Introduce your team

B-Side Games is a German game studio that was established in 2017 shortly before launching our first game (Three Twenty One) on Steam that we worked on for 3 years. Prior to B-Side we were split across various game studios and worked on titles including Scribblenauts, Drawn to Life, Battlestar Galactica Online, The Book of Unwritten Tales and many more. While the headquarters are in Germany, the team itself is placed all over the world including the US, Europe and Asia.

For the last 2 ½ years we have been developing Chainmonsters, a cross-platform massive multiplayer online RPG inspired by Pokemon, The Legends of Zelda and World of Warcraft that is deeply connected to blockchain technology. After multiple public tests we gathered a strong community and aim to finally launch a Beta version of Chainmonsters later this year!

When we are not working on our games, we spend our personal time writing bad standup comedy, drawing beautiful pictures and complaining about society.

‍What lured you into the world of blockchain?‍

The first big “Aha!” moment must have been the release of Cryptokitties in 2017. At that time the team had just finished their last major game launch on Steam and was ready to explore new projects. The promise of ERC-721 NFT tokens (non-fungible tokens), giving back the power to the players and the seemingly endless opportunities in games empowered by blockchain technology were just a few of the many reasons that inspired us to create our next game with blockchain in mind right from the start!‍

Why did you decide to build on Flow?‍

Initially we were aiming to build our ecosystem on Ethereum where we quickly realized that the technology was not quite where we needed it to be. Sharding and other supposed scaling solutions were nowhere to be found and after quite a few public gameplay tests we were reassured that there needed to be a change from the ground up to convert our traditional players into blockchain users.

In Chainmonsters, our current major project, every monster, item, collectible and cosmetic is supposed to be a token freely owned by every player. This requires us to onboard every new player in the background without overloading them with inconvenient tasks of letting them create a wallet, saving their private key and charging up their wallet with ETH from another Third-Party exchange, etc. Luckily, Flow is pretty much solving all of these issues for us directly. Whenever a new user signs up to our games, we just use our traditional onboarding mechanisms and call a single API endpoint to have game accounts connected to a brand new Flow blockchain account. Whatever they do inside of our games, this temporary Flow account is being used and filled with items and progress. For example in Chainmonsters, this all happens without the user actually knowing that every step they take part is connected and stored on an actual blockchain. Once a user is ready to take control, they can claim their full Flow account and start trading their assets outside of the game (which by the way does have a built-in native marketplace for everyone).

Editor’s note: Flow offers native meta-transaction capabilities, allowing any dapp developer the ability to pay user’s gas fee on their behalf seamlessly, with no over engineering required. Flow also has multi-sig functionality on the protocol level, so that account access and control can be gradually transferred to the user along their journey, without having to force the transfer of all assets to a new account.‍

What should I read next?

‍“The Swarm” by Frank Schaetzing or  “Nighthawk” by Clive Cussler.‍

If peanut butter wasn’t called peanut butter, what would it be called? Why?‍

“Nut cream” probably… If you had asked me about impersonator wasps then I would have gone for “NotAWasp” by the way. ‍

Tell us some fun facts about yourself!‍

#2 Max likes to dye his hair from time to time. At the moment it has been dyed invisible.

#3 There is no #1

B-Side Games is one of the selected winners of the Flow Alpha Program. Learn more about the Flow Alpha Program and how to join here.