Pantera Partner: Learn about the Dojo ecosystem and major game projects

By Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital Translation: Golden Finance Xiaozou

Summary:

• Dojo is a Starknet on-chain game engine developed based on the Cairo language, aiming to take advantage of Cairo’s STARK-friendly language features to provide a first-class development platform for high-quality blockchain games. Dojo combines ECS game development with a blockchain development stack consisting of Torii (automatic indexer), Katana (game sequencer), and Sozo (development and deployment toolchain).
• Dojo ecosystem apps cover open-economy RTS, MMO, TCG and RPG games, especially those where players can trade resources. Examples include Realms Eternum, Roll Your Own and Briq. Dojo has created a user-defined blockchain “autonomous world” that provides a new medium for creative expression, and Dojo and Starknet have the potential to become leading technological forces in this vertical.

1、Introduction

Dojo is a verifiable on-chain game engine running on Starknet, providing developers with a toolkit for creating high-quality on-chain games where all assets, user actions, and transactions take place on the Starknet chain. Before diving into Dojo’s features, let’s take a look at Dojo’s use of the Cairo language. We will then examine some applications built using this novel on-chain gaming framework, and finally discuss Dojo’s impact on the development of on-chain gaming.

2、Functional features of Dojo

Dojo as a game engine includes a variety of sub-components, including Cairo’s native ECS (Entity Component System), Torii auto-indexer, Katana game sequencer, and Sozo development and deployment toolchain. Let’s take a brief look at them one by one.

(1) ESC Entity Component System

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ECS is a design pattern commonly used in game design, which divides in-game interactions into three parts: “entity”, “component” and “system”.

Essentially, entities are in-game agents, such as Pikachu. The agent has several components, which are essentially modular groupings of functions. Some components may contain locations, actions, and attacks. These components contain no logic, only data. Logic is defined in the game system and users can interact with it. For example, a user can interact with the User System, read data from the Attack component, and then trigger an update in the Action System to update the Action and Location components. In addition, different entities or entities of different categories can share modular groupings of these components. For example, NPCs (non-player characters) may only have action and position components, but no attack components.

As a result, ECS is a very flexible, intuitive, and powerful framework that game developers can use to set how all these different agents interact in the game environment. One of Dojo’s highlights is deploying this flexible and familiar framework into Cairo so game developers can quickly develop games during the familiar process.

(2) Torii: Automatic indexer**

It is indeed great to have the blessing of Cairo’s native ECS framework, but our task is not to develop ordinary games, but to develop blockchain games, where all assets, state, and logic in the game are stored on a public chain like Starknet. To do this, we need some way to interact with the public blockchain and monitor on-chain information, and that is: a blockchain indexer.

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This is where Torii comes in as a dedicated autoindexer for Dojo. Torii can automatically index Dojo Worlds, providing low-latency, high-performance GraphQL and GRPC interfaces for game clients, allowing clients to visualize game state changes in real time. Using Torii, users can quickly index any events that occur in the on-chain gaming world deployed on Dojo. So, with Dojo Torii, developers no longer have to write their own indexers for their games, which would introduce unnecessary overhead and errors.

(3) Katana: Game-specific sequencer**

The next feature in the Dojo toolkit is Katana’s game-specific sequencer. Katana is designed around the unique needs of on-chain game development deployments. It is designed to run as a central sequencer, optimized for low latency and high throughput, supporting both local development and production deployments. During production deployments, its architecture supports sharding and regional deployments, which form a canonical parent chain that allows the game to scale out to a large user base.

(4) Development and deployment toolchain

Finally, Sozo is a set of scaffolding scaffolding code that developers can easily build, develop, test, and deploy scripts. Sozo has a list of project commands, such as init, build, test, migrate, etc., which can save developers time developing boilerplate code, especially on the deployment side. With a simple sozo migrate command, users can quickly deploy their game world on-chain, and the Sozo library will reconcile state differences between existing on-chain data and newly deployed code.

3、Apps in the Dojo ecosystem

As we can see from the above, Dojo provides a comprehensive development infrastructure that blends some common practices of traditional game development (such as the ECS model) with blockchain development (Torii, Katana, Sozo). Now we’ll talk about some of the apps in the Dojo ecosystem running on Starknet that are either currently using Dojo or are planned for a future release.

（1）Loot Realms

Loot Realms, developed by Bibliotheca DAO, is not a single-player game. Rather, it’s a loose collection of on-chain IPs that are used to constantly create many related game collections, preserving their own lore and experiences. Born out of the text-based Loot NFT collection in 2021, Loot today has become the foundation of numerous games. As the primary source of full-chain IP, Loot-based gaming and culture could become an important force in the Dojo ecosystem and the broader on-chain gaming scene in the future.

One of the main games developed using the Loot Realms IP is Realms: Eternum, an MMO strategy game based on the player’s Loot Realms NFT. A Realms NFT is essentially a map of a geographic area with cities, zones, ports, rivers, and resources such as copper, stone, coal, and rubies. These determine how many resources players can develop in their Realm, all of which can be traded on the liquidity market. Since players need to constantly make decisions and balance resources, this provides a sense of player control and supports strategic depth in the game.

Another game based on the Loot IP is Loot Survivor, a text-based survival game inspired by Loot’s textual origins. Essentially, players strategize RPGs, compete with others for loot, and play in a real-time strategic manner.

（2）Roll Your Own

Roll Your Own is a multiplayer strategy game published by Cartridge Games, one of Dojo’s major developers. It was originally developed in 2021 using Cairo Zero, but as Starknet was upgraded to Cairo, smart contracts had to be rewritten, so Cartridge used Dojo to rewrite contracts. In fact, Dojo was originally developed specifically to refactor RYO, a process led by the Cartridge team.

In a recent playtest deployed on the Katana sequencer, RYO recorded over 70,000 transactions over 2,500 rounds. This is a great demonstration of the Dojo toolkit’s ability to handle the large computing loads typical of gaming applications.

（3）Briq

Briq is the third interesting game project running on Starknet, and its team is one of the development teams that operate Dojo software. Essentially, Briq is trying to create a “Lego on chain” philosophy that allows players to mint “briq” collectibles and create their own NFT pieces. Existing “briq” structures can also be decomposed into component bricks that can be used to build other structures.

4, Dojo’s influence on on-chain games

From Dojo’s architecture and applications, we can see the emphasis on open game design, where players can exchange transactions with each other. In fact, this may be a key aspect of blockchain’s promise of a new gaming experience – one in which resources are shared and registered on a public blockchain such as Starknet, which enhances the game’s multiplayer interactivity.

Arguably, the enhancement of this blockchain-enabled multiplayer experience is a core promise of the “autonomous world.” The “world” in the autonomous world is a self-contained space with its own rules and unique culture. Having an on-chain but user-defined “autonomous world” provides a new platform for creative expression, which could be an important long-term value proposition for the development of blockchain gaming.

In this grand vision, the Dojo and Starknet ecosystems are poised to become industry-leading technology stacks that support this development. Whether it’s with Cairo’s linguistic superiority over Solidity, Starknet’s sophisticated and high-performance STARK proof system, or Dojo’s comprehensive test suite and architecture, this appears to be an ecosystem with strong technical capabilities to unlock the full potential of on-chain games and “autonomous worlds” and ultimately make Cairo an easy-to-use and widely adopted general-purpose programming language.