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Season 5Episode 214

How to Make a Game with AI using ChainCraft

March 26, 2026
40m
2 Guests

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About This Episode

In this episode of DevNTell, Narb welcomes back ChainCraft co-founders Ryan Beltrán and Eric Wood to discuss the platform's evolution. ChainCraft is an innovative platform transforming game development through the integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence. The guests detail how they have refined their approach, moving toward more deterministic game mechanics to ensure reliability and cost-effectiveness. They demonstrate a multiplayer game, 'Superhero Showdown', which uses AI to narrate and adjudicate battles between user-created characters. The conversation explores the democratizing potential of AI tools for creative expression and emphasizes the importance of community and finding the right funding, such as grants, for aspiring founders.

Key Takeaways

1

ChainCraft integrates blockchain and AI to simplify and revolutionize multiplayer game development.

2

The platform has shifted toward using AI for specific, high-value tasks like narrative generation, while relying on deterministic code for game mechanics to improve reliability.

3

ChainCraft features multiplayer capabilities, item economies, and community-driven content, allowing users to create and own game assets as NFTs.

4

AI is seen as a powerful tool for democratizing creativity, enabling individuals with great ideas but limited resources to build and share complex games.

Featured Guests

RB

Ryan Beltrán

Co-Founder @ ChainCraft

ChainCraft
EW

Eric Wood

Co-Founder @ ChainCraft

ChainCraft

Timestamps(click to jump)

Episode Transcript

Narb

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. If you don't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome back to the show the ChainCraft co-founders, Ryan Beltrán and Eric Wood. So, if you don't know, ChainCraft is an innovative platform that revolutionizes game development by integrating blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. So, if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to re-meet Ryan and Eric, learn about all the great developments that have gone into ChainCraft since their first time on the show, and how you can get started using them today. All right, let's get into it.

Narb

GM, GM. Welcome back to the show, Ryan and Eric. Pleasure to have you back on, guys. I know you guys have been hard at work, putting in the hours into ChainCraft since the first time you guys were on. And I'm really ecstatic for our audience to kind of get a peek at what you guys have been building. But I guess before that, and in case people didn't catch you the first time around, would you just like to give an introduction about yourselves?

Ryan Beltrán

Sure. So, I'm Ryan Beltrán, aka Bucho. I sort of am strategy at ChainCraft and have the blockchain experience and heavy gamer, all-time lifer when it comes to games. And that's sort of what I've brought to ChainCraft.

Eric Wood

Yeah, thanks. And I'm Eric. I'm tech at ChainCraft Games. Really into... I'm a heavy gamer, also a heavy, like, tabletop gamer. I participate in regular sessions, so I've really been interested in how we can use AI to enable creation of those types of experiences, which I think bring a very different feel and set of mechanics than you see in, you know, a typical 2D or 3D game.

Narb

Amazing. And yeah, I know you guys have quite the interesting backgrounds in tech as well and have kind of led you up to this point. I guess for people who, again, didn't catch the first episode, how did you guys meet each other and decide to co-found the company?

Eric Wood

Yeah, well, I used to work... we had a third founder who's still involved with the company, Matt Daly. And I worked with Matt after we left the company. I worked with him on some of his projects through his consultancy. I have a consultancy of my own, and we were working together on a lot of, like, metaverse projects and things like that. We were working with a company specifically that was in the Web3 blockchain space, and Ryan actually came on and did some consulting with us. And after that project kind of wrapped up, Matt and Ryan, I think, had been talking about the opportunity that exists in the Web3 space, particularly in terms of, like, you know, getting some grant or non-dilutive funding to go pursue technologies. And so a couple of years ago, I think we decided, hey, let's see what we can do, let's give this a try. And we pretty quickly... I was like, okay, what do you guys want to build? And they're like, oh, we want to build a game builder, you know? And I was like, oh, that's interesting, you know, just pick an easy problem, you know? And so we started talking about different things. We've always kind of been gravitating towards... we think that there is an underserved niche in game content creation, which is text-based games, card games, board games, you know, trading card games. Yeah. So, like, so we've always kind of been talking about that. We actually were talking initially about D&D, and I said, oh, that requires a lot of narrative work, and narrative generation is just not something that AI is great at right now. So we kind of pivoted a little bit, and yeah, so we've been very focused on creating those types of games and building, you know, great content generation experiences for our users.

