DAW and its parent set "Full Chain Game" are expected to become an important part of the future blockchain field.
I. Game Development Demonstration
DAW, which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Worlds, belongs to the subset of Full Chain Games, which is a type of game that is fully on-chain, open-ended, and without preset gameplay. Before discussing Full Chain Games and DAW, we first briefly analyze multiple aspects covered by the game, including game assets, game logic, game state, and game data storage.
Web2 Games
In this article, we divide Web2 games into two types: autonomous world games and non-autonomous world games. Both types of games share a common feature, which is that all elements related to the game are stored on the game company's servers. Whether it is game assets or the setting of gameplay rules, they are controlled by centralized companies. In these games, players usually lack true ownership of in-game assets, and game companies have control over virtual items, characters, and game progress, limiting players' ability to freely trade, sell virtual property, or monetize it.
This situation often leads to a series of unpleasant experiences. For example, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin once played "World of Warcraft" and became dissatisfied when Blizzard deleted his favorite character skill, leading Vitalik to choose to quit the game. In addition, in recent years, Blizzard has shut down Chinese servers, which has also brought very unpleasant experiences to Chinese players.
Web2 Non-Autonomous World Games
As shown in the above figure, this article classifies online games to date into four categories. Among them, Web2 non-autonomous world games include games such as "King of Glory," "League of Legends," and "Endless of God." These games usually set specific goals within the game, such as "rank," as shown in the figure above. The decentralization and autonomy of these games are relatively low. Compared to autonomous world games, the creativity of players in these games is usually lower, and the openness of the games is also relatively low.
Web2 Autonomous World Games (CAW)
In addition to the non-autonomous world games mentioned above, Web2 games also include a type of autonomous world game, as shown in the figure above. This type of game has a high degree of autonomy, but its decentralization is also very low.
"Minecraft" is a typical representative of this type of game. "Minecraft" focuses on allowing players to explore, interact, and change a dynamically generated autonomous world composed of many blocks.
In addition to blocks, the environment also includes animals, plants, and items. The game's content includes but is not limited to mining, battling hostile creatures, and collecting various resources in the game to craft new blocks and tools. The open game mode allows players to create buildings and artworks in various multiplayer servers or single-player maps.
In "Minecraft," players do not have a specific ultimate goal in the game, and the game encourages free creation, bringing many new ways to play. Players can not only build houses and raise animals, but also engage in advanced gameplay, such as a streamer player ingeniously using a large amount of TNT to create spectacular explosion effects, and another player even built a functional computer in the game, which also included mini-games.
In "Minecraft," there are many such amazing gameplay modes, which are truly impressive.
In addition to the "Creative Mode" mentioned earlier, "Minecraft" also has many other gameplay modes. For example, in "Survival Mode," players need to gather resources, build shelters, make tools and weapons, battle hostile creatures, and maintain their health and hunger status; in "Adventure Mode," players can embark on adventures in maps created by themselves or others, usually limiting some creative operations, requiring players to follow predetermined rules; in "Multiplayer" mode, players can play together on local area networks or the internet. This can include cooperative building, PvP (player versus player) battles, and multiplayer adventures.
It is also worth mentioning that players can install third-party mods to change the gameplay, add new content and features, thereby increasing the diversity of the game.
These are just a few of the gameplay modes in "Minecraft." Due to the game's high degree of freedom and expandability, players can develop various unique gameplay methods based on their interests and creativity.
Web3 Games
Early GameFi
As mentioned earlier, Web2 games all have centralized issues. Therefore, in the field of blockchain games (GameFi), people began to explore whether gameplays and economic cycles could be optimized through blockchain technology.
Asset On-Chain
Therefore, GameFi was born. GameFi refers to blockchain games that provide economic incentives for players to earn cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) rewards while playing. As shown in the figure above, compared to the two types of Web2 games mentioned earlier, these games have a higher degree of decentralization, but they still lack autonomy and are far from being fully decentralized.
After the birth of GameFi, famous projects such as Axie and Stepn emerged, which put game assets on-chain as NFTs, creating an open liquidity economic system. This not only gives game assets financial attributes but also ensures the uniqueness and tamper resistance of player assets.
