Alpha from on-chain gaming events | Skill Tree #21
7 Highlights from ETHGlobal’s Autonomous World’s Hackathon
From May 18 - 26, a virtual hackathon took place to explore autonomous worlds, a subset of on-chain gaming. The hackathon was hosted by 0xParc, Lattice ETHGlobal. Participants were invited to experiment with MUD, a framework for building autonomous worlds.
Check out the list of all projects created at the event
Highlights
Autonomous Game of Life: A fully decentralized and multiplayer version of Conway's Game of Life. The project also provides developers with a template for on-chain cellular automata models
Trade Wars: Utilizes multi-asset balancer pools. Players generate and consume resources, leading to pricing inefficencies between ports, which opens up arbitrage opportunities. This arbitrage is the main gameplay loop of Trade Wars, where players move between ports to arb price differences and turn a profit.
Realm of Pepe: Co-op RPG where resource gathering, trading and crafting works in streams (using Superfluid) rather than one-off transactions. NFTs change over time as the result of streaming.
MUDVRF: MUD module bringing randomness to on-chain games
Netherscape: On-chain RPG looking to integrate more complex gameplay elements. For example, the team integrated loans directly into the game
Mudtendo: Players can play short sessions of Nintendo classics. Any players can start a game from any checkpoint, whether their own or someone else’s
OPCraft 2: OPCraft can be described as on-chain Minecraft. V2 brings new user-created blocks, including Redstone, allowing for more emergent gameplay as players can specify how blocks transition into other blocks
Learnings from the 1kx On-chain Gaming Summit
Check out the recordings in the link above!
Highlights
Lessons learned after two years of onchain games | Cometh
Upgradability of code has to be planned from the start
P2E is good for UA but bad for economic balance
Infra and middleware are painful (Cometh was built in 2021)
You need your own chain if you aim for 400+ DAU for a game with a large on-chain component. Controlling fees becomes essential
Onchain Gaming: Principles for Building Viable Systems | Mithraeum
Financialization is inevitable: Pushing something on-chain turns it into an ultra-free market (no regulator, low tx costs). On-chain games are open economies by nature → Game designers have to recognize the open market, price it into game design and build the basic financialization layer before the market does
Making assets non-transferable doesn’t work because of account abstraction
Game design is everything: Trivial gameplay will be automated, making it worthless → Design non-trivial mechanics/mystery that cannot be solved, for example PVP
Immutability is key to prosperity: Nobody will build on a lose foundation. DAOs are not a solution, as they’ll try to increase the profits for the majority, in a PVP market → Only solution: Immutability + Fork-migration traditions (e.g. deploy a new world that takes the state of the old world and lets players migrate if they want)
Ponzinomics is a one-way ticket: Ultra-free market (see point #1) + traditional game = ponzi in 99% of cases, because they are closed economies with continuous inflation → Economic balance, incentivize skill not time (being early), players should see upward mobility
Quality is more than quantity: For on-chain gaming it’s not the number of players that matters, but capitalization
Riot’s esports problem
esports has a significantly contributed to Riot’s success with LoL and Valorant. But, the viewership numbers for LoL are declining
Riot is now looking to enhance the team partnership model to reduce the financial burden of teams. The lack of traditional revenue streams like ticket sales, concessions, and broadcasting rights for live events causes profitability problems in esports.