V2 Launch Media & Checklist

To-Do:

1. Linkedin post
2. Twitter threads
3. Threads, threads
4. Farcaster
5. ProductHunt

Linkedin

Well, it’s taken a little longer than I would have expected (and preferred), but I’m excited to announce that Star Sailors (V2) is now in “General Availability”. All current and new users can now access the full, and final, release of this iteration of Star Sailors.

Star Sailors started when I was finishing high school in 2020, with the goal to build an integrated citizen science gaming platform. The vision went from a full 3D voxel-based game, to a blockchain/decentralised network, to a browser-based MMO-type platform, which is the best way to describe the current version of Star Sailors. I’ll delve a little more into the history of Star Sailors, including my attempts (both successful and unsuccessful) to raise funds, and the full team in a future post, hopefully later this week.

If you’re first hearing about Star Sailors (and I guess that would be a large number of people reading this, because I don’t talk about it much on professional channels), then I’ll give you the brief synopsis:

Star Sailors is a website game that allows anyone to contribute to citizen science projects, from anywhere in the world, on [nearly] any internet-connected device.

But Liam, I hear you ask (or, rather, I imagine you’re asking - and hoping you’re still reading) - what is citizen science? And why does it matter? And why have you devoted almost 6 years of your life to a game that will (most likely) never make you a single Franc? All in good time, my slimes.

Citizen science is a concept that anyone, regardless of background, has the capacity (and in my [not so] humble opinion, the RIGHT) to contribute to science that interests them. Whether you want to help find habitable exoplanets, or track the migration of native bird species, or the mutations of the coronavirus, you or I, or anyone that could be reading this, has the ability to contribute.

(If you want to read more about citizen science and the meta-reasons behind Star Sailors, there will be a longer post published after I get back to Tallinn later this week).

Star Sailors is, simply a browser based game that is set in a semi-fictional world. You can discover planets, send satellites to those planets to find minerals and storms; you can identify solar activity on our Sun, and (in earlier versions…maybe I’ll bring this back soon) track endangered bird species.

Also, something that is (I’m relatively certain of this) unique to Star Sailors, is you can upload your own data. Did you see a red-tailed black cockatoo in your garden, 20km outside of its ‘regular area’ this morning? Take a photo, upload it - you’ll get points in-game, and your discovery will go right to a research maintainer. This way, we have two-way contributions. Researchers who have big data sets can get our users to classify their data. And researchers who need data can get it from our users.

After spending all my investor money on a 3D Unity game that never saw a single user, I pivoted after taking part in Season 3 of the Nights & Weekends Incubator by Buildspace in early 2023. It completely changed my life.

1. Build just one feature
2. Share it
3. Get feedback
4. Fix it
5. Share it
6. Build the second feature
7. Repeat

For the first time, I had a formula to get what I was working on in seen. So I quickly built a website with NextJS & Supabase that allowed people to discuss recent exoplanet discoveries. Throughout 2023, it went through multiple stages, and eventually I decided that it was time to begin working on a new version. One built with heavy visuals in mind as the primary method of user interaction, instead of text on a white screen with some images here and there.

It’s taken until today to get V2 out there. Well, for V2 to be fully finished. I’ve been doing weekly sprints since October last year. But today was the last new feature for the web version of Star Sailors. It’s just going to be bug fixes for the next little while.

Why am I stopping?

1. I’m starting to get a bit burnt out, across multiple professional areas of my life
2. Of all the code I’ve written since 2022, around 90% (according to Github) has been Typescript. And all of that has been in one framework - NextJS. For context (to my non-programmer friends), that’s like…hmm, I suck at analogies…I don’t know. Wearing the same clothes 90% of the time - and it always being a black shirt and tracksuit. Having a Ferrari but only driving it to work, and listening to the same song on repeat the whole time. Typescript is great. It’s fun, just like driving to work (can be). But I want to try other things
3. Of the code I’ve written outside of my professional life, almost all of it has been for Star Sailors. I haven’t built the little games I’ve wanted to for a while. I haven’t done any game jams or hackathons this year. The pressure to finish Star Sailors has been weighing on me. It’s been an incomplete and bug-riddled mess for over a year. And its user numbers are stagnating. I believe that I have a good enough product to be able to at least get some more users. I need to properly launch this thing and get it out there. I’m spending all my time building and outside of some half-arsed tweets, no public outreach at all.

So, what’s next? Well, thanks to my friend Naitik Mehta, I’m going to be navigating back into the writing game. I’ll be starting a newsletter about open & citizen science and attempting to rebuild an audience and (eventually) start shilling Star Sailors to said audience.

I’m also going to be working on some offshoots of Star Sailors - essentially, single-project citizen science minigames. It will all be on the same infrastructure and I’ll eventually bring them all into a singular storyline, but I want to make some traditional games again. The two working titles I have at the moment are “Bumble” and “Roving” (about bee growth and honey fraud prevention, and Mars rover obstacle avoidance training, respectively). I hope to have these available for public download very soon. APKs (for Android users) are already available, reach out if you’d like to try. Star Sailors is not ending.

