
- Cleaned up the GUI storybook so that each component is organized by usage
- Created a system for translating subgraph data into accessible game data for the UI
- Created rough ML model for rating the quality of DAO proposals and Discourse posts
- Set up Macro partnership
- Created animated Ship Hangers
- Finished additional Officer Ships (Check below!)
- Finished additional asteroid belt icon assets
- Revised Raider Coalition ship art
- Completed additional GUI modals
- Completed additional promotional material for marketing
🔹 Remaining Focuses
- Finishing the few GUI windows that remain
- Completing Citadel Game + DAO Website
- Completing Day Zero Proposals
- Tying everything together and polishing for the playtest
🔸 Macro x Citadel
What is Macro?
Macro is a firm led by some of the most talented auditors in crypto, whose aim is to solve many of the problems associated with the traditional audit process. Beyond delivering quality audits, they pride themselves on establishing long-term relationships with their clients. Through these relationships, audits become an iterative process, where each audit serves as a foundation for the next.
Another audit?
Yes, we're doing one final audit before launch. We've been given the opportunity to have one conducted as a part of this partnership, and we strongly believe that it’s in the best interest of the project and community. We’ve taken care to set everything up so that it will not delay our playtest or launch.
Before moving on, we wanted to outline our rationale for partnering with Macro, instead of continuing with Solidity Finance.
Throughout the process of our first audit, we came to understand that the traditional auditing process is something of a black box. You finish your code, polish it, and hand it off to a firm. The firm takes a few weeks, reviews your code for a set of security issues, and sends you a report. During those few weeks, you receive no feedback if any issues are discovered, and you’re left to react to any discoveries at the very end of the process. You’re expected to verify all discoveries, fix the true issues, and hand everything back for a second review. Every following audit becomes a separate contract, and each set of auditors has to reacquaint itself with the project.
From experience, we can tell you that this process is slow, painful, and inefficient. That’s obviously not what we want for community builders, but up until recently, it was the only proven process. Thankfully, this is not the process that Macro uses. Instead of assigning auditors by contract, they assign auditors by partnership, and ensure that they remain acquainted with its code. Instead of producing preliminary reports, they verify and report discoveries as they arise, leading to a more interactive process. Since they started in May, they have proven themselves to be a top-tier firm, and have built a long track record of catching the issues that others miss. Obviously, there is no such thing as a perfect audit, but we believe that they are the closest thing that exists, and the best partner possible for the DAO.
The Cost
To cover the initial portion of the audit, the core team has contributed $50,000. Upon launch, we’d like The Citadel DAO to contribute $50,000 for the remainder of the cost. We believe that the expense is well worth it for the quality of work, and that it is in the best interest of the community.
We’re still discussing terms with Macro for our longer term partnership, but their payment will likely involve a small number of ships. In exchange, The Citadel DAO will receive discounted audit rates and extremely low lead times. You can expect a co-authored proposal shortly after launch detailing the partnership and its terms.
🔸 MCON 2
What is MCON?
MCON is a conference focused on building and operating DAOs, hosted by MetaCartel. It takes place in Denver on September 6th-9th, and is sponsored by some names you might recognize, such as MetaMask, Snapshot, and CollabLand.
Learn more here: https://www.mcon.fun/
Join us on stage!
We’re honored to have been invited to speak on virtual economy governance by our friend Peter at 1kx. On the 6th, the whole gang will be packing up and shipping out to Denver in preparation for the conference. Aside from speaking, we’re beyond excited to have the opportunity to meet and learn from some of the people on the cutting edge of DAOs.
All of the stage events will be livestreamed, and we'll be sure to drop links here when our very own Flam Sanct is speaking about "Why governance matters for self sovereign virtual economies."
🔸 Citadel Gaming House v2
Aside from a few hiccups during their road trip, the development team’s relocation to Los Angeles has been a huge success. It’s taken a little bit longer than expected to get everyone fully settled in, but we've been going strong every day since the beginning of August!
Currently, we’re set up in a smaller temporary office with just the three of us, myself, Architect, and Code Runner, but our permanent office will be complete at the end of September. The extra space should allow for more in-person expansion, and Heimdall may even bless us with his barbecue grill. Having everyone in the same room has definitely increased the quality and efficiency of our work, and we can't wait to show you the results.
Catch us in Voice for Work/Dev Nights!
Throughout September, we’re planning on joining voice chat casually and hosting some live work streams. Since we’re all in the same place, we figured that it could be worth trying, as a way of keeping ourselves focused and catching up with everyone.
