GM Gamers of Farcaster! Y'all know we love games and gamers. So we're bring a new series to you - the untold stories behind the gamers on Farcaster. These folks are the early movers building gaming experiences on Farcaster and defining its gaming era. It pays to be early - and we're still so early!
Up first, we present to you Noah Bragg (@nbragg), who's building /stokefire ! Make sure to go follow his handle & game - without further ado let's dive straight in!
1. It's great to connect with you Noah - to kick off can you tell us a bit about yourself, how you got into web3 and what you've built in your journey so far?
Hello! I’ve been building things the last 7 years. I got into bootstrapping and the indie hacker movement early on. My goal was to make a small online business that could at least work for myself. I ended up doing that! And sold 2 web2 SaaS businesses in the last couple of years.
I got into crypto in 2020 and it really excited me to be able to create programs that could do things with assets. I went down the rabbit hole and never came back. I built one NFT project early on called City Clash and I currently own a Liquidity Provider website called Poolfish.
2. What got you interested in Farcaster and how did you get started?
I’ve always been interested in Twitter and building in public. When I saw Farcaster it really drew me in with how you could build on top of it without the worry of a centralized company rugging you. All the data is public and you can build around the social protocol with ease. I thought this could be the future of social and I still think it can be! I started making friends and building a following.
3. Can you tell us about your current gaming project on Farcaster - Stokefire? What was the inspiration behind it and why did you choose to build it on Farcaster?
Stoke Fire is a mobile game built on base where you grow a village and manage your villagers. You have to stoke the fire to keep your villagers warm and grow your economy by getting resources. You can then go and raid other villages. This is where farcaster comes in.
I wanted to create an experience where you could interact with your friends and the farcaster social graph is a great place to make that connection. In the future Stoke Fire can build more on top of farcaster and even create a “light” client to make it more of an interactive, social game.
4. How did you select the 15 closed Beta Testers?
I created a Hypersub (it’s a farcaster product kind of like Patreon) where people could subscribe to join the early access and show their support for me building it in the process. It’s been mostly friends and people I know on farcaster.
5. What is the upcoming roadmap for stokefire ?
There is a lot I’m building and lots of ideas I have! One of the things is making the player decide how many of their villagers they should allocate to different tasks. This will give more decision making and strategy to the player.
There will also be more buildings and things you can create in your village which will then give you more resources that you can use to battle other villages. I’m also playing around with different incentives I can add in the game.
What is your outlook on gaming on Farcaster - how will it progress given miniapps are now in the picture?
I think games on Farcaster could be huge! It reminds me a ton of the Facebook era of social games except with the benefit that Farcaster can’t rug like Facebook ended up doing.
I think miniapps will definitely add to the possibilities and its really cool to be able to play games in your social feed where lots of users spend time.
On the other hand I’m choosing to make my own app so that I have more control and kind of see miniapps as more of a marketing arm to the main thing.
With all these diverse projects and interests, how do you manage to balance and handle everything together?
It’s a challenge! haha. I kind of focus on one thing at a time and then rotate to my different obligations. But the world moves fast in crypto so it is definitely a lot. I’m still figuring things out and wouldn’t say I’m amazing at it yet.
Lastly, when you're not in the world of crypto and Farcaster, what do you enjoy doing and how do you spend your time?
I have 3 kids ages 2-6 so I spend a good amount of time with them and my family. The other main thing I do is mountain biking. It’s my favorite hobby! I also listen to a lot of podcasts and watch some YouTube videos. :)