Narb

Love it, love it. And yeah, Ryan, did you want to add on or...?

Ryan Beltrán

No, he got it pretty good. Yeah.

Narb

Yeah, I agree. And Eric, you mentioned it towards the end there, the since the last time you guys were on, AI and the landscape of AI has changed quite a bit, to say the least. Just curious to hear both your perspectives on what you think has changed and how much better or maybe worse you think the tech is.

Ryan Beltrán

Yeah, I want to chime in just a little bit on the game side, and then Eric is the tech guy here. I just feel like the landscape... and maybe it's also like this bubble that has happened in my own Twitter where I just get inundated with, like, overly AI, you know, OpenClaw and like games and... so I feel like it's hit this fever pitch and people are hitting ceilings with things but then are also finding out new innovative ways to progress in the space. So so much has happened since even personally with our team and in the AI space in general. And I think, luckily, I feel like we've been taking this approach that has scaled and moved and been very similar from the very beginning for us, where we keep seeing in similar projects in the AI and gaming space where they will use AI to make like one project, or like there are AI game develop platforms, but they're mostly like just surface-level wrapper of a chat, you know, like of an LLM or something. And so Eric can maybe get more into the nitty-gritty of why we're taking our approach and why it's different too, I guess.

Eric Wood

Yeah, I think I want to challenge a little bit that the AI landscape has changed that much in terms of actual capability. I think this is a case where expectation is starting to, or has been for a while, outstripping actual capability. I mean, sure, the frontier models are getting better, right? Sure, there's people taking Claude Opus 46 and Ralph Wiggum loops and posting about these amazing things that they've created. You know, that's just... okay, yes. What we're seeing is, you know, incremental improvements. And not even, like, continuous incremental improvement. I can't tell you for certain, like, wow, you know, the agents are really building a lot better than they have. And the fact is that, you know, you can't build, in my opinion, a profitable business by just relying on the enhancements and the improvements that are coming in the models themselves. There's a lot of people out there with a lot of hype saying, you know, software engineers are done, AI has replaced software engineers, AI can do everything software engineers can do. And you know, I think I said it in the last one, I'll say it again: I challenge those people who are actually building, you know, on with AI and trying to get AI to work. But even if the frontier models are enabling things that, you know, are able to build software that, you know, better than a software engineer or equal to a software engineer, you can't create a profitable business on that. And so in my opinion, the innovation is not going to come from better models; the innovation is going to come from better ways of using the models. And our strategy is to do as little with AI as possible. And we'll get into it, but we actually have reduced the amount of AI, or more accurately, specialized the AI and focused the AI on the things that it's good at and removed it from the things that it's not good at to try to drive reliability. So I don't think the AI landscape has changed that much. There's a few things people are doing that are interesting, you know, recursive LLMs and things like that. And every time something comes along, we look at it and we quickly say, yep, but the economics don't... you know, that we would spend so much in token cost that it's not going to be a return on investment. So our approach fundamentally hasn't changed. Of course, we're always up and up the model version, but we're not seeing huge differences there. And for us, like I said, the innovation is coming in more clever ways to use the model and more intelligent ways to use models with deterministic code to achieve the best outcomes.

Narb

Wonderful answer, and I always love a contrary take. And yeah, on that point around like the AI taking developers' jobs or whatnot, I don't know if you guys have seen, but there was a stat a week or so ago that came out, or a chart rather, that showed kind of the like an increase in developer job openings even like as of this year. So yeah, who knows, who knows who's crafting these narratives or whatnot.

