A brief analysis of the full-chain game engine

The rapid iteration of these engines has begun to allow us to see the arrival of an era of composable, scalable, and fully open full-chain games.

Written by: Ishanee, IOSG Ventures

introduction:

Full-chain games like Dark Forest have proven that you can put game logic on-chain, and because of its permissionless interoperability, it has encouraged the community to create new tools, alliances, DAOs, and more. Prior to this, although the paradigm and motivation of building an autonomous world have been well documented, there are not many articles on the full-chain game engine, which is one of the most fascinating new fields in this direction in our opinion.

Game development: traditional games and full-chain games

In the past, game engines like Unreal, Unity, and Phaser were used as one-stop shops for traditional game development. It includes the basic construction of developing games, such as control motion, 2D and 3D rendering, object collision detection, sound, color, scripting and other physical engines, and even includes server client architecture, PC / game console / mobile phone framework, transaction distribution mechanism such as the market.

When World of Warcraft launched, Blizzard had been working on the game's network stack for four years, but only one year on the game's content. Soon after Unity launched in 2005, development time was reduced from 4 years to a few months due to its modular technology stack.

In a full-chain game, the game state will all be stored on the blockchain, which means a unique set of challenges and the creation of new infrastructure. The first one developed for the Ethereum ecosystem was the MUD engine launched by Lattice. Later, several other engines for different ecosystems and using different programming languages gradually appeared, such as DojoEngine for starkware.

The first game engine: MUD

Lattice's MUD was created during the 0xParc Residency in Q3 2022. During this period, Lattice tried to create several full-chain games. Although the gameplay and styles were different, they all encountered the same blockchain problems. Not complex and difficult technical problems, but a lot of busy workload. In this way, they launched MUD - the first full-chain game engine.

When MUD teams try to create games, they do use game engines or tools like PhaserJS, Three, and Godot, but these are client-side engines whose main job is to take the state of the world and make it readable for the player. What used to be shared was the state of the world - "is the bishop on the board?" while readability was "a chess piece with fancy 3D projections, a user interface that moves it around the board with click and drag based on bishop movement rules" .

How to understand the engine architecture ECS used by MUD

They use the ECS (entity component-entity component system) architecture. In this framework, each full-chain game will deploy a world contract, which is the registry of all objects (Entities) in this world. Entity is a numerical ID, and components are attached to Entity and can be added to the world.

In this example, Entity 1 could be a dragon character and Position, CanFly and Price are 3 different components. Components do not have any logic themselves, they can be added to new Entities through system contracts. A system contract requires write access to the owner's component. In a MUD, there is no distinction between 1st and 3rd party developers.

StarkNet 上海 Dojo Engine

Dojo Engine is an open source ECS framework, like the MUD built for the StarkNet ecosystem, but not compatible with EVM, written in Cairo. Dojo's engineering team includes Realms, Briq, cartridge_gg, topology, starknet and other project teams.

First Game: Dark Forest

Dark Forest is a MMORTS space battle game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite randomly generated universe. The beta version of the game was launched in 2020, and its V0.3 version was released on the Ropsten testnet for 1 week. Players who participated in the test were whitelisted and competed for 1024Dai as part of the prize pool. So far, more than 10,000 players have participated in the rounds of the dark forest, consuming trillions of gas on Ropsten, xDai, and Gnosis Chain.

Dark Forest Ecosystem

• plugin
• Substitute customer
• GPU miners
• Corporate players
• Data/Broadcast Market - Players can add new functions through the data market and apply them in the game.

**Dark Forest does not distinguish whether players are EOA or smart contract players, and a new type of gamer community has emerged. **

• DF DAO - Created in May 2021
• Orden GG - another alliance to compete with DF DAO
• Astral Colossus is a smart contract (robot) player of DF DAO. This player has several limitations, such as not being able to extract resources, and plays with the sole goal of increasing Dark Forest DAO's score on the leaderboard. Any round wins contributed to the player will be recorded.

Full chain game ecology

As you can see, Ethereum, OP and StarkNet are the 3 key ecosystems.

Challenges for full-chain game development

These challenges can be categorized into three aspects: technology, onboarding and economic realization.

technology

Developing full-chain games requires complex technology and is still a daunting task. With the support of MUD and DOJO, although the development threshold has become lower, it still cannot provide convenience for developers like Unity. The technical challenges of game development also include the challenge of scaling.

This is why several teams have used rollup as a service companies like Caldera to create OPStack, either using client proofs, or building directly on L2. Some builders are also paying close attention to verifiable decentralized computing networks like RiscZero to expand the application range of their smart contracts. Gas optimization is also a big problem, partly related to technology and scalability, partly related to game design.

SNARKs are used for privacy or for scalability. Dark Forest uses zkps to add incompleteness to the game, without it any player can see the entire world view, others use it to offload heavy computation tasks to the client and sync state (like playmint).

Onboarding

If full-chain gaming is like attracting more blockchain gaming communities (before they think about mass adoption), wallet management is paramount. Since the game is entirely on-chain, players will likely have to sign up for every in-game action popup, which would make for a poor user experience. Session Keys is the easiest way to solve this problem, but there are potential security risks. Current game developers do not want players to hold high value items in their wallets, so this is not the most pressing issue at the moment, but as more and more players come in, this issue will have to be resolved sooner or later.

Another aspect is the onboarding of developers to encourage and attract game modders to contribute and expand the game, which will naturally increase the value of autonomous worlds. This is primarily achieved by providing developers with the proper tools and ensuring proper monetization or rewards for their contributions.

Economic Realization

This challenge will become clearer with the success of the first on-chain game. The economy within the game world will contribute to the fun, mining, and resource collection of any full-chain game itself, and will require multiple adjustments to ensure players have fun in the game.

An interesting way for game developers today to monetize is through sequencer fees, using their tokens in the game, and using tokens on L2 to get the gas they want.

Outlook

The rapid iteration of these engines has begun to allow us to see the arrival of an era of composable, scalable, and fully open full-chain games. Although the current full-chain game playability and interaction difficulty need to be optimized, the types and technical limitations of deployable games are also very obvious. But the whole-chain route is truly subverting traditional game logic, and it is one of the most potential tracks that we have seen after DeFi that can combine narrative and products. This fundamentalist feature also makes the quality and activity of the developer community very high. Soon, a series of ecological games, tools, guilds and other projects relying on its underlying architecture will appear on each engine of the full-chain game, and a real metaverse economy and social interaction will be born.