Behind The Screen with Gramajo

Chase Sommer

Gramajo Season 1 Episode 18

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In this episode, we explore the thrilling integration of social graphs in gaming, the potential of Web3 platforms, and Chase's vision for MMORPGs that foster community and interdependence. From in-game mechanics like sending buffs when offline to the introduction of NFT-based economies, Chase's insights offer a captivating look at the future of gaming. We'll also touch on his personal experiences, the challenges faced in game development, and the broader implications of Web3 in reshaping digital interactions.

00:00 Married gamer, game designer, lives in NC.
08:03 Exploring USDC payments and Web3 transition.
12:36 Web3 is wild; blockchain concepts becoming clearer.
17:50 Coinbase trustworthy despite higher fees, recommended beginners.
21:22 Solana has potential despite community criticism.
31:35 Creating a text-based MUD for constant engagement.
36:58 Desire seamless feed interaction and reward tracking.
42:19 Farcaster extends beyond Twitter, enabling broader uses.
44:39 Social feed connects to in-game actions creatively.
50:41 Supporting game development despite losing interest.
59:15 Farcaster activity mirrors Ethereum's market fluctuations.
01:05:02 Earning $250 on social media surpasses most.
01:10:35 Maddie's sociable; I dislike social media's necessity.
01:16:12 Has ideas but lacks funds and technical skills.
01:21:11 Web3 gaming is key to mass adoption.
01:23:53 Games will revolutionize blockchain adoption and engagement.
01:29:32 Innovation emerges from experimentation, aiming for mainstream.
01:38:04 Share your thoughts on Web3 gaming, please.
01:39:08 Airdrop near 25th episode; suggest topics/guests.

Music & Sounds By: Lakey Inspired
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Everyone that's in Web3 is probably very smart, very driven and willing to take a lot of. Willing to do a lot to figure things out. Most people aren't like that and we're probably like the top 1% of 1% of people that are like. I mean, especially you. Like you're in so early. It's just like it's gonna be a while before you start seeing a lot of. Gm. Gm. Welcome back to another episode of behind the Screen with G, the podcast where we unravel the stories, insights and secrets from top tier artists, avid collectors, and innovative builders shaping the digital frontier better known as Web3. I'm your host, Gramajo, an avid crypto enthusiast that's been in the spirit space since 2012, joined the NFT space in 2021 and never left. Yeah. So this week's episode is pretty cool. I sat down with Chase Summer, who is the creator of Santa Sumai, which is a text based RPG game based on the Farcaster Protocol. So it's like an on chain game. Yeah. We really got to talk about kind of what that experience has been like building a Web3 game, specifically an on chain game. This is also. I interviewed someone else named Noah who also did a Web3 game. So, yeah, getting a little bit into the Web3 gaming space, which I'm very bullish on overall in terms of like being effective at onboarding people into Web3. Yeah. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Let's dive in. Yeah. Did you want to start off with who is Chase? You know, obviously, feel free to dox yourself about as much as you feel comfortable. No pressure. Yeah. Chase is actually not my real name. It's my Internet name. Oh, that's perfect. That's even great. I'm kidding. Oh, I was going to say. Normal. You chose a legit first name last name to not be your real name at all. No, it's my name. I dox myself. I'm part of the few crypto people that are totally cool with that. I mean, going like Facebook and everyone's doxing each other, so I probably more lean. Like, I don't know, you'll eventually figure who I am. I don't. I don't need to hide. I don't have. I'm not rich enough to really need to care about security, so. That's funny. Yeah. Come rob me. You'll probably be really disappointed, but yeah. So I'm. I'm Chase and on all my socials, I'm Chase Summer. That's. That's me and I am. She's a big old dork. I so I'm married to Maddie and she's also on Forecaster and I have two kids, eight month Monroe and two and a half year old Fox and then from the Chicagoland area in the States but I'm currently living in North Carolina kind of where Epic Games is if anyone knows where that is and then yeah so I'm just, I'm a big dork. I'm a big gamer, lifelong gamer. I don't know my, my gaming progression. Sometimes people like to say like the games that they grew up with it was like Pokemon on the Game Boy SP and then a lot some like. And then I guess like Runescape was a huge one for me and then just World of Warcraft so I'm just big, I'm big on gaming long term. I've just, I don't know that's just what I do and I've made a career out of it and so it's a little bit about me. Oh yeah, I guess I'm so I was an analyst for a while and now I'm a game designer um at Game seven and then yeah just I do a bunch of other random stuff too on Forecaster and just in Life and Yeah so I mean does that kind of give you a decent background? Yeah, yeah a couple of things from there. I didn't know Epic was in Carrie. Yeah I didn't really know they were over there. Like a lot of gaming companies out. There we are in something called like the Research Triangle and it's like a mini tech hub over here so Raleigh, Cary, Durham and like Chapel Hill and there's like a few big universities like NC State, unc, some big other ones but there's not a ton of gaming studios but there's a lot of, it's like a mini tech, a lot of healthcare stuff um naturally with all the hospitals. Um yeah you have Epic and then a bunch of other things I don't truly know but it's a, it's a great place to live so I definitely recommend if I know a lot of people from California in the north are coming here uh word transplants as well so it's a decent, decent cost of living and it's really nice. So pretty mild, no, no snow um but you still get all four seasons but yeah it's nice. There's, there's tons of places here. Um it's, it's like on the top 10 places to live for a long time. Um yeah I, my bad, I got confused I know you guys went to Chicago recently, and that's where my brain was at for a second. Yeah, I mean, we're from the Chicagoland area, so. Family. My family's still there, man. Family still in. Is in Florida now. But yeah, we. We go back to Chicago, but we don't really like the snow. We don't like the bitter cold. We're fine with, like, again, like, we get four seasons here in Cary or North Carolina, we really like it. So it still gets down to like 30 degrees. But again, like, if it snows, it's. It's here for like a, like hours and then it's gone. So. Yeah, but I like North Carolina. Have you been here? Yeah, but like, I've been to. Because there's a lot of biotech companies out there. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I'm. I'm still getting over a cough. Yeah, there's a lot of biotech companies and I used to be in biotech for a while, so. Okay. I literally went to our office there and. And that was it. Like, I. I didn't even. I didn't even get to do anything else, essentially. Like, I did that. I've actually gone, but, like, I really feel like I haven't gone gone, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, there's. I mean, there's a lot of good food here too, which is another reason why we like it. There's a lot of. I don't know, a lot of. A little bit of everything. And coming from Chicago, like, we. We weren't going to move to a place that had bad food. One of the big reasons we were in Florida for a little bit for like a year, and like, one of the reasons we are not a fan of Florida is the food's not that good down there. Sorry, my Florida friends, but it's just. No, it's just not you. Like, because you get, like, you get a lot of older people that have a lot of money, but maybe that. I don't know, it's just like, they're willing to pay a lot of money for like, nothing. Like, that's. And it's touristy. So, like, you get a lot of places that, like, are selling just not good food for very expensive prices. And you're like, who's paying for this? And why is this rated 4.5 stars? Like, this is. This is awful. So, yeah, here in Aaron, the Raleigh area, like, there's lots of good food. I mean, it's not. It's not like a big city, but it's for. For the size and for all this. It's, it's, it's perfect for us. So. But yeah, yeah, Yep. That's awesome. Let's see. So I know that you said you. I saw an interesting cast from you that I wanted to kind of explore with you a little bit. So it was regarding, like, getting paid in usdc. And the reason kind of why I bring it up is, like, I bring it up more as a question around how you transition from, say, Web two or regular in real life to now being in Web three. And then on top of that, it seems like you went not just into Web three casually, like, hey, I'm getting paid at UD sdc. Like, you're on Farcaster. You're building a game. So, yeah, I wanted to kind of explore that transition with you. Yeah, I basically read. I actually have it on my desk here, but I read this book, Read, Write, Own by Chris Dixon, and that book basically onboarded me to web3 because it did a really good job in explaining, like, blockchain in English. Like, just very simple layman's terms that I could understand. And I was reading that book in preparation for my current role. And, yeah. And like, and Chris Dixon, basically in some of his interviews, like, I read the book and then I started watching some of his interviews. He just kept mentioning Farcaster. Farcaster. Farcaster. So I was just like, okay, I'll. I'll go into Forecaster. I'm not really, like a big social media dude. I don't like consuming it. I just, whenever I'm on it, like, honestly, like, my brain is just always all over the place. And like, I. You get addicted to the notifications. I don't like it. I prefer to be quiet. But Forecaster is a little bit different. I'm willing to make that sacrifice and be super active on it because it's a very special place. But we can get back to that. But, like, the way I onboarded was reading this book and hearing that and getting into Farcaster, and it was kind of like a big jump to get paid in usdc, even though it's usdc. And that seems super boring to, like, Web three people who have been in it for a long time. But for me, like, that's. I was coming from your standard, like, all crypto is a scam. This isn't real. Like, like, these people are like, I, I can't trust this. Like, what? Like, like, I'm not going to use a bank. Like, what. How does that work? Like, but at the same time, I do feel like I'm someone Who's willing to take risks when, yeah, like this, this new job. And I was like, this is like a really sweet like dream job. Like as a game designer, there's a lot of this weird web3 stuff. I'm willing to learn it. And yeah, the more I learned about it, the more I was like, okay, this could work. And yeah, man, I mean, I think I'm kind of rambling a little bit here, but those are kind of some of my feelings and thoughts as I was transitioning. Super hesitant. I only was using USDC and I saw a post recently about someone criticizing stablecoins and I was like, nah, dude, stablecoins is where