Ryan Beltrán

There was a quote somewhere where some CEO was like, there's going to be so much talent out in the field, this is the best time to hire because there's just a lot of people getting let go, you know, but at the same time they're out there and sometimes people are getting pulled back because they relied too heavily on AI and they're like, wait, we launched some... I think Amazon did that recently where they... yeah, anyway. You're going to see a lot of that. Bit of chaos.

Narb

Yeah, 100%. I think Block, I think they ended up rehiring some of the folks they let go. But yeah, it's an interesting time indeed. I guess kind of reeling it back to ChainCraft itself. I guess from the last time you guys were on, it was still in a bit of a alpha alpha stage, you guys were still kind of building it out. I guess between that time and now, what's different about ChainCraft?

Ryan Beltrán

It was in Discord last time. We had just gotten the Questbook grant and we are just now... we just finished the Questbook grant. So it's like a bookend to where we're at. And Eric has really developed... I'll just set up the stage for Eric. We have this focus of like getting our web app ready so that we can actually like play games through the engines that Eric has made, both the builder to help you create the game and then the simulator to have you actually play that game. And also during that time we're always thinking of like, what's the incentive to play on our platform? Why would somebody want to build here? And also like keeping in mind how we focus actually around items and assets and ownable things. And we really have like been able to take that, and it's kind of a constraint, but a good constraint, that like if we revolve around items, it both affects our gameplay, but it also allows creators to get be pretty creative with how their economic model of like building on our platform could be. So I'm just laying that out. It's not super in-depth, but maybe Eric can get further into what he's built.

Eric Wood

Yeah, thanks, Ryan, for reminding me of where we were last time we were on here, because I was like, how far back do I have to go? I appreciate it. I went back at where we were. So yeah, the engine has evolved dramatically, significantly. You know, a lot of it we're kind of in this constant balance of adding more capability to the platform and then optimizing that to try to keep costs low, to try to keep latency low and things like that. So you know, we... yeah, since the Discord days, we largely have kind of the same design front end, but we've done a few things to reduce token cost. So we batch... we started batching our design spec updates, what we call our spec. So now, like, if you make changes and they update the spec, it won't go generate that right away; it'll like queue a few of those up. We did a what I call narrative compression. So a lot of the content in the spec, especially when you're working on like text-based adventure games, which is a lot of the stuff we were looking at, is just these lengthy... AI is very good at creating a lot of detailed narrative text on, you know, how the AI should respond and what a character is like, and... and none of that is necessarily for like gameplay except like when it actually has to generate that. So we did something called narrative compression where we took all the narratives and we had AI just reduce that down to a marker. And we just stick the marker in the spec, and then we can expand that when we show it to a human being, but when we are, you know, iterating on it from a creation point of view, we just strip all that out. And then when we're ready for the engine to actually generate a narrative, we hand it back to it. So that's been a significant cost reduction. And then on the builder side, complete overhaul. I mean, we used to basically just kind of say, okay, here is the state of the game, AI, you're simulating this and we kind of had one LLM that was just kind of responsible for doing all that. And now what we've done is we've introduced this notion of artifacts. So the artifacts are our schema, our game schema, our state transitions, and then our instructions. And another big focus for us was reliability. So when we had the LLM just updating the entire state, it would hallucinate, it would make bad decisions, it would forget things. And so what we did with instructions is we said, all right, let's give the AI very narrow set of instructions and it can't actually write the state. All it can do is we call them state delta ops, all it can do is say how it would make the state, and then we do all that deterministically. So when we actually update the game state, it's all deterministic; the AI is just saying, these are the deltas that you need to make. So you know, that resulted in more token usage than what we were doing before, but the game engine's much more reliable. And one of the really nice things is those artifacts get generated the very first time you simulate a game, and then every time you run that same simulate, that same spec version, it's exactly the same. So we see no variability between game sessions. And then most recently, because you know, so now we are generating these artifacts, well now the AI can do a bad job of generating artifacts and it can hallucinate, and we have all these validation rules that are looking at the artifacts and saying, is this artifact a good artifact, is it going to produce a good game or a broken game? And so we wrote all these validation rules, but the problem was that like when the validation rules failed, your only recourse as a user was to go back and just start over. And so what we did is we introduced a repair capability. So now the system kind of self-heals. So it generates a bad artifact, it fails validation, we hand that to another LLM, we say, hey, we failed validation, and it goes back and it can do surgical edits on the artifacts to try to repair and fix it. And then most recently in terms of the core game builder stuff, we are now experimenting with fully deterministic mechanics. So when the AI... you take like rock-paper-scissors, right, and the rules for how to figure out who won versus rock-paper-scissors, currently those are text rules that are resolved by an AI because they're very hard to represent in our small instruction set. What we're doing now as an evolution towards more fully deterministic gameplay is we're actually taking those mechanics and saying, okay, just generate a function that implements those mechanics, and then we'll run that in lieu of the AI. So that's kind of the evolution and we're on this path to, you know, having fully deterministic games that reach out to an LLM when they need to for a narrative or for adjudication. But if they don't need an LLM, they don't use it. And then just to wrap up quickly, we participated in a couple hackathons. So we participated in an ETHDenver hackathon and an Arp hackathon. And for that we added token duels, which is the ability to actually stake a wager for two-player games and have some fun there. We added item creation, so the creator of the game can say, hey, when the person completes this game, I want you to be able to generate a token with their character and mint that character. And then later on in the game, we could pull that character in and you could use that character again. So it gives you some persistence there. And then we participated in the NYC Open House, and there we added the ability to pull in live data from blockchain or from REST APIs. And so we did a really simple fun little prediction game where it was like... I think Ryan calls it Tokimon, where basically like your Tokimon's strength is based on the current price of ETH or Bitcoin or whatever. So just some fun things that we can do. There's a lot more we can do in that space. And it's kind of gratifying as a builder when you can add capabilities really easily, when you've built an architecture where this stuff just slots in, and we're getting to that point. So that's really cool.

