Founder’s Pirates: Minting on November 8th

4 min readOct 26, 2022

After many months crafting a game and architecting an on-chain game engine, Pirate Nation is ready to mint and prepare players for beta gameplay.

Pirate Nation is a light hearted game filled with high seas adventure, treasure, and fun, unique characters. Players collect and send pirates on adventures where they collect materials for crafting, treasures and pirate gold!

9,000 Founder’s Pirates will be free to claim starting on November 8th. Pirates will be claimed on Ethereum and then bridged to Polygon via https://piratenation.game. You will need at least one Pirate in your wallet on Polygon to play.

TL;DR

0.00 Eth mint price
Phase 1: Goldlist — 2 Pirates per wallet guaranteed, 2,500 spots
Tuesday, November 8th
Un-claimed Pirates rollover to Stowaway after 24 hours
<1000 Goldlist spots remaining, details here
Phase 2: Stowaway — 3 Pirates per wallet, 1st come 1st served, until 4000 Founder’s Pirates are minted
Wednesday, November 9th
Un-claimed Pirates rollover to Public Mint after 24 hours
Join discord, follow twitter, sign up!
Phase 3: Public Mint — If there are any remaining Pirates, any wallet can claim 5 Pirates until they’re gone
Thursday, November 10th

Time to learn, ye scallywags!

Proof of Play, the company behind Pirate Nation, was founded and funded in December, 2021.

We’re composed of leaders from Epic Games, Riot Games, Zynga, Nifty Games, and Scopely just to name drop a few. We’ve all been founders, early, growth, and late-stage employees, and helped build companies and a variety of technologies. Read more on the team here.

Pirate Nation socials went live April 15, 2022 — along with plans to mint NFTs for a game we built. We had every intention to mint the following month, but just 15 days in, the bear market we all know and love unofficially, started. We used the opportunity to take a step back to make an even better first impression with our game.

We decided to…

Overhaul the core game loop,
Shift our art style away from 2D vector art and towards 3D Voxels,
Launch as a Unity game,
Remove any semblance of P2E from marketing and game mechanics,
Wait to do our mint until the beta version was ready to be played,
Make the mint free, and
Pay player’s gameplay transaction fees

Why Free?

Philosophically, it didn’t make sense to charge people to buy entry into a game that’s still technically in beta, especially in these market conditions where everyone is hurting. We don’t care about the ‘free mint meta,’ it simply seemed like the obvious and proper thing to do for us. And because we’re well capitalized, we didn’t need to raise funds from a mint to continue development on Pirate Nation.

What we’re excited about

Building 100% on-chain
Frictionless gameplay: No wallet confirmations
Gasless: We pay gameplay transaction fees

We built a fully on-chain game engine. There is no central database powering the game systems.

We have a novel approach towards a major UX pain point of web3 games: frequent wallet confirmations.

There are zero wallet confirmations while you play Pirate Nation. We are especially proud of this because there was no documentation on making this happen. Our engineers architected the system themselves and had a proof of concept within a few days of ideation.

This means as you play you will not need to confirm transactions or pay for them. Everything in the game still goes straight into your wallet as you obtain it, and there are no requirements in Pirate Nation to stake or otherwise temporarily lose custody of any of your NFTs.

The systems described above have been audited by Halborn Security — as have all of our contracts. Halborn’s 125 page audit is visible on our website now.

How many Founder’s Pirates are there?

There will only ever be 9,999 Founder’s Pirates. These pirates are the only art that we will do in 2D style making these pieces extra special and rare. Of those, the team has decided to hold back 999, similar to what Larva Labs did with Cryptopunks.

What utility do the Founder’s Pirates have?

Claiming a Founder’s Pirate means access to play and to have your feedback heard to help us build out Pirate Nation. Anyone holding one of these special tokens will have access to holders channels in our Discord and be eligible for other surprises in the future.

Each Pirate also receives 4 different Founder’s Chests & map pieces across the span of 90 days. If you transfer it or sell your pirate, the timer resets. More info here.