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In this episode, Dallas Johnson discusses the development of Alien Worlds and the opportunities for game developers to contribute to the metaverse. The episode also delves into Dallas's background, his love for music and gaming, and his dedication to creating a community-driven experience.
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Key Topics Covered:
- Decentralized Gaming and Metaverse Development: Alien Worlds provides a platform for new game developers to easily plug into the metaverse system.
- Community-Driven Lore Model: Alien Worlds leverages a large lore model to allow community members to contribute to expanding the game's mythology.
- Innovative Gameplay with NFTs: NFTs in Alien Worlds enhance the game experience by providing on-chain ownership and attributes for unique in-game assets.
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Episode Highlights:
- "Alien Worlds, with over 9.3 million users, is a decentralized metaverse where players explore, mine Trillium, collect NFTs, and participate in governance spanning Ethereum, WAX, and BNB blockchains." - (00:01:33-00:01:43)
- "We've got something in the pipeline which allows competitions or games to be more easily plugged in." - (00:27:37-00:27:58)
For the full transcript, see further below.
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About Our Guest:
Bio: Dallas Johnson is a prominent figure in the blockchain gaming industry, currently serving as the Chief Engineer at Dacoco, the company behind the decentralized metaverse game, Alien Worlds. With a robust background in iOS development and fintech, Dallas has been instrumental in shaping the user experience within the blockchain space.
- Website: Alien Worlds
- Twitter: @AlienWorlds
- Instagram:@alienworlds.io
- LinkedIn: Dallas Johnson
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Full Episode Transcript:
Dallas Johnson: Hi, this is Dallas Johnson of Alien Worlds. You're tuned in to the Edge of NFT, your ultimate source of groundbreaking insights into decentralized gaming and the metaverse. Keep listening.
Richard Carthon: Hey, Web3 Curious listeners, stay tuned for today's episode to learn why Alien Worlds is the perfect playground for new game developers and how community members can contribute to the large lore model to help expand the game's mythology. Finally, why today's guest's first childhood purchase is still used in his office today. All this and more at the Edge of Alien Worlds. Cue the intro.
Intro: Welcome to the Edge of NFT, the podcast that brings you the top 1% of Web3 today and what will stand the test of time. We explore the nuts and bolts of the business side and also the human element of how Web3 is changing the way we interact with the things we love. This podcast is for the dreamers, disruptors, and doers who are pumped about this ecosystem and driving where it goes next.
Richard Carthon: Welcome to the Edge of NFT, the podcast created by Jeff Kelly, Ethan Jenny, and Josh Krieger. And it features a variety of top-notch guests and other hosts like myself, Richard Carthon. It's another production of the Edge of Company, a quickly growing media ecosystem empowering the pioneers of Web3 tech and culture, responsible for other groundbreaking endeavors like Outer Edge Innovation Festival in LA and Riyadh. Today's sponsored episode features Dallas Johnson, who's the chief engineer at Dacoco, the primary contributor to Alien Worlds. Dallas is a skilled developer specializing in iOS development, GraphQL, and smart contract development on Antelope blockchain platforms, known for his ability to simplify complex problems. Alien Worlds, with over 9.3 million users, is a decentralized metaverse where players explore, mine Trillium, collect NFTs, and participate in governance spanning Ethereum, WAX, and BNB blockchains. Welcome to the show.
Dallas Johnson: Thanks, Richard. Great to be here.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, excited to have you here. And then for everyone listening, I want to do a couple of callbacks. We've had Alien Worlds on the show earlier this year, back on January 29th. We had a really good conversation. with one of the lead people from the grant side that was putting out if you want to be able to apply to the different programs in the grants, we had Evan Dean, and then we had Matthew with Trillium Quest, who's one of the top game developers for that, and was a grantee from the hubs. And then back on February 16th, they were also where we talked to the CMO, Kevin Rose and Shugum Kerr, who is one of the leading developers at Battlefleet Armageddon. So I want to do a couple of those callbacks before we dive into this conversation today with Dallas. Dallas, excited to have Alien Worlds back on the show again. And there's been a lot of exciting developments. One of them, I think, that you can talk about is being able to bring one of the games to the iPhone.