the normies are going to come in. Because if you're already hesitant about putting money into this fake digital currency, at least you want it to be one to one, be able to take it right back out, right? Like do a transaction, dip your toe in, come right back out and it's like a gateway. And so I feel like USDC or stablecoins or whatever are super important for that fact. And then I also onboarded with Coinbase because it was a US based company. I felt like they were following the US laws. I think Coinbase is great in that sense too because yeah, again, there are lots of scams. There are people getting rugged. Like people are warning all the time about your wallet getting drained by clicking a link. Like people like, I think people in web3 are super desensitized about what happens when I, when I go pay for a coffee. I don't have the risk of my entire bank account being drained. Right. Like there's, there are some things that normies are not like that. Like web3 is still super like wild west and, and I still like, I feel like I could still relate to that, that, that feeling of like crypto is wild and crypto is kind of like scary and. But I, at the same time reading this book, I was, I was starting to understand some of the concepts behind like blockchain. Not just like the cryptocurrency but like blockchains in the back end. And like you can do other things with blockchain doesn't need to be like token. You can do, I don't know, some other, like a lot of other things which we can get to later about like some of the games and just long term goals. But like those things were starting to click and I was willing to take the risk. I really want to make games and this opportunity with this job was like my first really big opportunity to do that. And so I was willing to just go all in. And yeah, my wife was very. Maddie is very supportive. And I was like, hey, this is kind of risky, but I think this is the way to achieve my dreams. Are you willing to support me or are you willing to do that? And she was like, yeah, of course. So she's super supportive of all this stuff. So big shout out to her. But yeah, that was a really long winded answer to onboarding to crypto. No, no, no, you're good, man. I think. But that's. I think that opinion is really. I think it's really critical because you're right. Like, I mean, for context for you, like, I've been in crypto since 2012. Oh, wow. Like, very late 2012. So, like December. So, like, I literally, like, graduated college, got my first job, and within three months of having, like, a steady paycheck immediately was like, let's. Let's buy like, bitcoin on a consistent basis, you know? So there was no stable coins back then? Well, I guess we had tether, but like, there was a lot of rumors about tether, like, not being, you know, they don't. They don't show the books and they don't follow the law as much. And, you know, I come from. I come from a legal background, so I tend to be a little bit, like, more risk adverse. Yeah. Than some people. And also, like, I'm not really. Well, I wasn't like, a citizen of the country or a green card holder, so I'm like. I'm like, even way more risk adverse in terms of, like, messing with the government. Like, I'm not trying to give them a reason for them to, like, deport me. Yeah. So. So, yeah. Anyways, like, I think it's a really important thing to say, like, and 100%, I think you're right. I think stable coins are like, an easy way to get people to. To make that transition easier. So I think it's important for you to highlight all that. Were you already living in North Carolina before? Okay. Okay. So it wasn't like, move to crypto, switch to uscc and we're moving to North Carolina. It wasn't like, oh, one big rug, actually. So we were from Chicago. We've lived in Iowa, DC, Florida and North Carolina. We've been married for like six years. So we've moved a ton. We actually were coming. So we were living in Florida to try to save money for a house. We were living with Maddie's parents. And so we actually did. We moved new job with. And then Also had a baby. So we did a lot of major changes in this last year, like the last six months. Yeah. And it was kind of just one of those like, dude, screw it. Like we, we are like, so we need like there's, there's like too much change but at the same time, like, if everything's up in the air, let's just go for it because I don't know, it was just like one of those. Like there's just so much happening. But so we did actually, like. I don't know, I, I mean looking back at it, I'm like, wow, like that's, that's a lot. Um, no wonder I've been like super stressed and like, yeah, just like a lot of change. But again, like I'm Maddie's always super supportive. I, I work very hard to, to try to make it all worth it and. But yeah, and just like a little note on the stable coin. I guess I'm specifically talking like USDC and then the native currency. I don't know any other stable coins really. So when I'm talking, I'm talking like literally matching the currency. I don't know. But yeah, I don't know. Like the peg to the dollar. Yeah, like the very US centric view, which I. Yeah, which is a very common view. You know, I know it's very international, like crypto is very international. But yeah, if you look at the data and stuff like that, like there's a reason why there's a lot of people in the US on crypto. And yeah, so like we. It does skew very American across the board for, for a reason. You know, like coin, Coinbase is huge. USDC is huge. And yeah, yeah, I mean Coinbase, I have a very. Just small brain thoughts on all this, but I feel like Coinbase is trying to do everything by the books and try to help work with lawmakers to get things done. And I think they don't have the cheapest fees, they probably have the higher fees on things. But it's also a place where you can trust. So if you're new, like that's where I point people. Like I'm not going to point people to places across overseas because it just sounds even sketchier. But yeah, I like Coinbase. I guess I've started to gravitate other places now that I'm a little bit more comfortable. But to start I feel like that's like the perfect place to point people. But yeah, I don't know, just some thoughts on getting like diving deep into all this world There's a lot to learn. I think just another note on like onboarding people is like, there's, there's like, there's an insane learning curve to Web3. And like, everyone that's in Web3 is probably very smart, very driven and willing to take a lot of, like, willing to do a lot to figure things out. Most people aren't like that. And we're probably like the top 1% of 1% of people that are like. I mean, especially you. Like, you're in so early. It's going to be a while before you start seeing a lot of older people or just people in general. Like onboarding. I think there's a lot of cool momentum, but I still think it's a little whiles away. There's just too much friction. There's just too much. It's a lot, dude. Again, the thought of me having to be careful about any link I click now because I don't want my entire wallet to be drained. And then I guess I'm learning about other wallets and cold wallets. But again, that's still. Think of all those layers compared to just having a debit card in a bank account. It's just, it's just. Yeah, there's a lot. I'm very optimistic. Be very clear. I'm very optimistic. I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't. But at the same time, we're just like the cliche of like very early. Even now, I still feel like that I tend to like to find new topics before they're mainstream and I did that. I feel like I'm doing that. But you guys might say that I'm late, but I still think there's. There's so much time before a ton of people on board and stuff. But I don't know, just some random thoughts. No, I would say, I would agree with you. You know, I don't even consider myself that early. Early in like certain sense, like with bitcoin maybe, but like late on eth. Like I, I didn't believe in ETH for a long time. So like there was a very big btc, only like Maxi Land. And I was in that land for a very long time where even something like eth, it was considered like a shitcoin. The same thing. It all cycles back. Everyone's like, ah, dogecoin. It's a shitcoin or dj, it's not a real coin. And it's like same thing. It just keeps going over and over again. Some new coin pops up and that was eth for a long time late in others. Yeah, I feel like, I mean I'm not sure if this is where you want to go, but like I, I have some small brain thoughts about, I'm talking about like that meme, like the, the histogram with midwit. Yeah, I have some small brain thoughts because I don't know the technical stuff but like on Solana, like, like everyone, everyone like rips on Solana in the ETH community and like I think there's like some drama where like some people are going to Solana or whatever. Yeah, I, I, I honestly couldn't give a crap. But like I think there's some real reasons why Solana should be thought of seriously and it has a lot to do with the context of what we just talked about of onboarding is Eth. I mean Solana. A few pros just from small brain, like just thinking from intuition is one amazing branding two they have one layer. So when I, when I was onboarded to ETH and was doing stuff on Zora, it took me a very long time to figure out that my Zora NFTs were not showing up in my wallet because my wallet was base. And so I was like, where the heck are my NFTs? And I was on OpenSea, I was like, why isn't this NFT that I minted in 2001 not in my wallet? Because it was on Ethereum Mainnet. So there's a lot of things and that's super confusing and I was willing to put in a lot of effort to figure that out. Most people aren't. And again, coming back to like the original onboarding. So Lana, it's one Jane and you don't have to do any layers and it's just as fast and just as cheap. And then another thing is there's like a strong voice from the founder who is just constantly talking. I guess you could say Vitalik has a strong voice and he does a lot of writing and it's very influential, obviously. But I think there's more of this sense of marketing and the sense of communicating, casting, vision from the Solana side, like Breakpoint and all that stuff that came up in my YouTube feed. But the Ethereum stuff doesn't and I wasn't searching out Solana stuff. So in my mindset those are some interesting things. I guess there's this triangle of things you could pick and it's like speed, security and something else like cost or something. And they're not as secure as Ethereum. But then from my perspective I care about games and games are the test bed where you do things that are like, I'm not a financial institution, so I'm care about more like speed and getting things done and experimenting and that more aligns with Solana. So games might work better in Solana. So those are some of my things. I'm like, yeah, but like you guys are all in on eth and that's cool. I think they're like, I'm not, I'm not dissing eth, but I'm saying, why do you guys get mad if people are experimenting on Solana? And I think there's some genuine reasons that people might onboard to Solana in the next couple of waves. So those are just some thoughts on it. Again, those