Very good. Great to great to connect with you. Thanks for accepting this interview I've been. This is about the sixth interview I've done and it's been really exciting because, you know, in web three, everybody is doing something different and so really curious to learn about via bionic ELLs and learn a little bit about your background how you got here. All right. And, yeah, so maybe we could start start with that. Something that I've been really interested is how people got to where they've gotten, you know, because with other careers and other industries, it's kind of a clear path, but with web three, everybody's from different places. I was in the music business before this. So So yeah, if we could maybe hear your story. How did you first get interested in web three and games and all of that?
All right, very good. Thank you, Joshua. Where are you located? By the way,
I'm in Vietnam right now. So it's, it's a wow for me. Yeah.
Okay, cool. All right. I'm in the I'm in the US. I'm in eastern part. I Philly. Not too far. These not too far from New York, New Jersey, Philly, Delaware and all that. So I'm in the East Okay. Anyways, standard times AP is APM for me, so we're opposite, dating him if he had an opposite. I know. So yeah. My name is Charles Mbata. I'm the founder of our barnacles. Well before I start diving into the project, my story it's a bit of it's a bit of a unique one in the sense that I was born and raised in Nigeria, West Africa is a developing country, quote, unquote. And I'm in the United States now, but so growing up as a kid you know, developing countries, there was a lot of stuff. That didn't work quite the way they're supposed to. So I'll go into that but my experience, I had some traumatic experience or witnessing really crazy violent stuff growing up as a kid, and that kind of traumatized me. And during when I was making me go into the struggle, now, I was born in a Christian family, with Catholics and my mom would say, you know, say our prayers and go to bed. And just like all my siblings, who said prayers and go to bed, but, you know, I still had a hard time you know, sleeping at night and and during the same time, we'll be taught in school that different types of birds will learn about different types of birds and I'll teach as I said, Hey, you know, I was gonna sleep at night and stay up all night, and innocently as a kid, and I was like, why would a bird stay up all night? And innocent as a kid I was like, Ah, maybe just to stay up and protect me and watch me go to bed. So I envisioned them to be robotic and stealth and with their wings over me and and that's what brought me peace he asked and and also, that was my coping mechanism and anytime I remember that, okay, they're watching over me and I was able to sleep and I couldn't tell. So the kicker is this. I couldn't tell my family that Hey, guys, the President really worked for me what mom says, But what worked for me was the bird and owls were they in a culturally from my place, they were deemed evil bird some just, you know, because they are wise and anything that has to do with the nighttime darkness, it's associated with evil. And also, you know, things, the things that come out at night. The Masquerade, Evilish masquerade, that's when they do all their crazy stuff. So anything that has to do with darkness at night, it's considered, quote unquote, evil. So the owls were, quote, unquote, the evil bird kind of thing has a bad connotation. So I couldn't tell my my my siblings and my parents, my mom, like the prayers don't really work for me but this imaginative brown robotic owls watching over me Well, that's what brought me pee. So I kept the story to myself as a kid, and I cannot dealt with that. So fast forward like 30 years from now. I'm now sharing the story with people and I man you need to put that into history book, a comic book. And that's where the inspiration for Bionicles came about. It's a bit of a silly story. And I say it all the time. Because I tell people all the time, like, why would you want to build a game? Why bionic owls, like, you know, so when I tell them to start a man that's really deep, man. Like you need to share with my father. Yeah, so anyway, so that's the inspiration behind the game. That's I chuckle every now and then because, you know, you know I will be doing stuff with my kids because I teach him about ALS and how a lot of books about ours. My wife thinks I'm a little bit crazy about them because I fascinated about ALS. But I teach my kids about different types of ALS and all that but I will chuckle a little bit I remember back then. And now the thinking you know working on that where is this putting this our lives in a place where they didn't call adopted the night planet? So fast forward and I now have a law about this my plan and about his birds. And that's the whole cost of where the game started came about. So there's there's a noble house and there's rogue owls, and there's enemy robots and all that. So I have a lot of very interesting lore about the bionic owls on the project. So that's where I'm so that's about the project. So in terms of the ecosystem in general, I I've always been a coming from this, you know, quote, unquote, dysfunctional place where a lot of things don't work the way they're