Dallas Johnson: Yeah, we're really excited that Battlefleet Armageddon, or we've had several projects that have been built out over the last few months that plug into our metaverse system, plug into the smart contracts and our APIs and so forth. But yeah, well, one of them in particular that was a bit of a milestone was to see something actually accepted and published on the app stores for Google and for Apple, and that's Battlefleet Armageddon. So that's great. Yeah, it's good to break out of that blockchain and just that web space and start reaching across to native mobile experiences as well. Yeah, we've got lots of a few other games that have started plugging in. and really making use of the tools we've been building over the last couple of years.
Richard Carthon: Well, this is extremely exciting. You know, you go from conversation into seeing the application and being able to get even more people on here. But I want to focus on you for a second around your just impressive background. You come from traditional gaming, found your way in the blockchain. Kind of walk us through that process. Like, how did you even get into this world?
Dallas Johnson: OK, my background, I worked in fintech for quite a while and did iOS development in the UK, in London for quite a few years and hopped around various fintechs and banks and so forth there. I was very, very curious about this area of blockchain as it was just starting to arise and smart contracts came back in, I guess around 2018, 19 sort of areas. And being an iOS developer, I cared a lot about very fluid user experiences. And because at the time every iPhone was very focused on having that quick response in your hand where everything reacted quickly, you only had 30 seconds or so before a user would lose interest and vague out and not be interested in whatever app you've built. And then when I saw blockchains and smart contracts come along, I thought, this is amazing. You've got this decentralized system where value can be transferred from one party to another without any central intermediary. but a lot of the user experience was pretty rough and it's just not a good user experience. So I was interested in that challenge, so I started getting into playing around with smart contract development on the Antelope blockchain technology, which was very fast and provided the ability to do a lot of complex computation inside the smart contract, also being able to update those smart contracts and do a lot of enhanced tables and generations, state store and processing within the smart contracts. And because it was so fast and snappy and had that decentralized aspect, it felt like it was bringing that user experience aspect that I love from iOS development and bringing that into the decentralized security of blockchain. And so that got me interested in the blockchain area.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome. Being able to lock in on that user experience, I've always found it very impressive as far as how the iOS application has been. Also, it makes you make sure that you have something that's sticky and the usability is at the forefront of thought. One of the things that Alien Worlds prides itself in trying to be is a haven for new developers. Can you share why? It's the ideal platform and the resources that you've been able to put together for game development for developers that are coming and building.
Dallas Johnson: Sure. So when you have a metaverse that's combining many different aspects, you've got NFTs, you've got tokens, you've got value, and then you've got games like the mining game, the missions game on BNB, and then these DAOs where you've got decentralized governance all running together and all intertwined and with this interesting web of tokenomics and incentives that are aligning. We were proud of what we built and how it can work and the capabilities of what you can do with that. And when we built it, we thought, oh, all these bits the community is going to be able to plug into because all the smart contracts are all on chain and all decentralized, so everyone can get involved. What we realized is that there's still quite a high barrier to entry with those things. And it's more complex for people to get on board and get involved. And so over the past few months or the last year or so, while we've had all the DAOs and the games and different capabilities all on chain, what we've really focused on is trying to build some hooks and levers as like plug-ins into those mechanisms so that The community and the community of builders who have a wide variety of skills have opportunities to be able to plug in them into a much easier way than really having to ramp up and write very complicated smart contracts or have to reverse engineer everything to be able to plug into that. So some of the tools we've done specifically to make that happen is we've added some what we call hooks into the mining smart contracts and into the user point system. And that allows third party game developers to be able to participate in some of the tokenized incentives in our native game without having to build all these games from scratch. They can just use their game making skills from non-blockchain environments and bring them in and just have a small touch point into the blockchain environment. So it allows them to bridge from Web 2 games, shall we say, into the Web 3 games without having to get their hands too dirty into the Web 3 space.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, that's awesome that you're able to build an architecture that helps them be able to come in, plug and play, and move quickly. One of the frustrations that I've heard from other game developers is coming and basically having to start from scratch of relearning certain tools and making it all work seamlessly, especially, like you said, when you're working with metaverses and dials and everything else and having everything move seamlessly. framework for these devs to be able to come in and move fast is definitely an added bonus. But to do that, you also want to be able to create a very strong community where, as developers are creating things, that they also can help each other with being able to create all of these amplifications and tools for the games and for the NFTs that they're creating and have everything work. Seamlessly. So what drove that governance through like the G hubs and how did it continue to advance the development for the player experience?
