Dec. 7, 2023
Star Atlas: Web3 and Solana Game Development, with Co-founder, Michael Wagner
This week on The Index, host Alex Kehaya is joined by Michael Wagner, Co-founder of Star Atlas, an exciting space exploration-themed RPG built on the Solana network. Set in the year 2620, the game features political factions, territorial pursuits, advanced weaponry, and spacecraft, enhancing various gameplay aspects. Learn all about developer opportunities on the Star Atlas platform, the commercialization of 3D models, and the future of open-source blockchain games.
Host - Alex Kehaya
Producer - Shawn Nova
Chapters
00:04 - Star Atlas
12:50 - Surviving the Bear Market
19:43 - Failure and the Composable Star Atlas
25:08 - Leveraging Assets and Open-Source Development
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Index Podcast hosted by Alex Kahaya.
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Plug in as we explore new frontiers with Web 3 and the decentralized future, hey everyone and welcome to the Index brought to you by the Graph, where we talk with the entrepreneurs building the next wave of the internet.
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I'm your host, alex Kahaya, and today I'm joined by Michael Wagner.
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Again, he's been on the show before.
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For those of you that don't remember, he's the co-founder of Star Atlas, a space-themed video game metaverse of grand strategy, open world exploration, territorial contest and political domination.
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With a blockchain-based layer that utilizes Solana, star Atlas is striving to be the first blockchain game to deliver AAA-grade cinematic quality visual experiences and, from what I saw at PlayGG a couple of months ago, y'all are nailing that for sure.
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But thanks for coming on the show.
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I appreciate it.
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Thanks, Ben.
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I'm excited to be here and chat with you again.
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Always enjoyable when we have conversations.
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So happy to be here and let's dive in.
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Let's just start with how are things going with Star Atlas, what's shipped recently and what do people need to know?
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Things are going exceptionally well.
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I'm actually going to speak to this a bit at Breakpoint, but it's been a challenging year, I think, for everyone across the Solana ecosystem.
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Obviously, we all know what happened with FTX and that was right on the tail end of Breakpoint last year, which I'm super excited to be attending again this year.
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But, man, we faced some challenging times but we just persevered.
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We stuck with it.
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We kept building, made changes where we needed to, and the team is doing incredibly well.
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We've shipped a lot of products over the course of this year, but most recently, and really with much fanfare, is our Sage Labs product.
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Now, sage is Star Atlas Golden Era and that is a browser implementation of the Star Atlas universe.
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So it's not the Unreal Engine content, it's not the cinematic open world MMO content.
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This is a 2D browser implementation that activated, largely activates the economy.
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It's all centered around resource extraction and crafting right now, but the future vision for the browser-based gameplay which is developed in Play Canvas and it will be with 3D WebGL assets, is more of a real-time strategy gameplay loop.
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So it's all focused on territory control, gathering resources, crafting star bases, building those, going out open world PVP in this map and being able to receive rewards for doing that.
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And again, sage Labs is really a 2D implementation, so much more of an O-game style, whereas the future version of Sage is essentially kind of like Stellaris for people familiar.
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But man, it has been absolutely blowing up.
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We and people in our community are posting numbers.
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As of two days ago, we did some 2.3 million transactions on Solana.
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We made up 15% of the daily network transaction volume and this has been increasing over the last several weeks, so we just rolled this out on September 21.
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We're about two and a half weeks in and the user counts are good, the growth is good, the transactions are good and what's really cool is we've built effectively all of the game logic on Solana through seven different Solana programs.
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And there's a lot of programs.
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But, honestly, for a game that has the kind of functionality you've built, it's kind of crazy.
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It's only seven.
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How did you guys achieve that?
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Brilliant blockchain engineers.
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I'm sure this could very easily have been 20 or 25 programs, but the guys worked their magic.
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We've gone through a number of different iterations.
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In fact, earlier in the year our community will be familiar but we launched something called Escape Velocity, which was just a movement test, an on-chain coordinate and movement system.
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It was a good demonstration of what was possible, but still very limited in the feature set available.
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And so this evolution into labs.
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Now it's just a massive, massive improvement over the gameplay economics and the gameplay mechanics and again creating a system that is sustainable, going into the future as well.
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Escape Velocity was we knew that was a temporary product that would be deprecated, wasn't intended to continue, but labs.
