Porting of Dark Forest on Harmony

Funding Proposals Grants
1

Name of Project

Dark Forest Port

Proposal overview

The proposal is in response to the Q1 action items of zkDAO – Succinct, Private, Fair for porting Dark Forest to Harmony and is made by the Wow Labz team.

The project will focus on bringing the Dark Forest Game to the Harmony Ecosystem, providing it with a sound, decentralized, incomplete information game. The project will implement the ZK Circuits, Smart Contracts, and Client for the game.

The Client and the Smart Contracts will provide an identical game experience to the consumers as available on xDAI.

Development roadmap

The project consists of 3 key deliverables:

  1. ZK Circuits
  2. Smart Contracts
  3. Game Client

Following the key deliverables, the project consists of 3 Milestones + 1 Optional Milestone, described in the following sections:

Proposal ask & Development overview/Metrics for success

  • Total Estimated Duration: 9.5 weeks
  • Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 2.6
  • Total Costs: 83,200 USD

Milestone 1

  • Estimated duration: 4 weeks
  • FTE: 2
  • Costs: 25,600 USD

The main deliverable for this milestone is the ZK Circuits that are used in the game to:

  • Initializing a player into the universe
  • Initiating a move between two planets
  • Broadcasting/revealing the coordinates of a planet

Deliverables

Number Deliverables Specifications
0a License Apache 2.0
0b Documentation We will provide both inline documentation of the code and separate Developer Documentation that can help other developers and teams contribute to the project.
0c Testing guide A complete testing guide for testing the ZK circuits will be provided, resulting in a better Developer Experience for developers and teams.
1 Init module Initializing a player into the universe
2 Move module Proof for initiating a move between two planets
3 Reveal module Proof for broadcasting/revealing the coordinates of a planet.
4 Biomebase module Proof that a planet has a given biomebase, which in combination with the planet’s spacetype will specify the planet’s biome.

Milestone 2

  • Estimated duration: 2 weeks
  • FTE: 2
  • Costs: 12,800 USD

The main deliverable for this milestone is the Smart Contracts used in the game to do all the state transitions happening in the game.

Deliverables

Number Deliverables Specifications
0a License Apache 2.0
0b Documentation We will provide both inline documentation of the code and separate Developer Documentation that can help other developers and teams contribute to the project.
0c Testing guide A complete testing guide for testing the Smart Contracts will be provided, this will result in a better Developer Experience for developers and teams.
1 Smart contract libraries Solidity Libraries that will be consumed by the core smart contracts
2 Core smart contracts Core Smart Contracts to do all the necessary game state transitions.
3 Deployment scripts Scripts to deploy the project to the Harmony main chain
4 Subgraphs Subgraphs for the game to record and index the associated critical data.

Milestone 3

  • Estimated duration: 3.5 weeks
  • FTE: 4
  • Costs: 44,800 USD

The main deliverable for this milestone is the game client that the end-user will use to interact with the game on top of the game smart contracts. This is the last stage of our project, and after the completion of the milestone, we will have the game ready for release on Harmony.

Deliverables

Number Deliverables Specifications
0a License Apache 2.0
0b Documentation We will provide both inline documentation of the code and separate Developer Documentation that can help other developers and teams contribute to the project.
0c Testing guide A complete testing guide for testing the game client will be provided, this will result in a better Developer Experience for developers and teams.
1 Implementation of game UI layer Implementation of the UI Layer of the game that end users will interact with.
2 Smart contract integration Integration of the UI Layer with the game smart contracts.

Milestone 4 (optional)

  • Estimated duration: 3.5 weeks
  • FTE: 2
  • Costs: 22,400 USD

Milestone 4 is an optional milestone where we plan to upgrade the gaming experience on the client. The goal for the milestone will be to deliver a better UI layer for the game to deliver a smoother and better gaming experience to the end-users.

The following component upgrades will be provided to the client:

  • Response time
  • Graphics
  • Rendering
  • Key management for end-users
  • Accessibility

The optional Milestone is a milestone that we can deliver if the Harmony protocol is interested in pursuing it. We think this can provide a better experience for users playing the game on the Harmony ecosystem.

Deliverables

Number Deliverables Specifications
0a License Apache 2.0
0b Documentation We will provide both inline documentation of the code and separate Developer Documentation that can help other developers and teams contribute to the project.
0c Testing guide A complete testing guide for testing the game client will be provided, this will result in a better Developer Experience for developers and teams.
1 Implementation of game UI layer Implementation of the UI Layer of the game that end users will interact with.
2 Smart contract integration Integration of the UI Layer with the game smart contracts.