Dallas Johnson: Yeah, so, so we've got the DAOs operating. So within Alien Worlds, there's six planets that each operate independently as their own independent DAO. And they're all voted in through a token weighted voting. a whole complicated mechanism that goes into that, which I won't bother going into for now, but certainly can find it all on the Alien Worlds website. So that's created these six individual communities that operate within the whole umbrella metaverse of Alien Worlds. So there's the big community, then there's six communities. They all work together or compete or collaborate on a mixture of things, depending on what topic they're encountering at the time. However, because there are a lot of the people that got into those, they have a large range of experience in managing projects or managing budgets of funds or getting things built and getting things across, like from an idea or a spark of an idea all the way through to something that can be deployed to the app store or live. So there's a lot of moving parts and project management that has to happen along the way. So what we've done is we've tried to take the best of the Dow communities and the governance and the enthusiasm there and combine that with some of our project management skills and resources. And so we've got galactic hubs, which sit on the side of Alien Worlds as a funding mechanism and as a sort of a mentoring and coaching mechanism to help nurture projects and seeds of projects from ideas to various milestones. And of course, with funding and all the way through to fruition and installing and plugging into our system. And then we build in and provide ongoing mechanisms to fund these games in a sustainable way through various inflation mechanisms or some of the circular staking and tokenomic mechanisms throughout the metaverse.
Richard Carthon: I like it. And I've always found that like you have this enormous community and then like these sub communities, and they all are finding ways to play nice and also build games within each of their own respective places. Can you speak to any of some of the grantees that have come out and some of the games that you've kind of been observing from a distance? A quick word from our sponsors who's ready to navigate the cutting edge of tomorrow's legal landscape. Because at Zuber Lawler, they're not just attorneys, they're visionaries. With expertise in emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and the metaverse, they're paving the way for you to seize the future. For mergers and acquisitions to IP, their selective team delivers strategic solutions tailored to the ever-changing world of technology. Join us at Zuber Lawler, where the future meets the law at ZuberLawler.com. Back to the episode.
Dallas Johnson: Yeah, sure. So from my perspective, I spent a lot of time down in the deep, dark engine room of the smart contracts and the plug-in mechanisms that work there. So I don't see as much of the fancy UI and the game mechanics that some of these amazing, talented builders are making out there in the community. But we see things like Battlefleet, Armageddon, we've got Milky Way Miner, Mercenary Battlegrounds, Nova War, Battledome, Avian Avatars, Mission Control, and then KVN World, which is all of these plug in to a different extent into our system. One particular one that I see more of would be mission control, for example, because that plugs directly into our smart contracts and is like an extra appendage to the mining game that we have. And so we built our mining game, which has a fair bit of complexity into it, but the mission control team, they've come along and plugged into our mining game and created a whole different mining UI experience which enhances and makes the mining experience much more optimal and optimized for the community. That's still using the same smart contracts we run, but it's a completely different UI and plugs in in a really intimate way, so to speak, into our smart contract mechanics.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome. You have so many games being built, and I kind of want to stay on the subject around smart contracts. And of course, within smart contracts, you have NFTs. And NFTs are uniquely enhancing the game experience in Alien Worlds. So what is helping to set them apart compared to some of the traditional in-game assets that you've seen from other games that were just built purely on iOS?