Insufficient Decentralization
However, despite the assets being put on-chain, the core logic and gameplay of the game still remain off-chain, which still poses a certain degree of centralization. In the early stages of GameFi, game developers still had too broad permissions, similar to Web2 game developers, to freely change the attributes of in-game assets, gameplay rules, and even the value of assets. For example, in Stepn (a run-to-earn GameFi), game developers can freely modify the value of in-game assets. Originally, a pair of running shoes might generate $100 in revenue per day, but after the game developers unilaterally modify the properties of the running shoes, this income might drop to $50. Therefore, in the early stages of GameFi, there is still a certain degree of centralization issue.
Unreasonable Economic Model
Moreover, fundamentally speaking, most early GameFi games are actually "passing the buck" games. Early players can obtain a large number of tokens through the game, but these tokens actually have no value.
In early GameFi, players usually need to purchase NFTs to participate in the game, while also earning GameFi tokens during the game. However, game teams often only profit by forcing players to purchase NFTs, and the output tokens have no upper limit, leading to a continuous decline in token value, which can only be maintained by new players continuously purchasing NFTs.
Therefore, once the revenue brought by new players purchasing NFTs is lower than the team's investment in repurchasing tokens, the team will be unable to stabilize the token price, and the token price will subsequently decline. Then, early players will start selling, leading to panic selling, causing more players to sell off, thus forming a vicious cycle.
Web3 Autonomous World Games (DAW)
Therefore, some people began to think, since assets can be put on-chain, can other game logic and game data storage be completely migrated to the blockchain as well? Thus, the concept of Full Chain Games emerged. Full Chain Games refer to a type of game where not only game assets are stored on the blockchain, but all elements related to the game are also stored in the blockchain network, ensuring complete decentralization and on-chain nature of the game.
The protagonist of this article, DAW, is a type of Full Chain Game, but the significance of DAW goes far beyond that. DAW is an "infinite game" that does not set specific tasks and goals internally, nor does it have preset opponents. It only establishes the most basic foundational rules based on "digital physical reality" as constraints. By providing an openly accessible programmable interface, it allows players to freely create, enhance, and expand the game experience within the boundaries of this digital physical reality, further expanding the game's plot.
Note: "Digital physical reality" refers to the basic law system existing in the computational world. Each world has its own set of fundamental laws that govern everything that happens in that world. These laws are the physics of that world. Please note that here, physics does not refer to the narrow physical laws in the atomic world where humans exist, but rather refers to the fundamental law system existing in any "world."
As a subset of Full Chain Games, DAW, compared to other Full Chain Games, not only stores game assets, all elements related to the game, gameplays, and logic in the blockchain network, but also has more characteristics and gameplay. In the autonomous world, players have stronger autonomy and further enhanced playability. As shown in the figure above, in terms of autonomy and decentralization, DAW is far ahead of the other three types of games.
So, what are the highlights of DAW?
Complete Decentralization:
As a form of game that is fully on-chain, DAW is immune to the risk of the game operating company "going out of business," so even if the game operating company goes out of business, players can still continue to play the game.
In contrast, in centralized games such as "Minecraft," if the operating company announces the cessation of game operations or the closure of specific servers for some reason, it will cause huge damage to players.
In addition, unlike early GameFi where only assets are put on-chain, all elements related to the game in DAW are also stored in the blockchain network. Compared to this, DAW is more secure, and players have stronger ownership.
Stronger Autonomy:
In DAW, the autonomy of players is emphasized more. In addition to sharing the "autonomous world" characteristics with CAW, DAW also allows players to develop plugins for use by other players, such as creating a virtual marketplace for players to trade. In addition, DAW players can engage in many activities that are difficult to achieve in CAW games. As mentioned earlier, they can establish a "world government" and independently formulate regulations.
Economic Incentives:
As a game on the blockchain, DAW can issue tokens and NFTs. Therefore, players have the possibility of obtaining some economic incentives, such as obtaining specific assets through "airdrops." In addition, the game can set some incentive goals to encourage players to participate in different activities.
Taking "OP Craft" (which will be introduced later) as an example, the game can encourage players to independently develop some mini-games within the game, and then players can apply for sponsorship funds from the "OP Craft" official fund. When players successfully complete the mini-games, the corresponding rewards can be distributed to them. This mechanism not only stimulates players' creativity and participation but also promotes community cooperation and development, which may be the true model for "play-to-earn."
Composability:
As a Full Chain Game, DAW also has strong composability. In theory, different Full Chain Games can achieve asset interoperability, thus building a metaverse. Let's make a bold assumption, just like the player's spaceship assets in "Dark Forest" can be used in "OP Craft," and in the "OP Craft" game, other players can see the player piloting this spaceship.
