Blockstars v0.1 (Finance Office)
This post will talk in detail about the methodology behind our first release, The Finance Office. If you just want to see what is in v0.1.0, skip ahead to “What’s in v0.1.0?” section below.
The Blockstars Release Methodology
At Blockstars, we believe in building features the right way, from the ground up, with our community closely involved. In order to do this, we use an iterative design & release process that allows us to move fast so that we can tweak and test features rapidly — all with all our most loyal supporters in mind. What does this mean?
We ship smaller pieces, more often.
The benefit of this approach is that you get to see the progress we make quickly and you get to give feedback early and often. However, the main drawback is that each release includes only a fraction of the bigger picture, and sometimes it is hard to see the grand vision until a more complete whole is there (in other words, some releases may seem underwhelming, but we promise that they all build up to an amazing Blockstars metaverse!).
In our view, though, the benefits of moving quickly far outweigh the drawbacks because this approach is more aligned with our beliefs in operating transparently and building for long-term sustained value.
In order to take this approach, we need to be very thoughtful about where we draw the line between releases. The question we ask ourselves to help us determine this is:
“ What are the smallest end-to-end parts we can ship that provide something valuable for our users?”
We’ll share with you our play-by-play journey to this first release using the above framework.
Wen First Feature?
It all started a few weeks ago, when the leadership team met to discuss and refine our feature requirements for the first few releases. This session was pretty straightforward because we have a crystal-clear high-level roadmap of what we want to build and deliver on in the next year, and beyond (see our whitepaper to learn more). Our main goal for this meeting was to identify precisely what we would include in each of our first few releases and really focus on the core question:
“ What are the smallest end-to-end parts we can ship that provide something valuable for our users?”
Requirements & wireframes
After clearly listing each shippable piece in a bulleted list, we moved on to the next phase — design. We had a few internal PDE (Product, Design & Engineering) discussions to flesh out what the requirements were for each piece. We used wireframes to help guide our discussions, and landed on a user experience that we believe is approachable and easy to understand.
Design polish, build & test
With our wireframes and requirements on hand, we moved on to the polish and build phase. We applied a pretty coat of paint (i.e. Art & Visual Design) to the wireframes and the engineering team began work on building all of the pieces. The entire time this work was happening, the engineering and product teams were constantly sharing live updates and testing every little piece of the flow. This is a part of our iterative development approach — a lot of designing, building, tweaking & testing all happening in parallel.
Time to 🚢!
Once everything is complete, tested & QA’d, and we have verified that the build is stable, we are ready to share with our community.
Which brings us to today! v0.1.0 is live to the world!
What’s in v0.1.0?
Our first version includes a lot of building blocks to get the game stood up, but the three main pieces that you will want to know are…
(1) The game website (app.blockstars.gg) is now live!
The “plumbing” required to run a blockchain game, on the web, through a browser, has been laid, and you can now access the game website through app.blockstars.gg, which is going to be the home of the Blockstars game going forward. As we add new gameplay features, they will all show up at app.blockstars.gg.
(2) You can now connect your Solana wallet to Blockstars!
Connect any one of the seven most popular Solana wallets to Blockstars. A pre-requisite for alpha gameplay is ownership of at least one Blockstars NFT held in a compatible Solana wallet — this feature enables users to connect their wallets to the game in order to view their $ROL balance in the Blockstars User Interface (UI). One of the very next upcoming features is the ability to view the Blockstars themselves (and their unique gameplay stats & attributes!) through the Blockstars UI, and this wallet feature lays the groundwork for that as well.
(3) You can now track your $ROL Balance!
Instantly view your $ROL totals for the last week, see the changes day-to-day and hour-to-hour, and zoom in on any specific transaction. You will be able to see each transaction logged & categorized, with links directly to Solscan for even more detail. Every great management simulation game needs a great finance office, and this is the foundation for the Blockstars Finance Office, which will be your entry point into the finances of your music management empire.
The last thing we want to mention is that we treat the way we work and communicate with each other like the products we build! We are always tweaking our internal processes and testing different ways of working together to have the most collaborative and creative culture possible. These processes we’ve mentioned today are working for us at this early stage and with our current team and size — and needless to say, all of this will evolve as our team grows and our products evolve as well.
Join Us!
This is just a teaser of what we are up to! If you are intrigued by Blockstars, be sure to read much, much more about the game design, tokenomics and development roadmap in our whitepaper, come and chat with other community members in our Discord and follow us on Twitter. If you want to join the team, check out our job openings here. We will also be posting news about upcoming features, roadmap progress & important events regularly right here, on our blog.
Sherrie Chen | Chief Product Officer | Blockstars