Ryan Beltrán

Yeah, to add to that, like, the all the hard work that Eric and and also I'll mention Mark is our sort of front-end and smart contract person who's been amazing, and we'll show the site in a little bit. But just between the amount of work on the foundation of all this that they've done this whole time, it is wonderful to see that now that the foundation's there, we have a laundry list of features but that we want on our wishlist, but we've seen that like some are just pretty easy to implement or add, and then that's just another tool belt or tool on the tool belt that kind of compounds the features that we can have over time for the user at the end of the day, which is pretty exciting.

Narb

Yeah, I'll say I've taken a little bit of a peek and played around with ChainCraft, and yeah, it's I think it's going to be a really awesome awesome tool and platform for people, hardcore gamers, maybe not even the hardcore gamers, maybe just like the gamer who's like, oh, making a game, I never thought this was in within my reach, but now now it might be. And yeah, you mentioned it, I'd love to kind of segue into you guys just showing it in action because I I think it's worthwhile to see the fruits of your labor.

Ryan Beltrán

Sure. Let's see, I will share... let's see...

Eric Wood

Yeah, and maybe while we're doing that, you know, kind of a little bit about where we're going next is that we're really leaning hard into, you know, like I said there's a niche out there, an underserved market in this trading card games, card games, board games, things like that. And so currently we're still a text-based interface and that has limitations on, you know, the cognitive ability of your players to hold things in their head about how many cards there are and which cards and everything. So so we know we need to introduce UIs.

Ryan Beltrán

Cool. So this is our current setup. It is we have it mobile-first and browser-first, so it plays really well on a cell phone, you know, like... this is our main page. You once you create a... once you come in, it asks you to create a profile. So we use Thirdweb to create a profile, and it has both like games you've created, games that you're working on. Every time you make a game, it creates a cartridge graphic for that game. Here, actually, go to Superhero Showdown, it's one of our favorites. So once you go to the builder, work on a game, you go back and forth with the simulator until you like it, and then you can publish it, and this mints as an NFT and it shows that you own that game, that game spec that is created. And right off the bat, it's multiplayer, like no add-ons. This is the only game that we have token duels on. So I'm going to start one with token duels and then I will invite you if you want to try it out. So if token duels is on, it has to do this process, and it even has a faucet for you to just get our testnet token.