supposed to be. Living in the western part of the world where things work the way they're supposed to be, for the most part. I've always been attracted to anything that will bring about solutions just some of the things that are lacking over there and that's how when I learned about the concept of blockchain technology as an oh shit, this was saw X y&z needed on one thing back there, I don't really see a lot of I mean, there's a use case everywhere. I don't see a lot of use cases in the western world versus, you know, developing countries. And that's how come I became very attracted to it. I'm like, Man, this could solve voting irregularities, that we have a lot of stuff that this blockchain technically can actually solve and help us improve on that. So I became very interested in the blockchain tech I started studying, start applying some of those means shoot coins, the shiver E News or the doors, coins, lost a lot of money made some money. This is like five, six years ago, kind of, you know, just studying and then boom. You know, I ran into a friend of mine artists that I advised him as we work for someone whose work really connect with me on a, you know, some of the upbringing that I had some of the masquerades that we watch growing up as a kid, you know, he drew them and you know, so I bought some work from him and a lot of work from him. And he told me Have you heard about and he said three years ago, he heard about this thing called NFC. I'm gonna watch that and he told me he's going to be putting his work as NF T's I'm like, Man, really? What is it then he know we kind of learned about it together. And then I was like, Man, this is this can really shape shaped change in people's life back home again and always have that thought. Back home. So I started a group called in Nigeria and if the community now endow you know, one of the largest NFT community African NFC communities out there a lot of churches and artists, photographers, poets and all So sir, onboarding them into the space we didn't we didn't really take a serious when I started it was just more of like, in the clubhouse. days. In Double A couple of guys is coming together talking because what we've learned is that some of these creatives, they're very brave and what they do, but when they come into those spaces, or this club rooms, they couldn't express themselves so some of them didn't know how to speak fluent English. And so we created a space whereby they can speak in their native languages and speak in a pidgin English and broken English is and they felt very comfortable that I come in by the time we knew it. We have about 2000 members and they are creating a wonderful onboarding. I'm telling them, Hey, this I create a wallet. This is how you make your first work. This is how we make it sell their practices. We started talking about cold wallet, not wanting to know that stuff. So some of them have gone as far as selling their work for like to eat and and that has changed and I like to eat you know, a couple eats might not be a lot of money. 2000 gonna be a lot for a Westerner, but over that you could build a house with it to eat or three to eat and and be able to live comfortably. So it really impacted a lot of lives. And I was invited to several places to speak about some of the work that I've done. I was a speaker and if the NYC last year, and most likely they're going to invite me in to speak the show. So that's a bit of my about myself, I'm traditional nine to five I still have a nine to five gig. I'm in the research and development space so help pharmaceutical companies with drug development. And that's what I do on nine to five but other side, you know, helping artists and also building a game so yeah, that's a bit of my story. I know. It's a long ramble. But you know, when I got your your, your message I felt Hey, you know, I think I have a story to tell. So yeah,
yeah, no, it's a great story. And I was just, we just had a Twitter spaces event. It was all about lore and storytelling, for NF T's. And so it's something I've been really interested in, and I'm a writer too. So I love storytelling, and it's one of the aspects of NF T's that I get the most excited about. You know, you should read
out you should read a lot then, you know, send it to you. She really
okay, I will. Is that on your white paper?
No, no, we have not. Well, we have another white paper. It's just a snippet of about how the story how they the chaos came about in the night plan and all that but there's a full door as long as conspiracy. There's, you know, yeah, I'm definitely gonna send it to you. I want you to read it since you're a writer. Yeah. I was talking to someone yesterday that read it and said, Hmm, why did we characterize the only female in the story and antagonists? She was a female so So I'm curious.
Well, that's good. Anytime a story engages people and makes them want to be involved. That's a good start.
Yeah. So why do we characterize as an antagonist on my field that lets you remember that when you say that you're right, I was really curious to see from a writer's perspective, because he read it from you know, he's all about a woman in the blockchain and women in the tech space and all that stuff. So I'm really curious to see what your take would be on that. Sure.
