Quick Facts
Description of Skybreach: Skybreach is a web3 gaming ecosystem connecting various games through lore and universe facilitated by smart contracts. The first game to launch is the Dungeon Crawler mini-game called Skybreach Dungeons. Resources gained in it will be available in a future launch to upgrade one’s gear to prepare for higher-difficulty dungeons, creating game loops.
Chains served: Base
Make or break feature: Instant game result and leaderboard indexing
Using SQD for: indexing game-related events, dungeon quests, in-game characters, sessions
Only possible with SQD: Access to underlying ORM to facilitate recursive data structure, wide selection of chain archives for all EVM chains, fast re-indexing using squid archives
How Skybreach came to use SQD
The Skybreach and SQD team go back a few years. Initially, both were building on Substrate in the Polkadot ecosystem. Eventually, the RMRK team realized that while they admire Polkadot for its vision and tech, there was no denying that the developer count was significantly higher on EVM chains. This led to their move to EVM, allowing them to tap into the latest innovations for consumer app builders, such as account abstraction.
When in the Polkadot ecosystem, building on Kusama, the RMRK team was indexing everything manually, listening to the latest block using polkadot.js, and parsing/filtering the content. In 2022, ahead of the move to EVM, the team explored multiple options, including The Graph, SubQuery, and SQD.
“The SQD indexing SDK is the most flexible of them all, allowing us to organize our indexer how we want to instead of being forced into a specific pattern.”
Adding on to that, Skybreach CTO Yuri also shared that it’s possible to have patterns recommended for those looking for a simple setup. The modular design exposes lower-level APIs, enabling flexible code organization.
On top of flexibility, Skybreach also had some very specific requirements that they couldn’t find anywhere else. One of them being access to the underlying ORM.
“Because we had to have a tree-like data structure that is recursive, no other indexer SDK but SQD allowed us to do so.”
Some other features that made them choose SQD were a wide selection of chain archives for all the EVM chains they planned to index, and strong technical support.
SQD in Skybreach’s data back-end
As long-time users of SQD, the team was self-hosting indexers indexing NFTs from 7 different chains before. However, for their current project, they wanted to move as quickly as possible with little overhead and, therefore, decided to go with SQD cloud.
SQD is used to index all the dungeon quests that they configure on smart contracts. On top of this, Skybreach captures players’ game sessions, their game results, in-game characters, and all Skybreach lands and settlements.
“Players can claim additional rewards once a week if they are in the top position of the leaderboard for each Dungeon, and having it indexed makes everything much easier, plus since SQD comes with the graphql server out of the box, we can do more complex queries.”
Another insight the team shared is that using SQD cloud didn’t limit them to a specific pre-defined tech stack either. Instead, since the indexer is just a docker container, adding additional services is very easy.
“We also emit all the events that we index into our external Redis, which then feeds our bullmq queue, which is ingested by our separate Search API that we self-host on digitalocean.”
This arrangement allows them to index all in-game characters in a separate database that is more suitable for search than GraphQL and enables advanced filtering capabilities.
They concluded that “SQD is one of the best indexing SDKs currently available on EVM.”
On working with the SQD team
This has been another highlight for Skybreach, thanks to the technical support they received and the open communication between the teams.
“We have a separate Dev chat with SQD developers. Not only are they super helpful when we have some difficulties, but they also listen to feedback on the SDK design.”
The team also received immediate support for critical bugs on weekends, demonstrating strong commitment to customer success.
The answers for this case study were kindly provided by Yuri, CTO and co-founder of RMRK and Skybreach.