Ok here we go again. I will take the time to respond here as I hope that a persisted place of this events will allow me to just link to it in the future and not spend any more time again and again and again talking through this.
This is going to be a longer post, but honestly by now it is just draining that you are going around slandering people and roping in more and more folks that have literally nothing to do with the whole situation.
My TLDR: @SCRTHodl was brought onto the team to deliver unity features, spoke misleading about their ability to deliver them, did not deliver the features and is now looking to get paid more than was initially agreed upon.
Background:
SecretHeroes was done as a hackathon project to showcase the capabilities of secret nfts and on-chain gaming. After the hackathon the core team (@johnbrodish, @baedrik, @can and me) spend roughly a month polishing it up and release it mostly in the state you see today.
Afterwards we applied for a grant to build out additional features to turn it into a more sustainable gaming experience: Secret Heroes - The Road to V2 · Issue #13 · scrtlabs/Grants · GitHub. One thing to note: The grant was done back in the days when $SCRT was at 1.644$.
Context:
@SCRTHodl was brought to the team as someone who had Unity experience and wanted to do some compensated work for the ecosystem. Right after joining the team chat he showed some video of assets he had imported into Unity and spoke about extending SecretHeroes.
It was stated by almost everyone multiple times early on that the focus is completing the grant.
Note here that it was very explicitly stated and received that the compensated work is for the grant related tasks only.
Ultimately it was agreed upon that @SCRTHodl would help with the unity work for the first milestone (The Forge) which was earmarked for 15hrs of Unity work (estimation done by the core team when writing the grant) at 70$SCRT / hour (again, this was when $SCRT was 1.6$ so we are talking about ~112$ per hour)
The milestone required 3 elements form the Unity side, which @SCRTHodl committing to do 2 of them:
- Finishing up a dynamic hero renderer to show the heroes (which change appearance based on attributes) in the grid view
- Implement a grid view to show your hero rooster and allow sending them to battle / upgrading them from there
What happened
@baedrik completed the backend work early on, @SCRTHodl started working on the grid logic (2), and I did the integration between Unity and the frontend (3). The flow of work was very asynchronously and parts of the team moved to other projects and I take full responsibility that this could have been handled better from my side.
Things started to get a bit weird at some point (Like @SCRTHodl putting up their own grant for work on SecretHeroes, making it sound like it involves the core team: Secret Heroes Game Development Unity Supplement · Issue #23 · scrtlabs/Grants · GitHub ), but we mostly brushed it aside as maybe miscommunications and kept refocusing on the grant. In hindsight this is something that is also on me and we should have stopped this way earlier, but I choose to trust @SCRTHodl in their ability to deliver.
What followed were many month of going back and forth between the core team and SCRT Force trying to get those features locked in that by his own words would only take them a few hours to implement.
At some point it surfaced that @SCRTHodl has hired an engineer to do the unity work for him, putting up another ? of the ability to build out the feature that we initially agreed upon.
At the same time we kept pushing the release date for SecretHeroes 1.5 back over and over again and @Stefan_DomeriumLabs, who manages the secret network roadmap, kept (very rightfully) knocking at my door every month.
Early this year we agreed that pushing it month by month over and over again was not a sustainable solution, so there was an agreement that we will take a proper assessment of the current state and figure out how to tie it up until February.
The state of the Unity work at this point was:
- The ‘renderer’ was an 8$ Unity assetstore asset that was purchased and dropped in, which (very clearly) states that I cannot be used in live and was meant to pre-generate images in editor.
- The visual element of the heroes grid were implemented but are not connected to any of the live game data, instead only using static test-data.
At this point the time spend on discussing potential implementations and resolving git issues massively outweighed the time it would have taken me to implement the features myself and the assessment of the current state, showed no clear path to a releasable version of the forge. The way a grant works is that you agree on deliverables and compensation beforehand and you only get paid this compensation once you deliver the deliverables. My proposal was to take the visual grid work done by @SCRTHodl , I properly connect it to the game logic and build out the renderer myself, so that we could release the first milestone. In this scenario @SCRTHodl would have received 1/3 of the Unity allocation for the work they have done with the visual part of the grid.
(Under the assumption that the grant was still valid anyhow. We took 10x the allocated time and the rate effectively quadrupled, so there was absolutely the expectation from the core team that we would either re-negotiate the grant with SCRTLabs or even would not be surprised if it just defaulted by itself)
This turned into weeks of discussions between core team and @SCRTHodl, later even getting non-involved community members in with the aim to potentially mediate.
By now the whole thing has blown complete out of proportion, roping in other community members and building up the idea of a conspiracy that honestly is not even worth writing up in here, also in an utter misconception of how grants work @SCRTHodl keeps asking to get compensated 1000-1300 SCRT. For reference that is 95% - 120% of the total allocation for Unity, for basically doing slightly less than 1/3rd of the work, which would only every pay out anyway if the grant-milestone is completed.
To be honest I have little idea how to respond to this further, I think I speak for the whole core team that any joy or drive to wrap up the grant-milestone has been completely vaporized.
To everyone who got roped into this: I am extremely sorry for any time and nerves you had to spend on this, I can just restate that I (and I think everyone of the core team) holds no grudge against anyone in the ecosystem and we are extremely unhappy how the whole story has played out.
To @SCRTHodl: I am truly sorry how things went down and that apparently there was a huge mismatch on what we each expected from this project and collaboration, as mentioned early on
I feel like the team really tried to figure out a way that works the best for everyone, but instead of working on a resolution you choose to post your personal version of this all over the internet:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220324110822/https://www.reddit.com/r/SecretNetwork/comments/tm1p6n/shilling_goes_both_ways/
https://web.archive.org/web/20220324110836/https://www.reddit.com/user/Crazy-Bumblebee-5060/
To anyone reading this far: Please feel free to ask any questions and voice any opinions, I am absolutely interested in getting a reality check on this and providing as much clarity as possible.