PoolTogether Community Podcast #27 with Ryan and Jake from Trains of the Century

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm Hot Mike, aka the Bob Saget fan, aka The man with the microphone, aka, um, I'm very hungry. I haven't had a lot of breakfast, and I'm here with Mikoso and Conductor Jake from Trains of the Century, which is a must-play game. I'm so pumped about it. Thanks for joining us on the Pull Together Community Podcast, friends.

Yeah, yeah, thanks for, thanks for having us. It's good to be here.

Yeah, thanks.

So can you just, can you just, Mikosa, you are a revered PoolTogether community podcaster. No, you're the— this is, this your first time? This is your first time on the, on the pod, but you're a revered PoolTogether community contributor. You're on the grants team, you do some dev stuff. What else do you do? What, how, how'd you get involved with PoolTogether?

Yeah, I don't know about revered, but yeah, I'm definitely, I love me some PoolTogether and What I do with Pool Together, I was a contributor to like one of the first P-tips, which was the retroactive airdrop, which there was kind of like a bug in the thing in the first kind of snapshot for the original pool token airdrop. And I worked on creating a new deployment that fixed that. And me and Taliskai worked on the P-tip. He actually did most of the Kind of admin stuff, I would say. And we launched the new— that passed and we launched the new airdrop. So that was my first kind of contribution to PoolTogether. And I'm also on the executive team for PoolTogether and the grants committee. I'm a member on the grants committee, like you said. And Most recently, I'm part of the Optimism deployment, which the Bounties team kind of pushed forward. So deploying the contracts on testnet and going to be on mainnet Optimism soon. So that's my kind of main responsibility for that. But PoolTogether, you know, something, it's just PoolTogether, there's something special here, right? Like, I was thinking about this earlier today, like PoolTogether, I first deposited into PoolTogether in 2019 and kept that deposit in there. And that was in version 2 of PoolTogether. And I was thinking like PoolTogether was the first Kind of protocol that brought me from like a crypto spectator or speculator rather to like an actual contributor. And a lot of people have stories like that, like PoolTogether's first protocol I interacted with. PoolTogether's like what brought me into Web3. And I think there's like a really strong merit to The collective, uh, having stories like that.

You've left out the most important thing that you've ever done, Mikoso.

Yeah, I got sidetracked by PoolTogether. It just gets me going, you know? Uh,

well, the most important thing you've ever done is you've created the, uh, best merch of Permissionless 2022.

I was just thinking that. I was just thinking. Um, so Uh, I created these Pool Together towels that we brought to Permissionless Conference and it won the unofficial best merch ever. Not even 2020, we're just going with ever. And we'll have some more towels in NFT NYC. So better come to the pool party.

That's that alpha leak right there. And my cats love the towels I've created. I've turned them into cat beds. And they, they really do look— my cats really pop against the purple, the PoolTogether purple.

It brings out their eyes.

So Mikosa, you brought a friend with you, Conductor Jake. Conductor Jake, what do you even do?

Well, I was introduced to PoolTogether from Ryan and got to meet you guys over at Permissionless. That was really cool. Yeah, so Ryan sort of dipped his toes into DeFi and crypto. I was still on the speculator side with crypto and everything until we came together with this idea for creating a railroad simulator game on the blockchain. So I am, I'm the creative director over at Train of the Century and We've been doing that for a little over a year now.

Yep. We're Choo-Choo Boys.

Yep.

How'd you boys get into the choo-choo?

Yeah, it's, uh, I mean, so it, it was looking for an opportunity for something that hadn't been done yet and that seemed like a, a no-brainer for a blockchain game. And so we were tossing around ideas. We knew we wanted to do something and I have a friend who is, he's a real choo-choo boy. I mean, he travels around the country. He's a younger guy, so he and his dad travel around the country chasing down locomotives and taking photos of them. And there's a huge community of people who do that. There's like rare choo-choos that come through like, oh, it's only 3 hours away. And so they'll, They'll leave at like 2:00 AM in the morning and go take pics of the rare heritage version of like a train that hasn't run since, I don't know, 1960. And so there's this huge culture to it, this huge following of trains. We saw an opening for this and yeah, I mean, it was really interesting and we just sort of, one thing led to another and Now we got, uh, the only, uh, railroad simulator game out there as far as—

Ryan, what's your side of the story?

