The problem Planetarian solves

The problem it solves

• Many existing onchain games lacked a deep integration of narrative and macro-philosophical thinking, focusing primarily on asset ownership rather than exploring complex civilizational shifts.
• For onchain builders and explorers, it was difficult to experientially grasp the potential impact of the global onchain economy and emerging concepts like Onchainomics IRL.
• There was a lack of engaging onchain simulation or sandbox environments that allowed for collaborative community building.

So seeing these problem, and recognizing the urgent need for platforms that can bridge onchain stories, narratives, ecosystem stories in Base, Farcaster, Zora, ETH, Optimism etc,. with tangible experience and foster true onchain co-creation, introducing - Planetarian

Planetarian leverages onchain architecture to transform complex theories like Onchainomics and Cyberealism into an engaging narrative simulation. As "Planetarians," players gain a high-dimensional perspective to interact with civilization's evolution, experiencing profound societal shifts and philosophical ideas. Furthermore, Planetarian establishes a comprehensive basic world rule system and lore, similar to the detailed playbooks of great TRPGs, that enables players to create their own stories. By integrating platforms like Zora and Farcaster and empowering community UGC shared onchain, Planetarian fosters a co-created "planetary" universe, allowing players to understand and participate in shaping the onchain future through interactive storytelling and creative contribution.

UGC community integrating with Farcaster& Zora

By integrating onchain infrastructure such as Zora and Farcaster and encouraging community-driven content creation shared on Farcaster, Planetarian not only provides unprecedented onchain interaction depth but also builds a "planetary" universe shaped and explored by its players. The unique narratives and consequences resulting from players’ choices and UGC on their planets can be published onchain via Zora, allowing them to share the stories they experience or create with the wider community.

In-Depth philosophical concepts

Planetarian uniquely transforms profound theories like Onchainomics and Cyberealism into an engaging game experience through its distinctive design and onchain architecture. Players adopt the high-dimensional perspective of a "Planetarian," interacting with the evolution of planetary civilizations and directly experiencing complex societal transformations and cyber-philosophical concepts.

Planetarian’s Vision

Planetarian functions as a narrative simulator that empowers a creative community to understand and participate in shaping the onchain future through enjoyable gameplay and creative story creation.

Planetarian Starmap at a glance

Orbital phrase

• 8 playable narratives/storylines
• Planetary mode and Scenario mode
• Shape and mint your unique planet on Zora, and share it on Farcaster with your friends
• UGC narrative creation guidebook & community setup

Escape phrase

• Planet cosmetics
• Interplanetary improvements, expanded multiplayer interactions
• 15+ unique narratives spanning the International, Global, and Planetarian Eras
• Various futuristic topics including AGIs, Longevity, a utopian global onchain economy, a future controlled by centralized mega-corporations, etc.
• An in-game AI Agent (Nounii) providing knowledgeable and engaging interactions and companionship

Interstellar phrase

• More in-depth philosophical storylines
• More interactions, features, and cosmetic options for planets
• Robust UGC functionalities: A community UGC system and editors allowing explorers and storytellers to not only share their onchain stories, narratives, and scenarios, but also experience those from the community. Storytellers can set up gated experiences for more exclusive content.
• Serves as a strategic gateway for various onchain entities, including L1 and L2 ecosystems, protocols, DApps, and brands, to establish their presence.
• Functions as an open-source narrative medium and tutorial/sandbox to represent ecosystem culture, mechanisms, and vision, translating complex onchain concepts into engaging experiences.

Challenges we ran into

Project Management

We had several ideas to work with. We started with a simple educational game, people come and play and learn all the things about onchainomics and onchain society, but later we found out that it was too boring and would not scale.
We pivoted to doing a real game, since we all are die-hard gamers. We wanted to resemble what Fallout: New Vegas used to be, the narratives.
Base, or the onchain ecosystem in a whole, need narratives to be acknowledged more often by people.
But the system is not so easy to build, and many new ideas and features came flowing in, and our PM (Arvin) was overburdened by coding tasks and couldn't keep up with the backlog management.

Coding

The teck stack we chose from the beginning was React, and we later found out after all the dependencies we have used in our project, it was impossible to pivot to NextJS, in order to integrate the MiniKit on Coinbase.
None of us had experience with ThreeJS before, so everything to do with the 3D Modeling part, we were fumbling about it.
We had issues with integrating IPFS services and the Zora coin-it SDK, since Zora used its own IPFS gateway, and the IPFS provider we used was not working with the Zora gateway, and it caused quite a stir for us.
We tried to do some complex 3D effects, but failed due to the complexity and the given time was not quite enough to complete them all. You may find some residual codes and effects that can be triggered in the frontend though.