Written by Pascal So, Bankless contributor Translation: Golden Finance Xiaozou
From the Ethereum Foundation’s push for Autonomous Worlds and related infrastructure such as Dark Forest and MUD, to Paradigm’s research articles on The Open Problem of on-chain games, the upcoming crypto narrative of full-chain games (FoG) has generated a lot of attention and discussion.
Different ecosystems have their own builders and game companies, and Starknet has created a niche by fostering a vibrant community of builders dedicated to full-chain gaming. Whether it’s Starknet’s verifiable game engine Dojo, or teams like Topology, Realms, Cartridge, and Influence that develop games based on blockchain principles and adhere to the principles of composability, decentralization, and transparency, the unique capabilities of the Starknet technology stack can take the lead in moving games in the ecosystem to a new paradigm.
**1、What is a full-chain game? **
We’ve seen that there are many ways to combine gaming with blockchain. In most cases, it’s less important stuff that moves on-chain: your game character is wearing NFTs, or the in-game currency happens to be ERC20 tokens. However, these are just treating blockchain as an accessibility, not a core principle of game creation as a whole.
What a full-chain game has to do is configure as many game components as possible on the chain.
From physics engines that indicate how objects interact, to game props that can be combined and “modified,” there are clear and transparent parameters that players can interact with. As a result, players can build bots on top of existing game logic, create models and frontends, and develop downstream secondary markets for any aspect of the game, which in a traditional game depends entirely on the wishes of the original game developer.
Try these games first!
Shoshin is a fighting game that allows players to start by generating a series of moves and reactions for their fighters, and then deploy their characters into battle. Like most fighting games, Shoshin is about strategy; Knowing that setting up dodges or parry moves to deal with opponents’ attacks, preparing for ranged attacks when opponents counterattack, and cleverly setting up a set of instructions in advance, etc., are all keys to defeating your opponent.
- Roll Your Own by Cartridge
Roll Your Own is a drug-trading game: following the basic principle of “buy low, sell high” (the same principle applies to cryptocurrency trading), players travel between different regions, buying cheap drugs in one area and selling them at a higher price in another, in order to earn money (in this case the proceeds are PAPER coins).
- Loot Survivor by Realms and Biblioteca DAO
Loot Survivor is a survival battle game where players fight monsters and upgrade weapons and armor to survive.
Influence is a space strategy MMO where players and their crews colonize planets, mine resources, and create new civilizations.
**2. Why do we want to put the game on the chain? **
Many people think that on-chain games are worse than web2 games because there are more restrictions on building on-chain games and a relative lack of loyalty compared to today’s most popular household names.
Similarly, many people have abandoned mobile games for many of the same reasons, but with the advent of games like Doodle Jump and Angry Birds, critics have seen how exciting it is to develop new design spaces that take advantage of mobile phones’ unique touchscreens, haptic feedback, and more. Instead of trying to compete directly with desktop and console games in terms of graphics and computing power, mobile games have created a new avenue for developers and users to realize that different types of games can be created outside the traditional rules of regular games.
On-chain games are still in their infancy and will take time to mature, but gaming phenomena like Angry Birds can spawn a new gaming paradigm. We should focus on teams that are actively working on innovative in-game features and look with an open mind about how the space will evolve and ultimately attract millions of players.
Why should you pay attention to Starknet? **
The Starknet architecture has several features that make it an attractive game development ecosystem:
Enhanced user experience with smart contract wallet
One of the main complaints about existing on-chain operations is the poor user experience of EOA (external accounts) wallets, which is the basis for the vast majority of wallets (including MetaMask). With the native account abstraction inherent in the Starknet architecture, Starknet uses smart contract wallets such as Argent and Braavos, greatly improving the user experience and making users’ on-chain interactions no longer frustrated.
Smart contract wallets allow the generation of “Session Keys”. Imagine that instead of signing transactions one by one, you sign one transaction – the equivalent of “login” in a traditional game – and then automatically sign all subsequent actions before the game ends. The operation is still written on-chain, but any user experience issues are pulled out and interaction with the game is as smooth as any other online game.
Verifiable Game Engine Dojo
Dojo is a verifiable game engine developed by the Starknet online gaming community, led by Tarrence of Cartridge. Dojo emphasizes “verifiability,” meaning that instead of writing all actions on-chain, players can create a proof within a specific time interval that shows the correctness of actions processed off-chain during that time interval. This allows games built with Dojo to surpass the TPS limitations faced by current on-chain games and is useful for games that require a large number of operations per second (real-time strategy games, first-person shooters, etc.).
Crypto Native Builders Community
Crypto game developers usually: only build a small part of the game on the blockchain. Most games are more expensive than web2 games using simple NFT minting or ERC20 tokens as in-game currency, which is a status quo; Not targeting a specific chain, or with little loyalty to the chain they’re building, and no community.
These approaches can be very effective, but Starknet’s ecosystem is not the usual because their developer community tries to think from first principles about how to build games on-chain to achieve unique features. In addition, because the ecosystem is still in its early stages, the developer tools and infrastructure built by the teams within the ecosystem can also be used by other potential competitors. This is not a zero-sum game, but a discovery process in which teams within the ecosystem are working together with the same goals.
4、Future Outlook
On-chain games have not yet seen the Angry Birds phenomenon, and this bear market has drowned out the enthusiasm of many fields and chains.
However, development talent continues to pour into Starknet, many of whom want to develop games that make extensive use of blockchain components to enhance the fun of the product. Whether in general or Starknet in particular, we are still in the embryonic stages of on-chain gaming, similar to DeFi in 2019, which experienced the Cambrian explosion in the following year.
Starknet is a particularly interesting gaming ecosystem that deserves attention, but different ecosystems have different approaches, such as Arbitrum Orbit and custom OP stack instances powered by teams like Caldera and Conduit, Polygon zkEVM at ImmutableX stronghold, and alt L1 like Solana, Avalanche, and Sui.