are small brain. I don't have any. I'm not technical, so I don't know. You can't. I can't debate you on anything other than that. So. No, I would agree with you on that. I know. I saw you kind of exploring Salon a little bit and that's good. You know, like, it took. It took a while for me to learn that lesson of like, you know, like being a maxi to the point that you're disregarding other technology. And one thing that I've learned now, so I work in like the IT legal space. Okay. So I implement software for enterprise companies or like large corporations. Billions of dollars and stuff like that. The whole nine. And if there's one thing I learned is like, you could have an actually technically better, superior product. But if you're marketing and the user experience isn't good. Yeah. Or you're just not good at selling either. None of that's going to matter. No one's going to buy it. No one's going to care. Yeah. No one's going to become like an angel user for you or like a champion. So it's like I feel I see the same thing. I'm like, look, we can argue about this till we're blue in the face, like ETH is better or whatever, but you know, I agree with you. I think Salon is doing a really great job at their marketing. Yeah. And that alone, like, I don't know, I'm just. Again, I don't have the technical stuff I have, but I have, I have a strong intuition. I've been learning that. And I do, I do think that there's. I think it is worth investigating. And the only thing about Solana for me is like, again, I'm not technical, so it's really hard for me to engage in the community. I don't do meme coins. I don't do day trading. So what am I supposed to do? In Solana, there's no apps besides that. Like, so, like, I want to be involved, but I can't yet because there's no tools for me to use. I'm like, I'm more Figma in Docs type of dude. So unless. Unless there's someone out there that wants to build an app with me, I'm down to do that anyways. But coming back maybe to Forecaster and stuff, this is where I think something really amazing about Farcaster is that it's the first community I've been involved with, like, in Web three. And, like, I think it's super important to have that community because that's. I don't know. Like, I feel like I'm getting to know people. People know me, People tag me and things. People send me stuff, and it's very base, biased, and. Because, like, a lot of the early people were all from Coinbase. But, yeah, I think. I think there's still. I think Farcaster is a super interesting place. I think I. Yeah. I don't know. Do you have specific questions you want to ask or do you just want me to ramble about that? Yeah. Okay. And it's kind of specific to Farcaster, too. But, like, so. So I know we were talking about, like, how you. You did a lot of big changes, essentially. So my. My question is, you know, why would you. Why would you then, on top of all those changes, then be like, hey, let. Let me launch a game. Because I'm a spaz. I'm never satisfied until, like, I make it big. Like, yeah, like, I. Like, I always have. I've always had a side project. Always. And so, like, so in college, it was esports, and then after college, it was more esports. So I was like a esports director at a community college here. Wake Tech Esports. We were varsity under athletics, gave scholarships, had jerseys, a whole dedicated room, competed nationally, and they've won a few national championships in Overwatch, League of Legends. I don't know if they won in Valorant, but they're. They. They're always in the playoffs for Valorant, Rocket League, and Fortnite, so there's lots of stuff there. But, like, I was super interested in esports, and that was, like, my side gig for a while. And then I did some VR projects. I had, like, a VR esports team where we were competing in these, like, super hyper niche games. I was running it. Like, I wasn't playing. I'm not like good at playing. I was always like running it and then now it's now it's now it's now it's broadcaster games. And the reason why, there's a lot of reasons, but one reason building is a very good way to learn. And I was trying to get a masterclass on how a Web3 game could work. And so there's lots of elements that I'm trying to build that are very boiled down versions of web3 games into this. And so I want to learn. Another reason is, I mean, try to make some money, I guess. Like I'm trying to create like a micro studio where I could sustain potentially myself or just a side, side bit of income building games, doing something that I genuinely love to do. Um, and that's always been like a dream of mine of ha. Of having a studio. Um, and then. Yeah, and then I just. Yeah, those are, those are a couple of reasons, but far. So it's. So the game is Sanza Samai. Well, okay, we can, we can go back real quick. The very first game I launched was a, like a little dungeon and I called it like delegate dungeon. And it's actually in the app Store and Warp Cast if you look it up. And it's basically just a frame game. It's a frame where you can go through a dungeon, kill a monster, get a key and then you win. And frames. I joined Farcast right after they launched frames and so I was like, okay, I'm going to try to make a game out of this cool new thing. And I thought it was pretty cool. And it was relatively, it was, it was, I was happy with the outcome. A few people played it, a few people minted the NFT and I was happy. The thing about frames and frame games is that the algorithm does not care about how much your frame is used. It cares about likes, recasts, comments, but it does not, it does not care. It does not reward you. If you have a thousand page frame and people are using it all day, every day doesn't get put in the algorithm, it gets lost forever unless you post it again. And so I was realizing that like if I want to make games, I need to figure out a way to keep the game in the feed because I don't want to keep posting the same thing over and over again. That doesn't make sense. That's spammy, that's annoying. How would I do that? And so then my head went to the old fashioned, like going back to the roots of my favorite genre of games, MMORPGs, they're called MUDs, multi user dungeons and they're basically just text based dungeons. So you type move forward, attack Goblin, talk to npc, but you type it all out. And with that framework, if you're always typing and casting, then it's always in the feed and it's always in people's faces in the sense that it's constantly living there and it'll come up sometimes in their feed, like in their homepage or just if you go on the channel, you'll obviously see it. But. So that was kind of like the evolution of where I like started to come to Sansa Semi. And so then I was like, okay, I'll create a mud, a multi user dungeon. And then I found out how much it costs to hire devs. So I was like, I don't, I'm not rich, I don't have enough money to do that. So I'm going to greatly simplify it. And I mean, I'm assuming people don't know, but games are hard mode, they're very complicated, they're very hard. There's tons of logic, I don't know, like Red Dev Redemption I believe costs like 500 million to make. They are very expensive things and they're very risky too. And especially MMOs, like people spend hundreds of millions of dollars and then they fail. And yeah, so there's just a lot of underlying logic you have to build out. And I had to greatly simplify. So the first season of the game was just typing RPG attack or RPG run. And I had a 500 different unique monsters that you could attack, level up, fight. But it's pretty basic. It was a pretty basic proof of concept, but people played it and I have a Dune dashboard to prove it. Like there were. It was an average of like, you know, anywhere from 15 to 20 players per day. People were just typing RPG quest. And then you would, you would RPG attack, RPG attack and kill people or defeat monsters. And yeah, I mean that was for the simplicity of the game. I felt like it was pretty successful. Again, it's kind of boring, really boring actually. And okay, first, do you want to ask me a question or do you want me to just keep going about the game? No, I was going to ask you something. Okay, go ahead and ask me. So I do thank you for giving the kind of the breakdown of like. I'm sorry, that was so detailed. I'm so sorry. No, no, no, that's perfect actually. So I was saying like, you know, thanks for doing that actually, because I I did. I am kind of curious how you, like, landed on building a mud kind of game and the logic behind it. So, like, regarding how you could have a frame that's used a million times, but you get no boost from the algorithm to have it naturally go viral, essentially. Or even just stay relevant. Yeah, or stay relevant, exactly. Other than you having to recap, cast it again, like, hey, I launched a game. And how many times can you say I launched a game? You're like, dude, you launched that like five months ago. We get it. You launched it. It becomes like a joke in itself. Almost exactly. So that's super interesting to me how little. Not, maybe not little, but decisions like that, that the Merkel team is doing and have that drove kind of some mechanics essentially of how the game works. That's really interesting to me. So, no, you can be as detailed as you want. That's the stuff. That's the good stuff. I do have a quick, I guess, like a quick segue. And you don't. We could dive into it later if you want, with season two, but obviously Frames was, like, very popular and it got a lot of people to join. Like, it got you to, it looks like, to sign up and to try it out. And they got changed recently now into like, this whole mini app concept. And I know me and you have talked about it, but, like, does your. Has your mind or your opinion shifted a bit now with kind of where. Where they're at with their, like, the frames in the mini apps? No, and just clarify, like, so I joined because of Chris Dixon, his book and his podcast. I joined, like, right, right. Either right before or right after Frames were launched. And I was just incredibly confused of what the heck I was looking at. I was like, whatever, like. And yeah, so mini apps, like, I think I'm still trying to figure out what exactly the use case would be for them. Like, in the sense of, like, I haven't fully grasped what I could build, and it's just because I've been focused on the game and I've tried. I've used like, the Trivia app. I've used a couple others. But, like, so what I'm interested in is having something that's just in your feed that you can play, and when you open the mini app, your feed and morpcast are gone. And so that kind of defeats. What I was trying to do is just have something in the feed opposed to building something that's a completely different experience. And so that's why I haven't really dug into it that much is because the frames are in the feed and they will be in the feed and you just keep replying and interacting. Another thing is, again, we're coming back to the same problem that I had before with purely frame interactions is that they're not tracking. I'm not getting rewarded if they're used a lot. You have to like, somehow implement like, you know, a way for them to share and so that you're relying on people sharing it