It's all, it's all lies. No. Yeah, no, me and Jake have been buddies for a while and Jake's got, uh, you know, some awesome skill with, uh, with like art design, that kind of stuff. So Jake takes care of all of the, uh, The design artwork, uh, anything like that. I do more functionality, code, that kind of stuff. And last year, like Jake said, you know, he's got a buddy, takes all the— he travels the country taking those pictures, really cool pictures. And like Jake said, like we were talking, we want to do something. We want to create like a board game. We want to do something fun. What could it be? And then I don't know, Jake brought it up and I was like, boom, there it is. We can have, we can have like a railroader. You build your train, you have your conductors, rail cars, commodities, transport 'em to station to station. The stations can be NFTs. And it just, it just like kind of snowballed from there. So, which I mean, has been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of work building out the mechanics. for everything is, is a lot of work. But

we also overkill, it feels like sometimes just because—

yeah, yeah, it's like, but, you know, we have a really good community too that has kind of built, built up from around us and, and whatnot. So,

so I have some friends who— I live in New York City and there are Subway nerds, like subway mavens. They know every bit of track, all of the companies, all of the types of cars and the gauges and the, you know, and so this like goes— the train obsession knows no bounds. I mean, it can go into, you know, public transportation. There's this game called Mini Metro that ate up many hours of my life. That is just a very minimalistic train thing. But, but Trains of the Century is this, this really relaxing, beautiful experience where I can just pop in. I got my train, I got my choo-choo, and then I direct it to a station. There might be some extra actions I can take as far as like I need to get some fuel. It's fun to see the owners of each of the stations. So they've customized it with like their own billboard or their own kind of like welcome screen, which you could get pretty creative with those as well. And then you've— so the music's great. It's very beautiful. It's a gorgeous game. It's very welcoming. It's very easy to use. There's like auto-signing and stuff that happens with the Wax wallet. But now you've added this extra minigame component. Can you tell me like what the thinking was behind that? Why, why mess with such a good thing? Like, why, why do you keep building?

Oh yeah, we're addicted to building. We gotta keep building. Uh, but so the, the minigame thing, and, and first of all, thank you, Tim. That's, uh, that's, that's awesome stuff. I'm glad you like it. And, and yeah, we're just getting started. Um, the minigames are just meant to be something that's fun, you know, something in between I dispatch my train. I've done that. Now I'm waiting. Let's, let's do some minigames. The minigames come out after you dispatch and they're randomly picked. Once you play a minigame, that's your chance to make it on top of the leaderboard. The leaderboards are gonna be a little bit, be more visible so that people can show off kind of their railroader badge, their profile picture on the leaderboard and whatnot. So the minigames are meant to be fun looking forward. We're gonna have a whole arcade. So you could go to the arcade, you can play minigames, you could pay TOKIUM to win some prizes or whatnot. And what's really cool about the minigames is they're built kind of modularly so that we can inject, like, anyone from the community, anyone could build an HTML type game, a JavaScript game, Phaser, it doesn't matter kind of the framework. We can inject that into the minigame component and you could, we can have your minigame on Train of the Century. So it's gonna be a lot of fun. And once we open up that kind of the gates for that, it's gonna be really interesting. I'm excited for that.

And there's this, you know, there's a sentiment that's been around that blockchain games are sort of just like glorified clickers and stuff like that. And so the minigames are an attempt to add like some, you know, some variety in play style and playing experience to the game because there is a lot of strategy already baked in. The game has been great for, you know, number crunchers and people who Really like trying to optimize their train, trying to, okay, do I want to make a train that is tailored towards finding NPCs so I can get some NFTs? Or do I want to try and take advantage of the rates in, in, in Trevithick Pines? And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna be more Tokium focused. So it, it was great with strategy in these mini games. Hopefully, you know, scratch another itch of, You know, of play so that it can, it can still have that strategy element, but have some, have some fun stuff too. And, and the, the games that we put out, we put out 3, they're pretty good and, and they're fun. And, and, and that's been a cool experience for me. Like, you, you can disable the minigames on Dispatch if you want to just focus on strategy and, and Tokium. But I've, I've been like finding myself excited to going back and trying to like improve my score. And, um, particularly Survive the Century is a, is a really fun game, um, that has potential to be competitive, I think. So.

