An Interview with Enjin community devs - 09/01/2019 The Enjin ecosystem is thriving, not only via official channels like the constant release of new developers engaged with the Enjin EA program, but also through the innovation of general community members of Enjin. Today, it’s a pleasure to chat with three such innovators: k (@another_k), Drew (@BITWIZE), & Village Idiot (@jfkidiot), who are already using the Enjin toolset to both mint their own items, and create an explorer for ERC 1155 collectibles. So without further ado, let’s get the melt down and hear from the developers themselves.

Hi guys, thanks for taking the time out to chat. First of all, and it’s a question I’ve asked all developers to date, what’s your background in gaming and game development?

Drew I've dabbled in little bits of everything todo with programming, from low-level languages like powerpc and x86_64 to c++, python, solidity.. etc. I started making macromedia flash mx games as a kid and grew up playing snes>playstation and everything in between. Gaming for me was mostly ruined from my eventual progress in ps3/ps4 modding, although fun…it made me less keen to play games I know can be cheated…which is partly why I look forward to blockchain games (if done right). I’ve also had experience in running a server side game or two, and tweaking them, but never built one from scratch.

k I haven’t played games for years. 😅 I don’t mean that I don’t play games anymore, just that I no longer played games like I used to years ago. I used to play 8-bit game console: Super Mario, Super Contra, then 16-bit era (Super NES and Sega Mega Drive): Donkey Kong Country, Sonic, followed by PlayStation 1 & 2. Also, Street Fighters in arcades, that’s nostalgic! I think I just revealed how old I am. Nowadays, I play the games on my phone downloaded by my daughter, and visit arcades every now and then with my family to have some good family time. As for game development, I have read some game development books during my free time a few years back, but I haven’t created any games so far. I’m interested to build games (backed by ENJ, of course) in the future if I have time.

Village Idiot Hello, my telegram nickname is Village Idiot and I am a more traditional like developer so I am not game dev per se. That of course does not stop me from loving games and seeing potential in Enjin.

What got you all dabbling in the black arts of Enjin?

k Since Enjin launched the Enjin Beam (the world’s first QR Airdrop System), many people have started trading the items they received from the airdrop. A few Enjin Coin fans have started a trading chat group @erc1155_collectibles. People have been trading in a peer-to-peer fashion all day long. I thought it would be cool to build a marketplace or some telegram bots specifically for ERC-1155 collectibles. I started to dig further into blockchain tech and asked some info from Enjin team. The team was kind to share with me the technical info needed to get started. Since then, I have been busy building stuffs.

Village Idiot I first discovered Enjin , when doing my first noobie research on what is blockchain good for. Many ideas in the space were kinda either boring or had big issues in "communicating" with the real world. Enjin stood out for couple of reasons. They identified a very clear showcase that is interesting and actually makes sense. Also this simple idea of being able to create "digital amiibos" can get very deep, very fast, and the more I thought about the usecases, the more I was interested, almost to the point I was all in ENJ (not financial advice). I hope Enjin team realise that what they created is way bigger than gaming. Games are just a subset of possibilities, not superset.

Drew I love crypto, programing and gaming…and Enjin sdk wasn't soon enough.

I’ve already received a token that you personally minted Drew, it’s very cool how you’ve customised the supply model and details. Is it a hard process? And can you or Village reveal how you’ve achieved your own custom mint?

Drew Whilst getting my first item minted was a bit of a process with quite a few mistakes, now the process is quite simple. The name of the token, the image url description, and extra stats (i.e. rarity) are all stored in .json and if the jsons is on your own server (mine is) you can edit it as you like and changes will reflect.I currently use my ether wallet (MeW) to interact with the contracts. Enjin kindly have testnet contracts available on ropsten, my first mint was done there, then it was just a matter of finding the right contract addresses. K was a big help getting it all working, more people will figure it out in time…but for now I have no immediate plans to teach or reveal the process.

Village Idiot To be frank I was trying to reverse engineer what’s going on in the transaction layer, but got side-tracked and hit a brick wall many times as there is a lack of documentation or almost no tech info on how the whole process works. Early adopters have access to everything ,so at one point I was seriously considering starting to create my own game just to get into the program :)Nevertheless, I talked to Drew and K a lot, and they definitely helped big time, I was missing 2 crucial parts of minting, so after I got that, boom, first mints. Process is not "hard", once it clicks, it is pretty straight forward. From that point I minted all my holding Enjin stack, so we can have more locked Enjins out of circulation, and it's way more fun to hold Rektokens than Enjin :)

I noticed in the mint, it didn’t have a token image for the platform. As it’s not coming under the general Blockchain Legacy platform, are there plans to create your own platform within the Enjin wallet, like what other EA developers have done?

Drew I have not yet found out how they manage the collections, except I know how the game devs are currently doing it. I have reached out to one to assist me in getting a platform. They seem willing to help (and Enjin is ok with), so we shall see in time. Though hopefully this will be easier in the future as I can’t imagine game devs wanna be helping everyone get their own platform/collection, but there may also be other possible ways, still early days.