We can’t promise that we’ll schedule any in advance, but we'll give everyone a heads-up in chat before each one happens. If you’re around, feel free to join and hang out with the team. We expect that there will be some sneak peeks, impromptu AMAs, and, of course, keyboard smashing.
🔹 Sneak Peeks
The goal of this showcase is to communicate what kind of decisions are being made, and to give you guys a glimpse into the process of creating the interfaces that will be used by veterans and newcomers alike.
For context, these modals sit on top of the star map, similar to windows on a computer desktop. They are part of a single page and open when you take actions through buttons, context menus, and click wheels. If the explanations get boring, feel free to skip them and just browse the images.
Graphical User Interface (GUI)
In our previous announcement, we mentioned that we were trying to decide between styles for the GUI. We had one that was more retro and compact, and another that was more modern, colorful, and simple. We liked both, but they each had their pros and cons.
Asteroid Belt Modal | Analyze composition, local ships, and kill reports.
Asteroid Belt Modal | Analyze composition. Expand to analyze region, ships, and kill reports.
After some debate, we chose to move forward with the more modern style. While we loved the feel of the retro version, we found its counterpart bolder, easier to understand, and more readily scalable for complex windows.
The example above shows our progress on cutting down the asteroid belt window. Our goal is to make it simple enough that players can have several on their screen at one time while analyzing opportunities. When one catches their interest, they have the ability to expand the window further to access information that’s relevant for ship management.
Asteroid Belt Modal + Ship Manager | View local ships and control your fleet
Our goal with the interface is to create something for players that is simple and compact, while still delivering all of the information necessary to make solid gameplay decisions. The inherent simplicity of this style has forced us to think about where each piece of information is relevant and to narrow what we display at any given time.
We believe that this has led to both better aesthetics and better usability. Surprisingly, designing with less has actually made it easier to create the most complicated windows. Here's a few extra sneak peeks of other windows:
Ship Information | View lore, stats, and history for any ship in the game.
Mining Ledger | Simulate drill and crime outcomes and select transport method.
Construction Bay & Ship Hangars
Since our last update, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the construction bay should be presented to users. Building off of our final UI style, the informational portion of the site came along easily. However, we got stuck on how to spice the site up for the average desktop screen.
More specifically, we had an awkward space to fill on the right side.
We knew that it would be a great place to show some ships that would be up for grabs, but displaying them directly felt… plain. The ships felt superimposed without a background, and it broke the consistency of the site.
After a few attempts, we found that our favorite involved these ship hangar concepts. Obviously, this is still very much in the works, but here’s how it looked:
Conveniently, the hangars solved a similar problem that we had been anticipating for marketplaces. Instead of your ship floating on a white background, it’ll be sitting in its hangar. We liked the hangars so much that we had them animated for use on the construction bay and on marketplaces.
Ships, Ships, & Ships
We've revised the Raider Coalition manufacturer, opting for more unique and aggressive designs:
Interceptors
Cruisers
Battleships
Officer ships are the rarest designation in the game, and they should be handled with care. Only look. No touching.
Marauder
Marauder
Miner
🔹 Project Timeline
In short, the playtest did not come in August.
We’d like to say that it’ll take place in September, but given the time that will be consumed by MCON and the Macro audit, we feel that it is best to be cautious. We want nothing more than to play and build the game alongside you guys, but we can't do it sustainably unless we've laid the foundation for the long term success of the DAO. In trying to do that, we have found ourselves spending longer than expected on the details. Still, we believe that we’re making the right choice for the community in progressing strongly, if not quickly.
With that said, we want to reassure you that we’re close. Although it’s painful, we have to continue to work until everything is fully ready and all of the details are right. The playtest is around the corner and closer than ever. We appreciate your patience in getting there, and we couldn't have made it this far without you.
🔸 Team Growth
New Team Member
We’re excited to announce that our longtime friend The Learner has joined the team. He’s a machine learning specialist and one of the most talented people we know.
Machine Learning
As his intro to the project, he’s been working independently on creating a model that predicts the quality of a DAO proposal or Discourse post based on its text. Currently, the model is trained on data from ENS, Decentraland, Maker, Yearn, Bankless, Index Co-op, and Compound, and is showing promising results for spam detection.
We believe that this model will be a great help in surfacing high-quality proposals as The Citadel grows. The easier it is for everyone to find and focus on proposals that push the project forward, the more time we can all spend supporting and building them.
Beyond Spam Detection
Beyond the model itself, we believe that it is a huge advantage to have The Learner’s skills and expertise at our disposal. Machine learning opens the door to a whole category of problems that can’t be solved effectively with classical programming. At the moment, we have plans to explore its applications for asteroid belt generation, among other things.