To some, the idea of a community-built metaverse having a chief engineer might seem like a contradiction in terms. But a conversation with Dacoco’s Dallas Johnson dispels this notion rather quickly. As Dallas tells it, the quest towards greater levels of decentralization and player empowerment within Alien Worlds is unstoppable.
“We’ve always tried to think, if we were down the path towards decentralizing the community and our company was to disappear, would everything be OK? That’s been a core design principle in everything we’ve built.”
In other words, the future of Alien Worlds is not dependent on its primary contributor Dacoco. “The core game mechanics of the mining, the voting, the DAOs, all of that actually runs on-chain,” Dallas explains. “If we were to switch off all our servers tomorrow, everything would be okay. A bit rocky for a few days – the UI might break a little – but the core mechanics of everything is rock solid under there. Everyone can feel safe that all their assets and NFTs still exist and aren’t going to evaporate.”
As Dacoco’s chief engineer, Dallas helps to set the tone for the playing experience by creating the underlying code and tools that make Alien Worlds an enjoyable metaverse to explore. But what brought him into the world of blockchain gaming in the first place?
“I used to work at a fintech firm in London, but one thing about working for a big tech company is that the agency and control you can give to individual users can be very limited. So while I was working there I was looking for a bit of extra intellectual stimulation,” he recalls.
“I started working around on the side and engaging with EOS stack, which was building some of the first DAO software on a blockchain, which was a lot of fun. Then a few years later I got a call from the founders at Dacoco asking me to help them out with scaling up the DAOs into the gaming concepts, which has become our Planetary DAOs. The initial delegated voting mechanism is still the kernel of the code used in the DAOs today.”
Starting Gun Fired on Syndicates
After work behind the scenes was complete, the voting feature of in-game DAOs – known as Planetary Syndicates – launched in October 2022, enabling Explorers, who were already able to stake to a planet, to influence governance. As co-founder Saro McKenna observed at the time, “It’s the first time in history that DAOs have been put inside a game to compete against each other as teams and hold or create their own NFTs.”
Dallas is understandably proud of Dacoco’s work on bringing the Syndicates to fruition, and thinks six is the magic number.
“The benefit of having six different planets is that we have different dynamic groups that can arise. Some are competitive, some collaborative, but each has their own personality which has organically evolved over time with no involvement from us. What we’re seeing is that different personalities lend themselves to different incentives and drivers for what drives people to want to be part of those groups.
“When you have six DAOs, you can effectively go in six different directions. If you’re not happy with the way one DAO is operating, that’s fine: you can unstake your tokens and go and restake them into a DAO that more aligns with your personal interests, join that group and see if you have more influence there.”
The Syndicates have been a resounding success: hundreds of Proposals have been made to Custodians on each planet, with the latter entrusted to manage treasury budgets appropriately. Proposals are hugely varied, concerning endeavors such as the creation of new infrastructure tools like AlienHelper, a bot that broadcasts game data and statistics to the Alien Worlds Discord and Telegram channels, as well as feature enhancements, tournaments, and more.
Decentralizing the Alien Worlds Metaverse
Planetary Syndicates are, of course, the bedrock of Alien Worlds, the defining feature that makes the sci-fi metaverse unique in a landscape featuring hundreds, if not thousands of blockchain-powered games. But Dacoco isn’t resting on its laurels now that Syndicates are in the wild, building and funding their own tools, games, art, and contests. The goal is to decentralize the game even more.
“What we’re trying to do is provide agency and control and security mechanisms to give players power to affect changes in the system in a decentralized and secured way,” Dallas explains. “One of the big core pieces in our smart contracts suite was a smart contract called the Federation smart contract, which sort of became the kitchen sink of all functionality. Any new features we brought to the game just got quickly thrown into the Federation smart contract while we experimented and tweaked things.
“Now that we have a much better idea of how everything works, we’re breaking up that Federation smart contract into small smart contracts. For example, a staking smart contract which does nothing other than managing Trilium staking, mining contacts which everyone knows mining to be the core functionality within Alien Worlds. Over time, we’re moving some of these into better places.”
The advantages of refactoring code into smaller smart contracts is that controls of different kernels of features can be delegated to members of the community.
“I think there are about 16 smart contracts used by the DAO and the game, and all have various levels of actions across them, we currently have about 321 actions. We’ve analyzed those to see which could be good candidates to decentralize, to be controlled by different parties within the community. So, some of them are just controlled by individuals like the mining action. That’s not something we give to a group because it’s already as decentralized as it can get. But as far as things like managing which NFTs go into the Outpost for offers, that’s something we managed and we’ve recently outsourced that to an Multi-signature group which is not run by anyone in Dacoco. So they can control that in a decentralized way.
“We’re starting to delegate some controls bit by bit, so that we can start seeing, in an objective way, how decentralized our actions are compared to what they were a few months ago.”
Greater levels of decentralization don’t just benefit influential players or communities who already operate in Alien Worlds, but also outside builders and developers lured by the promise of interacting with an engaged player base and the game’s solid fundamentals.
“One of the benefits of being on-chain and having all your game mechanics and NFTs available is that other game developers are free to use the NFTs in their game,” says Dallas. “This increases the general resilience and community value of Alien Worlds, because you’re no longer worried about just Dacoco as the original developer being a central participant in providing utility for NFTs and tokens; you know they can be used in other games.
“Some third-party communities are starting to build alternate UIs to the Dacoco-built UI, so they can tap into the mining and DAO experience from something that’s completely outside our control, and they have this full level of control and agency to drive those from the DAOs or the M-Sig groups as we would have.
“By designing a system like that, we ensure all our users who have invested time and effort into building large pools of NFTs and Trillium are, in comparison, much safer than they would be in a game that could be killed when a big publisher chooses to turn the service off one day.”
Stop Killing Games
This safety cannot be taken for granted, as evidenced by the furore that greeted Ubisoft’s decision to shut down its hit game The Crew, whose player base stood at 12 million. There was even a campaign, Stop Killing Games, that sought to hold the developer accountable for destroying video games sold to customers, the organizer calling it “an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.”
Dallas sympathizes with players who’ve been cut off from a game they love. “It’s certainly coming from a good place to want to stop big successful publishers like Ubisoft from canceling games,” he agrees. “No-one wants to see their time and effort and money they’ve put into building a huge skin base or whatever just evaporate overnight.”
While there’s no prospect of Alien Worlds meeting such an ignominious fate, there are certain ingredients needed to ensure its long-term success. After all, it’s one thing giving players the agency to self-organize and drive the game forward, but if they lose interest and stop connecting their wallets, it will die a slow death.
“In order to keep the community engaged for the long term, I think things like NFTs, interesting games, the DAO mechanisms – they’re all tools and mediums to help them along the way. But ultimately people are going to stick around if they feel empowered to change and drive and have an effect on the system. Also, if they can enjoy what they’re doing here. It could be that they enjoy getting paid, play-to-earn, that could be one type of enjoyment for one cohort. Some might say, I actually want to pay to play, in which case the game has to be fun for them. Others might like the challenge of building.
“As long as you’re providing something that gives someone the drive and incentive to participate, and balance the game dynamics so different parties have an equal sort of balancing force to be able to be involved, I think we can have a long-term community that keeps building and adding value into Alien Worlds.”
Amen to that. Read part 2 here.