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We now have the foundation for all of the future gameplay mechanics that go not only in labs but across the Unreal Engine client as well.
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What do I need to get started?
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Do I need a ship or something?
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Do I need assets, or can I just come on there with a little bit of soul and start playing?
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How do I get into this?
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You will need ships, and so a large part of our premise is being able to drive utility and value to the assets that people possess.
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Now, when we launched Escape Velocity, it was a small deposit to largely prevent botting behavior, to be honest with you, but it did not account for actual ship ownership.
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So now in Sage Labs, it is based on the assets that players own.
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Now we have ships that are selling for $3 or $4.00.
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We have ships that are selling for $100,000.
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So choose your own adventure in terms of how deep you want to go, but you can construct a small fleet of ships and still get out and play and start having fun if you spend maybe $10 or $15.
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And with respect to your comment on Soul, obviously we are massive supporters of Solana Network, but there was a really cool feature that we released, which was it is a fee payer service that we call Atlas Prime, and what that really means is all of our users are paying their network transaction fees in Atlas, which is our in-game currency, that is passed through to a proxy service that we run.
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We pay the Sol transaction fees on their behalf and they just pay Atlas, and for us, this is a big win for the Star Atlas ecosystem because users are earning Atlas and if you're completely new to Web 3 or completely new to crypto, we do want to simplify that process as much as possible.
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So earn the currency from playing the game and be able to pay all of your transaction fees and buy all of your items in that currency.
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That's how we create this circular economic loop for players.
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But a few ships and otherwise.
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Connect a wallet and you're off and running.
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Where do I go to get my ships?
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So our marketplace is at playstaratlascom.
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That would be the starting point for anyone without any assets whatsoever.
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It's quite an expansive marketplace.
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At this point, it is a marketplace that's another Solana program that we built from the ground up.
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All of the ships are categorized, from extra, extra small all the way up to commander ships.
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The scale of these things increases exponentially.
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Again, the price is associated with them, but there's also a ton of information out there already on different strategies and meta that people are employing.
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Going into the game and every one of the ships.
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There's a bunch of different categories of ships and manufacturers of ships.
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I won't take the time to go through all of those right here on this call, but there's eight different manufacturers that have different specializations and different attributes.
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And then there's ships that are racers, fighters, freighters, transport, bounty hunter, mining ships.
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You can effectively specialize based on your in-game strategy.
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Whether that's ultimately, in the future, wanting to engage in PVP with your fighterships, or if you're focused exclusively on logistic, supply chain management, extraction and crafting, your mining ships and your freighterships are going to be best suited for you.
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Which one's the most lucrative.
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What do you think will be the most lucrative?
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You might not know yet.
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In the current phase, it's a combination of fighterships and freighter ships, because the fighterships are able to extract faster than any other ship.
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Right now, the freighter ships are able to carry the most inventory.
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And so, if you're thinking about managing your cost as you play because every one of our gameplay loops Operate as a Genuine business, which means you're spending food, you're spending fuel, you're spending ammunition, you're using tool kits these are the four core resources.
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They get burned for every action that you take it's like bargain trail button space.
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It's like actual money that's fair.
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Yeah, I mean, it's a.
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It's a fair analogy.
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You know it is important for players to actually put a little thought into how they want to execute, because it's entirely possible that you run out of fuel while you're in the middle of space and then you have to self destruct and you lose everything in your, in your cargo.
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Oh, no, yeah, yeah, it gives me anxiety already.
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That's so fun, I mean, I already learned a lot.
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I don't have any ships in the wallet that I connected to earlier today.
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I think I've got one in like a different wall somewhere.
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But I should just go pick up like I don't know twenty, fifty dollars worth of ships and probably get like Two attack vessels like a freighter or something like that, and and then you form like this little gorilla group and start, you know, just trying to extract resources in the lab and see, see how it goes, like the best way to experiment.
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Exactly.
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I think it's important to maybe outline the different gameplay mechanics that are on Solana.
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So I mentioned what we tested in escape velocity.
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That was the coordinate system and movement system on chain.
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But when you sign into labs now you're not really creating an account per se, not in the traditional sense.
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It is a wallet connect and what happens on the back end is that creates a profile for you on chain and that profile will be used for character progression, xp loyalty point earning and then also managing permissions and settings within your account itself.
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Things like extraction of resources from the universe, that's on chain.