Team

Team members

  • Amit Singh (Product Manager)
  • Roshit Omanakuttan (Technical Architect)
  • Varun Gyanchandani (Backend Lead)
  • Aditya Yadav (ZK Research Lead)
  • Harsh Bajpai (Solidity Developer)
  • Bharath Kumar (Tester)

Contact

Team’s experience

The game is being built by the team at Wow Labz. Wow Labz is one of India’s leading turnkey product development firms. The team has previously built a decentralized storage protocol called Lake Network - Link shared in comments in addition to multiple dApps on Ethereum, Stellar, EOS, and Hyperledger.

A list of centralized apps published can be found here which includes products built for Fortune 500 companies.

In addition to this the team has also made open source contributions receiving grants from Web3 Foundation for building a decentralized marketplace.

Team code repos

Team LinkedIn profiles

2

Thanks for your proposal, it has been assigned and the team will review and respond shortly :blue_heart:

3

Thank you, @Mattyontap for your response!
Really excited and looking forward to hearing from you and the team!

4

Really appreciate your team reaching out to us here. Dark Forest is a very interesting concept using ZK Circuits applied into a game.

However, instead of a Port grant, this proposal fits best to the Launch grant based on the guidelines at Apply for Grants or DAO

Applications of each launch must have prototyped a feature-full product. Harmony helps incubate these founding teams with product development, fundraising, and talent recruit.
We recommend a $50K equity-free contribution each:

$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet,
$10K after forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs,
$10K after launching on our mainnet with audit,
$10K after 1K daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion),
$10K after 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process).

Moreover, we recommend a 5-out-9 multisig account on Gnosis Safe with 3 governors from the project team, 3 governors from the project community, and 3 governors from Harmony DAOs – namely, ONEcommunityDAO, ONEdeveloperDAO, ONEincubatorDAO.

Read about our Harmony Ventures Network program if you are seeking to raise capital.

Can we agree to the above terms?

1 Like
5

Hello @Jacksteroo

Thank you for your response!

We believe this is a port grant reason being it was mentioned in this article (zkDAO – Succinct, Private, Fair)

Here is a snippet of the article:

image
image923×271 41.2 KB

We also think porting a game like DF would take a lot of effort, so a $50k fund won’t suffice; you can check our milestone breakdown for more details.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
6

@Jacksteroo I will say, @lij made me aware of this game a while back. It is quite well established within other ecosystems, and I think we would be very fortunate to have the team building here.

On a sidenote, @martindoc ,please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (definalfantasy) or Discord (Flu#3017)…
I would love to speak to you about Harmony/Gaming in general. Big fan of what your team has accomplished.

1 Like
7

We’ll circle back with you soon and bring @hakwan into the conversation

1 Like
8

@martindoc can you elaborate on

  1. what other ZK-related products has the team been working on?
  2. Dark Forest is an attractive use case, but why should the Harmony community bank on your team to build this?
  3. what other projects has WowLabz worked on?
  4. I see the CEO, Amit Singh, is part time, this is of some concern
  5. the GitHub submissions are in substrate (polkadot-js), any examples in solidity?
9

Hello @Jacksteroo @hakwan

Apologies for the delay, please find my response below:

  1. What other ZK-related products has the team been working on?
  • Our Research team at Wow Labz is working on a transaction mixer for Ethereum based chains that can bring anonymity to these chains and can help stop tracking of accounts via methods like chain analysis. Our solution will work without the requirement of any 3rd party to generate a trusted setup as in case of existing mixers leveraging ZK SNARKs. We are suggesting using STARKs to bring non-interactive proof generation and verification and a completely Trustless transaction mixer to Ethereum based chains.
  • We are developing Zero Knowledge Rollups and Virtual Machines using ZK-Snarks and ZK-Starks. And Self Sovereign Identities for Web3. We are integrating Virtual Machines in Substrate Pallets which can generate proofs of any program executed inside them. The proof can then be sent to a Smart Contract on the main chain which can verify the proof and store the state data.
  • Not directly relevant, but we are also developing a workshop for ZKP’s using ZK-Snarks, ZK-Starks and Bulletproofs covering - core concepts, mathematics, implementations, and applications.
  1. Dark Forest is an attractive use case, but why should the Harmony community bank on your team to build this?
  • On the technical side, we would be happy to show a work-in-progress demo to give the team at Harmony the confidence that we would be able to successfully port it. Our mid term roadmap involves writing some plugins for Dark Forest and also enhancing its functionality.
  • Beyond that, Wow Labz is a reputed company that has consistently been recognised and awarded for its high quality work. The team behind Wow Labz has built some of India’s and Bangalore region’s leading startup, tech, product and design communities. We have been working on Substrate for nearly a year now and have already built a 9,000 member strong Polkadot community and hosted over 15 events in India. We are on a mission to make India a Blockchain superpower and look forward to building a long term partnership with Harmony Community as well.
  1. What other projects Wow Labz has worked on?

