Title
DarkForest NR 0.6 by Sloika Industries
Contact Details
@freeatnet, t[dot]me/freeatnet or ai[at]sloika[dot]xyz
Summary
Code — release early — integrate feedback — launch — support.
Our proposal takes a delivery-first approach designed to manage risk under tight timelines. Work is structured around clearly defined milestones and shipping early versions publicly, allowing issues to be discovered and resolved early. Alpha and beta deployments we propose should enable real-world feedback, and de-risk the project well ahead of launch day.
Feature scope is intentionally front-loaded, with a firm feature freeze ahead of launch to reserve time for stabilization, performance tuning, and bug fixing. Launch week is explicitly staffed, with the team available to respond to issues in real time and ship rapid fixes if required.
After launch, the proposal commits to continued support and maintenance to ensure the game remains stable and usable, while incorporating high-impact fixes and improvements identified through player feedback.
Start and End Date
Within the scope of this grant, the team will commit to the following timelines:
Initial development: January 9 — March 21, 2026, with an alpha and a beta deployment prior to the delivery deadline (see milestones).
Updates and improvements: March 22 — May 22, 2026 (2 months)
Support and bugfixes: March 22 – June 22, 2026 (3 months)
About You
Sloika Industries is a small, senior engineering team with deep experience in blockchain protocols and production applications. Combined, we have over 35 years of experience of building tech and almost 20 years of blockchain experience!
Our recent work includes Moai, an account-abstracted wallet that allows embedding crypto actions into any Telegram message. Prior to that, our team has shipped onchain marketing tools, an curated, verticalized NFT marketplace for visual creators, and even a DEX (that reached #2 most active dapp on Ethereum at the time).
We are also great at meeting tight deadlines, a skill we honed in on while participating at hackathons. The team has won prizes at EthBerlin Zwei (2019, finalists), ETHBelgrade (2024, finalist), and a few ETHGlobal events in-between.
While we have yet to ship a production application on Aztec, we have greatly enjoyed experimenting with Aztec tech, including at the latest ETHGlobal Buenos Aires, where we won Aztec’s “Privacy Across Chains” prize.
We are also an established US-based company, with ability to provide legal documentation and sign contracts if required 
Technical Approach
Contracts: We will port the Circom circuits directly into Noir private functions. The private functions will enqueue calls to restricted public functions which will apply the public state changes. The public state will roughly match that of the original implementation, and will include entity ownership, public stats, and events.
Frontend: We will re-use as much of the existing frontend (licensed under GPL) as possible to save on development time. We expect that we will need to significantly refactor network, proof generation, and contract interaction and state caching modules; however, we expect to be able to keep rendering engine and gameplay controls modules.
Tests: We will include ~100% test coverage of all Noir code, including happy paths, edge cases, and fuzz testing. In addition, we will include tests for any bugs identified by alpha/beta testers and production users.
Technical documentation:
- We will provide architectural decision records for new code and changes made to the existing code.
- All new Noir code will include doc comments to ensure maintainability.
- We also hope to compile a shareable guide on how to think about porting Solidity + ZK projects to Aztec for fellow developers.
User documentation: We will provide a “Getting Started” page and an onboarding video explaining core concepts of the game and Aztec network for new players.
Grant Milestones and Roadmap
Milestones to MVP
Week 0 (January 9–16)
This milestone has been completed.
- Onboarding into the latest Dark Forest v0.6 codebase.
- Ensure working development/QA environments for the original codebase, as well as the Aztec/Noir stack.
- Prepare a plan of work.
Weeks 1-3 (January 18 – February 6)
- Port core onchain game mechanics to Aztec, including:
- initialization, moves, map mining, planet capture;
- energy and silver (re-)generation;
- ships and ship movement.
- Port the frontend to Aztec, including:
- an embedded Aztec wallet, similar to the playground;
- refactor client-side proof generation and transaction submission to support with Aztec’s private function model.
Weeks 4-6 (February 8 – February 27)
- Port v0.6 game mechanics, including:
- planet upgrades/level system;
- planet prospecting, artifact finding;
- spacetime rip mechanics, including artifact withdrawal/deposit.
- Deploy an alpha version of the game to Aztec Devnet, open to Aztec community. Provide clear feedback channels, collect tester feedback.
Weeks 7-8 (March 1-13)
- Port v0.6 game mechanics:
- artifact application and effects;
- location reveals;
- hats.
- If time permits, implement cosmetic and lore features: emojis, interactive GPT-powered artifacts.
- Address feedback received on the alpha deployment.
- Deploy a beta version of the game to Aztec Devnet, and engage Aztec community for testing.
EOW: “Feature” freeze for March 22nd version.
Week 9 (March 15-20)
- Support testing, bug-fixing, critical performance improvements. Address feedback from the beta deployment.
- Time permitting, test existing community plugins and produce a list of plugins compatible with Dark Forest NR.
Week 10 (March 22-27)
- Support launch day activities; provide real-time bug fixes and staff a support channel.
Weeks 11 and on (after March 29)
- Engage with launch week players to gather feedback and prepare a list of three improvements to implement over in the following weeks.
Stretch Goals
Block time-related UX optimization
While running the game in an environment with 72s block time (to simulate what the game would feel like with Aztec’s current block times), we observed player frustration with the “pending” state displayed by the game until transactions are confirmed.
We would like to research both onchain and UI-based ways to mitigate that frustration, and implement one or more of them. Some early options are:
- Research current state of Aztec preconfirmations and attempt to integrate preconfirmations in the UI state.
- Optimistically display the action as “in progress” once client-side proof generation completes; implement notifications and rollbacks if the action fails.
- Mitigate the frustration purely in UI, like hiding actions of pending transactions unless the user targets an entity involved in the action.
Privacy enhancements
Existing implementation of Dark Forest allows any chain observer to trivially infer the size of player’s empire, their total energy resources, and their activity time patterns.
We would like to engage with Aztec and Dark Forest communities to research which of these details can be made private without sacrificing the playability of the game (and also the fun players derive from finding clever hacks of this nature).
Grant Amount and Budget
Grant Amount Requested: $75,000
We expect that the team costs to develop and support this project will exceed $104,000; however, we are prepared to cover the shortfall from our own treasury.