Inventory of noteworthy projects in the FOCG full-chain gaming field
Compared to traditional games, blockchain games can achieve higher openness, decentralization, and persistence.Original Author: dt, DODOResearch
Fully on-chain games have long been anticipated as the next major application of blockchain by the crypto-native community. Unlike the once-popular GameFi, which primarily focuses on financial aspects and does not put most game data on-chain aside from assets, FOCG (Fully on-chain game) places greater emphasis on gameplay, with all core logic and states of the game deployed on the blockchain and entirely driven by it, without any centralized servers involved. Compared to traditional games, fully on-chain games can achieve higher openness, decentralization, and permanence.
The ultimate goal of fully on-chain games is to create a completely autonomous and open game world, also known as "Autonomous Worlds." In such a world, games can exist permanently without relying on any centralized operators, and all rules, logic, and participation are conducted and verified through decentralized blockchain technology. Moreover, these autonomous game worlds can also interoperate seamlessly, allowing characters/assets from different games to be used in another game, thereby building a truly open and interconnected "game metaverse."
This week, Dr. DODO will introduce several noteworthy projects that have been deeply cultivated in the FOCG fully on-chain game field!
StarkNet Ecosystem
Recently, the L2 public chain StarkNet, which has generated considerable discussion due to its token launch, is quite suitable for deploying fully on-chain games. Its advantages can be summarized in three points:
- High Performance: StarkNet utilizes technologies such as recursive proofs and state transitions to compress a large amount of computation and storage into a constant-sized proof, significantly optimizing efficiency. This enables it to achieve transaction processing speeds of millions per second or even higher, fully meeting the high-performance demands of fully on-chain games.
Fairness: Fully on-chain games require fair randomness, and StarkNet natively supports zero-knowledge proof technology. Many games require randomness, such as card draws and dice rolls. After the Cairo V1 upgrade, StarkNet enabled Verifiable Random Function (VRF) technology, which can produce provably random numbers, thus ensuring fairness in games.
Coding Efficiency: Compared to Solidity, which is most commonly used on traditional EVM public chains, StarkNet's official language Cairo is more suitable for writing complex projects, requiring less code and achieving higher execution efficiency, reducing the complexity of fully on-chain game development and saving on expensive gas fees.
Now that we have introduced why StarkNet is suitable for fully on-chain games, let me introduce a few projects developed within the StarkNet ecosystem:
Dojo: Dojo is an open-source game engine and toolkit aimed at StarkNet. It implements an efficient entity-component-system architecture using the Cairo language, simplifying the game development process while natively supporting zero-knowledge proofs to ensure randomness and data privacy. Several games have successfully launched, such as Influence, Loot Survivor, and Briq. The Dojo community is also continuously expanding its functionalities, with future plans for research and development around L3 solutions, optimistic updates, and client proofs.
Loot Realm: Driven by the Loot NFT community DAO, it aims to create an open, scalable, and eternal on-chain game world. It includes multiple sub-games, with currently launched titles including the text adventure game Loot Survivor and the MMO fully on-chain game Realms: Eternum. Loot Realm represents the potential for fully on-chain games to achieve open sharing and autonomous operation.
Influence: Influence is a space-themed resource management and strategy game. Players can engage in infrastructure and economic activities in the asteroid belt. The game fully utilizes StarkNet's high performance to achieve a fully on-chain economic system and complex business logic modeling. Influence is currently under active development, with plans to launch multiple sub-games in phases.
Briq: Briq is an open on-chain creative space, dubbed "the Lego of the blockchain." Users can collect and assemble different blocks to freely create unique blockchain artworks. Briq showcases the potential for fully on-chain games to support user-generated content and metaverse.