Village Idiot Blockchain legacy is just a "folder" created by Enjin platform, default is "other". Categories are pure Enjin platform side filtering, and it's not part of the smart contract, so if anyone creates their own wallet that support 1155 items, they are not forced to respect any Enjin category. I expect once SDK and tools are out , they will open platform for minters to set their own categories. I plan to set couple categories myself, hope I will be allowed in. fingers crossed

Your explorer platform k, enj1155.com, was a surprise to see after Enjin X was released, especially considering your platform has the function of searching for ERC-1155 blockchain legacy tokens. What was the inspiration behind setting it up? And what was involved with gaining the data?

k Actually, I didn’t intend to build an explorer, I would like to build a marketplace or some telegram bots. However, I thought an explorer is a basic feature a marketplace should have. At this point in time, as EnjinX API is not available to public yet, there is lots of work needed to be done to pull the data from the blockchain. I have to build the back-end server to monitor the ERC-1155 transactions, e.g. when new tokens are minted, when a token is transferred from one address to another, when someone melted a token (Melt is murder!), etc. The transactions and the data are then stored in the database, which in turn serve to the website requests. It is quite a learning process, there are quite a number of issues I encountered when building the back-end server. There are still some edge cases yet to be handled. I will definitely consider to switch to EnjinX API once it is released to the public.

Will enj1155.com be an ongoing platform, and is there much maintenance behind running it?

k There are lots of new features I plan to add to the website, my aim is still to build a marketplace, which allows the users to trade using their Enjin wallets. I tried to architect the application to be low cost, low maintenance and high scalability. The hosting fee will remain low if there is not much traffic, but highly scalable when there is spike in traffic. It is still a prototype though, more works need to be done.

Out of curiosity, have you been able to add the tokens Drew has minted so far?

k Yes, I have just added that in the website as a separate category.

Nice one! Ok so the following questions are a free for all, so fire at will.

How do you see what you’ve developed benefiting the Enjin community as a whole?

Village Idiot I like creating meme mints, cos people really should have some fun and not get so serious all the time. For that reason I chose to mint and therefore lock as many Enjins out of circulation. It helps adoption, it helps community as they are engaged more. Also I plan to keep on minting interesting stuff from time to time , plus one side secret project that will actually use my mints in some way (no eta or soon).

k Before the EnjinX supports ERC-1155, enj1155.com can be used as a stopgap to explore newly minted tokens, to have quick view of the collectibles in any wallet, and also to see who are the token holders of a particular token.

Drew Most of my mints was/is just for personal use, but I am keen on making a service or app that gives my mints a purpose/use so I guess we will see where that leads to.

Have you found Enjin to be supportive of the community devs outside of EA?

Village Idiot I think a couple of ENJ team members noticed my mints, I am glad if they like it. They don't need to endorse it, I am doing it mostly for self-amusement, and with that I am trying to invite other people to have some fun too.

k I have had contact with Enjin regarding this as I needed some advice from them, I received positive feedback from them, and I really appreciate their time for answering my questions. So to answer your question simply, yes.

What’s the future hold for what you’ve both done so far? Are there any advancements we can expect in the near future?

k Aside from the website, I’m interested in creating a Telegram channel which allows the subscribed users to get the notification about the recently minted/melted items. As for the website, more features are coming soon. Stay tuned!

Drew Just watch this space.

Finally, do you have any other thoughts that you’d like to share with the readership and community?

k Enjin Coin community is strong, we now have more than 10 telegram chat groups/channels created by community, including trading (collectibles), giveaway and gaming guilds (Multiverse Brotherhood); not to mention, there is also 10+ telegram chat groups for Enjin games (Early Adopter Program). Some community members started a new chat group called @EverythingEnjin, check it out!

Village Idiot I would like to encourage people to step back and observe the forest, don't focus on trees so much. When you think about it, we have very healthy growth in terms of what’s actually going on in the community. People are spontaneously trading their own minted items, we no longer question if Items have use case, we already accept them as normal thing. We are hunting QR codes for item drops, we have our own scammers, we have our own item detectives, mass collectors, flippers you name it. When I compare this to projects I was interested in before, they look literally dead, only thing they have to talk about is price, cos there is nothing else to talk about. I think we are just witnessing the demo version of what this thing is going to be. Enjin is showing they are capable of delivering a product that is facing completely new uncharted territory. It sure isn’t punctual, but we are talking about new tech. You can't predict future hurdles, this is not creating another website where you 100% know what needs to be done. I am cautiously optimistic.

Drew Thanks for yours and your readers time, stay well!

And likewise to you guys, I hope to see more cool developments coming from your desks. I think it’s great to see others test and play with this new blockchain technology. Such community involvement shows what a special ecosystem Enjin have created. Fantastic insights, and I look forward to chatting again soon. I’m sure the rest of us have great interest in what you all are achieving. Thanks again and Melt out J