So you said strategy and I feel like I have zero strategy. What I'm just doing is coasting. I don't know what that is. I'm just, I'm choo-chooing. That's what I'm doing. I just like to choo-choo. I like to pick the station that looks the coolest, uh, looks the most complex, and then I go there. And I got my— I think I've got like petroleum. I got petrol in my tanks and I got diesel in my— as my fuel. And I've got what, you know, one car. I've got the, the engine, the locomotive, and I'm going around. And I've hit some like— I think I've talked to one NPC So far. And then I've just started seeing these mini games pop up and playing those. What else is my— and I get points. I get like, I get, I get like currency or something when I go to each station because of, I assume, what I'm hauling. But can you take me to the next level of choo-chooing? Can I like choo-choo-choo instead of just choo-chooing? What do I need to

do? Yeah. So like, well, one, one part that's left out is like, there's, we have a reflexive algorithm that a adjusts the rates for the station. So every station pays out certain rates per commodity type. So at, let's say, Station A, they would be paying 100% rate on gas-type commodities, whereas Station B would be paying 80%, or Station C would be paying 150%. So it's— that's part of the strategy, is to look around what's, what station you're kind of transporting to, who has the best rates and how you can kind of maximize that reward, the token reward. And how those rates are adjusted, they're adjusted every 12 hours and it's based on how many of that commodity types get delivered to that station. So if a whole bunch of pallets get delivered to station A, Once the rates are updated on that 12-hour cycle, then the rates are gonna go way down for that station. If a station hasn't had any pallets in a while, then the rates are gonna continue to go up. So that's part of the strategy that people are mentioning. So hopefully that can get you to choo-choo-choo vibe.

Okay. So I'm looking at right now, I'm in I'm in— where am I? I'm in Idle at Vengeance Gardens in the Pawpaw Plains.

Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah, it looks— I like this one. There's a bridge coming and I'm like, ooh, I don't know if my train can go the distance over that to the next aisle, but we'll see. But I've got Dark Gardens as an option. I've got a couple different like little stations, nothing that looks big and fancy. So I'm gonna click into the station and then I'm gonna look at the— I'm gonna specifically look at their rates, commodity rates for what? Let's see. I have petroleum. What do I have in my train? We can edit this out. I just want to be better at the game. Okay. I've got, oh, commodity petroleum. I've got volume 25 something 12 in my railcar of petroleum.

Yeah. If you look, if you have petroleum, then you want to look at like what station nearby has the best Rates for liquid.

Okay. So there's building, there's crate, building materials, top secret, ore, and oversized.

Yeah. So click on that modal for the station and it should expand it. And yeah.

I see that. Okay.

And then the liquid would be like the water drops. If you hover over it, you'll get like a cool tip.

Oh, so click on the modal. Got it. And then the liquid— oh, so it's 103 for one station.

It's not bad.

Then the— okay, all right, that's good to know. Then another one is 1, uh, 99. Okay.

Yep.

Okay. Oh, so I'll do that in surrounding, but there might be like 1, 2 stations away that'll be even— oh, this one's 78. So see, this is a pretty station that I want to go to for some reason, but that's going to give me way less than the little tiny station that's not as attractive. That's what you're saying, huh?

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

It's, it doesn't really matter. The rates don't depend on like how pretty the station is, but I totally understand that.

Little UX for you. Oh my gosh, this one's 113. I got to go to this one. Let's go there. Oh wow.

If you can get to Bone Depot, that has 187. There's a really cool tool. I'll put it in the chat that his, his name's The Gardener. One of our community members made. That kind of will show you all the like highest rates of the stations. Yeah, he made some really cool tools.

But, but, but for Bone Depot TM, if I wanted to go there, I would need to like go— I, it's probably on like some other island somewhere, right? I mean, it's not—

Well, no, it's in Papa Plains.

Oh.

Yeah. So it's on that region. Just you'd have to kind of find it.

So there's this Vendetta Park. It's too far away for me to get to it. Like I tried to dispatch my train there. And it's— there's— I can't get there. So that just means it's not— let's see, what does it say? Dispatch, this is important. This train has max distance of 40, but this run requires 45.

There you go. Yeah. So you need your train, your locomotive doesn't have enough distance to make that run, that transport.

So then how do I up my distance?

You could upgrade the composition. Uh, which, which uses Tokium in it. You can upgrade from iron to steel or steel to carbon weave or carbon weave to tungsten. And depending on the locomotive, uh, it'll increase certain stats. Uh, like speed, it might increase speed. It might increase hauling power. It might increase different, uh, distance at different levels. Um, another way is if you have any Century Train parts. Certain Century Train parts, if you fuse them to your locomotive, will increase the distance.

Oh, is there like a— I'm sure there is, and I've just not seen it because I just— I have ADD and I just jump into this and I want to figure it out. But what's the— yeah, what's the go-to, like, tutorial on, like, how to become a choo-choo chewer?