Dallas Johnson: Sure. So when, and I think this, this narrative has been shared a lot about what sets NFTs apart. Because they're on-chain assets, anyone who owns an NFT can have complete ownership of it. And the general idea is that you own that NFT and you can take that NFT wherever you want to go and use it in this game or that game or any other use case. And then you can sell it on a decentralized market or decks of your choosing, and there's real market price discovery out there. And so it enables a decoupling from the creator and the founder of those assets, which might be stuck in an otherwise iOS game or whichever game platform you're talking about. With NFTs, they allow them to solve and they're allowed to be decoupled from that experience. Our NFTs take that a step further and all the attributes for our NFTs are stored on a chain. So they're readable by all the smart contracts without having to read them back in through IPFS loading or rely on a centralized API provided by someone else. So the advantages of that is that while we use the attributes in our game for our smart contracts to determine how much mining rewards or how much of a delay you get for particular mining events or whatever it might be for, that capability is equally publicly available for everyone else on the blockchain to be able to read and basically they can read them and We also have the ability to, on a case-by-case basis, be able to append and write and modify some things to those NFTs as well, to really extend the capabilities of them.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, so I want to kind of dive into that even deeper, because by creating NFTs in that fashion, it's fostering deeper player engagement innovation within the game development. How have you seen your developers kind of take advantage of that opportunity and make some really cool adjustments?
Dallas Johnson: Well, they're taking those NFTs. I guess I don't have any good examples because I'm right down, like I said, looking at the deeper mechanics of how they're doing it. or like the sort of the ones and zeros, not quite literally that, but making sure the Luare works in. But I've seen cases where these NFTs are being used and they're being used, well, quite simply, they're being used in other games. So if it's a mining tool, they're being used. to be game pieces in those other games, as if they were mining tools in ours, and they're just reading the assets that way. And then some of the NFTs we've created, which had just generic attributes, such as a, just the rarity power or a, just like, unlike a mining drill, which has a particular strength or a delay, which is sort of unambiguous to what it can be used for. If you have more abstract terms, which is just value one or value two or value three, then that can just be thrown out there into the metaverse. And then it's up to the games to determine how those attributes are applied and how you interpret each of those attributes and use them in those third party games. So we've tried to do a bit of a mixture of prescriptive attributes, what they're for, and then also abstract attributes to allow the games to decide how they want to interpret those attributes for their own games, whatever they come up with.
Richard Carthon: Right. That's cool. I mean, but it kind of adds this new layer of complexity. Right. And one of the challenges and talk tracks around like, you know, Web3 gaming is the incentive mechanics that can be put in place by having some of this ownership and having the ability to have markets, et cetera. So as the CTO, how do you balance the complexity of the Web3 incentives, but still delivering a quality gameplay?
