Substrate Asset Game Engine (SAGE) revised
Beneficiary:Substrate Asset Game Engine (SAGE)
Hello, I am Rosťa and I am bringing You a revised proposal for SAGE.
I will address a few comments that we have received and I will try to explain why I think SAGE is valuable for Polkadot Ecosystem.
I do not want to repeat myself, so at the bottom, you can find the original proposal.
Target audience
Junior Developers and Junior Game developers.
Impact
The .net development ecosystem in Polkadot has been growing and it is now used by many projects secured by Polkadot that depend on it.
Projects like Xcavate, Ajuna, PlutoFramework... (Those are only open-sourced projects that I know of. There are certainly many more closed-sourced ones too)
By supporting this proposal, you will help all of these projects by improving the tooling they use. Teams will spend less time figuring out low-level shits and they will have more time to focus on the final product. This has been proven multiple times at hackathons over the past 2 years.
Proven team and proven tooling
Cedric (The main developer behind SAGE) and his company Ajuna have proven themselves with the development of incredible open-sourced tooling for .net ecosystem and also with the development of most technically advanced fully on-chain games.
Unlike many other teams, Cedric and Ajuna have followed the web3 core principles and made all of their work open-sourced. This was also beneficial for them, because many developers that used these tools have also contributed back!
The help from Cedric and everyone maintaining always immediate. Take a look at the github issues other dev's made and notice that the responses came just a few hours after the issue was made. Many times Cedric stepped up and coded his own solution of the problem, like in this issue and this issue.
One of the most important things for toolings is not only to have them, but also having them maintained. Polkadot is well known for it's forkless upgrades, however frequent updates also require frequent maintenance of tools. Cedric and Ajuna also have not disappointed and delivered all of the updates needed on time.
Elegance of the .net tooling developed by Cedric and Ajuna could be seen on Hackathons. Over the past 2 years, there has always been at least 1 project which used Substrate.Net.Api and won the main prize. Here is a list of the hackathons and prizes won:
Polkadot Global Series 2023 (Europe) by AngelHack - Second place
Polkadot Global Series 2023 (APEC) by AngelHack - Second place
Polkadot Winter Hackathon 2023 by OneBlock - First place
Polkadot Global Series 2024 (North America) by AngelHack - Third place
Polkadot Summer Hackathon 2024 (Singapore) by OneBlock - First place
This would not have been possible if the tooling would not been so effective and simple to use. In fact, it is very powerful.
No need for marketing
Developers are clever and very mindful of their time. If they want to build a c# application that is secured by Polkadot, they will use google/chatgpt and search what are the existing options for developing a c#/unity application/game with Polkadot. They will easily find Polkadot Unity SDK, Substrate.Net.Api, Substrate.Net.Toolchain... on the first page of google search. All of them are well documented, with a lot of working examples. Developers will find what they need just because it is very useful to them.
Personally, if the tooling would not have been there, I would probably give up and move on to a different ecosystem/different projects.
Also, you can not market something you do not have. It is hard to say that development on Polkadot is easy when in reality it is not. SAGE tries to address this by developing a full-featured solution for game developers that are not really familiar with the inner workings of blockchains.
Value brought
I will not try to persuade anyone into thinking that the value is large. It probably is not. However, it is proportional with the amount requested.
Cedric is asking for ~0.0014% (as of time of writing) of the treasury funds and I think the impact for the ecosystem is already reaching >1% (Projects that rely on using Substrate.Net.Api for their parachain secured on Polkadot) and the potential for growth is even larger.
Not just c#
SAGE brings:
- Substrate pallets
- JavaScript SDK
apart from just Unity SDK integration.
Original Proposal
Comments (13)
Proposal Passed
3
of 3Summary
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Aye
0%
Nay
Aye (60)0.0 DOT
Support0.0 DOT
Nay (40)0.0 DOT
Voting Data
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As I already recused here because of my connection to Ajuna, I would like to add my opinion. First of all, the whole DotPlay Discussion is a pain in the Ass! We all speak about decentralization, but one of the most mentioned reasons people Vote for Nay is why Ajuna doesn't go with DotPlay, a centralized entity for Web3 Gaming, which is more a Web2 institution than Web3 ... not gonna say anything more about this! Another thing many mentioned is the Unity SDK, which "failed". It did not fail. The SDK is actively used in some projects, and you can even use it for Unreal, just not in the Unity Asset Store for obvious reasons. The SDK is the fully-fledged Interface between Gaming and any Substrate chain. Ajuna developed it to open it to every possible project on Polkadot/Kusama. My Personal Opinion as a Beginner Game Developer and Technical Person: As already said, the SDK did not fail but did not address the right audience. With the SDK, you can develop ANY Web3 Game on Polkadot, but you need a lot of knowledge in game development and blockchain and all the traps that come with it. Finding skilled Gamedevelopers alone is a huge challenge, so if you combine it with Blockchain Skills, it's impossible. Indie game developers are often purely on the creative side (design, storytelling, art) or on the visual scripting side (graphic coding with drag & drop), and very few are on the coding side and those who Code are often below-average coders. The Blockchain part requires a lot of understanding of the Code! There is no drag-and-drop or Creative stuff in general if you speak of Blockchains. We missed 99% of the Indie game developers with the Unity SDK. SAGE aims for those 99% now! Making it as easy as possible for all Indie Game Developers to use. Remember the times of Polkadot, when we only had polkadot.js ? It needed several iterations to come to where Polkadot is now. In this new environment, we need to learn and improve. No one hit a home run the first time! The Unity SDK was only the first step for Ajuna, but SAGE could be close to a Homerun.
I would like to support this proposal as our project mobile app development using .net has been hugely supported by this team.