Note: Dark Forest is a decentralized real-time strategy (RTS) game built on Ethereum, inspired by Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy, specifically the second novel "The Dark Forest" and its namesake thought experiment. It is an MMO space conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally generated, cryptographically specified universe.
Although there are currently no actual projects that can fully realize the above idea, theoretical assumptions like the one above are feasible at the conceptual level, and various projects are continuously striving to turn them into reality. With the growing ecosystem and the increasing collaboration between project teams, these ideas may have the potential to be successfully implemented in the near future.
In addition, as a GameFi, DAW can issue tokens that can be combined with DeFi. Players can stake tokens in mining pools, and they may also be able to re-stake the generated trading pairs in other DeFi projects to earn secondary income. There are many other DeFi "nesting doll" gameplay features that add value to DAW.
II. Implementation of DAW
In the previous section, it was mentioned that DAW has its core competitiveness compared to other types of games. So, how is DAW actually implemented?
Decentralization transfers game rights from traditional developers to players as creative entities, and composability breaks down the long-closed garden walls, as well as the true ownership of players.
However, in the early stages of GameFi, we did not see the true decentralization and composability as claimed in the Web3 world—players lacked autonomy and a sense of participation in gameplays and game content, and different game projects did not actually share the blockchain state.
Core Issues
To truly achieve DAW, several core issues in on-chain games need to be addressed:
Lack of game development framework: Each development team generally adopts a self-built approach, leading to inefficiency and a failure to fully utilize shared system knowledge to solve the same problem and continuously optimize the best solutions.
Lack of code reusability: For many blockchain games currently under development, only a very small portion of game code can be reused to create different games. The lack of clear distinctions between different layers and components of different games limits the potential to use similar code libraries to build the next generation of games.
Lack of data composability: How to solve the problem of sharing blockchain state between blockchain games and how to effectively use the data from games A and B to build each other are still unresolved challenges.
Therefore, to build a truly DAW, it is necessary to start from a deeper level and address issues beyond "how to build a game": how to find a more general and suitable game development framework or engine for the blockchain.
What is a Game Engine
A game engine is essentially a modularized code library and set of tools. Game developers can complete tasks such as graphics rendering, physics simulation, and network communication by calling various interfaces of the engine, without needing to engage in relatively low-level and low-level programming work. This feature greatly saves time, allowing developers to focus more on game design and content creation. In the commercial game engine field, the most common engines include Unity and Unreal.
Currently, many Web2 games and even some so-called "weak on-chain games" still use Unreal or Unity. However, as Full Chain Games continue to develop and mature, some Web3 game studios are developing their own game engines to allow developers to write complex decentralized game logic and interactive content.
Although on-chain game engines are conceptually similar to traditional game engines, as they both aim to simplify the game development process, their specific implementations differ fundamentally due to the storage of game state on the blockchain. On-chain game engines focus more on issues related to state synchronization, game security, gas cost efficiency improvement, and maximizing composability and interoperability. Therefore, developers can focus more on the game itself, reduce concerns about blockchain compatibility issues, and reduce the cost of learning the Solidity programming language.
What Are the Full Chain Game Engines—Using MUD as an Example
In the realm of Full Chain Games, there are currently four main engines, including MUD, Dojo Engine, World Engine, and Keystone, with MUD and Dojo Engine being the most prominent. This article will focus on introducing the first Full Chain Game engine, MUD.
MUD is the earliest pioneer in the field of Full Chain Game engines and is a framework that can be used to build EVM-compatible applications. It mainly revolves around the ECS framework, focusing on solving three core issues in the development of Full Chain Games: contract and client state synchronization, continuous content updates, and interoperability with other contracts. By providing a set of code libraries and tools, it facilitates developers in building dApps more easily, especially for developing complex dApps such as gaming applications. In theory, MUD can be used to develop any application, but its specific attributes make it particularly suitable as an on-chain game engine.
Background Team
The development team behind MUD is Lattice, which is a part of the 0xPARC subproject and is a very important part of it. 0xPARC was originally formed by the pioneer of Full Chain Games, the Dark Forest team, and several other projects.