MUD & Redstone - LATTICE Team
Next, we introduce the fully on-chain game engine MUD and the layer 2 public chain Redstone designed specifically for fully on-chain games. Before we begin, we must introduce the development team behind it - Lattice. Lattice is the core team of the open-source developer community 0x PARC, which participated in the development of the first fully on-chain game, Dark Forest, back in 2020. After Dark Forest, Lattice continued to delve into the fully on-chain game track and, after developing multiple games, recognized the many pain points in fully on-chain game development at that time, leading to the creation of the fully on-chain game engine MUD.
The Lattice team describes MUD as a game engine specifically for FOCG, which can actually be divided into two main parts: a smart contract application development framework + an on-chain relational database. It features an efficient EVM database, supports automatic on-chain and off-chain state synchronization, and simplifies the development process by encapsulating many commonly used game logics into a framework. Developers can define data structures through configuration, and the MUD engine will automatically generate Solidity libraries. Currently, over 90% of EVM fully on-chain games are built on MUD.
Source: https://github.com/latticexyz/mud
As the number of games based on MUD increases, the Lattice team has also found that existing EVM public chains struggle to support large-scale on-chain applications. Therefore, they independently developed the Redstone rollup solution. Redstone significantly reduces costs by only submitting data summaries on Layer 1 and is specifically designed to optimize compatibility with MUD, making high-throughput fully on-chain games feasible.
Redstone represents a new generation of Layer 2 technology exploration for fully on-chain games, and its deep compatibility with MUD greatly promotes the development of the entire ecosystem. The Redstone testnet is now live, supporting multiple games including Sky Strife, with the mainnet expected to officially launch in Q1 2024.
Source: https://redstone.xyz/
Argus & Paima
In addition to Dojo and the Lattice team, many other teams are also developing fully on-chain game engines and public chains. Argus and Paima are among the standout teams in this regard.
The Argus team members, similar to Lattice, began to emerge from the Dark Forest developer community and founded Argus to address the difficulties faced by FOCG developers in today's blockchain infrastructure, aiming to create high-performance infrastructure for blockchain games. They have secured millions in funding from top venture capital firms such as 1kx, Polychain Capital, and Dragonfly Capital. Currently, they have two main products:
World Engine: This is Argus's self-developed Layer 2 solution for blockchain games. World Engine implements an innovative sharding mechanism that can horizontally scale to match the real-time load requirements of games, while using customized Game Shards for game state transitions, significantly enhancing execution performance.
Cardinal: This is a game sharding solution built on top of World Engine. Cardinal is developed using Go language and implements an efficient entity-component-system architecture. It is highly compatible with mainstream game engines, allowing users to seamlessly integrate with commercial game engines like Unity and Unreal.
Another standout, Paima, differs from other teams by focusing primarily on Ethereum or Ethereum L2. Paima emphasizes Cardano and Milkomeda, receiving a million-dollar donation from the Cardano Foundation. Its flagship product, Paima Engine, is a universal development framework for blockchain games that allows developers to deploy games directly within Paima's rollup, reducing the difficulty of game scaling. It also features a built-in cross-chain mechanism, enabling the same game to be deployed across different public chains, achieving state synchronization between environments. Additionally, Paima provides automated smart game units through the Shinkai AI layer, which can be seen as an open game "operating system."
Author's Perspective
I believe the concept of fully on-chain games is indeed very appealing, and the ideal Autonomous Worlds has a sort of geek utopia feel to it. However, I remain skeptical about whether FOCG can become the next billion-dollar track in the blockchain world.
Due to the fully on-chain design, FOCG naturally sacrifices several performance and smoothness metrics that current Web2 gaming giants pursue. Instead, it focuses more on gameplay and how to balance the financial issues of in-game economies. I believe that fully on-chain games will certainly attract a group of genuine users, but they will not become a breakthrough for blockchain mass adoption.
A "small but beautiful" approach is more suitable for this type of project, so community loyalty and engagement will be crucial indicators for exploring high-quality projects in the FOCG track. Overall, I do not foresee fully on-chain games becoming the next wave of flourishing narratives in the blockchain world.