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Crafting systems are on chain, the inventory systems and in fact, throughout the map of Gallia, which is the sage galaxy, it is localized inventory.
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So if you have SFT assets, which all of the resources being extracted are, they are stored at the star base where you're positioned and if you want to get them back to, say, the central space station, you need to physically load them into ships and bring them back.
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Or if you set up crafting hubs at any of the 51 different star bases around the map, you can craft at those star bases, but ultimately you have to get those back to your central space station.
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So localized inventory and then going into the future, which kind of dovetails off of your previous question, is kind of like what is the matter or what's the best, what's the most profitable today?
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Well, the meta is going to shift pretty frequently across star atlas as we develop out new features, and a feature that's in our pipeline Is combat, and another feature is the actual star base construction, where players need to collect resources and build their star bases.
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But you know, when we get into combat systems it gets more complex in terms of what's most lucrative, because you could stay in the safe zone but the extraction rates are lower and you know the amount of materials you collect is lower, your transportation costs are lower, but where it's most lucrative is out in the medium risk zone or in the high risk.
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I'm just like smiling right now, like thinking about like someone just pillaging my tiny little Space fleet.
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You know, just like some dude who's got like a hundred grand worth of big boss fighters and stuff just comes in and wipes me out.
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You know, just cleans house.
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How pissed off it could be.
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I feel like a twelve year old again, playing like starcraft back in the day.
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Ironically, the twelve year old are much better at gaming than I am at this point.
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Yeah especially on fast-twitch games.
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But so there's a mechanic that we haven't implemented yet, but it actually speaks to your concern there, and it kind of speaks to the idea of pay to win, because we do have this extremely wide range of asset values.
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But going into the future will also have a council rank system and a licensing system that requires players to.
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Everybody has to start on the same footing.
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Everybody has to start with the smallest ships in the game and it's only through playing and collecting XP and allocating points to different skills that you're able to acquire the licenses allow you to fly those bigger ships in the future.
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Now, that gating mechanism is not in place today and it's possible we change that at some point in the future.
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But the idea that somebody can just spend a hundred grand and then immediately destroy you because they spent more money we do want to try to prevent that to some extent.
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Let's talk about this bear market a little bit, if you're open to it.
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You guys have had to make some pretty hard decisions in the last three months.
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I think I remember, like right after play to your like, right around that time you had to cut some headcount and stuff like that.
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And there are some founders who listen to this show and I think, like are probably navigating a pretty difficult market, like we all are, and I was wondering if you just share some Anecdotes of like how you made those decisions and the like how you navigated that with your community and just kind of talk about that process a little bit, if you're open to it, I think that we could valuable, especially for some of the younger teams in the space.
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Just full transparency for anyone who doesn't know, we got caught up in the FTX mess.
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We lost quite a substantial amount of money there, so we had to start thinking about how do we pivot our strategy or what is the future look like for star atlas going almost a year ago now.
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We made a first round of cuts in December, going into January to pair the team back.
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I think it was about 13% of our staff.
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My goal, my objective, was to iterate and deliver product quickly enough that we could build momentum and interest and start to acquire new users.
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Now, you know, through the bear market, it's already difficult to acquire new users, and we're really working on this pioneering tech which is on chain logic.
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So while we had a few products released over the course of the year, they didn't drive the momentum that we were expecting, and so as we got into July, I had to take a really hard look at our balance sheet and our run rate and whatever revenue was coming in and our ability to capture cash flow off of things like token sales.
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Right At the end of the day, it was a simple mathematical formula.
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Here's what we have, here's what we're making, and if I don't make adjustments, this is when we die on the vine.
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And so I would just say, for anyone out there that is considering this right now, it is an incredibly difficult decision to make.
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These are friends, these are people we interact with every day.
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These are great contributors to the product that you're developing most likely.
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But ultimately, survival is paramount, and so when we got to that point, you know, we made the cuts, and it was about 75% of the remaining team that we actually cut back in end of July, going into August.
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The silver lining here while it doesn't feel good to make that cut, it was an immediate sense of relief.
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The weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders in that moment because I knew that I just extended our runway, our worst case lifetime, out another 18 months, and really the goal here is making sure you survive until the next cycle and when you have product available for people to start to use and hopefully the product is something that they're interested in.
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But one was the sense of relief that I got immediately, despite feeling bad about making that move.