Eric Wood

And we've got a good plan to do there where basically we build a a UX description of the game alongside of the specification, and then we can have various visualization strategies that can display that can take that UX and say, okay, now I'm going to create a a Phaser-based interface or I'm going to create a Babylon-based interface or ultimately if you want to do Unity or Unreal or something like that. So and then and then also like I said we're going to be doubling down on on code generation, folding more like, you know, software engineering agents in that will generate full games, but with the ability to call out to LLMs and these other capabilities.

Ryan Beltrán

I'll put the QR in chat, so the link in chat. So when you start a game, you get an invite link here, but what's cool is when it turns... when it's the size of mobile, you get this QR code because I was doing it in real life like at IRL events, and it was just easy to just be like, hey, jump in, like join this QR code. And some interesting things that happened as we built this is each each game has... there's a global chat and then each game creates its own chat. So even if other people join... so I put that in the... if you want to try out this game with me, click that link and you should be prompted to create a pass, and we want it to be super frictionless or low friction, you can be a guest without adding social login in like two clicks. But what I was trying to say is that anybody can join and spectate the game as well, which was kind of an interesting like side feature as we built out the way we did. And let me know if you come in any issues, Narb, if you if you want to try to play this out. If not, I can just do like a single player game.

Eric Wood

Oh, here, I can I can join, Ryan.

Ryan Beltrán

Okay, okay. So I put it in the chat. Go ahead and give that a shot. Let's see...

Narb

I gotta say I I love the the cartridge, it gives like N64 N64 Super Nintendo vibes.

Ryan Beltrán

Yeah, it'll autogenerate. So the gasless stuff is not working. Do you have a version that doesn't have token duels?

Ryan Beltrán

Okay, yeah. Okay, then we will not do a token duels one. That's what it is. You have to get tokens in your wallet.

Eric Wood

Yeah, I haven't like gone to the faucet and gotten any tokens, so that's why it's not working. That's probably the same thing for Narb, if you give him a link with a non-token.

Ryan Beltrán

Yeah, let's try this new link then. Whoever wants to try it out. So this game is basically you create a superhero of any kind, any kind of description, and then I will do the same thing and then the AI will have them battle in a narrative and decide who wins.

Eric Wood

All right, I'm in.

Ryan Beltrán

All right. So let's see. I... wow, everybody's going to watch my input. So what am I going to be? I am a super cute puppy with big eyes and an even bigger heart. So I made a move and he... Eric won't see what what I submitted. And then it'll think as it decides who who wins. Okay, so it showed that they received mine. Eric made a move. Let's see. It's still thinking on mine. It's still processing. Oh, here we go.

Eric Wood

I didn't even know you were going to be a puppy, I just went with my normal Schrodinger's cat.

Ryan Beltrán

I am a super cute puppy with big eyes and even bigger heart vs Schrodinger's cat. He is neither alive nor dead, so can't be defeated. And then so this AI kind of I gave it a like announcer like wrestling announcer kind of feel or style. 'Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, a super cute puppy with the big heart, this adorable eyes are locked and loaded, but wait, its opponent emerges as Schrodinger's cat, simultaneously alive and dead, existing in quantum superposition. The puppy charges with pure-hearted cuteness, but the cat phases through reality itself. The crowd gasps as the puppy's love attacks pass harmlessly through Schrodinger's cat, lands a devastating uncertainty principle strike. The puppy cannot defeat what cannot be definitively defeated. The winner, defying observation and defeat itself, Schrodinger's cat.' And then it creates like an image of that. So I was going to say, and this is the first time that I've lost with this strategy, is that I have found that if I make something super cute, the AI does not want it to lose. So that was my go-to, and then my afterward I would explain why I chose something super cute. But I like this that that Schrodinger's cat won. So it's a very simple type game just to get a quick IRL like somebody to to play with you and to showcase what AI in-game can do. Because that's something that a lot of games don't even have game engines out there, so there's other AI game builders, but they don't normally have multiplayer, they don't normally have the ability to have AI in your game in different ways, like AI's telling the outcome of the game, AI's narrating the game. So that's interesting thing that I think we also have that is different than others, and then also this whole item economy something that's sort of differentiates our platform. Yeah. So that's a little little peek. But we also want to grow this in a way that's very community-driven, community-based, like with chat, profiles, community... so it's easy to go spectate somebody's game, remix somebody else's, or you could even invite somebody to to your builder and spectate as you build a game and they can give feedback as well. So we're kind of looking at like almost the itch.io-like route where it's very like easy to share and we just keep adding tools and playable in the app and everything. Yeah.

