BZ RedditPosh CR and now PS

The past few weeks on Hive were positively motivating. The CommentRewarder (CR) project came together quickly from ideation to production launch. Upon launch, CR probably gained more adoption than any of my other Hive-related projects in the past five years -- and, there have been many projects.

I have been reflecting on the CR launch a bit. One thing that helped get things together was how Hive account@acidyo and I communicated the project details. After seeing the idea, I offered to work on it and wrote up a design document (DESIGN.md) based on what I understood. We went back and forth on some of the details, and having it written down made it easier to think about corner cases and areas needing more attention. After a couple of days of revision and thinking, the core design was settled, and it was easier to bang out the code based on that agreed-upon structure.

Later, as we built, iterated, fixed, and gathered community feedback, the DESIGN.md was revised and updated. The document lives with the source code so that other future developers or I can reference it and understand how the system is meant to be put together. This documentation process was very lightweight, and I plan to reuse this method for future projects.

All those older Hive projects, including RedditPosh, helped with execution speed. The learnings from each project compound and build upon each other, enabling new opportunities. It seems that even RedditPosh is growing in momentum, and more sharing is happening. I'm happy to see the tools being used every day. I'm hoping this positive shift of tides continues for months to come.

One of my other favorite projects was BurningZa. The idea is that you can burn some fractions of PIZZA tokens to paint pixels on a grid, to create letters, pixel art, or whatever you want. Several rounds of this were completed, turned into NFTs, published in Hive account@nftshowroom, and given to contributors who helped paint it.

Here are four examples of community-crafted pixel art from BurningZa

BurningZa (BZ) is a semi-decentralized game; with some work, it could be more decentralized. The "painting" happens via hive-engine token transfers to Hive account@null with a transfer memo that includes extra data about location and color for painting instructions. The BZ interface was clunky but functional and left much room for improvement.

I want to revive this idea under a new name and vision. The project is called Hive account@pixelswarm (PS). (A hive account has already been created.)

As a lifelong gamer and recently a semi-competent developer, I have been thinking about game development more seriously lately. PS could be an excellent opportunity to learn and experiment with some Web3 game ideas. The basic concept of BZ reborn and expanded in PS will also be a way to try out some new technology.

For example, PS could be one of the first functional apps to use VSC lite accounts. It would be beneficial to allow players into the game without requiring a complete Hive account. I'm actively talking to Hive account@vaultec from the VSC team about the building blocks needed for this. At a minimum, we need a way to authenticate a user with VSC and a way to subscribe to VSC transfer operations.

I fear a novel app like PS could fail to attract attention and usage. Then, the hours invested would not have a good ROI. After the CR launch, which surprised me with attention and usage, I think it's worth it to keep taking the risks. Even if few people use/play the game, some knowledge is gained, and new relationships are built along the way, which are both very valuable.

One of the reasons CR works so well is that you don't need to leave your Hive favorite front end to use it. It works with PeakD, Ecency, Hive, blog, etc. out of the box. It won't be easy to achieve the same for PS unless I can convince Hive account@asgarth or other devs to add my mini-app to their existing apps. This can wait until later.

I think PS could become valuable for the whole Hive network, including various communities and games integrated with Hive. I'm excited to explore some of those ideas in future posts and code. Stay tuned!

Note: 10% of rewards are routed to Hive account@commentrewarder for this post. Please let me know your thoughts on these ideas in the discussion thread.