Yeah, I will. I'll read it. I during the you know, the whole gold rush of NF T's. I also do marketing for different projects. And at one time I had 200 clients, it was crazy. And I was managing all their social media, their communities. And one thing I noticed is that the lower aspect was something that a lot of people really struggle with, you know, what I what I discovered is a lot of projects, you know, they would build something really cool. And then when it came to attaching a story or a lower, they would kind of force it, you know, it felt really like I'm gonna make I'm gonna make this part of the story just because it has to do with this part of our project, but when you're reading it as a story, it would unfold in a weird way. It's like, why why is that there? You know, versus I did an interview with the Woody's NFT I don't know if you're familiar with that project, but they planted they planted a million trees and their project was really built on lower and storytelling. And, and what he said is part of what kept people interested is what's going to happen next, you know, and with the community, it's hard to keep people together and you know, you have to always be doing something. You know, as soon as you lead up, you stop providing content, you stop engaging the people, they disappear. Yeah. But if you're on the edge of your seat, what's the next thing that's going to happen to these hours or to you know, whatever the situation is, that keeps people there. So, so yeah, I'm really excited to hear hear about the story, especially after learning about your experience as a child. very fascinated. So
yeah, and people say, I mean, we have a we have quite a decent amount of people. On that discord, and we have a channel that we just recently created. We put it at the law. And we have a little bit of snippet there, but we're going to be the plan is to be dropping a little bit of stuff every now and then just so that we could always go read, you read about what we've dropped in the law. And we actually have a comic book that where we've already started developing. And we have a playable demo for bony cars ready built. But it's just the demo. We don't have I don't everything you see so far for the project have been self funded by myself. So you know, I can't afford to go to full alpha version of the game out of pocket but we're doing a couple of things to raise funds this q3 is an NFT. So coming up next month. We're still talking to some people trying to see how to raise money for the project as well as to build out a game but we want to put out a game on the playable demo out sometime. We're talking to a few, a few platforms, hyper play a few other platforms that will help us publish this and we can get a feel for it. We'll take all the feedbacks and we've now incorporated into building out a full alpha version of the game. So that's where we are. Yeah, so definitely want to want to share the load with you and also just what we're building in terms of the comic books and just to get your insight and what you think about the story. It's it's fleshed out to some degree, but we have some angles that we haven't explored. So yeah,
still developing some stories that I'm curious about. I've been I work for a project that has a component of play to earn. And so I've really been learning a lot about those types of projects and how they work and stuff. How did you how did you design your plates that are an aspect? And is it different than axiom? You know, last year, there were kind of all these plates that are in projects that fumbled when the market shifted. And so it seems like this new generation of plate to earn games are finding solutions so that that aspect is more stable.
Yeah, I wouldn't say you know, that angle that we have it down packed or we we kind of shift their focus we didn't want to replay you know, over play around with the play that we have a token numbers and all that done, which seems well designed from the feedback that we've gotten but we just wanted to put out the game first. We just wanted to have the game product out and the player earn game side of things. We're we're still fine tuning it, but for the most part, we're not going to rely on people coming into the game. Using the whole extra liquidity strategy. It's more of like, we have a quite a view, just the end game assets. There's a lot of assets that we're going to be selling to maintain the ecosystem. There's a lot of you know, not just skins the guns, the spaceships and you know, land and all that stuff. We're going to be selling to kind of keep our economy strong. So you know, that part. I mean, I wouldn't say we have that down pack under percent. But we just want to kind of, you know, we've been busy for the past few months build an IRA demo. And, you know, just less emphasis on on the token side of things, how to maintain the economy, but yeah, we have put together but we felt like now that we have the damage done. That's a huge fee, so who opt for heavy lifting that we've done. So now we go back and try and tease out how to maintain how to run a very stable economy with the game now that we have the game while people are playing it and giving us feedback. Now we're going to focus on that as well. You know, talking to experts, or looking at what are the games what they're doing to maintain the economy because that's it's a tough thing to balance I'm not only not an expert by any chance I'm definitely have some people that I've talked to on a daily about such but yeah, it's a tricky one. We're just trying to work fine line and prioritize on the game. Not more of like the fun game, not more of a big pie, but that's gonna come in, in q2, that's the goal.