or like mints or something. But it's the same problem as the frame game is if people are using your mini app a ton, you might get, I guess, a boost on Google SEO, but you're not getting a boost from the Farcaster algorithm or like the warpcast algorithm or the supercast algorithm. So it's the same problem for me where I'm like, okay, so I will. In Warpcast defense, they built a frame miniapp store, which that's. That is a solution to my. The problem either. I don't know the metrics on that and it's not really clear, like, how they're measuring, like, who gets number one or two. Like, I think it's kind of manual, but, like, I think they're just kind of testing it out. I know that mini apps are very popular in other apps, like, like, I think WeChat for in China. And then like, like mini apps are all over for just some reason. Like, they're not getting picked up too much on Farcaster. And I don't have too many thoughts off of that. It could be because of, like, financial incentives. For me, it's like, I want things in the feed, like, yeah, the point of my game that I'm designing is that it's just. You can see something like you can be chatting about crypto and then you could see like, oh, this person's fighting this person. I'm going to buff them with fortitude so that they can get healed throughout the day and I just help them. I gained some experience. Cool. I'm going to go back to casting. That's the experience that I'm trying to build where it's like ingrained in your normal interaction on Forecaster, not like a separate experience, which some other thoughts too. Like, I've flirted with the idea of creating like a Forecaster client myself that's purely based off of this game. But I don't know if there's a, like, an incentive to. Like, I'm still confused on why. Like, so the forecaster team wants people to build clients, but why? Like, I is it is it like just so I can compete in this hyper competitive social media thing. And then like how many people do they think have the skills to build clients? I just like, I'm not sure. This is maybe a little tangent, but I'm not sure the incentives are there. They're not rewarding people for using this stuff. I guess you could implement your own stuff, but again, that audience is super small. I don't know. Random thoughts. I'm sorry, I don't know if I'm answering your question. It's funny because if you actually. Have you ever joined one of those late night crew? Yeah. I think I've seen you on there actually once or twice. Yeah. Yeah. I'm usually putting the kids to bed or watch TV with Maddie. I, I have the exact same issue. Like it's

7:

00 Pacific and my kid literally goes to sleep between 7 and 8 Pacific. Same. I am literally like. And she. We don't do screen time. It's funny. We could, we could get down to talk about this in a bit with the way that like Maddie is raising your guys's kids. It's very like similar to my wife's thought process. So it cracks me up just seeing her post. She's doing, she's doing really well. Yeah, yeah, but I know, I put in the notes, I was like, we could talk about you being married to an influencer. It's like a joke. Yeah, yeah, I thought it was funny. I thought it was funny. But yeah, like it just never works for me. Like I can't have, I can't be listening to it usually because my daughter won't go to sleep because she'll be distracted. No, I feel that. And then yeah, it's like our time, you know, like, you know how it is. It's like you work all day or shitposting all day. Yeah, it's like. And then you're absolutely exhausted. Yeah, you're like, I could take an hour or two to like be present for the kids and you know, eat dinner and not be shit posting. But yeah, so yeah, they talk about similar things and I think some people talk about it in general too. Like in, in the, in the feed as a whole where it's like if there's no monetary incent incentive to build a client, then you know, like. Yeah, why would you. You know. And yeah, yeah, I. And I also have another thought on. It is like people are using Farcaster. Like I feel like most people only really view Farcaster as like Twitter and something I've been trying to I've posted a few times is like Epic, Epic games, they have a service where they give out their social graph which is essentially what could build. It doesn't need to be a Twitter clone, it could be a game, it could be anything using Farcaster. So by using Epic games online services, they give away the Fortnite social graph. So when you build a game, if people have used Fortnite, which is just millions and millions and millions and millions of people, they would have their friends list already there. And that's essentially what Farcaster is doing. But they seem to be doing trying to hyper focus on social. I'm not entirely sure, I don't know, I just thought why don't they try to get more Instead of incentivizing Twitter clone clients like orbcast or Supercast, why don't they work with some games where they're like the first people to do this was smallbrain and the words 3. It was the first time I've ever seen a game implement Farcaster as the social graph and chat. And this was another really amazing inspiration for Sansa Semi because if you could use so really interesting use case for Farcaster in games would be sort of for context like World of Warcraft, it's a, it's a multiplayer game. And in World of Warcraft there are channels. There is general chat where you could talk to anyone. There's trade chat where you talk about selling things. There's looking for group chat where you're, you're talking, looking for people to run dungeons to kill monsters together. And in my eyes imagine if all those channels were Farcaster channels and then you're using, you have like the social graph in the game. So every time you typed in game into one of these channels, it also typed or sent it to the Farcaster channel that you would see. And the first time I saw this again was web small brains words words 3 and when you type in the chat it also types in the channel. And I always thought that that was a super interesting concept because you could bridge social and your game in a really unique way where everything that people are typing in game you would see on your social feed. So if you weren't playing you could see what your friends are talking about. But then potentially this is kind of where another inspiration for Sans of Samai is like what if you had these micro elements in the social feed that you could play and would affect people in game? So let's say I'm working, I have to work all day today, but my friends are all raiding. I could see them talking about it in chat because I'm connected to the same forecaster channel. But what if I could buff them and give them special powers from my forecaster feed and it affects them in game. And I think that those are some super interesting things. When there's some people that work a lot and they can't play, but they want to be able to buff and participate or at least help and just be like, yo, I'm going to shoot you guys a buff. And then they would say, hey, thanks. I think those kind of concepts are really cool in my mind for Farcaster in the sense that this is all one shared graph, social graph. But then it's also a shared like, like text based channels which could, could, could have their tentacles in all these different games that are connected. So like, yeah, so like those are, those are like some of the thoughts where my head is at is on building on podcasters. Like I think these elements could be really cool. I can't build well, I can't build my own game from scratch because it costs a lot of time and money. But like, I would really love that. I would really love to pitch to someone building a game. Like let's put, let's put, let's make the in game chat forecaster, the social graph forecaster. I think there could be some really cool use cases for it, but I'm biased. I love games so. And I'm a game designer so like of course I'm thinking in that sense. I don't know if that's the way they want to go about it, but those are some of my, my thoughts on it all. Dude, it's so cool hearing your brain like you're thinking it out loud and I know for you it's like, oh, I'm rambling and I'm like, dude, no, it's freaking great here you talk about it out loud because there's so many interesting things that you say. Like even now that we're seeing with season two, like of Santa of my, where it's like the buff is like really cool, you know, where, you know, Web3 is very, you know, even though it is very US centric, like we talked about that it is an international thing and if you make friends with people online abroad, you know, like, yeah, maybe you can't join the raid, but if you, if you are able to give like a, you know, like a buff like you said. Yeah, like now I know like, hey, I'm going to bed. I can't raid with these guys tonight because you know I gotta go to sleep and I got work the next day or something. But why don't I just hand out a bunch of buffs? Yeah. Last like 12 hours and then by the time they wake up and play like, you know, they're like, oh dude, thanks. You're like there in spirit, you know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I think, yeah, I think that's, that's kind of like, I don't know, it's just I, I like, I like that concept. It was actually a concept that was suggested to me. Someone's like, hey, like I don't have time to play but I would love to be able to just help out if it came out in my feed. And that was like kind of an inspiration for that was like, how do I enable someone to help just with a couple clicks of the button. And for those that don't know, like buffs again are just a way to empower your friends and you can do that in the game now. And that, that kind of also is. It's a social aspect where the incentive is you will get farther in the game and you will be higher on the leaderboard if you do work together. Which is another like sub tangent we could go on. But like that's a very important part of the genre that I'm interested in, which is MMORPGs, multiplayer games. And the more interdependence, the stronger the community and the stronger the game. The whole game needs to be interdependent on other people. Otherwise it's not fun. Otherwise you just have a social like a single player game which are fun but like those games focus on different aspects. MMOs are the people are the story, the people are the lore. There is usually lore in the game, but when you interact, that's the special stuff. When you get five to 40 people together to take down big monsters and form organizations around it. Like that's the special stuff. And so assists kind of play into that where again you're interacting. And I think we're starting to see that now with like people are tagging other people. Hey, can I get a buff today? Hey, can I get a buff today? Or we have raids now which are just very simple five man monsters that you need five people to, to defeat. But you'll see people tagging, hey, join the raid, join the raid. The ones up, I found one. And that's the social aspect where now we're starting to. Now you're starting to get to know someone else and now you're starting to form bonds and now you have like your body that buffs you or you have your group of two priests that will give you