Yeah, we have a like wiki.trains.cards and

it

brings you through a whole, uh, getting started learning. There's even like a rail run calculator that one of the community members built. Um, there's a whole look at NPCs, sentry trains, sentry train parts, all that stuff. And on there's some lore as well. I mean, we have our Medium pages for lore, but we do have a full-time copywriter who's Really good at you know he he wrote the whole campaign. He yeah, he's he's really good. So

I think we need like a Chris K DeFi Wealth Bible video of like and you might have this too of just like so yeah just like all right let me break it down for you. That's that's my impression of Chris K. Let me break it down for you. This is how you chew chew chew. In Trains of the Century, right? Yeah. And then step 1, step 2, step 3, boom.

I love it. Yeah. Chris K, if you're listening to this, yeah, let us know. We need a how-to video. We need a tutorial.

That's right. You know, put up a bounty or something. I'm sure this is great. So who is like the master of all the trains? What is their game looking like? 17 cars or like 100 cars and they've got— yeah, tell me about the Michael Jordan of Trains of the Century.

Yeah, big shout out to Mark G's. He's, he's probably the biggest whale he has. He's running and operating 10 trains at the moment, which, I mean, you, if you have more locomotives, if you have more railcar NFTs, if you have like more sets, You can run as many trains as you want. You just have to unlock 'em. So he's unlocked, um, 9 other trains. So he has 10 total. And I, I've, he's making, he's getting rewarded, uh, a whole bunch. I mean, it just, and it depends your strategy. Like I think he has, um, 1,000 NPC encounters, which is pretty wild to me.

And to get the NPC encounters, you go, that's the distance, right? You want it like the, the, the, the farther you go, the more NPCs you encounter. The first one's at 500 miles or something. And then—

Oh no. So that's, there's 2 different types of NPCs, I guess you would say, or 2 categories. There's asset encounters, which are NPCs. So that's like Thomas, uh, mysterious stranger. The, the culprit now, and, and then auto. So there's 4 of them. And then there's like story encounters, they're called. So that's more of like the campaign. And that is the campaign is unlocked based on distance, how much distance you travel. And then once you get done running a transport, you'll see kind of those red show curtains come out and it's like, ding. And you can start your, uh, the campaign kind of scene or the chapter, if you will. Uh, the asset encounters are just solely based on luck. So, uh, conductors, one of conductors, one of a conductor's perks could be luck. And so say it's like 10%, then you have a 10% better chance of encountering Um, an asset NPC per run. And then if you do encounter it, then it goes to different odds to randomly get you either a mysterious stranger who offers AMP, um, uh, Oil Zone Auto, who will offer you a discount on a Century Train part, uh, Transporter Thomas, who will like offer you a passenger, or the commodity culprit. who will offer you a commodity for free.

So I realize I probably botched this whole podcast because I just got so excited that we're talking about trains and I have a bunch of needs that I wanted to be served and met in my own gaming. But how did you— and you might have done this in the intro, but again, I'm so flustered with my strategy and such. How did you guys like get into game dev? game design? Like, I know, like, yeah, we have— like, there's not trains on the internet, on the Web3s. This is going to be great. We're going to make a train game. But then you had to go out and, like, actually do it and design it. Was it, like, lots of strategy before you got started or build as you go? A little bit of both? Do you have, like, a game— somebody who just makes games on your team between the two of you or between somebody else? How'd you be able to do this game design stuff?

Yeah, I, I mean, I would, I would start out with saying we're really fast learners. Um, but yeah, it was a lot of planning. We also were fortunate to, uh, kind of capture our front end, our lead front end guy. His name is Stefan and he's absolutely amazing. So he was able to contribute a whole bunch and That was really great. But, and it has, it still is really great. It's, it has been really great. But it's a lot of kind of build as we go. And then we released the beta back in November. So we were iterating on that and we were getting feedback. And like I said, the community's great. Um, so we were getting feedback, we were iterating on it, and it kind of just kept heading in the right direction and morphed into something that's really awesome. And I have to add, like, uh, like Jake is like, anything you see on the map, the game, the modals, the windows, anything has was first mocked up by Jake. So he's really, yeah, he's really good at that stuff.