Right? Well, I think that's a really smart way to do it, you know, because you're solving a problem that a lot of games ran into, which is they're not fun. So make it fun first, you know, that's that's the whole point of playing a game and then add the money aspect and the tokenomics. Yeah, that should be secondary.
Yeah. And that's, that's how we've kind of, you know, put more efforts of trying to bring the story to life and, you know, by doing a comic book, we're gonna be sharing that with our community and just some of those things to make it a bit more fun and more lively. And people resonate and see how we're gonna resonate with different characters that we have in the game in the in a story, and hopefully that will keep them attached to the project in the long run. But yeah, you know, we're just, we're still early, small team of people trying to accomplish a lot, so Okay.
Fantastic. So I'm curious how what stage are you guys at and if somebody reads this interview, and they connect with it, and they're like, Man, I want to be a part of this. Is there a whitelist? Are you looking for any team members? How can people get involved?
Oh, sure. We would definitely, it's just a handful of people working on this on a daily you know, in terms of the the the NFT side of things Oh, yeah, we have an allow list that we are that we're going to be that we'll use in so we're kind of building that out in terms of how that's going to structure but we're calling it the who was who? Expo who's who list so people Yeah, as per the 1000. Yeah, so the list is what kind of compiling will partner with women's that they're going to help us with all our smart contract data devs that USPS as well. They're going to help us out a smart contract all our discussed security to doing that. So they're gonna, you know, have a meeting with them on Monday, kind of structure all that out, because they're gonna I'm just giving them that to handle them. Really, you know, a small team that we have cannot handle all their loudness and all that stuff. So they're going to be a structure for us on how I want to follow him out to delish so yeah, in terms of the oh man we can I you know, the only thing is limited us as I don't have just the limited resources to pay people. But if if someone is willing to join the team, help us out in any way for a future stake or percentage. That's how come we're gonna walk through all the people that we're working with are just, you know, taking the staking out and the NF T's and all that's our fault. But you know, I'm you know, we don't have a lot of resources, financial resources to ask people but if they want to join our Share, share interest in the process of seeing us succeed. A Oh has a deputy us marketing person. You don't have to, he's the marketing person with us. I don't know we'll name it. You know, it's just me and a handful of people. Just the rescue kind of outsourcing because we don't have the means to hire a full time, full time. They have to be on a team and all that stuff. Yeah.
Great. Well, one thing that I really liked about web three is you know, there's really a place for everybody. So, you know, and there's value in in so many different ways. So, even if somebody doesn't have any money, they just, you know, they're kind of in an observer position. I think they're still really helpful because even a like, tweet, is something you know, even a chair on a LinkedIn post is something and so. So, you know, to for somebody who just wants to kind of follow you guys and maybe he's not looking for a job. He's just looking to meet other other builders and have some fun. It was at your discord that they would join or what's the best way?
Yeah, they don't turn out discord. We are on all the social class social media platform discord, Twitter, YouTube. Yeah, I can just share our share quick. Link tree so you could, you know, you can see Yeah, it's when all the platforms as much as we can. We don't manage all of them effectively. I'll tell you that but um, you know, again, it's just, we're just doing the best we can for now. So link is for slash bionic housing. Cllr Yeah, so I YouTube has quite a bit of subscribers. We put all this it's a you know, some of the videos that we can pull the I wouldn't say they're high quality videos, quality videos, but we get a lot of comments about where can we go and play the game, though we just do that because we want to show when we start having money in funding and five doing like that high 4k videos, we can always look back and say Hey, see where we started from from posting, you know, some of what we could come up with to this crack scrappy, you know, videos and then where we are now where we are whooping feature we just we just didn't want to wait until we had all the funding and all that we focused that sharing stuff so we just said hey, let's share videos and and see what sticks out. Yeah, that's that's that's literally
I love the way you're doing it. I follow the the influencer Gary Vee and he always talks about that he always says take people on the journey. You know instead of just working behind the scenes, all that and then you pop out this this polished thing. Let people be a part of the struggle is and share the wins with them and and you know, build like that. And it sounds like you know, that's what you're doing. Just be open and transparent and keep building and you get to get to the destination by doing that.