Dallas Johnson: I think a lot of it is, we do our best to plan ahead and say, if we introduce these user points mechanics, for example, when you mine, you get mining rewards, but you also get shards. We used to call them user points, but yeah, we call them shards, so I use the old name. Shards can then be used to exchange for NFTs. And we've looked at the dynamics of how popular some of these tools are used in the mining game. And then we've had to then weigh up how many shards you need to relinquish in order to be given these NFTs. And that's just one example, sort of like a market discovery for that sort of price of shards. But then there's some other things that we're looking to introduce, such as on one hand, you've got your Trillium tokens, which you can stake into the DAO game to give you voting power to to give you a significant voice or vote in the custodians you want to govern one of the planets. But you can also take that Trillium and stake it onto the missions game over on the Binance chain. And then you get NFTs from the missions game over there and also staking rewards from a pot there. So we've got these a few different mechanisms where you can stake your Trillium, put it here and you get this functionality or put it over here and you might get this other functionality. a new one we've got coming up soon would be, we're bringing in a system where you can create new law that actually changes the narrative and the whole background story and the future story of what is alien worlds and going into the future narrative of the races, the different aliens, the different creatures and the tools and events that have happened in the past or could happen in the future. And we're opening this up to the community to be able to actually build that themselves. But in order to have a say on what goes in and what gets contributed into the actual canon of law, you need to be able to stake some of your trillium, which gives you vote power. And then that gives you a voice and changes the course of changing the future of adding worlds. And yeah,
Richard Carthon: Yeah, that part's awesome. And we spent a good amount of time around just the lore of alien worlds and how a lot of it's going to be impacted by the community and participation and how they use these different gaming mechanics that you just described. And so I just want to spend a moment to go a little bit further in that and to like, what is the role of like large lore model playing, maintaining, expanding the game's mythology and making sure that it continues to stay community driven versus the core team driving where the narrative goes next.
Dallas Johnson: Sure, yeah. Yeah, it's a really exciting time for all this to all come to a head. So we've seen the LLMs come out, so a large language model or in our case a large law model, we can think of it that way. We already have a body of law which is accumulated and being created and that's, we see that to be like the starting point, day one. like the original story of Star Wars or Star Trek, whatever it is, it starts from there and then you think forward to all the things that could come in the future and how that story manifests and changes along the way. So by opening this up to the community to be able to make decisions on where things could go or how things could change, that's great. But it sort of means they can change anything. They could sort of change the laws of physics where things used to go down, now all of a sudden they go up. And so by taking advantage of the LLM technology, we can load our existing law into LLMs. And then the community, when they come along, and they want to make changes or proposals or whatever it might be, evolutions in the law story, Rather than just coming out and coming up with some crazy idea out of nowhere that doesn't make sense or doesn't fit into the canon of the existing law, they can interact with the LLM model. and have a conversation with it, interact with it, ask questions about it, ask questions about history, and get some answers back from that, which gives them a real guiding light as to how they can suggest changes to the community to change the law. And then finally, because we have a focus on community, we want to leave that up to the community to actually decide what changes they want to allow to be changed into the law. It's not just like AI just going wild, it's AI making suggestions and then the humans and the community come together and decide what they like to take it forward.
Richard Carthon: It's awesome. It's prompt technology where, like you said, instead of someone going crazy and just completely making up down, you can ask creative questions, curious questions, and then understand more of what's already been created and then make adjustments around how it could be implemented in a way that's not completely destructive, but adds on, but also can add some flavor in there too. And having those LLMs that AI that you can speak with in there, I think is a really cool value add. But one of the things as technology is continuing to advance quickly with AI and other things, metaverse technology is improving with things like the Apple Vision Pro. And I believe we're going to see even more AR, VR headsets that become available to your everyday consumer and are able to, I guess, get us closer to Ready Player One. So, like, how do you see advancements in those types of technologies being able to continue the innovations that you see in the player experience in Alien Worlds?
Dallas Johnson: Yes, it's really exciting to see what's coming out from Meta and Apple with their different AI technologies. It's hard to know exactly which way it's going to go or if it's going to go multiple ways at the same time. The part of the Metaverse stack that we focus on, we don't have to care about that. We're down at looking at the governance layer, the tokenomics layer, the exchange of value, whether it's through NFTs and tokens, and bringing communities of humans together, mostly, to be able to make decisions, collaborate, fight, compete, whatever it might be. at the building blocks, like the raw tokenomics level and decision-making level. And by taking this approach where we're starting to allow the community to come in and add community-driven games, community-driven AIs, and having those parts available through APIs and smart contracts on-chain, It's pretty exciting to see how the community is going to plug into those. And we could have a Vision Pro UI built by someone in the community, and then a meta UI component built by someone else in the community, and then whoever comes out with a third. User interface, AI interface, whatever it might be, come out with a different interface there, but all of them can plug into the same common core of governance and blockchain technology that works underneath.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, I think, again, y'all are putting so much effort into the infrastructure so that it can be very interoperable going across platforms, going from each DAO planet. Everything is building on itself. And I know that you're very core to that. But as you look out into the rest of this year, maybe looking into next year, a lot of progress has already been made since our very first conversation we had with Alien Worlds at the beginning of the year. what is to come that you are able to share with us?
