This is going to be very different than our usual medium posts.
This is Aaron from Greymass writing this unplanned post (Hi!) late on a Friday night. All this content was originally a series of telegram messages that became far too long.
Alpha Release
We managed to get the game reset/running last night and deployed an alpha test instance on EOS.
https://alpha.shiploadgame.com
I haven’t had a chance to record myself playing and explaining the game yet as promised, but anyone with an EOS account is welcome to start playing with us as we test and develop it further.
If you join… just imagine that I sat you down in front of a new board game and gave you a set of pieces… with no instructions. You’re going to have to try things, ask questions, and figure out how to play. This isn’t a game you can just drop into and have a guided experience (yet!), so we don’t expect this to be for everyone (yet!).
This is a public alpha test (and a very unfinished game).
Shipload
Since the game doesn’t even explain the premise to you… I’ll just do that here. Upon joining the game you are going to found a new space trading company. The game gives you a loan in CREDITS (the untradable in-game currency and scoring mechanism) to start your new company, along with 1 basic ship. Your challenge is to take these resources, compete with everyone else, and become the most successful trader. The trader with the highest net worth at the end of the game wins.
Gameplay
The core gameplay is traveling from planet to planet dealing in futuristic confections. You find where to buy at the lowest prices and travel elsewhere to sell them for a profit. You’ll increase the strength of your fleet by investing in additional ships. Each additional ship acts as its own piece on the game board capable of trading.
That’s the basics — and we’ll be adding more to this game loop as the game continues to evolve.
Clicker/idle game inspirations
We’ve wrapped this initial experience in a clicker/idle game interface. You access the controls (currently) from the very plain looking white buttons on the bottom of the screen. You’ll probably spend a lot of times in the “Ships” menu. Here you manage each of your ships and what they are doing.
When trading, to simplify the gameplay as much as possible, you’re presented with trade opportunities the game has found for as cards. You pick which looks best, select how many (without going too overweight), and commit to the trade. Then you wait for the travel time and complete your trade once the timer is complete, earning your profit. Then onto the next trade!
This UI still needs a lot of work — but is functional enough to play with. Expect to see a lot of iteration on this design. We’ll also add a more advanced trading interface in the future, for nerds who like numbers (like us!).
Come play with us!
Our team will be playing this alpha to figure out what does and doesn’t work. We’ll try to shift most of our chatter to the Telegram channel and would invite those of you who are playing to do the same. We’ll figure out this game together… 😆
Notes for playing Shipload
- I’d highly recommend playing on a computer vs a mobile device — we haven’t optimized for mobile at all yet (and won’t for a while).
- You shouldn’t need your own CPU/NET/RAM resources, aside from a tiny bit of RAM to register as a player.
- I’d highly recommend setting up a Session Key when you first join the game. Click on your account name in the upper right and it’ll be an option in the dropdown menu. This will create a special permission on your account that can only play Shipload, authorizing your web browser to use that permission. Then you can play without having to approve transactions with your wallet constantly.
- There are bugs, and I think there’s a memory leak we haven’t addressed yet. Things are going to crash or get slow. Feel free to let us know if its happening, but the solution for now is just refreshing the page (or closing and reopening the tab).
- You can click/drag or use the arrow keys to pan around the game map. You can also click on planets or ships. There’s not a lot of utility to this yet, but we’ll be working towards making it so you can just browse around the game board and get information.
- All the game data is open and on-chain (or derived from on-chain data). The details of every player, trade, rice at location, etc can all be accessed and analyzed by anyone. The game client we’re building uses the same public SDKs and contracts that any other developer could use.