We've, we've really found a, a good flow of, I mean, like Ryan said, before we did anything, we had a basic, you know, tokenomic structure laid out and like flowcharts and stuff like that. But we, we really have, we've set really harsh deadlines for ourselves this whole time. And that's sort of, it, it was tough at times, but it forced us to, to get a really good groove. And so we have, uh, we have backlog meetings where we, we know there's a feature that we want to implement. I'll take the first whack at the, at the UX, at the, at the UI, the flow. And then with Stefan and Ryan, we'll, we'll look it over and we'll pick it apart and, and hurt my feelings and—

Yeah.

And then, yeah, so it, and then it all comes together. And Stefan, like Ryan said, has a lot of experience on the front end side of game development. And so he's a really important player on the team.

I'm finding that lore is such a big part of crypto, really, like NFT projects. Like there are these lore masters that people are trying to hire. And I've never seen that before in corporate, in the corporate world, or even in the nonprofit world. It's like this memes and lore specifically are these 2 positions that are like highly sought after and kind of new to me, new to the space. But it sounds like your lore is like, I mean, I've experienced your lore, but it's always a desire to build that out and, and to get more people involved. Yeah. And

that You know, we, we made that decision while seeing a, a lot of projects not go that route and sort of fizzle out. And so we, we saw the value in having, in, in, in world building and creating something with legs. I mean, I don't know if you, I don't know if you caught, what's it called, that, that League of Legends Netflix show. Did, did you catch that? Arcane?

No.

It was really good. It was really good and really well done. And, and that's League of Legends, you know, a, uh, a third-person strategy game. And it's, it's crazy to me that they're able to, to, to, uh, expand their universe like that in this Netflix show, which was, it was really well received. And so, yeah, I mean, we, we made the decision to go for, for the long run with everything, and that included hiring. The lore master on the team. And unfortunately, most of it has been relegated to like Medium articles and stuff so far. But we are, we do have the campaign, which, you know, there's chapters and there's different options you can, you can choose when interacting with a character in a story scene. And then there's going to be additional lore elements too. So. Where the next century, because right now this is all just the modern century there. We've, we've already got, um, the past, the Wild West hashed out as far as the lore goes and the story goes. Um, and so that, that is all due to John. Uh, he's, he, he's actually my brother and, uh, and so he's, he's our lore master and he's, he's really good at what he does. So we're, we're grateful to have him.

Yeah. So what's next? Uh, Train of the Century miniseries on Netflix is what Jake said.

Yeah. Well, maybe a comic first.

Maybe. Yeah.

Yeah. Graphic novel. But, but wait a second. So you got more centuries coming, so you could also have a future one.

Yeah. The whole thing with, uh, Train of the Century is a play on, uh, Turn of the Century. So, uh, there will be time travel. Uh, you know, it is a sci-fi kind of game. Um, so yeah, we're, we're gonna be going from modern century to past century to Wild West or industrial age or whatnot. Um, and then right now we're pegged for 3 centuries. Of course, it's, it's, it's up to the community if they want more after that, but, um, it's gonna be really, um, yeah, it's gonna be really good. So we're gonna go in the past one and then One in the future, and then who knows what's going to happen after that.

Like one, like what? How future are we talking? Are we, are we, are we hovering? Hovering. Transporting? Hovering. Got it.

Maybe fuel.

Yeah. All nanotubes everywhere. Yeah.

Or people.

Yeah. Fuel's just peak. Yeah. The passengers.

The passengers turn to fuel.

You can take all those common passengers from the modern century and turn them into fuel.

Oh no.

What's that, uh, what's that show that everybody's on a train and like the passengers, like the poor, there's the poor people.

Snowpiercer.

Yeah, Snowpiercer. There you go.

Yeah, we're gonna have a Snowpiercer train.

So there's this whole conversation about play to earn, uh, work to earn. Walk to earn. Walk to earn, fill in the blank to earn. But, but so I play ice poker. I have NFTs for, for doing that, for ice poker in the metaverse with Decentral Games. And they're talking about shifting the model from play to earn to play and earn to like, I mean, basically it's like keeping it in the system, like keeping it in the, in the in the environment, like, where you're so enamored with the game, and the value of the playing gives you so much value that you're just like, no, I want to keep it in the system. I want to— so for Ice Poker, that might be, hey, you actually like get to play in the World Series of Poker through this, if you level up enough, or those sorts of things. What is that for Trades of the Century? Because I know that these are NFTs, there's value there you can sell, but like, What is the thought about the economics behind the—