Yeah, and that's why we wanted to put out our play have a demo on get on between now and I know there's gonna be something but you know that it is so far so far. It's if you have a couple of minutes I can play. I can play a little bit of snippet so that we have a get a sense of what we're building. If you have a minute. Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. And now we have about six minutes. So let me just play this. Let me share my screen with you. You can see just
all right, you should have access now.
Share with sound Yeah, are you able to see Yeah. So you know when you read the law as well you understand it and I talked about in that planning room Earth and then the moon? See the NGOs at inaudible barnacles. The rvos is a royal Bonica house. It's a bit of a stir but yeah, I've just get playing so you get a sense of what we're doing.
That looks great. Yeah.
Yeah. That's just to show the environment. We have more videos that show a lot of games, no gameplay, fighting the novel, The enemy robots and the nobles and drugs. So we have more we just were putting them out. We're trying to do some type of type video, you know, just compiling that. But this is just this was done a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago, but we have new videos with more gameplay action on it. Yeah.
Okay, well, that looks great. And I'll embed that in the interview so people can actually go go take a look at it. Or if you have another one. You think it's better let me know. Oh, sure. But
yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. It's just a lot of files a lot of work going on. But there's there's a better video this was done like three four weeks ago that better videos than this one. I love
that one looks great.
Oh, yeah, that was just adopted. That's a noble so that's a novel. Just you know, doing this thing but there's one with you see the enemy robots and all that me? Yeah, I don't know if how much time you have. But you know, I could play another one that it's the shows more gameplay if you have a minute block. You know, just to give you you know, high quality. It's a high high resolution game, an environment of very high quality high resolution environments. So that's, that's all go for the ankle, maybe down the line is to get into mobile, but that sounds like
well, the quality looks incredible to me. You know, I've seen a lot of play to earn games that are very 2d and they almost look like a game from the 80s or 90s Yeah,
no, I see that he does. He does a lot of nice with I mean, you know all the that's why you know, all the sandbox stuff all the pixelated there's nothing wrong with that. But, you know, it has to do with the you know, the lore again the story you know, the those the role guys the noble house, we're looking at, you know, toys as well and the down the line, you know, the stuff that you could easily model and tutorials and sell those and you know, just depending on what faction the kid wants to identify with. You know, they could play a rogue or, you know, a noble, you know, defendant in defeating a badass and all that. So yeah, when you read the law, you kind of get a sense of where we're going with the project.
Okay, great. Well, yeah, we'd love to read that. And if you want we can even share a link on the article or something like that, too. So yeah. Popsicle reading reading comm check it out. I did want to ask you. One last thing. Because these articles I want to bring value to anybody who's reading it and maybe inspire some people and let them know, hey, there's other people out there building cool things. So I wanted to ask him, since you've been building through this bear market and through all these things, do you have any advice for somebody? Let's say they're just starting to explore web three, they're interested. Do you have anything you'd give them as just a suggestion to maybe to be careful or do this or that? Anything you discovered in your journey that can be helpful?