It is worth mentioning that the concept of "autonomous world" was proposed by 0xPARC, and in mid-September to mid-December 2022, 0xPrac organized an offline event called "Autonomous World Residence," with participants including Lattice, Dark Forest, DFDAO, CAPSULE, and Moving Castle. The purpose of this event was to gather teams that are building or interested in building autonomous worlds, on-chain games, and related technologies in a face-to-face setting to promote collaboration, exchange of ideas, learning, feedback, and ultimately shape and guide this emerging field.
During this event, 0xPrac provided funding assistance to all successful applicants, specifically reimbursing £600 / $720 for transportation and £1,500 / $1,800 for accommodation per month. In addition, 0xPrac also provided additional funding, which will be considered based on the project scope, team, and commitment level.
Furthermore, as shown in the above image, 0xPrac recently launched the Autonomous Worlds Network, which primarily focuses on the following areas:
Research and development: Supporting experimental methods and projects to break the boundaries of autonomous worlds inside and outside the blockchain.
Open-source tools and infrastructure: New worlds require new tools and infrastructure, and the development of these tools is encouraged based on the values of an open ecosystem.
Education and ecosystem development: Supporting a creative ecosystem composed of developers, technologists, artists, writers, and designers to contribute to the definition and development of autonomous worlds.
ECS (Entity-Component-System Framework)
ECS is a very classic framework in the traditional game industry, built on top of a general engine, used to solve the relationships, interactions, and operation updates between game objects.
Compared to other software architecture patterns, ECS has many advantages. It is very efficient because it only loads the data required for the current scene. It is also very flexible because it allows developers to easily create new game objects and systems.
Here are some benefits of using ECS in game development:
Efficiency: ECS demonstrates excellent efficiency in memory and CPU usage, thanks to only loading the data required for the current scene.
Flexibility: ECS presents great flexibility in creating and modifying game objects. This is because entities themselves do not contain any data or behavior, but are defined through the components attached to them. This allows developers to easily create new game objects and systems.
Scalability: ECS has outstanding scalability for large games because it does not rely on a centralized data structure. Instead, entities and components are stored in a distributed manner, making it possible to create games with millions or even billions of entities.
Issues with OOP
Before ECS was widely adopted, the game industry typically used object-oriented programming (OOP) to handle data. This involved nesting various game objects under class structures to inherit the properties and functionality of the classes, thus building the entire data framework.
This approach has several obvious problems:
Inheritance: The relationships between game objects usually need to be defined at the initial stage (which is almost unrealistic), otherwise, when a new type of object appears and needs to use the functionality of multiple old classes, inheritance becomes complex and difficult to implement.
Maintenance issues: As the game content increases, the number of classes gradually increases, making maintenance work very heavy.
Performance bottlenecks: For game engines, there are many modules, but many of them are not directly related. For example, there is not much connection between the rendering module and the network connection module. However, when all properties are stuffed into one object, performance will inevitably be affected.
Solutions with ECS
Note: This section is based on the article "Full Chain Game③: Engines and Ecosystems—Mud & Dojo."
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MUD adopts the ECS framework, abandoning the OOP approach and breaking down all properties into separate components, such as health points, position, elemental attributes, and more.
In ECS, an entity is simply a data identifier used to uniquely identify a specific collection of components. Therefore, the "player" identifier corresponds to a group of components, such as {"HP", "MP", etc.}. It is important to note that entities and components do not contain computational logic; all computations are handled by systems. For example, the movement system is responsible for handling entity movement, and the damage system is responsible for combat value calculations, and so on.
To better understand this, let's use a comparison from an article by Boreal Games. Suppose we want to develop a very simple game that includes four elements: rocks, trees, enemies, and players. The traditional OOP implementation is as follows:
And the implementation using ECS:
It is evident that ECS is a highly modularized data management system. The concept of "entity" in this design completely changes the way game design is approached, no longer requiring game designers to rely on programmers to modify game logic every time. Additionally, the relationships between entities are easier to adjust.
Sovereign Spaces
One of the notable features of MUD is that anyone can create new ownerless spaces for state and logic. Component creators can seamlessly collaborate on this framework, efficiently query data from the central World contract without the need for full node blockchain synchronization. Furthermore, MUD's inherent interoperability allows different worlds to interact with each other, paving the way for exciting and permissionless possibilities.
Core Components
As the Web3 ecosystem matures, new methods for building applications and achieving scalability will emerge. While much attention is focused on zero-knowledge (ZK) technology and modular/DA (data availability) blockchains, MUD provides an intriguing alternative.
