Astra: Play-to-wear Luxury Fashion

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Astra Environment
Astra Environment

Inspiration

With the metaverse trending, virtual worlds are all the rave. However, even as 45% of gamers are ladies there isn't a virtual world created with games designed to entertain and onboard ladies into the metaverse. Ladies love fashion, so what if we could create a new fashion experience with gaming, crypto and real life rewards. This would onboard a new demographic into the metaverse through a blockchain gaming play-to-earn concept we call play-to-wear, powered by Solana.

What is Astra

A virtual world on the blockchain for fashion games where players can compete to win real luxury fashion in real life, earn tokens in-game while playing and spend these tokens on NFT clothes for their avatar. From our research the reason why a lot of ladies didn't play games like Fortnite and call of duty was violence. We came up with a fun and innovative game that is non-lethal and has a true incentive for ladies to play. Long term we plan on expanding into a virtual world with different use cases other than gaming such as real-life shopping, 3D clubhouse conversations and web3 classes.

How we built it

We received a grant from Epic Games creators of Fortnite and built a virtual environment, with clothes and avatars on Unreal Engine. We then worked with Stardust to deploy v1 on Solana. We went with Solana, a blockchain that is not environmentally degrading as we plan to make fast fashion slower through gaming, by pairing nft outfits bought in-game with real-life clothes long term. We also want to introduce virtual commerce and this is also key for the transactions we want to be carried out in Astra long term.

Challenges we ran into

Clothing customisation The fundamental truth is that clothing needs to be a skeletal mesh in order to work as a separate component on any given avatar. The problem we were facing was the game engine stating that the skeleton for the clothing models we imported did not match the skeleton for the avatars we were importing them for. This is still a current issue that still needs resolving.

Multiplayer Building any game is quite challenging but building a multiplayer game is even more challenging. We couldn’t just create mechanics that looked great and forget about them, we had to give a lot of thought to event and variable replication; this is the way events are handled on the server and client machines. More often than not, events just didn’t work and it was down to the way they were being called.

Deployment
Cloud streaming is a viable way to share project experiences. This is typically done via a web page. We had no issue pixel streaming the game across the internet. The issue we have is adding multiplayer to that streaming pipeline. It’s not natively supported. This is still a current issue that still needs resolving.

External API calls The game engine we used supports PHP through a plugin it has. The challenge was making 2 different languages communicate with each other. PHP and Python. This was a “learn on the job” sort of approach which was extremely time-consuming as we've never done anything like it before. We managed to get PHP to talk to Python but didn’t have time to find out how to get it working the other way around.

All of these can be improved on with funding from Solana, and other early-stage investors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting over 1k sign-ups on the first weekend of the launch on social media, a community of 526 on Telegram and also getting the multiplayer version to work after a lot of debugging.

What we learned

That the metaverse won't come until we figure out how to scale accessibility to games like ours. If we want users to experience games with life-like avatars, there has to be more investment into cloud gaming infrastructure and tools like Stardust that demystify blockchain development to game developers.

What's next for Astra: A Virtual world for fashion games & NFTs.

We are now speaking to investors and also hoping to get support from Solana as we have a waiting list and a lot of people excited to play the game we are building.

Built With

solana
stardust
unreal-engine

Submitted to

IGNITION | A Global Solana Hackathon

Created by

As the Cloud Engineer, my responsibilities involved deploying and documenting the entire cloud deployment. Specifically, I monitored, and conducted weekly maintenance tasks, which included performing patches, and creating new AMIs, for the Perforce server hosted on EC2, to ensure resiliency and disaster recovery. This server played a vital role in supporting the game developers. Additionally, I implemented a Client VPN to secure access to the server. The experience gained during this period was undeniably a valuable learning opportunity.

Charles Uneze
As CEO and Metaverse Design Lead, I did ux research interviewing about 54 people to design the game/metaverse concept. I then worked on the light paper, tokenomics, business model, recruited talented teammates and also project managed the team towards building the mvp of Astra.

Delzerinle
I worked as a Virtual environment architect for Thrill digital, where I created 3D experiences with technology for brands and consumers. I have designed and modelled 3D retail spaces to be explored through virtual reality for consumers to purchase clothing items. I have led an incredible team of designers to create the Astra gaming environment.

Adekunbi Ajai
As CDO, I worked on the branding and art direction of the project, from visual rollout to communication materials, logos, typography, colors and overall visual aesthetics.

Okeowo Adeniyi
Niyi Okeowo is a Brand Specialist, Art Director and accomplished Photographer based in Lagos, Nigeria.
Thrill Digital is a web3 studio building the future of virtual experiences in the metaverse.

Astra Verse
As lead developer and CTO, I worked on the development side of things. This ranged from animation scripting to gameplay interactions both local and networked. I also covered some events outside the game via API calls which helped communicate with a backend system.

Luke Jeffers