fortitudes. You're going to ping those two guys and that's, that's like, that's what you need in these types of games and that's what will grow it is that community and stuff. So. Yeah, I don't know, I'm more tangents, but. No, no, no, no, it's good, man. I. It's so funny hearing you say that because I mean like, as a, as an actual like user of the game and I've slowed down a little bit and playing it mostly from travel and, and other worries, but you know, I still like, one of the reasons why I subbed to your hyper sub for the Sansa Samaya was kind of like, I'm just here to like help support like development. Like, that's kind of like how I looked at it. I was like, obviously I want to play and I want it to be fun. And I was like, pretty, I was going at it like pretty good for season one and then I lost Steam and that was season two. That's exactly what happened. It's like, you know Hodl, I think his name's like Hodl CEO. Yeah, he changed it to Uncle Hodl. But yeah, Uncle Hodl. Yeah, yeah, but I think, yeah, it used to be like Hodl CEO or something. Yep. But like, you know, he, he, he or she or they, they got defeated and then they were like, I need a revive. And then yeah, I jumped in and I revived and like you launch raids like you said and like, you know, I got a ping for a raid and I was like, what the hell is this thing? And I was like screaming career. Like I just gotta press the button. And like, yeah, yeah, it's just super. Simple stuff where like you don't have to I the stuff. And that's how I've been playing because I don't, I don't need to be in the leaderboard. I'm. I made the game like I, but I. When people ping me, then I'll help them. And yeah, because I like, I want to incentivize that kind of behavior. I like that because you're forming friends and community and maybe it's super small right now, but what you're saying is like, even if you don't want to play hard, you could still get pretty decently up the leaderboard just by participating in one off like buffing people or reviving them or joining a raid, which is literally like two clicks of a button. And if it just comes up to your feed, this is that simple. And we, and we share like the. We share. We get a little bit of xp. Exactly. Yeah. So you both get experience. You. So it's like. Yeah, it's. So look, those are like, that's just kind of leaning into the people who don't want to play that much but want to help support. And then there's people that really want to play and need your support. And so like there's, there's already like, you can see different types of players, casual versus like people going hard but need the casual because they need your buff. So like. Yeah, I don't know. I think right now we're only at like 17 players like Daily, which is not bad. But it's the same as season one. So I think if we were to hit maybe 100 people, it would be kind of wild to see all the people interacting and stuff like that. So we have some kind of ideas that we're trying to figure out of how to get the word out a little bit better. But, but yeah, I mean I'm still very happy. I'm learning a lot, like, I'm learning a lot of like intricacies. I'm putting some like, like some, some thoughts into practice. So it's, it's still worth it in my opinion, even if a lot of people don't play it. But I think the next thing, I'm sorry, like the next thing that we. The next season, season three will be NFT items. So items will make like swords, armor, potions and that is going to create a player to player economy. So like that's the next layer of it all is, is creating interdependence and then creating items that are better for priests, warriors or mages. And so then you, if you, if you're a priest and you loot a warrior weapon, you can sell it on open sea. And now we're creating value and people can start, you know, if they, if they find a legendary weapon and they could sell it for two to five dollars. Cool. You just made some money by playing Sansa Sabai and it's just a player to player economy. It's nothing, nothing scammy, nothing. It's just genuine like, oh cool, you got this weapon, I want it. You don't want it, I'll buy it off you. A type of thing. But yeah, yeah. Those are just some thoughts for season three. All right, let's take a quick break. I hope you're enjoying this episode. This episode was made possible with the Support of my premium subscribers, Seattle Dog Mike, Vinyls OG Lucres, Johan Nonlinear, Brennan Peachy, Inceptionally, Topos, Danny, Tree Girl, Ham, Branson and Disco. Yeah, thanks again everyone for your support. If you'd like to receive exclusive drops access to token gated content, make sure to subscribe to my hypersub. You know, a little bit goes a long way. You could do a month instead of anything long term. So, yeah, thanks again. Let's get back to it. Yeah, no, and I do like that, you know, like one thing I'm noticing, like, very, very. It's like very obvious to me, like, so I've been doing this content thing now for two plus years, similar to you. My kid was like. I was doing it for like three months before my kid was born, maybe four, I think. Then my kid was born. And you know, like, that would have been like a perfect. You know how it is when you have your, like your first kid and yeah, yeah, she was born a little underweight. So, like, we were having like, to do triple feedings and like, just. It's. It was brutal. But yeah, yeah, surprisingly, I. I was doing really well from like, degening and being in crypto perspective because I was just up every two, three hours. So I was like 24 7, just constantly. So I was really, like, doing really well from that perspective. And it would have been like a perfect time to have been like, hey, you know, I'm not going to do this content stuff anymore. Because, like, back then I think I had like, I don't Even know, like, 50 subscribers to my newsletter and stuff like that. I only had like five people listening to my podcast, stuff like that. Not that I have a ton now. No, don't get me wrong, I don't have a ton of people now, but, you know, it would have been like, yeah, that was a cool experiment. Like, kids born. I don't have time for this anymore. Like, I'm just, I'm done. And instead I was like, I'm just gonna keep doing it. If anything, I'm just gonna double down. Yeah. And it's been great. But what I was gonna say is, like, I'm noticing in like the Forecaster, people are getting burned out very quickly. So, like, people will, you know, will start. They came because of frames or, you know, they got the most excited because of frames back in February. And then, you know, they were like, super bullish, like going to Farcon and spending money and developing apps and developing like little micro systems or like micro tools. And then they're like, rah. Rah, rah. And then three, four months later, they're like, I'm burned out. Like, I'm done with Forecaster. I'm done with this or I'm done with this tool. Yeah. And so I feel like for you, like, the reason why I bring it up is like, it's. I feel like if you, if you follow that trend of delivering something new every single Friday, which is a great commitment, like to do, like, do something weekly or something. Like I'm, I'm all for like accountability and all that. Yeah. But it could get tiring, you know, like delivering, especially for something technical. Like you're like, crap. Like I'm. I mean, I don't know if it's different. Like for writing, I do, I do something every week. I do like one new piece of content and it takes me time to like do the research. I don't know if it's the same or not. I'm sure people argue. It's not like it's. Coding's harder, I guess so. I don't know, you know, it, it's tiring. It's all I. Oh, I know. So I was a long winded way of saying, like, you know, I like the way you're doing it. Like, I like that you started off like slow or you started off with like season one and now you're like, okay, this is what season two is. And season two is like, I think it's gonna. Season two is really cool. Like, I think it's actually getting me excited to go back in and start playing against some more. So thank you. Uh, I'm excited for season three and kind of any, any, really, any ideas that you're cooking in your head because I feel like you, you, you have a good head, like good mind about gaming as a whole and you work in the gaming industry too, so I'm sure that helps. It does help. Um, so, yeah, that long winded ways of like, yeah, man, take, you know, take it slow and learn and all that. Yeah, yeah. I think related to what you said about people burning out from Farcaster, personally, I think it's people on Farcaster have an extremely close connection relationship of their emotions and the market prices of Ethereum or just in general. But you could see the daily active users of Forecaster are like one to one with the price of Ethereum. And so as the price of Ethereum goes down, I think the enthusiasm of Forecaster goes down. So I think the positive of that is just wait for the next spike. You'll be back genuinely this is me saying the next Ethereum spike, like the next big one. I bet you there's me a massive influx of people, the forecaster. And people are like, oh, this is great. And it'll be hilarious because I'll be there through all the downturns because I'm just stubborn like that. But, like, I don't know, I. I think, like, people will be back and they're gonna be like, oh, I'm. Hey, I'm back. I don't know. And you'll be like, oh. So, yeah, I don't know. But yeah, I think some other ideas that we're flirting with are like, for the moxie gameathon, potentially implementing loot boxes and the sense that you kill a monster, you loot it. That's like a normal RPG progression and just experimenting with the. The idea of having having fan tokens drop out of the. So basically all of the moxie that's earned from the channel gets pooled and then we buy our own fan token and then distribute them based off of level and. And stuff like that. And so then you would. You would basically be able to. You get a daily allocation that you can loot and then you'd be able to go and so kill monsters and get a percentage of your daily allocation and just a way to, I guess get the word out a little bit more. But then at the same time, that is like a part of the rpg, like, like game gameplay loop, kill monster, loot it. And so this would just be a. An experiment with the moxie kind of stuff. Still learning about all that, to be honest, I'm not someone that is all in. I'm maybe a little bit more balanced. I think that moxie ecosystem needs to figure out a way to bring in money, stuff like that, because otherwise you're just a typical Web3 Ponzi scheme. But I think. I think there's some interesting stuff that they're doing. Not sure if you want to get in that, but there's lots of ideas for this game. Again, we're trying to build an mmorpg, but just stripped of all of the. Just boiled down to the essence of what is an mmorpg. And that's a lot of people, a lot of social interaction, killing monsters, loot, player to player economy and things like that. So anything that aligns with those values, we'll try to build out. But yeah, man, I don't know. It's also like, I think kind of it too, with Farcaster. They keep changing things. Everything changes, like every two weeks. It does not just like, from, like the Mergle team, but like, just in general, like, moxie. Like now they're like, ah, like, you know, if you've earned over $250 of, like, moxie, like, you know, you're captain, you got to launch your own fan token. And then, I don't know, there was some shit happening where, like, people were attacking someone yesterday and I'm like, oh, God. There's always. Yeah, there's. There's some weird drama. You're not going to get drama from me. Yeah, I'm like, you guys go for it. You know what I mean? Like, I think, I think there's some pros and cons of each of like, of like, like. So, like my opinion, this is just my opinion. I think it's. It's totally fair that if people are giving away free money that they're like, hey, you can only have this much free money. I feel like it's fine. And then if you want more free money, you have to start participating in our ecosystem. To me, that makes sense. Seems great. I don't. I don't have that much free money to give. So when I give it out. Yeah, when I give it out, I decide how much I give out. I mean, it's free. And then, yeah, of course there's a weird. If you're mean, then bad things are going to happen to you. I don't know what to say. Yeah. I'm just trying to have a super, like, okay, common sense. What are we talking about? Why are you guys all freaking out? Say mean things, bad things happen. I don't know what to say. Fuck around, find out. That's pretty. Yeah, Like, I don't. Where's the controversy here? I'm not understanding, but I don't know. Those are just my opinions. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to get spicy, but. No, you're good. Yeah, I'm with you. Like, I was like, I agree. Like, if you've got 250is, like, pretty generous, you know? And if you got to participate, in my opinion, and literally participation is so simple. It's like you press a button and then you have a token and that's it. You don't have to do anything with it. Participation doesn't mean you're, I don't know, grinding. I don't know. I'm used to like. I played Destiny. Okay, I think we talked about. I played destiny for like 1000 hours. I'm like, yeah, we're literally talking about something way less than that. We're talking about. You press a button, you create an auction, and the fan token gets lost to your channel and that's it. Like, you're done. You've now participated. Like, I think, I think people need to maybe a little frame of reference. Like think about all the work you have to do to get make money on YouTube. You have to grind, grind, grind for one to two years and then you have to apply and then you might get some ad revenue. If you want free money or if you want money for participating in a social network, you just have to just get$250 for free, which is probably most than most people will ever earn on social media and Web two. And then if you want to apply, you can earn more. Like when you frame it like that, you're like, why are people upset? Like, these people who have earned 250 have earned more than 99.9999% of people on Web2. Yeah, that's so it's like that literally, literally like I've never, I never earned any money like that's lit that I'm exactly like you, like on Twitter. Even like my content. Like, so I have a couple, like, you know, I have a hyper sub and I had a couple subscribers and stuff like that. And obviously I'm like, okay, like the hyper subs. Like, you know, I'm like, all right, I guess I, I earned it because like you're the one hustling or whatever. But like when it came to like the tips from Degen when, when Djinn was popping off, I forget what it was like someone gave me. This is back when DJ was like like nothing almost. Someone tipped me like 200, 000 deja. Wow. Yeah. Which. And then it popped off and I never sold any of it actually. Like I still have all of it. But like, let's say someone gives me like a thousand dj and even now, which I think is like, even in today's prices, is like $7. I have never earned $7 from Twitter. Exactly. Instagram and Reddit. And I've been on like I've been on Reddit for over 12 years. I, I've been on Twitter for over 15 years. Exactly. I've been on Facebook since literally they allowed high schoolers to be on it. I've literally been on all these apps for a long ass time. Never earned any money from it. That's literally, that's why I think Forecaster is the best place for creators still. Even if people think the vibes are down, I'm like, you guys are still earning more than 99.9999% of all people in webtube. Yeah, like, it's, it's. You have to like, step back and realize, like, no, you guys are, you guys are the 1% of creators. You guys realize that, like, by doing the very, like, not that much on Podcaster, you're doing more than everyone else. And that's like one of the promises of Web3 is cutting out a lot of the middlemen and how like, like web2 takes all the money and doesn't give it back. But I think like, YouTube does the most. And then I think X is trying to start doing that. But like, yeah, yeah, still it's like a very small fraction. But yeah, I mean, like, like, to talk about your wife, like, she got the $5 or whatever. Like, I still haven't even gotten that, but I'm like, dude, even if you got the $5 once, that's more money than like, you've ever made probably. Exactly. With other apps. Yeah. And so, yeah, and that's, that's what I've been telling Maddie is I'm like, she's like, I only earned like 50 cents in this token. And I was like, you earned more people more money than I was like, how much money have you earned since 2008 on Facebook? And she's like, nothing. I said, like. And so it's starting to click with her too, because she wants to do. She's always had the idea of like kind of going to the final topic. Like, Maddie's always like, flirted with the idea of like being a stay at home mom kind of influencer or like, like holistic living, like food and like cooking stuff from scratch and like, like family and all that kind of stuff. She's stay at home mom. So she loves, like, that's her, that's her thing and baking and. But so I was like, just get on Forecaster and start casting about that stuff. Like, start posting like the same stuff you put on Instagram. Put on. Put on Forecaster, Just copy paste. And she's like at like 100 bucks now. Like, that's all good, dude. And, and she was at like, like until recently, she had like 200 followers. And I'm like, I'm like, you're like, I fully believe she's going to have like a hundred X my followers one day because she's just good at that stuff. And I don't want to be popular. I want my games to be popular. I don't need to be. I don't want to be an influencer. I have no desire. I'm an introvert. I might not seem like it on this, but because I'm spazzing about my one hyper niche topic, but I don't like talk, I'm not an extrovert. I don't want people to, to constantly be talking to me. Um, but she would handle it. I might look like I'm extroverted, but I'm actually like, yeah, pretty introverted myself. Exactly. Like you said, like, when it's about the one thing that I'd like, feel very confident in. And we, and we've already had our first, we already had one conversation like me and you before this. Yeah, that helps a lot. That's why I started doing those is like, then it makes this feel a little bit more, more normal to me that I'm okay. But like for Farcaster Fridays, I go to those things and I'm like, I know like two people now, maybe three now. And, and I'm always like gravitating to them because, like, I just know them and everybody else. I'm like, I was like, it's not that I don't like, care about you guys or any. I'm like, I'm, I clearly will vibe with you because like, we're all here and we're all on Forecaster, but like, it's still very weird to me. Like, yeah, exactly. I'm, I'm just like, encounter me in the wild and you're like, is, is he okay? Like, I'm just sitting there quietly glancing at my phone. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I'm just trying to say Maddie's like, Maddie's super cool with like, she was like, I don't know, she's good, she's good at social. I, I don't like social. I, I, I don't actually, I don't like being on Podcaster, but I'm doing it because I genuinely see the value and I want to build like this micro game studio. I just, I don't like, I don't want to be on like, I, but I, I, I think the pros greatly outweigh the cons. But like, personally I'd probably be a happier person if I wasn't on any social media and I was just doing my thing. But I don't see a path of like, in this modern day world growing what I want to do if I'm not doing that. So like, I know that might seem weird, but like, I don't like social. Like, I don't, that's not Me. That's not me, that's Maddie. Maddie's good at it. I'm not. I. I can't handle it. So I don't know. Random. Random. Last point. No, no, no. Yeah, I don't know if you have like a little more extra time. Yeah, yeah, I got a little. Okay, let's see, what else do we have? Yeah, let's kind of recap kind of in season two, like, what are the new. What are the neat things? I guess just so like for anyone that wants to check out. Sans. Yeah. So Sansa Smite 2 Season 2, we did a lot of new things. So again, this is an RPG game. So we created classes. We have a warrior, priest and mage class. And you pick it by doing a personality test. You can change it to whatever you want, but I think the personality test is pretty cool. And then there's. For each class there are spells. So each class has five unique spells. And this is going from just there being no classes and no spells. So it's pretty cool. Pretty big upgrade. So like warrior has Charge, Slam and Execute, Battle Shout and Revenge. Mage has Inflame, Freeze, Pyroblast, Ice, Ice, Shield, and Polymorph. And then priest has Martyr, Smite, Heal, Revive and Fortitude. So those are like all the spells classes. And then, and then there's a lot of like hidden calculations. So we, we had, we have classes. Certain classes do more damage to other classes. So if you look at the monsters, they have a class. So certain classes do more. I think like Priest does more damage to mage, Mage does more damage to Warrior, and Warrior does more damage to priest by like 20. And then there's a lot of rng in the background of like ranges of damage. There's critical strikes. So like there's, there's a lot of rng in the numbers. Now it's not just you're not doing the same amount of damage, which is exciting. And then we have raids which are just very simplistic raids. So essentially they will happen randomly three times per day. And you have 60 minutes to get five people to join the raid. If you do successfully, everyone gets a big chunk of experience. If, if you don't get enough people or you join late, it fails. And then all of this is done through frames. So we brought back the frame, but it's still cast based. So you press a button and it pre fills a reply for you. So this is more of a hybrid approach. So if you look at it, there's a bunch of visuals right now. There's 285 unique monsters. I'll probably add more and you can. So you'd go and press attack and then the spell and then precast it and stuff like that. And then we've mentioned it before but there's assist things. We can help other people give them more attack, reduce the damage taken or