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And two, what I think is quite surprising is it was an extensive exercise to decide who we're keeping and who do we have to let go, and what positions are they filling and what roles and responsibilities are they completing?
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Thinking forward about what is our roadmap going to look like if and when we make these cuts, which we knew were necessary.
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The people that we retained after a short period of turbulence, working closely on regular calls with the team.
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Everybody got aligned extremely closely and one of the things, one of the challenges I would say that we faced as a team historically is that it was almost a pitfall that we had as much success early on as we did, because we tried to rapidly scale to account for the revenue that we had achieved in year one and even, to some extent, year two.
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There's a great podcast that I've referenced I might have even referenced it before with you, but it's Tim Ferriss and he's interviewing the CEO founder of Evernote and he references this study, which says, essentially, every time you 3x the amount of people in your company, you need to radically transform all of your processes and all of your procedures, and we're a fully remote company.
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We scaled from four people to 235 people over the course of a year and a half, and we operate almost exclusively through Discord, and so communication channels were broken, getting people to coordinate and collaborate.
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Interdepartmental coordination was a challenge, and so what we found is that in downscaling the company, we actually had better fusion of all team members and we really isolated our focus on what we were all going to work on and we set to task, just having those meetings, having those priority calls, and our velocity, our momentum right now is arguably better than it was when we had a bigger team.
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So kind of key lesson here is number of people doesn't necessarily translate into momentum or velocity of development.
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It's really ensuring that you have that team alignment, that cohesion, before you scale, and that's a lesson that I'll take into the future.
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Even in the face of significant success with income is.
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I want to be extremely strategic in how we scale the next time around, because it actually introduced, I think, more challenges to us than the benefits we derive from it.
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Yeah, I mean that is great advice and I had a very similar lesson learned from my company, olaplex.
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We scaled really fast to meet what was a lot of growth in the beginning of our company's lifecycle, like first year and a half.
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The bear market forced us to lay off about half of our people back in December, which sucked, but between then and now we shipped more better product than we ever did, just because of how much it focused our team and I think bear markets have that effect on people.
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It's bringing a lot of focus.
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You got to really buckle down and figure out how to survive and frankly, transparently, our company might not make it still, but seeing how those people were able to rally and deliver a really great product in a pretty short period of time between because we basically pivoted the company to starting in January, like end of last year our revenue went from pretty significant to nothing overnight after FDX that was a pretty big kick in the pants and I think, looking back, one of the big things I would do differently is when we were adding all that headcount, really trying to drill down and like, do we really need that headcount?
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Like, do we really need that person, and I think what happened with us is, with all those resources that we had, you know you try to build too much.
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You're building all these different things and if you focus and focus like constantly pairing back and I saw something like Elon Musk posted this somewhere, like some video on Twitter about this where it's like pair back your product initiatives until you start having to add things back in later, that's better than having too many things that you're doing.
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So, yeah, really big lesson learned for me as an entrepreneur and it sounds like you guys had a similar one and I guess, like for teams that I don't think it's happened publicly that much yet, but I think it's coming there are going to be teams that just don't make it, even with, you know, all the effort they might put in to like cut headcount and stuff and figure out a way forward, they just don't get probably market fit or run out of money or whatever.
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What would you say to those teams, like in this market, that are almost dead or like on death?
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Are there companies about to have to shut down?
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What would you say to those guys who are kind of thinking about what their next thing is or I don't know how do you deal with that as an entrepreneur.
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Key advice for me is don't stop until the music stops.
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My mentality has always been, you know, going down with the ship.
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I'll be the guy playing the violin as we go under.
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It was never a question to me of all right, it feels too hard, I'm going to give up now.
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Another quote I love is David Goggins, and he says you know, pain is temporary, failures forever, something like that.
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And for me it's as much of a struggle as it might be, as long as there's a penny in the account and we can satisfy our liabilities and we still have a vision for what we can build.
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We keep going, man.
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We keep iterating, and so even if you're getting down there to the the final days, you never know what's going to happen.
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So just don't give up early.
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Definitely, fight until the bitter end.
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But if it is a quote, unquote failure, a failure is a lesson.
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I don't think that there's anything intrinsically wrong with failing.
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If anything, I think it's a testament to the individual to try something that's challenging and fail.
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That's much better than just never trying at all.
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So don't get discouraged from starting another business or doing something else again just because you failed once.