You wanna go first, Ryan?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, so we have a pretty unique token, I would say, that's kind of like the opposite of the normal kind of inflationary token. It's deflationary. So every time it's used in game, it's actually the max supply of it is burned. Not just the circulating supply. So it started at 100 billion. It also can't go down to zero. So it has a floor max supply of 21 million. So once it gets to 21 million, then it goes back into the kind of like recycler mode. So if you use it in at that point to like buy fuel or, or whatnot in game, then it would just be recycled, which wouldn't affect the max supply. It would just affect the circulating supply. So we have that, that's unique to our system. The other thing that is kind of coming, but I don't think we're public about it, is we're revamping the tokenomics with the new centuries that are going to be coming out. We're gonna make some key changes. Uh, uh, actually, yeah. So yeah, I can't say anything about that, but, um, yeah, actually I forgot what I was talking about. So.

It's, uh, yeah. So the play and own thing, I, I, or I'm sorry, the play and earn. I think they've actually moved on from that even now because, yeah, it was play-to-earn and then play-and-earn became big. And now I'm seeing play-and-own tossed around quite a bit. So it's, yeah, it's really tricky, you know? I mean, there's stories of these types of games doing really good things in the world. Like, you know, Axie was able to support People during the pandemic who couldn't otherwise make a living. And so there are some really interesting opportunities for these games, GameFi or whatever. It can be kind of tricky because there's, you know, Ryan and I really wanted to make something that like provided value in terms of a game first, first and foremost, you know, like if you took the blockchain away from all of this, Would anybody play it? And so that's, that's sort of one of our main goals. But then, yeah, like you said, keeping it in system, that's, that's how, especially now when, when there is no, there, there's not really clear regulation on it and stuff like that's, that's how we promote it is, is you're, you're earning token. It's all, it's all in-game. It's, you know, in-game currency and stuff like that. And we're really, Trying to be above board on, on everything with that and making sure that we're not just creating some glorified, like, pyramid scheme too, because I've seen a lot of games can, can sort of fall into that. Like, they're only successful if they keep blowing up. So it's, it's really complicated. And like Ryan said, these These additional tokenomics that we're looking to introduce, I think will be cool. But first and foremost is like, would people play this if there was no and own and earn to earn at the end, if it was just play? So that's sort of our primary focus.

I love that. I love that. And it basically, my experience with on-chain games has been You know, it's, it's like I'm— it's, it's kind of like it's cute, right? It's like, oh, I'm gonna play this game and okay, I've just like, you know, uh, incubated my amphibian or whatever and they're gonna catch some bugs and then, you know, but I— it's a lot of transactions and I'm like, this, this layer just totally loves this game because it's just eating all my gas fees. Like, I'm just— I'm basically— I'm paying to play this thing. And but it's fun. It's like, I mean, to me, it's— I feel like I'm a pioneer. I'm doing something that eventually will be so awesome with on-chain gaming. But I get to talk to, you know, my grandcats because I don't have kids but cats about, about like back in the day when we had to confirm all the transactions. But there's— but with what you've got, it's really this— like I had someone, I had Taliskay actually from PoolTogether talk to me about this. He's like, yeah, I just love like walking up like Opening up trains, setting up my stuff, putting it on a route, doing a couple things, listening to the music, vibing, and then just going back, doing some work, and then coming back a little bit later. So there's this really cool experience where the game shines, like you said, where it's like, oh no, this is actually something I would play. This is actually something that I would do whether it's crypto or not, whether it's, whether it's You know, revolutionary or not. But I guess all of that to say, how can you integrate this game? And, or is this a desire with like DeFi and with Web3 and with IRL? I think that's kind of what I'm seeing with some of these things is like, hey, we've taken it to this step, but what if we did something else? So do you have any like interesting integrations or directions kind of outside of game? That you're thinking about?

Um, yeah. And well, so real quick, you, uh, you mentioned on a whole bunch and back, I'll answer the question in just a second. Back when we were, back when we were speccing out the game, we had that big decision. Like we were thinking, we want to create this kind of type of protocol almost where it's open to anyone. Like you don't have to go to trainsplay.trains.cards to play the game. You could do it, you know, straight from the contract or it's open for anyone else to build an interface on. So like you could create, so anyone could create a mobile app and just plug in the Train of the Century contracts and start using it that way and kind of build out their own app or a different website or whatever they want to do. And we wanted to build it open in that way so that community can build tools and they can build other interfaces and everyone can kind of build off These contracts. And so keeping that in mind made it like we have to juggle that playability, but on-chain interaction kind of stuff. And sometimes that can be really difficult. So with the different interfaces, back to your question. So, oh, real quick. So that's why we chose the Wax blockchain because there's like, No, it's gasless transactions. 'Cause we were kind of juggling different blockchains thinking about when we were speccing out the contracts, thinking like, okay, what, what, what blockchains would work? You know, what chains would work for us? And so that's why we went with Wax because of gasless transactions mainly. So, yeah.