It’s a little bit of an open secret that I’ve been exploring going back to Swinburne (moving back to Melbourne) and studying. I think it’s the right time. There’s job opportunities straight out of uni, the industry is not saturated, and the cost of education has gotten lower in Australia. However, if I do follow through with this, I’ll be studying Astrophysics, not computer science. I’ve realised that while I live writing code, I don’t love writing code for the sake of it. You can do a lot of jobs with code. But I don’t have the passion for a lot of those jobs anymore. I’ve done banking with the Bank of Melbourne & UBS. I loved it, but would I spend 30+ years there (following in my dad’s footsteps at BHP)? No. Space is my passion, and if I’m going to go into debt for education (or use my planned house deposit fund), I’m not going to study something just for the degree.

There’s a lot of time until Semester 1, though. We’ve got Space Tech Expo happening in Berlin, and I’ve got a lot of work coming up in Estonia & back in Zurich. Things may change. But that’s the plan at the moment.

There are a lot of people I have to thank though. In no specific order -

1. Rob Gell from the Royal Society of Victoria, and Kostas Siourthus from TomorrowX. Rob was one of the first people to see the early versions of V2, back when we won the People’s Choice awards at the 2023 NASA Space Apps Challenge, and he and Kostas offered some thoughts and feedback that really helped the business and user approach I took in 2024
2. Matt Kane - mate, thanks for all your time on video calls late at night going through my pitch decks, early demos, and for the amazing brownie in West Berlin we shared when I released V2.1 and needed feedback.
3. Dave Wilson, Rob Nathan, and everyone at Australian Tenders - thanks for the generous usage of your office space whenever I’m in town, and the feedback and support on not just Star Sailors but my overall career and life
4. Sina, Eric and everyone at DSL - you guys helped me turn Star Sailors into software that was compatible with our decentralised science infra and community. I loved working on the Nodes platform when I was with DSL.
5. Copernic Space - while acting CTO, I was given a lot of opportunities to share Star Sailors and influence corporate policy on decentralised science.
6. Rhys Malcolm - this guy has been incredible. I’ve been by his side (metaphorically) through multiple lawsuits, injuries and seen how relentless he is despite everything that’s been thrown at him. The fact he’s been able to support me through hundreds of design review meetings and late night pizzas in Melbourne is incredible.
7. Fred Bruce - speaking of design reviews, Fred has been incredible. For a while, we were grabbing coffees at Bakery Bakery or Kraftwerk almost daily. Fred is someone who really understands game design and art, and most of the visuals in V2 are down to him in some way.

I also need to say thanks to the various venues and staff who have fuelled my team and I through the last ~2 years of development -

1. Sandholt Bakery in Reykjavik, Ísland
2. Kraftwerk in Zuri - an amazing coworking space & amazing coffee
3. Mrkt Space in North Fremantle
4. Espresso House in Oslo, Trondheim & Copenhagen
5. Bookbar by Katkos, in Athens
6. Dan’s Lab in Basel
7. Bakery & Coffee in Berlin
8. White Label Coffee in Amsterdam
9. Roasting Plant Coffee in London
10. Marche & Station Street in Melbourne

There’s way too many people to mention, but thank you to everyone who’s contributed in any way. Whether it was one line of code or ten thousand, I’ve enjoyed working on SS because of you guys. And I couldn’t have done it without all the coffee and various pastries.

If you want to read more about citizen science and my views, here’s a bit more context:

Because all of science is, when you drill down as far as you can go, about collecting data, making sense of that data, and determining what data to collect next (and then begging your benefactors for more grant money). Data does not discriminate. Race, gender or sexual identity, even education levels - if you can read a graph, you can contribute. For some projects, if you can simply count and describe shapes, you can contribute. This makes the citizen science movement really exciting, because it even allows those with severe learning difficulties or intellectual disabilities the opportunity to be involved in a field that they have an interest in (there we go - now I have to write an article about …).

Today, almost all scientific discoveries in the developed world are locked behind restrictive and predatory paywalls. If you’re a high school student wanting to read up on the latest papers, you either have to fork out about 3 months of your pocket money (well, I don’t know how stingy your parents were when you were 12, but that’s what things were like for me when I was 12) to read peer-reviewed journals, wait 6+ months for the discoveries to eventually be picked up by the mainstream media or freelance writers (with varying levels of quality)…or just…never hear about the studies at all. In my view, this disconnect between scientists and the media (and politicians) is one of the chief causes of the antivaccine/covid denialism, and climate change denialism, that has occurred in recent times (but, that’s another post, for another day).