Wow Labz has worked on protocols like:

  • The world’s leading decentralized VPN
  • Lake Network - Decentralised Storage - https://lakenetwork.io/,
  • Multiple DApps across multiple chains, some of which are listed later
  • List of centralized applications can be found here
  1. I see the CEO, Amit Singh, is part time, this of some concern
  • Wow Labz is building a layer one protocol called Socialli, while Wow Labz is a Consulting Organization. For various reasons they are two separate legal entities, especially in India it makes more sense to split services and product development. But Amit owns both of them and they are basically one logical organization. And Amit is full time between the two of them and has no conflict due to any other pursuits or interests.
  1. The GitHub submissions are in substrate (polkadot-js), any examples in solidity
  • Kailash - An NFT collection with onchain deployment (testnet)
  • Cheeze DAO - Fork of Olympus DAO (which we did not launch, available on testnet)
  • Trench - A decentralized file sharing product built on Lake Network, on solidity
  • Donera - A decentralized platform that brings together Charities, Donors, Banks and Vendors to create an ecosystem that allows all participants to interact with one another
  • Bloodline - Decentralised application which helps people, earn crypto to donate and at times help skip the line when users need blood.
  • Wow Vaults - A simple DeFi staking vault
  • Data Marketplace - A marketplace of data assets as NFTs
  • MoonRabbit - EVM Bridge: A cross chain EVM bridge with MoonRabbit chain

Barring c, d, e which are old and not functional, we would be happy to get on a call to demo these apps if you so desire.

Do let me know if you have any other questions.

Regards,

1 Like
10

Hello @Jacksteroo & @hakwan

Just want to bump this thread up!
Do let me know if you have any updates for us or questions that we can answer.

Regards,

11

Upon further review and meeting with this team, I have followed up with @jacksteroo internally.

12

I’m curious to know whether the Wow Labz team is the team that built Dark Forest on Ethereum @martindoc ?

13

Hello @Jacksteroo

No, the Wow Labz, team has not built the official Dark Forest Game on Ethereum or in any way related to the only developer (Ivan Chub) who has built the game.

Regards,

14

hey Martindoc -

i wanted to let you know that there is another group which is also trying to port Dark Forest to Harmony - Dark Forest: A Port of DarkForest to Harmony Ecosystem

it would be a bit of a waste of time for both groups to be competing for this. not sure what’s the best way to resolve this.

perhaps i can let you guys communicate directly about this? apparently they already have a good chunk of it done, on testnet.

h

15

Hello @hakwan

We have also deployed the game locally to an EVM chain, played it and can verify that our port was fully functional. Can also share a demo if required.

Regards,
Martindoc

16

Curious to know where you are on this.

Please do.

17

Please name the Top 3 examples of the most successful projects your team has ever completed and deployed on Mainnet, including the traction metrics, total volume per day, user base (wallets vs. followers)

1 Like
18

Since we didn’t receive any interest from the Harmony team we stopped working on the project. But we can still give you a demo of the game since we deployed it locally on an EVM chain.

If you want to see a demo we can schedule a call (Zoom/ Meets/ BraveTalk) let me know if you are interested? Will take the conversation over dms

We also have a brief documentation written on our learnings which can be found below:

19

Due to the confidential nature of the projects, we won’t be able to share the names and exact details but here is an overview:

Here are the top 3:

  1. Decentralised VPN - 200k+ Installs of the Android App.
  2. Created DeFi Infrastructure Layer for Cosmos Ecosystem.
  3. Decentralised Storage protocol.

Both 2 and 3 have tens of thousands of users.