heal them. And then yeah, that's, that's basically it. We have. There's a website that has the full like NFT collection. There's. There's a leaderboard. Everyone has their own profile that's on the leaderboard. So if you click their name on the leaderboard and then. Yeah, so that's all season two. There's a lot of like, like just a lot of backend work on all that. But then this was a huge like visual experience update and I think it's like really solidifies like kind of like the vision. And then yeah, again next update would be NFT items. So you got swords, armor, stabs, potions and that would all be NFT based and tradable on third party marketplaces to solidify the concept of a player to player marketplace or a player to player economy. But yeah, those are a lot of great changes man, honestly. Yeah. Thank you. No, seriously, it's good. I know we talked about. One of the feedbacks I had early on was like, hey, just use the frame just for a visual of the NFT that you're trying to defeat. Like it's not even like, like you said, like it's still text based which with the reasoning behind it, like it's actually pretty great. Another cool thing that like that kind of popped into my mind while you were saying all this is like, I know Farcaster has even like talked about having like who's active, you know, like if you've ever been on Telegram or something or Instagram, it shows like a little green bubble for people that are active and you can opt in, opt out. But like I feel like that could even for you, like that could be something you could tap into for, for the game, you know. Yeah, I think there could be some really cool stuff with that, man. I have lots of ideas. The hardest thing for me is I don't have any money and so I have to hire devs. I'm not technical. And so if anyone's ever interested in like you know, joining, I don't know, I know how we would all do it but I really. There's a lot of cool things I think we could make like build this up slowly to the fact to the point where like it's taking up a, like a huge chunk of forecaster activity. You can see in the, there's the top forecaster channels, we're in the top forecaster channel. But it's a little bit, it's a little bit hacked in the sense that the bot replies so much and people in all of your casts are replies and all of your spells are replies. So that is. But that at the same time, that's the whole point is those are the metrics that the network cares about. But, but we are in the top channels in terms of engagement. So you're like each day we're getting four to 6,000 frame interactions and then each player is replying like anywhere from like, like, like, like obviously one time to like 200 times per player. Like there's, there's a ton of, there's a ton of engagement per player and so it's there. I just think once we, we need to like, I don't know, figure out a way to share it with more people or get people more interested. I'm not sure. But yeah, the, the dude dashboards is pretty cool. Like, like to share that. Have you thought about like, maybe doing like. Here, let me look. Actually, let me go look at your channel real quick. I, I mean, just while you're looking. I have a dashboard too for Sansa Smai, if anyone's interested in looking. But like, there are, there are daily players. There's 17 daily players and each player interacts a lot. So I think, I think, I think that that's good, that's a good signal. It's just, it's a very small amount of people. It could be from the fact that like you said earlier, a lot of people are leaving Forecaster or like temporarily, you know, done until the price goes up. But did you find what you're looking for? Yeah, I was going to say you could have like a banner competition. I'm trying to think of ways like you can get out there. Have you thought about like applying for some funding like from we're gonna do or Octin or something like that? I don't know anyone, so I don't know anyone that would be doing it. There was a Polygon grant, but I wanted to keep things on base for now. And then the, the Moxie game, a thon thing, there's like 20, 20, 000 up for grabs. But yeah, if you, if anyone is interested or knows someone, I mean, please just reach out to me. I'm, I, I respond to everyone and so. But yeah, I think, I think there's, there's, there's. Overall I'm biased, but I think there's, there's a really cool potential to create a mini MMO on Farcaster. I don't think the Farcaster team really cares about games, but I'm going to prove them wrong because I think, genuinely think about if one person is commenting in a channel 200 times a day, that's engagement, they're playing something, they're driving growth, that is retention. I'm not to call anyone out, but there are certain people that's mostly what they do is play this game. And in my eyes that, that is, that is help. Like that is keeping people on Varcaster. Like, yeah, yeah, I know they get into like this weird like quality daily active user. And like quality is subjective. And then they're like, you know, is that actually like benefiting? Like we, we get all philosophical about it and I'm like, dude, like if, if this game didn't exist or that's the reason why someone like. So I'll give you an example. So I think you're playing this too. Like I use, I play, I'm playing Stoke Fire. And I was going to ask you a little bit about other kind of web three games as a whole, but like, you know, like it's gone to the point where you know, sometimes like it's a 72 hour clock or a three day clock, which can be kind of hard for like just life as a whole. So I've had to like make reminders sometimes to just keep that fire going. But like, I know for some people, they were saying like they're so deep into like the Stoke Fire game that like, you know, they wake up and that's like the first thing they're doing. And I'm like, but the thing is like it's an app away from Forecaster. Yeah. Like, and so for you, I'm like, you've thought about it to the point of like, hey, like you're bringing them like to play your game, they gotta go in into Forecaster to go play it. And on top of that they're not going to a mini app. Like they're going like it's in the feed, like, yeah, so you've already, if you're hooking them again up for debate regarding quality daily active user or whatever, you know, like, is this cast a banger? Whatever. But yeah, yeah, I feel like I'm with you. Like, I know we've had discussions about, I think, you know, everyone's super hyper focused on like stable coins And Djen and Meme coins and like NFT art and all these other things and how that's going to onboard like the next million. I'm like, dude, I think it's going to be gaming. I think web3 gaming is like the red pill that gets everybody or the blue pill, whatever. And there's some historical kind of thought behind that too. You realize that the reason we have AI is because of games in the sense that all the early AI training facilities, National Defense had a massive AI thing and it was all using PS3 GPUs. And the reason why there's GPUs is because of gaming. And like gaming, gaming pushes technology forward and people maybe think they're too intellectual or too cool or too smart to realize that. But like gaming is the frontier of like culture and tech because that's where, that's where you're experimenting. That kind of comes back to my Solana point of like that you're there to experiment, push it to the limits and grow it and like the amount of computation needed like World of Warcraft. I was reading the initial development diary from like 1998 to 2002 ish. And at the time World of Warcraft accounted for like half the Internet down. I believe it was download speeds. Let's see here. I have it because I was telling someone earlier, let's see here. Until YouTube began streaming videos a year later. Wow. Servers handled over 10% of global Internet bandwidth and downloads and its players contributed to roughly half of global Internet traffic at any time. That's how big games can be. And think about in the context of these chains, right? Let's imagine that we launched the coolest web 3 game MMO out there and now it accounts for half of all transactions on Base or Solana or whatever. And then people are like, oh, games are great. That's the exact. I'm going to take that Internet type of stat and put it on chain and I'm going to say I'm going to show everyone like hey, we're going to create a game that handles the bulk of volume on this chain. Like that's at least maybe that's really like cocky of me but like that's my mindset of like I think that games are going to onboard people because we're going to create something so fun and so new, mind blowing that people. And I'm not just talking about sans, I'm maybe just talking about in general like my life lifetime, like my life goals is like to create something like that, like that is so impactful. That it blows people's minds and the architecture is blockchain based, but they don't really necessarily care about that too much, but it's going to be powered by it. And I think games will do that. Personally, I'm biased, but I think games will do that. And I think games are going to push blockchains forward and we're going to sit like these awesome worlds. We didn't even talk about autonomous worlds or unstoppable worlds, like fully unchained games. But that's where you really start getting to metaverse type stuff, where you create a world that has an economy. Okay. MMORPGs is the blueprint for creating the metaverse because these are the only games that have, or I guess like eve too. But these MMO games have player economies that people want to spend like thousands, tens of thousands of hours playing and living in. And no other game kind of really does that. And so if you could put that fully on chain, like where all game logic is possible, and there's an example of like a Solana magic block doing this with the game where there's no servers, it's all fully unchained, the game logic and everything, then you can create these worlds that no one can delete, no one can turn off. And so then now you have these MMOs where people can build on it and there's an economy. And so now you can literally make some money by playing games in this virtual economy. And I think that's where the metaverse kind of type of stuff comes. I think blockchain will be like, the foundation of it all. I don't think people are going to give a crap about the technical aspects in the sense that when they're playing games, they don't care that they're running on servers. But, like, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I just went full, like, rambling on you. But that's where I see a lot of this stuff. I think you're right. I mean, like, no one. No one buys a new. I'm trying to think of. I don't know, no one's buying the new COD because it's like on Unreal Engine 2 or something like that. Buying it because it's fun. No one's talking about the nerdy. Like, only, like, the only time I've ever talked about my GPU specs is literally when I was buying it. Like, that's any other. Any other time. I have never spoken about it ever. Like, other than like, when some nerds, like. And I classify myself also as A nerd too. Like, just so no one gets offended. But like, you know, so I was like, oh, like, what GPU do you got? And like, how