Question 1

Claire:

For those who aren’t familiar, can you share what Wow Labzs does - and your vision?

Answer

We are Wow Labz, one of India's leading turnkey product development companies. We aspire to build products that touch the lives of 100 Million people worldwide by 2025. We build innovative products for enterprises, startups and research labs. We believe collaboration drives innovation. The team has previously built a decentralized storage protocol called Lake Network, in addition to multiple dApps on Ethereum, Polkadot, Stellar, EOS, Hyperledger and others.

We have a strong understanding of communities, as we have built multiple communities in the startup, product, design and web3 space, including a 20k+ member strong community for Polkadot in India called Polkadot India.

Question 2

Claire:

What problem are you tackling with your project? What inspired you to address this problem?

Answer

Pirates Project is basically based on Probability (Stochastic Logic). And randomness is one of the toughest things to achieve on a blockchain. For games which just use Tokens and NFTs, randomness is not required. But for ones which are driven off Smart Contracts using transparent logic, randomness is tough. Players can predict outcomes and the game evolution and cheat etc. Pirates is the first step in this direction.

Additionally we are putting it up as an Open Source reference for the community to use to develop their own games on Stacks. It would mean putting in some effort in interacting with the community and keeping the documentation in sync with the evolving codebase.

Question 3

Claire:

What functionality does your work unlock for Stacks entrepreneurs, devs, or other stakeholders?

Answer

Our goal is to create a play-and-earn game based on Stacks. The game would be a novel integration of the SIP 010 + SIP 009 token standards and has the potential to become a lucrative collectible project in the Stacks Ecosystem. These NFTs would truly be permanent as they would be stored on the Stacks blockchain itself as RLE strings opening up a lot of potential for future game play.
Pirates Project is also meant to serve as a template or starter for the game developer community to learn from and adopt Stacks / Clarity for their NFT based games.

Question 4

Claire:

Can you share more about your experience working on your project? Any learnings or noteworthy pivots?

Answer

It's been a fantastic experience working on Clarity; the language is well-structured and easy to write and the community on Discord is growing quickly. Since we are working on a project that requires some features of turing complete language, which obviously does not exist, we tried our best to implement it and succeeded someway around.

Question 5

Claire:

How do you see your project shaping, or contributing to the Stacks ecosystem?

Answer

Stacks is made in Rust and uses Clarity Smart Contracts over BitCoin. Bitcoin is the leading cryptocurrency in the world and while Ethereum/Solidity is way more popular in the developer community. We would like to invest time, money and resources in pursuing Bitcoin based Applications.

We are involved in creating a 10,000 developer Rust and Substrate ecosystem in India. We understand the developer community in this part of the world, which is usually orders of magnitude larger than that in the western world. For Stacks to succeed, it will need to extend its community into India and Asia in a big way. And this project helps it do exactly that.

Secondly, Gaming as a category contributes a high volume of transactions on any crypto network/platform. This project could help Stacks achieve a significant uptick in activity, adoption and value. India also happens to be one of the biggest Offshore Development Centers in the world for 3D, Graphics and Games. We have enormous talent that can be channelized by us to put Stacks in an exponential growth trajectory.

Web 2 was primarily for consumption and Web 3 is essentially participative and democratic. Developers and Gamers are two sub-communities of a platform's ecosystem that are inherently so. And the Pirates Project will enable them to adopt Stacks and grow.

Question 6

Claire:

Are there any updates/announcements coming up that readers can look for?

Answer

We are gearing up towards the launch of the Pirates Project Phase 1.
In phase 1, players would be able to mint Fleet X NFT Collection using their STX tokens. They would also be able to stake these NFTs to earn $TRS tokens.

Question 7

Claire:

Anything you would share with someone new to the ecosystem?

Answer

The readers can connect with the project updates on Twitter (https://twitter.com/piratesgame_io) and join the project community at Discord (https://discord.gg/MnTTD2CzJa).