Well, no, no. So now I gotta stop you. So I have it written down. I'll, I'll take us back to that question. But wait a second. So you said, yes, you can play, and this is, of course, it's crypto, right? You can play from contracts. That blows my mind. I'm not even thinking in that space, but you could do that. So you're saying somebody could build a mobile app, hook it up to Trains, and it could be like a completely different thing.

Yep.

And still use Trains and like play it in the background or something.

Yeah, absolutely. So like, and we wanted to do that. I mean, we learned, we took the experience of, Really DeFi of these protocols that say, hey, we're open, and then you can build off them however you want, right? Like PoolTogether, for example. Anyone can build pooltogether.com, right? They can build their own interface. Anyone can make a PoolTogether app and interact with the pools and whatnot and deposit into PoolTogether. So it's the same kind of It's the same kind of analogy is like you can build, anyone could build a mobile app, they could build a separate website, they could build a tool and it interacts with the contracts and it can be their own thing. So anyone can build on Chainless Sentry contracts, just like some of the community members have done already. If you go to our Discord under community tools, you can see people who already built separate tools to play the game.

Someone could create like a mobile game called Bane of the Century and it would be like, yeah, well, interesting Batman. Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's fun. I didn't even think about that, but that's, that's— so I would think that any sort of app integration would need to stay Trainy, but you could go crazy and do something else that might work. That's just really great. Okay. So how, what about DeFi integrations? What about, um, You know, yeah, trains plus whatever pulled together.

Right, right, right. So like what we have, so me and Jake co-founded Oso Interactive, which we're framing as a multi-chain game studio. So one of our flagship products and the only product right now that's released is Train of the Century. So we're going to have other products and some of the stuff that's coming out, Uh, more recently is going to be on Ethereum, which is gonna be like the Railroaders profile picture. And so those are gonna be on Ethereum and it's gonna be a collection of 10,000 Railroaders that are, you know, generative in nature. And so you can, we're actually gonna be able to, uh, integrate those into Train of the Century. So you'll be able to, if you own like a Railroader profile picture, Then you can link up your Ethereum wallet on Train of the Century and then set your profile picture on Train of the Century to your NFTs. So that's the kind of most coming soonest, I

guess. Right. So bringing the NFTs onto mainnet.

Yeah. So Train of the Century going kind of multi-chain in a In a little bit, not like the full-on game, but pieces of it going multi-chain.

But what about like, so, so I know like in, in certain other, like Atlantis World, there's like, it's a metaverse and Trains is like a metaverse, right? I mean, it's this world that you've created. I'm just wondering like, how could we, like at certain stations, could there be a PoolTogether teller? or something, you know, or I'm just thinking of ways to integrate DeFi or other interactions with the game. But just, just for the— I guess, I guess it's not like user-friendly, like people aren't like begging for this, but I just, I see with these banners, I'm like, oh, this would be really cool. Like, like Pool Together has a station and like if you go there, you get like some sort of drop. And so then that like, that's like a gravity in the game where trains want to go there to get the special The special doodad.

Yeah. And right now we have some other projects running specials on their stations. So they have something called like the Monkey Trains or the Monkey Train Path or something like that. And it's, if you run these routes and visit the certain stations that they own, then you'll, you have a chance to win one of their NFTs or you're rewarded in some way. By getting one of their NFTs. So yeah, there's definitely that on the picture. I mean, integrating these Ethereum railroaders is kind of like the foundational step of Train of the Century having multi-chain interactions. So if we build out that framework of having contractual interaction from Train of the Century on say Ethereum or other chains, then, uh, yeah, there's a good possibility that there could be a lot of other, uh, you know, EVM-based DeFi integrations into Train of the Century.

I, I want to get pulled together, not just like a station, but like an aquatic center, like throw, throw that into the, uh, in Centuryville. And then you can go inside it, maybe have some like swimming minigames, you know, like kicking your legs around or something.

Yes.