For developers interested in using MUD, the framework is equipped with several core components, including the Store, World, Foundry, and MODE.
The Store serves as an on-chain database optimized for gas efficiency and inspired by SQLite. It provides developers with the ability to store and retrieve data using tables, columns, and rows, offering a more self-managed alternative to traditional Solidity storage mechanisms. Through the Store, developers can define custom data structures (e.g., AllowanceTable) and interact with data using set and get operations.
On the other hand, the World acts as the entry point kernel, providing standardized access control, upgrades, and module functionality. It serves as an intermediary between contracts and storage to ensure secure and controlled access to data. The system itself is a stateless contract that executes logic for the entire world and interacts with storage for data read and write. By using custom permissions to partition logic between different contracts, MUD promotes modularity and upgradability.
In addition to the Store and World, MUD also offers rapid development tools based on the Foundry (reflecting client data storage of on-chain state) and MODE (a Postgres database mapped one-to-one to on-chain state). MODE allows developers to query on-chain state using SQL and provides efficient materialized views for real-time data synchronization with client applications.
By fully utilizing MUD's Store and World, developers can easily create on-chain applications without the need for additional indexers or subgraphs. On-chain data becomes self-managed, and any changes are propagated through standard events. MODE plays a crucial role in real-time synchronization of on-chain state with client applications, eliminating the need for complex polling or subgraph subscriptions. This simplifies the development process and improves the overall efficiency of on-chain applications.
With MUD, developers can harness the powerful capabilities of Ethereum and other EVM-compatible chains to build complex applications and games. This framework provides a solid foundation for creating highly interoperable, decentralized, and self-managed worlds. Developers are free to design and implement their own components and systems as needed, making it a flexible and scalable platform.
MUD has a wide range of potential applications. It can be used to build decentralized games, virtual worlds, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, social platforms, and more. Its modular architecture and compatibility with various chains make it suitable for different project requirements and environments.
In conclusion, one of the main advantages of MUD is that it addresses scalability challenges. By leveraging off-chain storage solutions like MODE and efficient data synchronization mechanisms, MUD allows developers to create high-performance applications without compromising on-chain security. This scalability is crucial for building applications capable of handling a large number of users and transactions.
III. DAW Games
MUD Series
OP Craft: The Most Representative DAW Game
Note: This section is based on the official OP Craft article.
OP Craft is a fully chained 3D Minecraft-themed game created by the Lattice team from Dark Forest in October 2022. It is currently the game that best embodies the features of DAW.
In OPCraft, a simple set of rules is established. Players can only perform four in-game operations, including breaking blocks, crafting blocks, placing blocks, and claiming a 16x16 piece of land (becoming the highest diamond staker for that chunk). Additionally, players can use the officially provided open plugin system to customize the frontend, deploy custom components and systems.
Surprisingly, within just two weeks of its launch, this simple rule-based game exceeded the developers' expectations. It not only achieved tremendous success in terms of data, attracting over 1500 participating players and over 3.5 million on-chain records, but also sparked various user-generated pixel art, individual player-made plugins, and a series of spontaneously formed competitive, gaming, and community governance activities, as well as some malicious and friendly player behaviors.
Unlocking the Creativity of Artists, Architects, and Developers
OPCraft unleashed the creative talents of artists and architects. From initially simple wooden houses and towers to later, exquisite craftsmanship, players began building various amazing architectural structures, such as Mario and Fire Flower, and giant phoenix statues spanning hundreds of blocks, which were truly breathtaking.
On the other hand, engineers and "scientists" used their coding abilities to explore another limit of the OPCraft world. Using the user-friendly and permissionless World1 plugin system and "component system" provided by the system, players began to use their intelligence to explore the potential of technology. For example, a player released a plugin for automated material collection that does not require consideration of geographical coordinates. Another player released an automatic diamond mining drill tool and a chat plugin tool for text communication, and so on.
Digging and Filling Holes
For some reason, whether out of mischief, dark humor, or spontaneous gaming behavior, some players in OPCraft began digging extremely deep holes, causing many unsuspecting players to fall into traps.
However, such malicious events took a turn when players fell into the traps. Some players initiated rescue missions by filling the holes or directly placing stairs in the holes to rescue the trapped players. There were even players who developed a teleport plugin tool to avoid pitfalls.
A player in the hole initiated a "call for help" on Discord.
