I’ve been building Frontier Crown around a question I wanted to play rather than debate:
What changes when a multiplayer economy has a fixed monetary supply, no monster-money faucet, and every action resolves on the same global tick?
Players gather resources, mine a finite supply of Crown Gold, forge equipment, place bids and asks on a player order book, hunt the Warden, and eventually sponsor new players by sacrificing resources.
The design is Bitcoin-inspired, but Crown Gold is only an in-game currency. There’s no token sale, NFT, wallet requirement, play-to-earn system, or promise of financial return.
The browser beta is playable now. I’m looking for people who will pressure-test whether the scarcity is understandable and whether the economy creates interesting decisions.
I’m the developer. Direct criticism is welcome—especially after you’ve experienced a few global ticks.
It’s mobile ready you can try on Keychat
This looks vibe coded, and that's a red flag for me.
I don't care if it is vibe coded, but if it appears like something AI generated, I click away.
There was a meme about vibecoding. I can't find it, but it featured Rick Rubin, and this clip.
In the clip, Anderson Cooper asks him a series of questions:
(in this case, replace artists with gamers)
Rick Rubin is a successful guy because (among other reasons) he helped some major artists produce some hit songs. He did it using his good taste.
If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort.
Ew, what's this 2.5D thing? I'm not much of a gamer and this surprised me. I don't like how the background stays the same and it's just the map overlay that moves. But that's just me and it's just not my cup of tea.
(side note: I don't think I should be able to select the UI text.
user-select: noneCSS type of thing. https://stackoverflow.com/a/4407335)I gotta say, the fixed money supply thing captivated me. I have been thinking about currency in MMOs for years, ever since Gaia Online and I love seeing Bitcoin concepts make it to games.
I have made a few games myself and I know it's extremely difficult so I gotta hold myself back from any more critique because I think you've done a great thing here by bringing together all the parts and you're now running a playable game. I see people chatting in there, and that's another level of complexity that I have to salute.
A few years ago I made a game Kybertrike. (Dead game, not recommended.) Technically it's a game, because there is a win and lose condition, but it's not fun. I quit working on it because I realized how hard it is to make a fun game.
Lately I've been studying games I play. I'm playing through Diddy Kong Racing and if you haven't played, I recommend it. It was made in the early 2000's and the amount of love and care that was put into that game is blowing my mind. You can tell how every model, voice line, map, song, ELABORATE SONG/SFX TEMPO SYNCRONIZATION SYSTEM, was meticulously crafted by a human, and I don't see games like that today. I tell myself that if Kybertrike ever sees the light of day it will because I put aside the AI tools and spent hours crafting every little detail.
Here's a great blog post I like
https://anthonyhobday.com/blog/20260410#how-i-think-about-quality
My favorite quote, "Quality is the absense of problems"
I can only name 1 issue with Diddy Kong Racing, and that's that it sometimes has framedrop issues. Everything else, the characters, the events, the collection mechanics, the story development, the biomes, the color palette, are just chef's kiss and I can't even identify a single problem with any of them.
I'm not trying to make a comparison between your game and Diddy Kong Racing. "Comparison is the thief of joy" after all. I'm using DKR as an example of what a great game looks like. And yes, the game was made with a big team and probably a huge budget. What am I saying here? I lost my train of thought.
I think your game has something there. It has a shell, but can it have a soul? I would love to see that.
a wish job for my life. do nothing, judge and express your taste.
Could start by being a literal taste-tester lol
are you hiring?
thank you for your soulful answer! I jumped into Kyberkit for a bit and climbed the tower and took out some boars lol
much of it outside the core mechanics are indeed vibe-coded and my hope is that in time, and with taste, and thoughtful feedback like yours it can be shaped better.
