Announcing Our Hackathon Winners

Authored by Timothy Hao Chi Ho

Hack with ChainSafe Gaming's web3.unity SDK and get rewarded for buidling blockchain NFT games!

With the bear market in full bloom, it's heartening to see the blockchain gaming community carry on hacking, building, and pioneering. This fall season has been full of hackathons and community calls and is good evidence of the gaming community's ceaseless #ShipItMentality. For our part, ChainSafe Gaming has been keen on keeping the buidling going, so we've been incentivizing hackers to ideate and build with web3.unity by offering cash bounties. 👀

The requirement? Show us your best ideas for integrating your web3 Unity game with our new marketplace prefab (check out our NFT Minting And Marketplace For web3.unity announcement to learn more).

We already know the sort of capabilities our marketplace prefab could potentially unlock. Imagine a fully composable, cross-game, and cross-ecosystem World of Warcraft-style NFT Auction House that can be integrated into all Unity<->blockchain games. Of course, that's simply one view, and there are plenty more web3-native ideas that can be implemented - ones even we haven't thought of yet! To that end, we wanted to challenge our gaming community to cook up their wildest ideas!

Immediately following our last major version release on the Unity SDK, we held a 2-week mini-hackathon with cash prizes up to $2250 USD (or ETH equivalent)! Following that, the ChainSafe familia then showed out in full force in Bogotá, Colombia for the ETHBogota hackathon, where we offered hackers a $2k USD bounty. As we mentioned, we were keen!

Minted, Marketed, Made. Winners of our 2-week mini hack 🏆

Let's first start off with our 2-week mini-hackathon. We kicked it off with our Community Call extravaganza (thank you to ALL our attendees for adding to a superb conversation), which you can view again on our YouTube under Mint, Market, Make ChainSafe Gaming Community Call #5. Hackers had until Oct 12th for submissions, and when the closing bell rang, we were stoked to not only see the number of submissions, but also the quality of them.

Let's take a look:

🥇 Reverie

In 1st place is a Spyro-inspired platforming dragon in the world of Reverie by @0xFirekeeper. Their integration of #web3unity's marketplace prefab allows players to purchase and switch out the dragon's skin as NFTs (on Goerli)! Grats on $1.5k USD!

Play Reverie 🕹

0xFirekeeper, a full-time developer, had a ton of great insights to share with the team after building with web3.unity. Among its many advantages, 0xFirekeeper found the ability to read and write from any contract alongside easy plug & play shorthands to be among the top benefits of using our SDK and the marketplace prefabs. Additionally, one of the main challenges that ChainSafe Gaming helped 0xFirekeeper solve when building their game is - "avoiding JavaScript/Web development and just getting straight into it."

As for what's next for Reverie, 0xFirekeeper will be reusing the code and optimizing it for other projects.

🥈 Forgotten Familiars

In 2nd place is Forgotten Familiars by @Riley_Page_Code, a side-scrolling wizard platformer where you can use #web3unity's marketplace prefab to purchase different familiars with different abilities for your magic-wielding avatar. Cool! Grats on $500 USD! (Submission was made via video but #codeiskleen!)

Riley first learned about ChainSafe in the BlockJam hackathon hosted by Nervos where they won the bounty with Drawing Edge. They have been using our SDK ever since as it's their favourite Unity<->web3 integration.

"As a developer, I've thought of implementing a marketplace within games before, but always dismissed the idea of it due to the difficulties of setting it up. Instead, I relied on sites such as OpenSea. I believe that the ChainSafe Gaming marketplace prefab will create countless opportunities for developers and is an amazing tool to have."

As for the next steps, Riley will continue their web3 gaming development journey by participating in hackathons to continue upskilling and winning prizes.

🥉 The Auction House

Last but not least, in 3rd place is Auction House by @superfastgamez, an earnest attempt to integrate the ChainSafe Gaming NFT Marketplace (http://marketplace.chainsafe.io) into a play area. Grats on $250 USD!

Play The Auction House 🕹

Congratulations to all the winners! We hope that the cash prize bounty will incentivize you all to continue working on your game, or keep hacking with web3.unity in the future!

Giving all the papaya at ETHBogota 🇨🇴

In the midst of the 2-week mini-hack, the ChainSafe gang also participated in numbers at ETHBogota and Devcon VI in Colombia! It was exhilarating to experience the energy of the LatAm web3 community gathered together - and the future of the Internet is in good hands. Of course, ChainSafe Gaming had to get in on the ETHBogota hackathon action by offering up our very own bounty and having our PM Alex V on the ground and judging!

To take home the juicy $2k USD reward for hacking with web3.unity's marketplace prefab is the @ZtowerT team! Through sweat and hard work, they managed to build an augmented reality mobile game based on tower defense vs. a horde of zombies 🧟‍♀️! In the game, players can go through the ChainSafe marketplace to buy (and list) tower defenses. What's more, the hack idea had an element of regenerative cryptoeconomics, positing that 50% of in-game NFT purchases go towards funding LatAm scholarships. 💡 The team coins this #Play2Help.

Congratulations again to all winners!

Don't miss our upcoming community call with SKALE: the zero gas fee network ⛽️

Next Wednesday on November 16th, 2022, the ChainSafe Gaming team will be hosting the SKALE network team in our Discord for our 6th community call! You can gain access by registering here.

For those in attendance, commemorative NFTs will be available for minting (gas not covered) on the Avalanche mainnet and tradable from the ChainSafe Marketplace 👀

See you all there!

Give back to the community

Web3.unity is a public good 🌱 . If the SDK has been beneficial for you, consider giving back by spreading the word about ChainSafe, ChainSafe Gaming, and web3.unity adding our brand assets into your Unity web3 game. In return, you could receive some love on our socials, and even get spotlighted in a future blog or on our website!

Welcome to the new era of #web3 gaming

Dive into the code via Github and check out the docs.

Share your work on social media and tag us on Twitter @ChainSafeGaming, @ChainSafeth or on LinkedIn @ ChainSafe Systems with the hashtags #web3unity or #ChainSafeGaming. We love giving shoutouts 👊

About ChainSafe

ChainSafe is a leading blockchain research and development firm specializing in infrastructure solutions for web3. Alongside its contributions to major ecosystems such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin, and more, ChainSafe creates solutions for developers and teams across the web3 space utilizing our expertise in gaming, bridging, NFTs, and decentralized storage. As part of its mission to build innovative products for users and improved tooling for developers, ChainSafe embodies an open source and community-oriented ethos to advance the future of the internet. To learn more, click here.

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