Evolution: Tools and Productivity Improvement
In OPCraft, initially, players only performed basic operations such as gathering flowers, chopping trees, mining ores, digging caves, building simple wooden houses, and constructing single-width towers. Additionally, some rough and unrecognizable digital objects were created.
Over time, players gradually delved into this virtual world, mastering the skills to create more complex items, such as making glass, dyeing wool, and making bricks. As a result, these more complex materials could be used to create larger and more complex artworks and buildings, fully demonstrating composability.
As shown in the image below, players used colored wool blocks to create huge pixel art, such as the Union Jack, giant pandas, and even showcased their own NFT projects. Additionally, some players used synthesized materials such as sand, stone, wood, and bedrock to build magnificent sky-high pyramids. There was also a massive space-themed planet, a tribute to "The Dark Forest," created by a game player using 6360 bedrock blocks.
Example of a player-built structure
SupremeLeaderOP Republic
In a very interesting turn of events within the OPCraft game, on October 29th, just two days before the end of the OPCraft test, a player named SupremeLeaderOP announced the establishment of a world government on Discord and Twitter.
This player mined a large number of diamonds through various means (officially reported as 135,200), claimed a large number of in-game plots with diamonds (after a plot is claimed, other players cannot build or cultivate without permission).
Furthermore, this player directly announced the establishment of a world government in the game and allowed other players to pledge allegiance to the republic and become citizens of the world government through the apro-comrade plugin. However, after becoming citizens of the world government, they had to give up all private property (player inventory), but could use the government treasury. Once players became citizens, they could mine materials for the government treasury through smart contracts deployed by the supreme leader and use treasury materials to build on government-owned land.
III. DAW Games
MUD Series
OP Craft: The Most Representative DAW Game
Note: This section is based on the official OP Craft article.
The World Government Republic even established a "social credit" system to prevent citizens who obtained more material from the national treasury than they contributed. Citizens with low credit scores can only "repair social credit" by contributing their labor before they can continue to use the national treasury.
Afterwards, many game players spontaneously welcomed this player as the supreme leader of the World Government Republic, and even spontaneously built statues of the supreme leader. At the same time, some participants strongly opposed the supreme leader, condemning their control and collectivist policies, and calling for resistance and fighting for freedom.
Strong Playability
In just two weeks, OP Craft has seen the emergence of many emerging social behaviors within the game. For example, players set traps for entertainment, and then other players cooperated to escape from these traps, sometimes even resorting to filling in caves to solve problems.
During these two weeks, we witnessed developers creating plugins at an unprecedented speed, without the need for special authorization and with the freedom to do so. What's even more surprising is that we also witnessed the rise of a new government and the voluntary adoption of new rules and systems, which were not pre-designed by the game's official developers and were not even imagined to occur.
In DAW games, unlimited possibilities spread out, and the occurrence and evolution of anything are not controlled by anyone. Based on this freedom, the game has also spawned more engaging gameplay. Compared to early GameFi focused on "Play to Earn," DAW has taken an important step in terms of game playability, sometimes even providing a more enjoyable gaming experience than Web2 games.
Dojo Series
Loot Realms Series
The development team behind the Loot Realms series is BibliothecaDAO. It is worth mentioning that due to its community nature, BibliothecaDAO has not conducted any institutional financing, but chose to issue its own governance token $LORD in December 2021. On February 1, 2023, it completed a round of community private financing based on Community Proposal 7 (BIP-7), achieving an overfunding of 6.35 times due to the strong cohesion of the community.
The Loot Realms series currently has two main games. The first is Realms: Eternum, which officially opened its Alpha test version in early 2023. The second is LootSurvivor, the first "play to die" Roguelike game released at ETHGlobal Lisbon in May 2023.
Realms: Eternum
Realms: Eternum is an economic and military strategy game developed by Bibliotheca DAO on Starknet using L2 high scalability. Eternum combines gameplay from popular web games like Travian and Tribal War, as well as game modes from board games like Catan and Risk, and incorporates some economic elements.
The 8,000 Eternal Realms in the game are independent territories managed and developed by the lords of each realm. It is important to note that Eternum is an eternal game, meaning it will continue to run as long as Ethereum is producing blocks, and events in this world will determine the direction of the game.
However, the game is still under development and needs improvement in terms of interactive experience.
Loot Survivor
Loot Survivor is a fully on-chain survival game where players can devise RPG-style strategies and compete with other players to obtain loot, helping them survive traps and boss battles. During the adventure, if a player's character survives and ranks in the top three, every new adventurer who enters the game will pay tribute to that player in $LORD until the achievement is surpassed.