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Keep going with that too.
00:20:07.729 --> 00:20:15.803
I always use this wrestling analogy because I wrestled for like a decade and it was all I cared about from the time I was like nine until I was almost 20.
00:20:15.803 --> 00:20:24.920
And for the first five or six years you just get your ass kicked all day, every day, and, like I, literally cried after most matches when I was a little kid.
00:20:24.920 --> 00:20:36.921
You know, what I learned is, if you give it your all and you wrestle hard and you leave everything out on the mat, you just shake your opponent's hand and you like, keep your head up and walk off the mat.
00:20:36.921 --> 00:20:44.232
Don't say anything, just walk off the mat proud and come back again, get to the next tournament, get to the next match and do it all over again.
00:20:44.333 --> 00:20:50.080
And that's how, as an entrepreneur and I've had multiple companies that had some fail and some be successful, and that's just the way that I look at it.
00:20:50.080 --> 00:21:03.303
If you really do hang on and go down with the ship and you really put everything into it and you know there's like nothing else you could do to make it work, then you can keep your head high and take those lessons with you to the next one, lick your wounds, take a little time and get building again.
00:21:03.303 --> 00:21:05.913
I don't think this bear market is over soon.
00:21:05.913 --> 00:21:11.722
Some people have been kind of posting on Twitter like bull posting, like oh, we're almost at the end, this has got to be the bottom, and I'm like I don't know.
00:21:11.722 --> 00:21:16.194
So I think, like, keep building is the thing that I keep thinking.
00:21:16.520 --> 00:21:19.595
But first of all, that is the exact mentality that I support too.
00:21:19.595 --> 00:21:20.740
You know, give it your all, man.
00:21:20.740 --> 00:21:22.243
You have nothing to be ashamed of.
00:21:22.243 --> 00:21:31.683
If you did your absolute best and I'm not talking about, you know, participation trophies, but for your own personal mental health and psychology.
00:21:31.683 --> 00:21:41.159
If you know that you've done everything you could and you tried everything you could, like you said, hold your head high, know that you gave it your best and you'll do it again.
00:21:42.522 --> 00:21:45.250
Yep, you guys are thriving, which is great.
00:21:45.250 --> 00:21:46.755
It's so cool to see those metrics.
00:21:46.755 --> 00:21:47.999
I saw Twitter today.
00:21:47.999 --> 00:21:53.555
You guys surpassed Polygon, which I love, on total daily transactions.
00:21:53.555 --> 00:21:58.595
Like all of Star Atlas is more transactions than Polygon, which is kind of interesting.
00:21:58.595 --> 00:22:08.275
Like, when you think about that, a lot of these layer ones like a layer one, like if you look at yourself as like a Web3 ecosystem on top of a layer one, and they're an L2 on top of a layer one too.
00:22:08.275 --> 00:22:15.906
So if you like, just do apples to apples comparisons and you look at those valuations, it's kind of interesting not to like price speculate, but it's kind of interesting if you look at that.
00:22:17.815 --> 00:22:25.266
Yeah, I hesitate to respond to that one and, for the record, we're not the ones that are drawing the comparisons between any other L1s or L2s.
00:22:25.266 --> 00:22:26.349
That's people.
00:22:26.349 --> 00:22:27.454
You know these data runners.
00:22:27.555 --> 00:22:28.518
I saw that on Twitter.
00:22:28.518 --> 00:22:29.821
Yeah, I saw that on Twitter.
00:22:29.821 --> 00:22:30.925
This is random Twitter account.
00:22:32.675 --> 00:22:38.326
I mean, I think it's really cool to see, but it's people from our community or that are following Star Atlas that are making these comparisons.
00:22:38.326 --> 00:22:40.494
I do think it's extremely impressive.
00:22:40.494 --> 00:22:55.624
It speaks to the idea of only possible on Solana that, to your exact point, we think of ourselves almost as a developing in very much the same fashion that a layer one builds, because we have open access to our tooling, like all of those programs that we just rolled out for Sage Labs.
00:22:55.624 --> 00:23:09.519
We've opened bindings, APIs, documentation, and we already have people that are looking at ways to integrate into those programs, build their own extensions, build automation tools which is kind of a bad word, automation botting.
00:23:09.519 --> 00:23:15.121
But we actually think that this is the big opportunity and this is why we're building on chain is composability.