No, definitely. For me, it's just it's a space where there's a lot of there's a lot of whiskey Dejan we were detailing you know, there's a lot of risky things going on was a lot of so for me, I've always been a student of the game for you know, just just studying and reading and jumping in spaces because it's a fast it's a fast moving space, right? And if you if you're not like trying to keep up to your knowledge or understanding of different chains, say for instance, in layer one versus what's the difference between layer one or layer two, some of those basic knowledge don't necessarily have to be a dev or techie person to be able to understand the difference. Okay. What some of these ecosystems offer. So I've always I've always, even when I was onboarding people was like, just do your own research, trying to stay up to date with learn, you know? So for me, it's just about being a student of the game of the web through ecosystem learning. Just learning applying yourself it's, it's not something that you could do. I don't think it's something you could do passively. You really have to be involved. You have to dedicate time and learn and in that learning, you know, you've grown yourself a lot of things you can watch it on YouTube, so it's not necessarily where you have to spend money, quote, unquote, for an education of sorts, to enhance your knowledge. But just from talking to other people, go into spaces ask some questions or business or talk and following the child what's happening. You know, does it shift now going from, you know, Metamask not being adding friction now cluster to one it's a noncustodial wallets, learning how things are shifting that people are trying to make things easy for people, and that's going to bring about mass adoption. So it's learning those look what the trends are, how the space is moving, I think will really help you and just doing your research in some of this new projects. And also, you know, just invest in yourself and you know, spend some time and learn you know, just apply some of the security features out there, you know, understand the importance of having a cold wallet and just just just invest in yourself and learn. I know it's difficult most people not necessarily keen to read a 16 page white paper sometimes but you know, at some point you need to you need to understand the basics. You don't have to know the code, but just the basics, that just invest a little bit of time and learn. You know?
Yeah, well, that's great advice. Don't be intimidated by the technical aspects. Just know I mean, some Twitter spaces, just start learning. I gained a lot from medium.com. There's so much good web three articles and NFC articles and gaming articles. So I agree with you. I think that's great advice is dive in and start learning. You know, nobody's going to say oh, you're dumb because you don't know what a layer two is. Or something like that. We're all excited. We're happy to have new people coming in and and to teach them so. Yeah. Great, great advice. Is there anything else you would like to say or anything we didn't cover?
Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot that we didn't cover, Josh. Yeah. So I, you know, I'm a strong advocate of, you know, this is a peer to peer space, quote, unquote, where people you know, we're trying to, you know, negate the big institutions, the big banks and all that so security is always an issue in this space. So it just everybody's joining the space has to be security conscious at all times. Of course, you know, the hacker has a wallet Jamie. And so it's really important people pay attention to that. And you know, the space it's a global space. And there are people that might not necessarily sound like you and I know, speak fluently that you're not, but they also deserve a right to clean the space, because the blockchain is a peer to peer ecosystem. And that's, that's the design that's how it was designed. So you're going to run into people that have different beliefs or might not sound necessarily like you're gonna look like you. But you know, just have to keep an open mind you can be you can be closed minded person and succeed in a web three space. I just don't see it. Maybe maybe in a traditional web to space. That's not that's possible. But if you really want to play freely in the web through space, he has to be an open minded person because the people from all walks of life from all parts of the globe that are that this piece has made it possible for them to connect. So just keep an open mind and interact with people. Yeah, beautiful people.
Yeah, awesome. That's one of the things I really love about it, is that, you know, maybe the timing isn't so great because sometimes I'm having a zoom call it like three in the morning in Vietnam, because I have to talk to somebody in LA or something. And so that that part is tricky, but, but working with people from Hong Kong from South Africa, from Australia, you know, I really love that and getting the undersea their perspectives and their point of views. And I really think great things happen, the more perspectives there are you know, you can be the smartest person but you don't see the world the way this person is and the way this person is. And so I think innovation really needs that. And he's that international perspective and needs all of us to get together and that's something I do think web two is kind of lacking. And there's some boundaries and things like that, which I don't like so. Yeah, great, great. Great advice. Awesome. Well, I guess we're about out of time. I could talk to you all day, cuz I love talking about and if T's and web three but the guy who edits these interviews will will be so angry with me if I given these long interviews to take up all his time. But what I'll do I'll, we'll get a transcription from the otter and then I'll clean it up a bit and send it to you and if there's any anything that is sometimes the AI will scrambled stuff or will miss something and stuff so I'll do I'll make it presentable. But if there's anything that you want to tweak or you think didn't quite capture it, or there's something we missed, we can we can do that before publishing it. Get it ready so that it educates people and helps them the most it can.
Sounds good. It's been a pleasure, Josh. Yeah, it's been
a pleasure. Well, thanks for your time, and I'll stay in touch.
Appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Have a good night. Have a good time. Thank you, Charles.