During the game, if a player's character dies, the $LORD owned by the player's character and the loot obtained during the adventure will drop and become the earnings of the level developer. This interesting game mechanism has gained favor among many players.
However, in terms of interaction, the StarkNet L2 network has slow and unstable speeds, and games deployed on StarkNet require 3-5 minutes of waiting time for each interaction. In the Loot Survivor game, reaching the top 50 rankings requires at least 3-5 hours, and the developers revealed that it took about 6 hours to reach the top three. Considering the current number of participants, the required time may be much longer than 6 hours.
ISAAC
Isaac is a large-scale cooperative game that references Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem." In the game, all players live on a planet in a trisolar system (a system with three suns), and there is a high probability that this planet will be hit by a sun, leading to the destruction of the world.
Therefore, to survive, players must collaborate to build infrastructure, with the ultimate goal of building a star propulsion engine similar to the NDPE (Neutrino-Driven Photon Engine) in "The Wandering Earth," which can give the planet acceleration and allow it to escape the trisolar system. In addition, players need to devise a plan to change the planet's orbit to avoid the dangers of the trisolar system and achieve escape velocity.
Topology
Topology was founded by @guiltygyoza and @iamkunhokim. Unlike other teams focused on on-chain games, engines, and other developer tools, they focus on the underlying implementation of DAW. So far, Topology has launched three projects: ISAAC, MuMu, and ShoShin.
It is worth mentioning that, as shown in the image above, Topology recently held a tournament for Shoshin.
IV. Limitations of DAW
Note: For more detailed content, please refer to this article.
The first part of the article discusses the core competitive advantages of DAW compared to other types of games. However, what limitations does DAW face in its development? In fact, DAW itself does not have specific limitations, but because it is a fully on-chain game running on a blockchain network, its development is constrained by the progress of blockchain technology, leading to the following two main limitations for DAW:
Limited Game Categories:
Although fully on-chain games have opened up new areas of game design, some important trade-offs limit the types and functionalities of games. The most significant limitation is the impact of blockchain synchronization delays on fully on-chain games, which adversely affects the user experience.
Game states are stored on the blockchain, and when one player updates their state, another player must wait for on-chain confirmation and game index updates, greatly limiting the nature of the game. This makes fully on-chain games more suitable for asynchronous turn-based gameplay, such as in "Minecraft," while large-scale multiplayer online games requiring strong real-time performance, like "EVE Online," are difficult to achieve. As game users frequently operate, it may lead to frequent calls to public RPC endpoints to read smart contracts, causing network congestion.
The solution is for users to run nodes locally to avoid RPC congestion. In addition, Ethereum's stateless client and Verkle trees, Mina's recursive zkSNARKs, and Polkadot's Substrate Connect are all moving in this direction.
Poor Game Experience:
In on-chain games, all logic runs in smart contracts, and players need to sign transactions to confirm every operation in the game, which is quite a poor player experience. Additionally, compared to Web2 games that only require one-click login through some common social apps, on-chain games also have a barrier to entry for novice players in terms of wallet usage. However, many corresponding solutions have emerged.
The "Burner" wallet is a strategy adopted by many on-chain games. This type of wallet is temporary and stored in the local browser. When a player participates in the game, the wallet automatically signs transactions in the background. Therefore, players can start the game without downloading or connecting a wallet, and without frequent transaction confirmations.
Another solution is "Account Abstraction" (AA). This solution can give smart contract properties to external EOA (externally owned accounts). It abstracts the player's wallet interaction experience to achieve secure deployment and highly customizable smart wallets.
Account Abstraction supports modular logic in hot wallet logic. Players can generate a new account for any game with temporary "local key pairs" (compared to the main account). The functionality of this set of temporary key pairs can be limited to only a few functions, such as: 1) the ability to transfer assets back to the main wallet; 2) the ability to call limited functions from a whitelist in the proxy contract.
This modular architecture not only reduces frequent in-game signing operations but also retains the strong security of the main wallet.
In addition, compared to EOA wallets, AA wallets have lowered the entry barrier. Some AA wallets even implement features that allow users to log in with facial recognition, greatly reducing the entry barrier for blockchain wallets.