00:23:15.884 --> 00:23:29.987
We want other teams to build DeFi services, build lending models, build scholarship models, build liquidity pools with all of these different commodities, build wallet management or game management tools and make those open and accessible to all of our players.
00:23:29.987 --> 00:23:40.027
So if you were to analogize that to what any layer one does, it's building a base tool set that other developers can then leverage to create programs and applications that live on top of it.
00:23:40.027 --> 00:23:48.950
Well, the way we're building on top of Solana allows other developers to build on top of Star Atlas in the future, and the benefit is we have a captive audience.
00:23:48.950 --> 00:23:53.489
We have a user base that is extremely passionate about being able to play and what we're doing.
00:23:53.489 --> 00:24:06.547
And if you're a developer and you're looking for a new opportunity, do you want to create something brand new out of the air and hope you can capture users, or do you want to build something that you know there's an existing audience for and we see a major advantage for that?
00:24:06.949 --> 00:24:09.919
That was actually one of my next questions, like how composable is it?
00:24:09.919 --> 00:24:13.007
And it sounds like it's very open and composable, which is cool.
00:24:13.007 --> 00:24:16.744
I was thinking about the fact that everything is self-custody.
00:24:16.744 --> 00:24:32.647
You could imagine, maybe somebody else makes a different universe, but all my stuff, the basic contracts, are the same and so all of my game identity and gameplay and all my assets and stuff can pour it over to a different game even.
00:24:34.675 --> 00:24:36.624
That is 100% the idea.
00:24:36.624 --> 00:24:38.150
What you just said your game identity.
00:24:38.150 --> 00:24:39.756
That's essentially our profile system.
00:24:39.756 --> 00:24:43.851
We're actually productizing that in a specific way as well.
00:24:43.851 --> 00:24:58.856
I'm not sharing any details on it at the moment, but the profile system itself is largely going to evolve into a Web3ID or Web3 passport of sorts, with the intention of allowing immediate access into any other game that wants to build on Solana.
00:24:58.856 --> 00:25:08.008
Now we've already open sourced other tools as well, like our Foundation SDK, which is a Solana native integration into Unreal Engine 5.
00:25:08.008 --> 00:25:22.114
Whether it's creating a mod for Star Atlas or creating a unique storyline or a single player mode for Star Atlas, within our asset repository on buildstaratalystcom, we have ship assets and art that people can leverage.
00:25:22.114 --> 00:25:23.881
We have branding that people can leverage.
00:25:23.881 --> 00:25:25.729
People are able to commercialize those.
00:25:25.729 --> 00:25:32.712
We have a structure in place that allows them to earn up to a million dollars in revenue without paying any royalty fees to us.
00:25:32.712 --> 00:25:37.425
Take a chance right, build something and see if it works here and people the revenue engine.
00:25:38.234 --> 00:25:43.488
We are, yeah, and we've already spent all of this money and all of this time in creating amazing assets.
00:25:43.488 --> 00:25:46.378
Let's make those available to people so that they can get ahead.
00:25:46.378 --> 00:25:55.098
Start our only requirement we have a few requirements, like if you're using the star atlas assets, than it needs to reference the star atlas, nfts or SFTs.
00:25:55.098 --> 00:26:15.602
But, to your exact point, if you're a player and you own some of the ships and someone else builds a game Using the build repository, now your ships work in that game to you can end, your profile works, so you can just go play as a developer, can I also create new ships and things like that that People can buy and then after a million dollars, like you guys, get a piece of that action.
00:26:15.622 --> 00:26:18.467
Is that how that works, or is only existing ships and stuff like?
00:26:18.467 --> 00:26:25.939
I can't make new ones, but I can, like, make a new game that allows us to work In my game yeah, you could build your own ships.
00:26:25.979 --> 00:26:27.922
You could create your own ships that work in your game.
00:26:27.922 --> 00:26:30.924
That doesn't mean that we're going to backport those into our game.
00:26:30.924 --> 00:26:36.371
We do have extremely high quality standards and you know we want to ensure we protect the integrity of our game.
00:26:36.371 --> 00:26:40.922
Now I'm sure there's some great studios out there who could create assets that we might want to use.
00:26:40.922 --> 00:26:43.144
That would be more of a one off conversation.
00:26:43.144 --> 00:26:46.490
But within this build repository it's startless branding.
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