And if the capacity to READ about science for ‘normal citizens’ is being drained (sad, isn’t it, that the internet - the thing created to enable the sharing of all knowledge through plain old HTML - has arguably put up more restrictions on the freedom of information than any politician or dictator) more and more every day, the ability to contribute is almost non-existent. There are almost no pathways or job openings without expensive degrees, which often don’t equip you for the real world and, in my country of Australia, do not keep up with changing trends and dynamics. Even if you discover something on your own, good luck getting it seen, let alone published. Want to hire lab equipment? Ha, yeah right.

So, anyway - that’s citizen science. What is Star Sailors and (to my investor friends, who would no doubt be asking this question if I was still seeking investment) does it have competitors?

Zooniverse is probably the most well-known citizen science platform. The basic flow is you pick a project, get handed datasets (usually images or graphs), and then you annotate or assign values to create a “classification”.

Zooniverse is an amazing network. It’s been growing for over a decade and I’ve got great friends working there. But I’ve found the majority of its users tend to be academics or individuals who are far more connected to the scientific industry than the average person. It isn’t gamified - beyond a basic counter of all the classifications you’ve made.

And I’m not knocking Zooniverse. It doesn’t need to be a game. It doesn’t need to have millions of daily users. It just needs to be the best Zooniverse it can be. Almost any dataset can slot right into Zooniverse, so the barrier to entry is incredibly small. But I want to make a citizen science game (for reasons I’ll explain below). That’s no slight to Zooniverse or the team behind it, and their success is no indictment on my concept. Competition in this field (actually, in any field, in my view) is not only healthy, it’s essential. Collaborative competition is how I’d describe it.

When I think about what I want to achieve, it’s simply a contribution. Gamified citizen science is something that could attract millions of players and have a massive impact. But even a dozen consistent users is something that should be celebrated. My mindset has changed from the Silicon Valley/VC-inspired “growth is the only thing that matters” culture. While it would be great if I could make a living off Star Sailors (or any of my projects), gone are the days where I’m dreaming of the sports cars (well, also because the NDIS has banned me from driving in Australia due to my disability) and the fast lifestyle built from Star Sailors. Only these questions matter - does it help? Does it contribute? And - just as important - do I enjoy building it; and does it satisfy me? Do I play my own game (I think the answer has to be yes).

This contribution does not need to make money. Can the lights stay on? Well, Star Sailors currently costs around CHF 230 each month to run - database, domain, hosting, image/media transformations, email & distribution. 200 of that has been covered, for the last 2 years, by generous donations from figures in the Victorian science communication industry. So I spend around 30 Swiss Francs each month on a hobby that I hope will continue to make a small impact and contribution. If and when Supabase and Vercel allow you to buy 100 year plans, I can just buy that and then we’re set. The lights will be on for 100 years. Based on current costings, Star Sailors can grow to 10,000 daily active users and not cause any increase in costs to me. That would be amazing.

I didn’t enjoy high school at all. That was for a number of reasons (the administration of Perth Modern School has a lot of responsibility due to them allowing the rampant drug usage and isolationist, perfectionist culture to permeate for a decade), but the main reason was I just didn’t perform in tests and examinations. At a school like Perth Mod, getting a high test score was worth more than a thorough understanding of the topic, and we all knew that. That’s the system that we’ve had in western education for hundreds of years. And that system never worked for me.

Due to the isolationist nature of Mod, I was convinced that my test scores were so abysmal that I wouldn’t be accepted into university to study astrophysics (and, at times, that I wouldn’t be accepted into university at all). After 6 years, the culture were even scraping an A was considered to be a “disappointment” had taken its toll on my self-esteem, and I didn’t really have great plans for the future. Citizen science appealed to me because it promised the ability to contribute to scientific research without a degree. That was sort of the ‘last resort’ for me for a little while. I learnt to program (thanks to my incredible computer science teacher, Dervish) and that kept me going at times where school got to be too much.

And then Covid happened. I was finishing high school, and it turns out my grades were more than enough to get into university. I ended up getting an offer from Curtin University to study computer science (if I remember correctly, I was to major in game design). My future seemed set.

Until it wasn’t. Immediately after graduation, I began working as an engineer with ShareSqair in Perth, as their first hire. I raised some funds for my game Star Sailors, moved into an office, made hires and eventually did my Series A raise (totally around $100KAUD).Iquestionedtheneedforuniversity.DidIlovelearning?Sure.DidIlovetheideaofspending$50,000 on a degree that would be at best out of date, and at worst, over-saturated and worthless? Western men had been told for the better part of a decade that computer science was the key to easy money. Additionally, we had a massive number of international students soaking up scholarship and internship opportunities. The job market in Perth for comp sci roles has never been great. I didn’t want to be one of 10,000 students competing for 5 shitty internships. So in the end, I just decided to defer my enrolment. And outside of a mathematics & industrial design course at Swinburne in 2023, I haven’t been back.