Dallas Johnson: We've got something in the pipeline which allows competitions or games to be more easily plugged in. So I've already talked about some of those things that allow people to plug their smart contracts in, but we know that there are other developers who are making games who have not even the slightest clue about well, some not even about development. They've got great ideas for games. They could even be playing, you know, a hacky sack in the park or something like that. And so we're creating a platform that allows people to create like a hub of competitions and tournaments and all of those tournaments will be visible altogether. People will be able to come in and join a tournament and they'll get a share of rewards from that tournament and they'll be able to jump into that tournament or jump into that tournament and it's going to be a way for different community members that have very little technical skills to be able to come in and engage in competition making and game creation using our the different resources with our metaverse. That's something that's coming up pretty soon.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, that's spectacular. It's something I wish I had years ago. I had a lot of different concepts for games. It's just a quick answer. Don't like the concept of love. not necessarily the last of us, but the one where it's like, you're trying to figure out who's the one going around and taking out everyone else. Like I back in like 2000 and like 13 had that concept in my brain, but had no idea how to actually build it. And so I think there's a lot of creatives out there that don't necessarily have the technical background to go make it. And to have a resource like this, um, is super valuable. Um, so, um, for people that are trying to be on the lookout for that, when it's ready, Where's the best way to plug in and see those announcements?
Dallas Johnson: Yeah, well if you just in see on adding worlds on it on our website or get into our discord channels and Follow us on X and you're going to see all the the announcements come out as soon as we've got them ready So we just sort of finish up some of the final touches on that. We're bringing in some of the Early community developers who we know we're trying to build things some have a lot of technical experience Some have no real technical experience particularly with blockchain game development at all So we're already in the conversations with them and working closely with them to iterate on our designs of how that system would work. So that when we do have it, we can say, look at this, it works, come on board. And it's already had a pretty good amount of validation of how it should and is going to work.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, if you're out there and you're thinking like, hey, I have a great concept. Obviously, Alien Worlds is a cool place to come in and do that. But you've done a really good job, Dallas, of walking us through all the things that are happening over in the Alien Worlds world. But we want to learn a little bit more about you. And so we're going to do that with our next segment called Edge Quick Hitters. OK. Great. And now for a quick word from our sponsor before we dive into the next segment. Are you ready to take your sports predictions to the next level? Look no further than MainCard.io, the fantasy management platform that's taking the blockchain world by storm. With MainCard, every card is a ticket to excitement. You can predict sport outcomes, trade cards in the marketplace, and challenge opponents in thrilling weekly duels. And don't wait, head to MainCard.io now and start earning rewards with your NFTs, because it pays to be early. And now back to today's episode. All right. Edge quick hitters are a fun and quick way to get to know you a little better. There are 10 questions and we're looking for a short or single few word response. And if you feel the urge to give us a little bit more, you can go for it. Um, are you ready? I think so. All right. What is the first thing you remember purchasing in your life?
Dallas Johnson: A guitar, acoustic guitar. I still got it sitting over in the corner. So it's still something I play in between when I'm compiling code just to keep me sane.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome. What was the first song you learned? You remember?
Dallas Johnson: Um, it was probably a Beatles song, like a three chord, let it be something like that. I don't even know if it's probably something like that.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome. Um, what is the first thing you remember selling in your life?
Dallas Johnson: Um, Another guitar that I bought along the way that wasn't very good.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. What is the most recent thing you purchased?