Narb

Great stuff, great stuff. And I guess is there any alpha you can share with our audience today around when they might be able to get their hands on this and create their own games and play with their friends?

Ryan Beltrán

Well, I could say right now if they reach out as needed, like we are looking for play testers that want to kind of tinker with this, give us feedback and grow with us. So if they just go join our Discord and just say, hey, we want try it out, we could we could invite them, you know, on a case-by-case basis. But yeah, we're looking for that. But in a few months, in months out, we're looking to to launch something more accessible. But there's still a lot of features that we really want to layer in here before we do a public launch because I feel like we have some things that we want ready and able before I think a more of a market can take a bite out of it and enjoy it. Yeah.

Narb

Awesome. And yeah, folks will have all that information in the description of the podcast below. So definitely if you are keen to go on the razor's edge and play around with ChainCraft, definitely reach out to Ryan and Eric. And I guess as we're kind of coming to time, just curious to get your perspective on just like this the use of AI in the gaming industry itself. From my observations and some friends that work in the gaming industry, there's there's this weird kind of tension between the use of AI in games and people using it in game development and yeah, this yeah, I I guess I'm not sure why, at least from my perspective, but I'm not in the gaming industry so I can't say, but yeah.

Ryan Beltrán

I do have something to say about that. And so I have a background in photography of of all things, like photography and film and storytelling. And early on, I was like in the darkroom, like doing darkroom photography. And it was right around when like digital was coming out. And the same sort of feel and vibe was happening there where, like, it was digital versus, you know, like darkroom. And I embraced both, but it was interesting to see that tension, but ultimately it's like another tool. Like it you could even go back to when painting was around and then photography came around and people were like, oh, now paintings can be reproduced. So these things like happen in our history and there's this like struggle against it. And there's nothing wrong with like not being happy about it, but then there's also this reality like it's here, it's happening, like how can we embrace it and make the most positive change going forward? And that's how I felt about photography and how I feel now is that if done right, I think it's just a new tool for artists. And even the very original thoughts of our platform were how can we bring some of these tools to artists so that they can earn revenue or earn something as they build on our platform. Everybody thinks AI's going to just completely replace everything and all the jobs and things like that, and artists. And it is sure going to do that in in a lot of ways and it's sad, but I believe you can also have artists who are creators at heart and want to create no matter what, they want their outlet. And some will embrace this and have their creative creativity maybe shine in ways that they couldn't do before. And we want to be able to have them have a place where they're able to maybe sell their style, like their art as a Lora, as like a skin for our platform, be able to sell their sounds or music for game sprites, like things like that. If there's like that ability to say, hey, if you're just good at this one thing you really like to do it, here's like an outlet for your creativity here and you may be able to to earn from it. So that was even inherently at the heart of our original vision for this.

