The problem Cosmobot, built on cosmic-engine solves

Cosmo is a fun NPC experiment using AI and Web3 social, but more importantly he's part of the cosmic-engine, an open-source framework that uses AI x Web3 x Frames x Social to engage game designers to think about novel games and experiences using new tech and platforms, bringing about a new wave of games natively built on Web3 social.

Most Web 3 games are built on outdated economic models that are not sybil-resistant. Farcaster as a platform is unique in that it embraces cryptoeconomics, decentralization and openness to emerging tech. We need to inspire new game developers to start creating games not possible on any other platform, but also mindful of what has failed/succeeded before and what players really want to play.

In addition, AI has started to change how games are made. We have open-sourced Cosmo, the cosmic-engine, an example game Degen Trail: Jackpot Junction and its smart contracts. We are also building on open models because we believe that we should empower the game developers with this new tech, instead of centralizing and extracting more value from game developers and players.

Challenges we ran into

Cosmo is very early stage and there were a lot of challenges getting to this point!

First is we wanted to build on open-source LLMs so that have control over their output. We had to learn stacks such as ComfyUI and find suitable models like sv3d. The output is still a long way to where we want to go, but this will get better as we collaborate with more builders on their LLMs

Cost of running these models are also pretty high, also limiting the quality of the output. We have addressed this by running the smallest model we can on AWS, but the goal is to allow anyone to run their own servers, perhaps even locally and just replace API keys on their self-hosted cosmic-engine.

We've had a lot of fun building on Farcaster, but of course building on a new tech always has new challenges. We can see some improvements can be made on onboarding devs to the platform with documentation and examples. Nothing that was a blocker though!