DSPACE has been my passion project over the last few months. I’ve been working on it in my spare time, and I’m excited to share it with you.

What is DSPACE?

DSPACE is a space exploration idle game that sends you on quests across the solar system.

The goal is to show the player skills and careers related to space exploration (even if only slightly) in a way that’s low stakes and might actually inspire them to get involved IRL.

Super long term, the goal is to actually bridge the virtual world with the real world through blockchain integration. This part is still a ways off because I want to get every detail right on the first try (if I can help it) because, for better or worse, tokenizing something causes price discovery to emerge, and that raises the stakes considerably. I’ll write posts describing that part in detail, and I’m happy to hear your feedback and ideas!

Additive manufacturing allows us to embed NFC tags in everyday items, which provides a *good enough* way to track ownership of physical objects. I’m planning to use this technology to track ownership of virtual assets in a way that’s secure, tamper-proof, decentralized, and most importantly, democratized. With 3D printing, you can create repeatable schematics that print the same way every time, and this provides a standard way to tokenize real-world objects. If you take away the constraints of digital scarcity, you can map each tokenized physical object to a digital token, and then you can use that token to represent ownership of the physical object. This is a very powerful combination, and I’m going to prove it by building systems with it.

All of that is super ambitious, so don’t expect any notable progress on that front for a while. I’m going to start with the basics, and I’ll work my way up to the more ambitious stuff after making a fun, compelling, and engaging game. A game that’s free to play, can be hosted almost anywhere, and is easy to extend and contribute to.

Why Space exploration?

I’m personally a big fan of space exploration and can’t wait for us to build permanent human habitats on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. It does seem like we’re headed for that future, but I want to make sure we’re not dependent on any one company’s continued success to get there.

I’ve been going down the crypto rabbit hole for a while now, and I’m excited to see how blockchain technology can be used to make space exploration more accessible to everyone. DeFi, ReFi, and DeSci are near and dear to my heart, and space seems like a great use case to stress test these new ways of doing things.

Carbon sequestration, renewables, and sustainability are, I think, critical to long-term habitation in space, so simulating these things in a game (one that’s intended to be fun) can help us crowdsource solutions to these problems by leveraging people’s natural curiosity and desire to learn.

Why an idle game?

Idle games are a great way to learn about a topic, and they’re also a great way to get people to do things they wouldn’t normally do. I’m play a ton of idle games right now (this is not an exhaustive list, and yes I’m stretching the definition of “idle” a bit):

• FarmRPG
• Melvor Idle
• Old School RuneScape
• Pixel Tribe
• CraftBound
• DSPACE ;)

One of the great things about idle games (and why I rotate through so many at once) is that they’re not a huge time sink. You familiarize yourself with the game mechanics, plan toward some goal, and set and forget certain processes, tasks, activities, etc. You can play them for a few minutes a day, or you can play them for a few hours a day. It’s up to you, but there’s no built-in incentive to keep playing excessively.

In DSPACE, everything is intended to mirror real-time as much as possible. Hydroponic plants takes a few weeks to sprout and begin growing, and it potentially takes a while before you can harvest them. 3D prints take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple days depending on the complexity and scale. A flight to Mars will take months and will only be possible every 26 months, just like in real life! I want landing on Mars to feel like a huge milestone, like beating the final boss in a difficult endgame raid in an MMORPG.

How do you plan to monetize the game?

I don’t plan to directly monetize the game. I’m going to build it in public and make it fully open source. Anyone could technically fork my project, change it to their liking, and host an instance themselves. I’m going to make it easy to do so, and I’m going to make it easy to contribute to the project and even automate interaction with it through bots. At the same time, I intend to intentionally design it in such a way that’s purely value-added and not value-extractive. I take heavy inspiration from the concept of hyperstructures, detailed in this article, which I recommend you check out if you’re curious. To be clear, I don’t plan to introduce platform-level fees, but I plan to empower creators and players to monetize their own contributions, and participating in that directly seems to be the most conflict-free way for me to also “get paid”.

How can I help?

I’m looking for people to help me make the app better by playing it and reporting their experience. You can do so on the Discord!