Dallas Johnson: One of the most recent things was these headphones. Convenient because I can walk around and listen to music or podcasts and still hear what I'm doing as I'm going.
Richard Carthon: That's right. Are those the Treks?
Dallas Johnson: Uh, they're the, the shock open shook ones.
Richard Carthon: Yup. Yeah. I have those there. Yeah. Uh, they're, they're so good. Um, using like the bone density stuff. Yeah.
Dallas Johnson: Yeah. They don't look like they would sound good, but they're actually really good and usable. So I love them.
Richard Carthon: They are, they don't sponsor us, but like for everyone listening out there, like I've had them for years. They're there. They're, they're great. Uh, what would you consider your most prized possession?
Dallas Johnson: My prize, my most prized thing would be my daughter, but I can't say she's my possession. But it's been a lot of time focused just when you're a parent, just like, oh, well, I try to think and focus on what I want, how I want things to be going good for her. So, yeah.
Richard Carthon: Yeah. No, that's still valid. It's awesome. Children in your life are incredible. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical service experience that's currently for sale and money wasn't an issue, what would it be?
Dallas Johnson: I think experiences are some of the most valuable things you can buy and so going on holidays to beautiful sunny places or seeing beautiful parts of the world. With this job I've been fortunate enough to go on a few trips to conferences and I've been really fortunate to see different parts of the world over the last couple of years. But I would certainly think that travel is and experiencing unique places is one of the best things you could purchase.
Richard Carthon: Agreed. If there is a specific place that's been on your mind, you're like, I want to go there.
Dallas Johnson: What's what's next on the list? I've never been to South America, somewhere like Machu Picchu. It just looks so far away from where I am in such a exotic place where you have to hike up through some pretty rough terrain to get to it. But then you get an amazing view at the top to make it worthwhile. So it's not just about getting there. It's about the journey, the difficulty, the rarity, the scarcity of being able to get to it. I think that's what would add a lot of value for me to go there.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, that's an awesome one. That's one that's on my list as well. Awesome. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
Dallas Johnson: I think Curiosity. That would be one of my traits that I'm most proud of, that I love learning new things. I'm curious all the time and spend so much of my day, weekends and nights learning new things and trying to expand my horizons into new areas.
Richard Carthon: That's awesome. And a good one. If you could eliminate one of your personality traits for the next generation, what would it be?
Dallas Johnson: My occasional intolerance for things that I should be more tolerant of.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, very fair. What did you do just before joining us on the podcast?
Dallas Johnson: I said goodnight to my daughter. It's 11 p.m. for me over here. She's in the middle of exams in her last year of school, so I need to sort of say You're doing well. I'm really proud of you. And that's what I did before I got on here.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. And thank you for staying up late with us for this interview. What are you going to be doing right after the podcast?
Dallas Johnson: Well, given I'm in Australia and the rest of the teams all around the world, we're a very distributed team. This is pretty much near the start of my work day. So after I get off this podcast, I'll be checking in with the team. We've got a few things we're building on the tokenized law, smart contracts and competition stuff. Lots of exciting things. Lots of little things we're working on right now, which is pretty exciting. So I'm curious to see how the rest of the team's going, how I can help them, and how we can progress things out and provide more tools to the community.
Richard Carthon: Excellent. One of the beautiful things about being in Web 3, a lot of fully distributed teams and getting to work on all kinds of time zones. So really cool. We always like to wrap up with a couple of bonus questions. And I have two, because you like two things that I like, which is music, playing the guitar, and also gaming. So first, we'll start with music. What is, since you play the guitar, what type of music do you like to play? And what's your, I guess, favorite um, guitarists that you try to like, I guess, emulate when you play.
Dallas Johnson: Um, I play acoustic guitar, so I like to play stuff that I can sort of play easily, strum along to maybe try and sing too. Um, and as far as artists, there's not a lot of, um, I guess, modern stuff that's, um, has really got me hooked in. Uh, so things like, Jeff Buckley, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, like really old, like old man type music, I guess, but old stuff, old goodies and their classics. Yeah.