V. Economic Model Outlook
Importing External Resources to Fill the Treasury:
Drawing from the experience of early GameFi, we may reasonably speculate that a rational GameFi economic model should cover external circulation, rather than being limited to internal vicious cycles.
To stabilize the in-game economy in the long term, it is crucial to introduce diverse and lasting resources through external commercial expansion. This resource interaction can be both external fund consumption (external users paying for and purchasing game-related assets) and internal fund precipitation (introducing external scarce resources to guide internal player payments). We refer to folius Ventures' "Ten Suggestions on P2E Game Economy" and propose the following viewpoints:
Regarding the import of external resources, the following aspects can be considered:
Direct advertising revenue: In the Web3 era, user attention has become scarcer, making community marketing activities more likely to attract user attention accurately.
Product resource collaboration: Once the community ecosystem flourishes, collaboration with teams with similar tones can exchange product resources as scarce rewards to drive user participation and achieve in-game currency consumption.
Esports broadcasting and event betting: Only applicable to highly intense, highly entertaining, and high-level PVP scenes, revenue can be obtained through obtaining broadcasting rights and betting.
Peripheral product releases: Perhaps collaboration with fashion brands with matching styles, or independently launching popular products such as clothing and shoes.
Of course, these resource import plans are difficult to implement before the establishment of user communities and brand culture. Therefore, the team still needs to focus on game mechanics and content as the core, design a secure economic mechanism, and prepare relatively abundant capital for gradual expansion from cold start.
Reducing Value Outflow and Increasing Value Inflow
Unlike traditional game players who purely invest value, Web3 games with property rights and leasing rights allow users to derive value from them, making it easier to attract players who are purely seeking returns and speculation.
Furthermore, early GameFi games mostly lacked sufficient entertainment value, making it difficult to create "non-return-oriented demand," resulting in overall value outflow far exceeding value input. To compensate for this unsustainable phenomenon, games need to rely on new player investments to make up for the loss of value. This is not only an unsustainable practice but also wastes the entertainment and enjoyment value that the game itself brings.
Therefore, game teams should understand the behavior habits of cryptocurrency users to reduce the outflow of their value and strive to increase their economic contribution to the ecosystem. By improving user experience, creating emotional value, and encouraging players to increase their value input in various ways, the game can encourage players to become holders after receiving economic incentives, and even gain a sense of achievement from holding limited NFTs.
Additionally, the target user base should be expanded to provide more convenient and cost-effective entry paths for traditional game players. At the same time, efforts can be made to guide cryptocurrency players with similar goals and behaviors to become more entertainment-focused players (refer to the two tables below). Through this approach, different types of players can enjoy the game together, contribute to the ecosystem, and receive rewards.
Summary of DAW Economic Model
In summary, whether it is importing external resources or reducing internal value outflow, the underlying principle is actually a return to "playability." Only when the game itself is attractive enough to attract genuine gamers rather than just financial speculators, can the token economy return to a healthy cycle.
In this regard, DAW has performed well, not only having advantages over early GameFi but even surpassing traditional Web2 games in terms of autonomy and other aspects. Therefore, we have every reason to believe that DAW will be able to attract more genuine gamers with its outstanding playability, thereby addressing the sustainability issues of the token economy.
VI. Conclusion
Through the discussion in this article, it can be understood that DAW is still in a very early stage, with a lack of ecological projects and many technical challenges.
However, as mentioned above, many corresponding solutions are continuously advancing, and DAW has its core competitiveness compared to other games. We have reason to believe that after its technical deficiencies are addressed, DAW's decentralized advantages, strong autonomy, composability, and economic incentives can attract more players.
Furthermore, DAW itself is a strong narrative, and based on this, one can imagine whether a decentralized autonomous world game similar to "Ready Player One" will emerge in the future. In DAW, the game itself can act as an economic system, with its own currency, market, and economic rules, creating a new type of economic organization that coexists with traditional economies. Such a completely autonomous world itself has high openness and an independent economic system, all of which make it possible to achieve a game like "Ready Player One" in DAW.
In conclusion, DAW itself contains a compelling narrative, with many interesting and boundary-breaking gameplay elements, enough to attract the attention of many people. With the continuous development of technology and the improvement of the ecosystem, it is foreseeable that DAW and its parent category "fully on-chain games" are expected to become an important and highly anticipated part of the future blockchain field. Perhaps, with the continuous progress of technology and the development of the ecosystem, DAW can become an important player in the next Web3 bull market.
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