I've heard the best indie game devs easily put in 5000-8000 hours into their games and I'm only just 100 hours in
appreciate your feedback on the selectable text and 2.5D and true world-building with sound and music
God bless Diddy Kong Racing and also those Nintendo 64 classic devs
Will keep this in mind as I plug away: "It has a shell, but can it have a soul?"
a 2d game up view, like first zelda or Pokémon firered or isometric like Diablo or Fallout could be more interesting, immersive and easy to dev than what you used. allows you to expand the map and build your world better.
great thought, I’m actually thinking I’m gonna do this for the next game server, copy over the base code and redo the graphics and make the experience like Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse lol
I had the same thoughts. There's nothing here that I'd be interested in outside of the basic concept in the ad.
thank you
Low time preference goes a long way when designing video games that people actually want to play (especially in the vibe coding era).
...why don't you just use Bitcoin as the game's currency instead of "Crown Gold"?
That's what I was going to ask.
I've been thinking about a dynamic where players essentially seed the game world with their purchase and can then withdraw what their character has when they finish.
this is a great idea! wanted to find a way to let people build adjacent worlds but also within constraint, I will think on it.
was definitely an option, and I was concerned it would become overly tied to the real world that way, can definitely replicate a version with real sats
the fun starts when the mine runs dry and new players keep joining. early players sit on the stock, latecomers pay their prices, and you get to watch deflation happen in real time instead of arguing about it. the order book's gonna show you if sound money ends in hoarding or velocity
so you’re proposing fixed supply on materials too huh
nah, the money's the only thing fixed. materials stay abundant, that's the whole point of it. if every rock's scarce too it's just a survival sim and you can't tell the money did anything
ohh good good this was my thinking though people have suggested some good ideas with making time scarce for hiscores and stuff
yeah time's the one input you can't just spawn more of, so gating hiscores on it is the right call. it's basically proof of work with a leaderboard, latecomers can farm rocks all day but they can't buy back the early ticks
I tested the guest path. In a browser where WebGL is unavailable, both
/playand/marketcrash and expose a technical stack trace instead of giving the visitor recovery steps.I can provide a customer-journey audit covering onboarding, market clarity, trust copy, account saving, and failure states. You’ll receive prioritized findings, screenshots, exact replacement copy, and the three highest-impact fixes.
Fixed price: 160,000 sats, paid directly on-chain. No private access needed. Reply here if interested and I’ll provide the scope first.
thank you! I’ll hold off on this a bit and I’m interested in your services in future
Good luck!
The fixed supply is what caught my attention. I’m building a Windows application by myself, so I know how quickly one simple idea can turn into dozens of design decisions.
One thing I’m curious about: when new players start, do they understand that every trade only redistributes existing money, or do they still expect the game to create more somewhere?
I haven’t played enough ticks to offer useful criticism yet, but that’s the first thing I’ll pay attention to.
Can you make everything in the game have a fixed supply, or at least be constrained by what can be built from materials in world?
yes and I didn't since the thesis was use of sound money in an abundant world and I didn't want everything else to become money as well? technically everything else is still time and compute constrained (super lite PoW), and not fixed supply.
Two of the things that always bother me eventually when playing RPGs are how preposterously wealthy my character becomes and how much loot just piles up.
Both of those problems stem from the game spawning so much stuff de novo.
indeed, essentially there needs to be an item sink right? I've tried to allow for this with item durability and maintenance requirements along with death mechanics where you lose everything you don't have equipped, but you just made me recognize how our life on earth is limited and that in itself may be the most important restriction to put in place... limit the lifetime/mana of each character so they're encouraged to do the most efficient things, maybe let them buy another life to keep progress or access a new frontier and second life lol
Item durability is the another important aspect. Stuff breaking is what keeps blacksmiths in business.
Fixed supply with infinite resources means hoarding wins and money velocity drops to zero. To fix this and the loot-pile problem, don't just destroy items via durability. Recycle their base materials back into the global world pool. A true closed-loop simulation forces trade.
Definitely an interesting idea. I'll check it out!
login-free gameplay enabled with nostr sign-in available when saving your character