What a week! Storms, Bugs, Hard Fork right after a Hard Fork, Internet outages, even a few physical injuries! Yet here we are, still kicking, back to posting, everything is right in the world. Well, relatively speaking anyway. So what did I do during the "break"? I started working on Thicket the interface for OpenSeed which I talked about in my proposal to the DAO (read it here).
What is Thicket?
Think of Thicket as Steam, for STEEM. With many of the features you expect from Valve, but built from the ground up to work with STEEM and IPFS it will be a completely original way to consume content. Though the primary function of Thicket will be catering to the Video Game community (developers and players) I couldn't help but add a music and video playing interfaces to the mix. Below are images of the Music Player in action.
Note: This is far from feature complete, I will be reaching out to various communities and curation groups to be added to the menu on the left.
default window size 1024x600 with song info shown
default window size 1024x600 song info collapsed
Currently the only working list is derived from my previously created cakeFS script that backs-up any dsound track that is like by the manual curation bot. Most if not all the buttons work in the interface save the ones on the right of the top most image. When coded they're functions will be:
- Like: Likes the post associated with the track via STEEM. It will also be used to build the "Liked" list within the program.
- Favorite: This will move the track from a hidden cache folder (which is volatile) to a favorites folder which will remain on the users computer.
- Download: Though the song is technically on your computer the file format as well as the naming convention for that file is less than user friendly. When you request a download Thicket will pull up a dialog that once confirmed will download the track as an mp3 to a folder that is visible to the user.
How does someone make money with this?
Game developers will be able to set the price of their games when they have published it to the store. The price will be set in SBD as it is more stable than STEEM but when it comes to purchasing the game you can use either currency. For games set as "Free" the user will be asked to "Pay what you Want" and can choose their own price. Similarly, any music "Downloaded" will pull up the "Pay what you want" dialog before proceeding.
To offset the cost of running the servers, and maintaining the system will take 10% of the purchase on Games and 5% on Music, with the other 5% going to the original host of the music (e.g. dsound)
#Road to MVP
I have most if not all the questions I needed answered by creating the Music interface to have the game developer dialog finalized and ready for testing.
The initial closed beta will begin after these features are mostly working:
Gaming
- Game Developer setup
- New Game dialog and inital upload of content
- Payment dialog functioning
- Downloading of content is reliable and maintainable.
Music
- Searching for musician via steem account
- More interface tweaks to make sure it behaves as expected
- Playlists
- Payment dialog
Like what you see and read? Support my proposal so I can devote time not teaching to the project!
I currently have a proposal on the proposal system. Which you can find here along with others hoping to fund their projects. Thank you in advance for your support.