fast is it? And I'm like, cool. Like, it does this, but like, in real life, like, the only difference I've noticed for me is like, you know, when I render 4K videos or something. And. Yeah, that's about it. Like, when you're pushing it to the limits. Yeah, that's pretty much it. But like. But I don't even play games that push it to the limit. Like, that's a depressing thing, you know, like, it's like I'm playing switch on it and then. Or I'm playing something like, you know, don't starve together. Yeah. And you don't need a freaking. No, you don't. But it's awesome. But it's. I play Wild Classic. I'm like freaking like 40, 70. Like, you don't need that for Wild Classic, but exactly. I got World Classic on my Steam deck, so you can play it on this and smoothly on the highest. I need to get one of those. But yeah, like, I did want to talk to you a little bit about, like. Because I know we've talked about it. Like, this is like, even as a non. So I used to play a lot of games and I still do, but like, now I play mostly. I know. I think we talked about this. Like, I play mostly, like, Game Boy games just because, like, I can save and end it like, pretty quickly. Like Pokemon. Like, I still play Pokemon because you could play for 10, 15 minutes. Yeah. Hit save and then turn it off and. Yeah, that's it. You know, like, I used to play like, Uncharted and these like, PlayStation games that were like, single player and like, there was like, no real good place you could pause it like, or you have to like, dedicate like more than like an hour plus to it. Yeah, I just don't have that, like, level of luxury anymore. So, like, that's what makes even like, as a quasi wannabe gamer and Web3 enthusiasts, I'm like, yeah, Web3 gaming is. It's where it's at, man. I feel like it. It's gonna get people. Like you said, no one's gonna care about the chain. No one's gonna care about the. Yeah. The speed and all that. Well, I guess they will care about the speed, but like, you know, the. They don't really, like, to a certain extent, as long as it's playable and stuff like that. Yeah, I think it's fun they'll play it. Yeah. I don't know. There's a lot of stuff we could talk about, but. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I think it's really easy to get caught up in this chain or that chain, or this token or that token. But just stepping back a lot, I think we're all working on some pretty cool stuff. I think we're going to accidentally figure something out. I think, like, it's going to be. It'll emerge from a bunch of seemingly random things and then one day someone's going to create something and it's going to click and it's going to hit mainstream and there you go. I think, like, that's. That's in the most general form, like, that's how it's going to work. And I hope it's me. I want to be a part of that, you know, Like, I want to be a part of the team that's like, ruthlessly experimenting with these games until something just feels so good that you're like, okay, I'm waking up early before work to play this. Or, like, I'm staying up a little late because I got to play this. Or if you're in high school or middle school, you're playing it on the weekends all day. I want to create that because that's my experience with RuneScape and World Warcraft, and I want to recreate that, but in the next major way. And I don't know, those are some of like, my, like, lifelong. Like, that's what I want to do. Like, that's. I want to be that guy. So I don't know her here first. Yeah, Maddie's heard it plenty of times, but. No, I. I know exactly what you mean. Recreating that magic from the, from the early days. I mean, I'm. For me, it's still like, you know, game rooms or like, voice chats. I think about, like, the first Modern Warfare or Modern Warfare 2. I'm like, dude, kids these days don't know about those first chat rooms that we had when we were finally able to speak on the microphone and hear each other. Like, the amount of shit talking we did. Yeah, and Halo and stuff like that. Halo, Call Duty. I just think about all that stuff and I'm like, dude, if only people knew. I'm pretty sure they're still doing it Fortnite or. Yeah, I think Roblox. The boomer of me, is nostalgic about that. But yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I used to wake up super early to watch Cartoons or anime and play video games, and we just need that level of magic. And if it's on a web3, it's going to be on a blockchain. It's going to be nuts. Again, we still haven't, I think just, it's, it's, it. There's just going to be something that emerges and it'll just click. And then people would be like, oh, how do we not expect this all along? Yeah, but I don't think. Yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's one of those where, like, I know, I know this is the place to be. I just don't know what to do. And so I'm just constantly like, that's why I'm doing Sansa Samai. It's like I need to get an intuition. I need to get a feel for how this stuff works or how it could work. What the pros and cons. Where is it awkward? Where does it feel really good? And my. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, yeah, I'm betting you'll figure it out, man. I mean, that's where. Yeah, no, seriously, I'm not even joking. Like, I feel like. I feel like you're. You have the in real life experience. I feel like it's actually kind of benefited you a little bit, maybe coming in later from like a web3 perspective. I feel like you're very familiar with the pain points of getting onto crypto recently and it's a lot better now. But as you know, we still got a long way to go. Things like Privy are making it better. But, yeah, Privy is nice where we still got a long way to go. So I feel. Yeah, I feel like I'm like, you. Like, I don't know what I'm doing on podcaster. Like, I'm doing this content thing right now, and I like it from the perspective that I get to meet new people and really connect with them. And, like, I get to chat with you for like an hour plus. And again, thank you for taking the time. So, like, I like that aspect of it. My content hasn't popped off on YouTube and Twitter and Warcast and all that. And I'm okay with that because I'm meeting cool people. But at some point I'm like, I'm hoping something will. Like, I'm experimenting, so I'm hoping something will finally click and then, yeah, it's. Like, do I continue with this something? Start something new? Yeah, exactly. I've done that for, like my whole life. And so it's very Frustrating. I hate that feeling. Yeah. But unlike you, I'm like, I know I'm in the right place. I just gotta like, you know, try new things, experiment, keep my eyes open. Yeah. You know, and meet people and it, it will work out. Um, yeah, speaking of. So are you, Are you, are you playing any other Web three games or any games in general right now that inspire you or give you ideas or. Honestly, I don't actually, I don't. I've never actually played a web3 game that I've enjoyed. I honestly think they're all pretty crap. Like genuinely like you. I know. Like the amount of cope that goes on, the amount of copium that goes on with Web3 gamers is unreal. I do it. If I play, I'm studying the token stuff or how does it feel for onboarding but none of it's fun so I just play web two games. So I, I always play wild classic with my brother, like my friend Baldur's Gate 3 and then a bunch of random like survival crafting games with some buddies and yeah, I'm always a fan. My favorite genre is like fantasy rpg but I'll play other stuff. I've. Yeah. But yeah, that's what I'm playing. And what else? Oh, Hades is really good. It's like I love the art in Hades. Like the best art in any game. Like it's my favorite. But yeah, that's. That's what I've been playing. I feel you on the, on the web three gaming. Like it's so funny. Like I feel like Web three games are so hyper focused on what tech stack they're on. So like what? Like are they on Solana? Are they on Ethereum? Are they on Bitcoin? They're so focused on that and they're so focused on the tokenomics. Like gotta have a token and gotta figure out a way like. And then I'm like, dude, but the game. Yeah. The game itself isn't fun. That defeats the whole purpose of it. I almost feel like you should. It's almost like better to have a fun game and then figure out all that other stuff. I agree. Why? Yeah, I feel like everyone's so hyper focused on trying the other way and I'm like, has anyone ever thought about doing it this other way? Like yeah. And everyone thinks that. Like. Yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of thoughts on that but I, I gotta. Yeah, I need to bring some kids in from the car but. Oh, no worries. I. I've really enjoyed chatting but. And I Was on a chat again. Yeah. I got one more question before you wrap up. Yeah, we could be quick. Favorite snack? My favorite snack. Like, it's like not food like snack, like just at the computer. This can't. Okay. Recently, apples. That's fine. Recently there's this brand, like grass fed organic ice cream. And it's got a matcha chocolate chip and it's pretty freaking good. I'm pretty impressed. That's been something, that's been my go to treat. But like, snacks. Oh, dude, I love Rx bars so much. Like, I just, I, I, the thing is, I'll eat, I'll eat a whole box in like a sitting. Like, I'll just, I'll just eat them and I just can't help myself because I'm a freaking loser. Like, I just, I just eat them all and I get in trouble, but I don't care because I was like, okay, I'll just go buy more. Yeah. They're like, this is a solution to this. I'll buy more. Yeah. But yeah, let's say RX bars is my final answer. Rx Bars. There you go. I see you being healthy. It's not when you eat that much. No, I know. I'm sure eating a whole box is a healthy. Yeah. All right, well, thanks again, man. I appreciate your time and I hope we get to do it again. Yeah, yeah. Always down to chat again. Yep. All right, welcome back. That's a wrap on that episode. You made it through the whole thing. Thank you for that. Before we kind of head off this week's Cast off, and for those not familiar with Cast off, it's a section where I want to hear from you, the audience. So this week's episode Cast off question is, what do you think about Web3 gaming? Is are you bullish, bearish on it? Do you think it's a great way to onboard people? Is it making something that's supposed to be fun and easy? Too complex? Let me know. You can let me know on Farcaster Area 51 channel or on the Telegram channel. All links are provided there. Join. I'll be tipping people degen, you know, for best answers. Yeah. So if you're on podcast, make sure to subscribe from your favorite Web2 podcasting app. If you are not on pods or if you. Yeah, if you're not on pods, make sure you go to pods. Collect this episode. I'll probably be doing an airdrop around the 25th episode. Feel free to send me kind of topics or people you'd like me to get in touch with. I have an open period now that we're doing calling it the Covenant, we're going to be doing it all on chain, so. So, yeah, just stick around. I got another Web3 game developer coming on, so exciting times over here behind the screen with gmajo, so. All right, take care. See you next time.

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