Eric Wood

Yeah, you know, and I mean I have a daughter who is a, you know, a writer and an artist, you know, and so I have conversations with her about AI. And obviously in the art world, you know, there's a lot of concern and fear. And I think, and I tell her and I think it's true, I think it's a bit misplaced. You know, I think most people are still going to gravitate towards human-created experiences. In fact, human-created experiences are going to become more valuable as we look at, you know, the amount of what people call slop out there, right? Like people that are just, you know, throwing something out there on one of these content creation or game creator sites. And you know, people are concerned, I think, that that somehow we're going to dilute the value of human-generated art, and I don't think that's true. I think we're going to elevate it. But where I think the real benefit is, is that imagine the number of people out there that have really good, really creative ideas but don't have the resources, don't have the passion, don't have the time to invest in creating a great tabletop or digital property. I look at what we're doing as expanding the scope and democratizing that creativity and giving people an opportunity who have great ideas but don't have the resources. We all, you know, get to experience their great creative ideas where we couldn't do that if we didn't have tools like this. So I really do feel I understand the pushback, I understand the animosity. We're not here to create a game builder that is going to replace human-generated content. I am still going to love to play, you know, great indie games and AAA games that were completely human-created, but I really want to tap into that untapped potential, that creative energy that's out there that just otherwise wouldn't be able to be expressed.

Narb

Yeah, that's wonderful answer and I completely agree. I think these things always start out with this weird kind of tug left and right and then I think everyone just like adapts. So I think this industry's going to be no different, at least from my perspective. And I realize we've gone a little bit over time, but one final question: since you both are co-founders yourselves and there might be some aspiring founders in our audience today, I guess are there any words of advice or sage advice you'd want to pass along to anybody watching today?

Ryan Beltrán

I mean, I'll say that it's a, you know, it's a great time to have AI help you like iterate ideas and play like simulate what your idea may be and how the outcome may play out. So those things I didn't have, you'd have to like workshop it yourself or work with other people. But I think for those out there, you know, look for people in the same realm, look for if you need funding, that's always a big part, like grants are great and I gotta you know, really tip my hat to Arbitrum. I really like their longevity, their long-term goals. We've predominantly worked in the Arbitrum ecosystem and they have a lot of grants out there that if you're, you know, have a really good idea, pitch it to them, you know, write it really well, put a lot of time and thought into how you pitch your grant. And at the very least they will give you feedback on like why it doesn't work or why maybe to reapply again later. So we did our Questbook grant and so that's what I would say is, you know, it's kind of focused in that area, but yeah.

Eric Wood

Yeah, I guess I would say, you know, don't don't skimp on your go-to-market. You know, I'm a builder, right? So I'm like, oh, I just want to I want to build, right? But you gotta look at it as like, okay, I'm about to invest some number of years of my life and the sacrifices I'm going to make in my life and, you know, my relationship and things like that because I'm going to be spending time doing this while I'm working a full-time job. You know, and so some spend some time figuring out who is your audience, you know, does your audience do you have a compelling proposition for your audience, you know, can you monetize it, right? You're going to need to establish those things for yourself and then you're going to need to establish them for other people because, you know, when we started ChainCraft we're like, okay, well maybe we can just grow this thing, you know, with sweat equity and non-dilutive funding and get some revenue and flywheel and, you know, I'm quickly finding out that it's just not it's just not sustainable. It's just, you know, not if you want to have any part of you left on the other end of it, right? So so think about what you're really willing to invest, what you really can invest, what you can sacrifice. Definitely talk to your partners or your loved ones in your life and and get their support and figure out, you know, kind of where they are. And then, you know, recognize that you may need to go and do a raise and you may need to pull in some some help in order to realize this vision and, you know, and that's okay because it's better to get to the end of this and and still have your health and your sanity than to get to the end and be completely burned out. So.

Narb

Yeah, wonderfully said and yeah, I've seen both sides of that story and yeah, definitely need to lean on everyone around you to get that help. But I think this is a wonderful way to kind of end things off. Ryan, Eric, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy days to come chat with us today. I really love where ChainCraft is at and where it's heading. And yeah, I really looking forward to people getting their hands on... and again, folks, if you are keen on getting your hands dirty with ChainCraft, the contact details to get in touch with Ryan and Eric are in the podcast details below. Thank you. Of course, my pleasure. And yeah, with that, wish everybody a happy rest of your day and we will catch you back here next week for another great episode of DevNTell. Until then, have a good one, folks. Thank you. Of course, my pleasure.

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