And then,

uh, yes. This is what I want the podcast to be. I just want to dream dreams and like no one's going to listen, but it's going to be like just really fun to like product develop. But I love that. I didn't even, I'm not even thinking about like paths. Oh, okay. It's like a scavenger hunt. And if you hit these certain areas, you get an NFT or a drop or a delegation or that sort of thing. But then yes, minigames is a whole nother beast. You know, I guess video content or other sorts of like Easter eggs or experiences. There's so many ways you can go. This is great. I love it.

And we're going down onto the ground level. That's something we've been working on for a while. Um, you, instead of just looking at it from bird's eye view, you're, you're gonna be able to go down and into the buildings and stuff. And I think that'll open it up a lot more too for, for more stuff.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. So, so like, you're like a, is it like a first person or like a third person kind of experience kind of thing?

More, um, right now the plan is more, uh, like putt-putt. I don't know if you ever played that, probably not, but, uh, where you can just click around and move around the town, but the art is there. Yeah.

Okay. I'm thinking Myst, like a Myst, kind of like you see a screen and then you go right or left and another screen pops up. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think that's the first implementation.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Nice.

We're kind of limited with what we can do because, um, We're using Pixi.js, which is really great for browser stuff, but you can't really do 3D that well with it.

So good. I'm just dreaming dreams right now. But we're almost at time. I wanted to see, have we not talked about anything that you would like to talk about with trains or just your lives, or you want to give us predictions for crypto? You want— this is not financial advice, but do you want to do that? Do we want to talk about like, where are we headed in this darkest timeline that we're on?

I think if you're a, a pulley holder, then you'll be okay in any market. And we have, we have something special coming lined up that for pulley holders. So if you hold a pulley, you're going to have pre-mint access to a free mint of a choo-choo that has kind of been kept under wraps. But we'll have that live today, actually.

Yeah. You want to tell them what it is, Ryan?

It's a choo-choo. No, it's a, it's, it's a good— it's so it's a free-to-mint 10,000 choo-choos. And they're again generative and, uh, you'll actually be able to, um, view them in your Train of the Century, uh, profile page. So it's even gonna be active in Train of the Century. Um, and we're gonna, we did that cuz, um, you know, the pulleys represent kind of, uh, Pulled Together Inc. fighting this lawsuit. That, you know, we definitely see as an attack on overall DeFi. So if anyone is, I mean, anyone who supports DeFi or Web3 crypto, anything like that should support their, the poolies, you know, but especially so if you're an American, like, Crypto company or whatnot, because that's really what's under attack. Because who knows what's next after after this? So it's it's definitely super important. So we want to kind of do something that's just fun and and cool and and kind of showcase the pulleys and give the pulleys a little bit of use.

So good.

Yep. And so those, um, uh, what was I gonna say? They're, uh, they're at trains.card/choochoos and, uh, and, and, oh yeah, you can

go there now.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's live and, or I'm, I'm not sure if the minting's live.

The minting's not, no, but that'll be on later today.

Yep. And, uh, In addition to it just being a free mint, we also have some forms on, on that website where we'll, we'll get you a Wax wallet, 'cause I think it costs 5 Wax to make a wallet. So we, we got a promo code for that. And then we'll also send you a train setup if you have a choo-choo, if you mint one of those free choo-choos, we'll, we'll send you like 4 or 5 Wax NFTs. So you can start hitting the rails.

Yep.

Okay. So it says on there, June 17th is the mint. Is that what you're talking about?

Yes, that's the public mint.

Oh,

bullies get special pre-mint access starting today and until, uh, the public mint.

At this very link right here. Yeah.

You gotta click on the orange button.

Gotta click on the orange button. Okay, cool. Oh, mint.trains.cards.

Yep.

Is the jam. Yep. All right, well, we gotta get in the Pooley Discord, the Friends of Pooley, and preach that gospel. That's great. Woo! I'm so pumped. All right, what's that guy's name that's the top train person?

Mark Cheese.

I'm coming for you, Mark.

Yeah, you are.

I'm coming for you, brother.

Hell yeah.

Higher education got you down? Coming for you, brother. That's so good. All right. Well, thanks so much, Jake and Ryan. I hurt my voice doing that. Thanks for coming on the Pull Together Community Podcast. I'm so pumped about your creativity and your game-making abilities and excited for the development of this game and others, I'm sure, to come. And thanks for being just such great members of the PoolTogether community and really supporting us. And I look forward to supporting trains and anything else you're doing. Thanks for being here.

Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Grant. See ya.

Bye. Cool. Bye-bye. All right, guys. Thanks so much. Yeah, that was fun.

No, thanks for having us there. That was a blast.

Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, And we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the Pull Together Discord and let us know.