Richard Carthon: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. And then I guess on the gaming side, um, what is your favorite game that you've ever played?
Dallas Johnson: You know, I don't play many games. When I was a kid, I played games. Um, but there were crappy games looking back on it and like just on like Atari 2600 sort of thing, like so bad. But for me, writing code and getting into the technical details is like a game for me. Learning new skills, learning new programming languages, whether it's Rust, C++, Swift, whatever it is, type like JavaScript, all of that stuff, getting in there and solving computational or algorithmic problems is my very embarrassingly nerdy game that I play.
Richard Carthon: No, all good. I guess I'll reframe it because I think this is something that's cool here, which is like if you'd like to solve those complex problems, what was one of the hardest things that you've ever had to solve for like the simplest solution?
Dallas Johnson: As in it ended up being a simple solution or it was.
Richard Carthon: No, like let's say I just wanted to move my mouse a little bit to the left and it just took you like hours or days just to figure out like.
Dallas Johnson: One that comes to mind would be related to how our DAO election system works and inside the planet governance which we run now. In order to get that so that people can vote with their tokens and that the tokens can still be moved around and fluid and also enable vote decay in that voting system and different levels of voting staking that scales up all the different, there's quite a few levers that are pulling all in different directions to try and try to make it fair but also try and make it difficult at the same time. That's probably the most complex thing that comes to mind, but I've got to tell you that the solution wasn't very simple in the end. There's a lot of tricky smart contract stuff, which it's still working. I'm pretty happy with it. And to have all of that running on a blockchain, it's a bit of a challenge, but that's something I'm kind of pretty proud of.
Richard Carthon: Yeah, no, that's awesome. Well, we definitely appreciate that. And thanks for sharing all of that information with us. As we wrap up here, we always like to finish up with a special section called shout out. So obviously, you put in a lot of work to make everything work the way it does in alien worlds. But that doesn't just extend to work. It also extends externally to other parts of your life. So if there's anyone in this moment that you want to shout out, we give you the floor to do that.
Dallas Johnson: Well, I want to shout out to them, there's no single person in our team that I want to single out as much as the global team. So we've got a great team spread all around the world, which all give 110% all the time. And they, we've been so blessed to have such a great team of developers and designers and product managers and support team that really are committed to working all sorts of stupid hours to make things work, to fit with our distributed team. But in addition to that, we've got a really engaged community that cares about making the game better and making the metaverse better. So they're all involved. So they all deserve a shout out. And then, of course, I want to give a shout out to my wife and daughter who support and tolerate me as I work these crazy hours and do some crazy things. So, yeah.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, we appreciate those shout outs. And for everyone that's listening to this, they're like, I want to keep learning more about alien worlds. I want to get more involved. Maybe I want to come build the places that they can go to learn more and become part of the community.
Dallas Johnson: First place, just come to alien worlds.io. Everything links from there. Get into our Discord channel, which is very active. Telegram channels as well for game development developers or development studios that want to plug in and get access to our huge resource of players and also resources that we can help fund your game development. Specifically look at G Hubs or Galactic Hubs which are linked from alienworlds.io and it'd be great to have you partner with us and build and make our metaverse bigger and better.
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, we appreciate all of that. And for, of course, everyone who is listening, we have reached the outer limit of the edge of entity for today. Thank you for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on the Starship. So invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make the journey so much better. How? If you're listening, go to Spotify, iTunes, or Maiko right now, rate us and say something awesome. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, join over 130,000 other followers by hitting the subscribe button and passing this episode on to a friend or two. You can also catch us on Maiko, that's M-Y-C-O dot I-O, where you can watch and earn your time and attention. Lastly, be sure to tune in next week for some more great Web 3 content. Thanks again for sharing this content with us today.
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