The most encrypted native games? A quick overview of the latest developments in blockchain games

Author: dt, DODOResearch

Editor: Lisa

Blockchain games have always been highly anticipated by the capital market, but Web 2.5 games still seem to lack a breakthrough. Now, a group of people hopes to put the entire game logic on-chain to enhance the composability between games, and the founder of Dark Forest, known as the pioneer of full-chain games, Gubsheep, wrote an article titled "The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis," which describes crypto-native games as a game architecture model and spirit that maximally embraces blockchain application development. The community now generally refers to this as full-chain games or autonomous worlds.

Recently, many games have launched tests or updates. This week, let's follow Dr. DODO to see what updates have occurred in full-chain games.

Redstone Mainnet Launch

Lattice officially launched the Plasma Mode OpStack Layer 2 Redstone mainnet in early May, modifying the data availability of traditional layer 2 to significantly reduce L1 data usage, attempting to overcome the high gas consumption problem of full-chain games, and creating a public chain specifically designed for FOCG full-chain games.

Currently, besides the official game Skystrife, other games such as This Cursed Machine, Biomes, and Downstream have also launched on the mainnet. Lattice also held a hackathon for developers to create game plugins.

Source: https://community.redstone.xyz/

Sky Strife

Sky Strife is currently Lattice's most representative game, an RTS strategy game developed by Lattice itself. Unlike most full-chain games, which are slower-paced turn-based games, the development difficulty is significantly higher. The goal of the game is to defend your castle and survive until the end, destroying all other players' castles before they destroy yours.

In addition to the game itself, Sky Strife also issues a Season Pass, allowing those who purchase it to start with two different types of units to choose from, and most importantly, to create private matches. Besides the Season Pass, Sky Strife also has its own token, Orbs (🔮). The only function of Orbs is to create Sky Strife matches. Starting a match requires consuming 100 Orbs, and each match distributes ORBS rewards based on player rankings. Total rewards range from 500 ORBS to 0 Orbs, depending on the number of matches conducted in the past 7 days.

Source: https://latticexyz.notion.site/1054c36f2805407cbd9d738427f49d13

Recent Updates on Other Full-Chain Games

Primodium

Primodium is a space empire-building MMO game and can be considered one of the most complete games in the full-chain game field. In the game, you can mine resources, build military bases, and fight against others to gain control over the asteroid belt. Primodium's goal is open and permissionless, meaning that any third-party developer can freely develop on its Primodium, deploying robots or plugins.

Recently, Primodium released version 0.11.0, which added points related to Wormholes and Shards, requiring players to feed black holes and capture Shards to earn economic and military points.

Project Awakening Phase III

Project Awakening Phase III is the on-chain version of the space sci-fi MMORPG game Eve Online, which has been online for over 20 years. The developer of Eve Online, CCP Game, previously announced a collaboration with Lattice to use MUD (the EVM game engine developed by Lattice) for joint development. Project Awakening can be considered the first complex on-chain application of MUD, and it is currently undergoing pre-launch testing.

Game testing requires signing an NDA, so I won't describe the gameplay too much; most of it is similar to Eve Online. Interested parties can sign up to participate.

Source: https://x.com/HilmarVeigar/status/1792828503211356653

Duper

Game studio Curio announced the launch of the Duper Alpha version. Duper is an on-chain betting social war game set against the backdrop of a distant desert planet. The goal is to introduce the crypto community's native speculation into competitive on-chain gaming, with very complex gameplay.

Each match involves five players and lasts about 40 minutes. Each player enters the game with a real stake (currently a minimum of 0.005 ETH) in exchange for gems representing "equity." Duper is not a winner-takes-all game: when the game ends, only one player wins, but the pot is distributed based on how much equity each player holds in the winner. The winner does not necessarily earn the most.

The most interesting element in Duper is the social aspect—resource exchanges, conspiracies, and backstabbing secret alliances are not only allowed but encouraged.

Source: https://docs.duper.gg/

Author's Perspective

The author believes that full-chain games are one of the few interesting native applications of blockchain in this cycle and one of the few applications that retail players can directly engage with. Truly deep games require a combination of art, music, and software development. The grand vision of full-chain games has attracted many talented developers and some capital. Although most game development is still in very early stages and the gameplay is not very intuitive, I still encourage everyone to give it a try, experience crypto-native games, and look forward to the future development of full-chain games.