Exploring the Omni-Chain Game: A Small but Beautiful On-Chain Utopia or a Big Narrative with a Hundred Flowers Blooming?

Producer: DODOResearch

Author: dt

Editor: Lisa

Full-chain games have always been the next major application of the blockchain that the crypto-native community is looking forward to, unlike the smash-hot GameFi, which takes finance as the main body and does not have any other information in the game except for assets, FOCG (Fully on-chain game) attaches more importance to gameplay, and all the core logic and state of the game are deployed on the blockchain, and are completely driven by the blockchain without any centralized server to participate in it. Decentralization and persistence.

**The ultimate goal of omni-chain gaming is to create a fully autonomous and open game world, also known as “Autonomous Worlds”. In this kind of world, games can exist in perpetuity, without relying on any centralized operator, and all the rule logic and participation are conducted and verified through a decentralized blockchain. At the same time, these autonomous game worlds can also be seamlessly interoperable, and characters/assets from different games can also be used in another game, thus building a truly open and interconnected “gaming metaverse”.

This week, Dr.DODO will introduce you to some good projects that have been deeply cultivated in the field of FOCG full-chain games for a long time and deserve your attention!

StarkNet Ecosystem

Starknet, an L2 public chain that has recently caused a lot of discussion due to the spread of currency, is quite suitable for the deployment of full-chain games in terms of technology and development, and its advantages can be divided into the following three aspects:

• High performance: StarkNet can compress a large amount of computing and storage into a constant-size proof through recursive proofs, state transitions and other technical means, which greatly optimizes the efficiency, which makes it achieve millions of transaction processing speeds per second or even higher, fully meeting the high-performance requirements of full-chain games.
• Fairness: Full-chain games require fair randomness, and StarkNet natively supports zero-knowledge proof technology, and many games require randomness such as card drawing, dice rolling, etc. StarkNet has enabled Verifiable Random Function (VRF) technology after the Cairo V1 upgrade, which can achieve provably verifiable random numbers to ensure the fairness of the game.
• Coding efficiency: Compared with Solidity, which is most commonly used in traditional EVM public chains, Cairo, the official language of StarkNet, is more suitable for writing complex projects, with less code and higher execution efficiency, reducing the complexity of full-chain game development and saving expensive gas fees.

After introducing why StarkNet is suitable for full-chain games, let me introduce a few projects developed in the StarkNet ecosystem:

Dojo:D ojo is an open-source, StarkNet-oriented game engine and toolkit. The Cairo language implements an efficient entity-component-system architecture, simplifies the game development process, and natively supports zero-knowledge proofs to ensure randomness and data privacy, and has been successfully launched in many games, such as Influence, Loot Survivor, Briq, etc. At present, the Dojo community is also continuing to expand its functions, and plans to focus on L3 solutions, optimistic updates, and client proofing in the future. Loot Realm: Powered by the Loot NFT community DAO, dedicated to building an open, scalable, and timeless on-chain gaming world. Comprising a number of sub-games, including Loot Survivor, a text adventure game, and Realms: Eternum, an MMO full-chain game, Loot Realm represents the potential for open, shared, and autonomous operations of full-chain games. Influence: Influence is a space-themed resource management and strategy game. Players can carry out infrastructure and economic activities in the asteroid belt, and the game fully leverages the high performance of StarkNet to realize the full chain of the economic system and the modeling of complex business logic. Influence is currently under active development, with plans to launch multiple sub-games in phases. Briq: Briq is an open on-chain creative space, known as the “Lego of the blockchain world”. Users can freely build unique blockchain artworks by collecting and assembling different blocks, and Briq demonstrates the possibilities of full-chain games to support user-generated content and the metaverse.

MUD & Redstone - LATTICE Team

Next, we will introduce the MUD, a full-chain game engine, and Redstone, a layer-2 public chain designed for full-chain games. Before we begin, we have to introduce the development team behind it - Lattice. Lattice is the core team of 0xPARC, an open-source developer community, and was involved in the development of the first full-chain game, Dark Forest, back in 2020. After Dark Forest, Lattice continued to cultivate the full-chain game track, and after developing a number of games, he knew that there were many pain points in full-chain game development at that time, so he developed the full-chain game engine MUD.

The Lattice team says that MUD is a game engine exclusive to FOCG, and the so-called game engine can actually be divided into two parts, smart contract application development framework + on-chain relational database. It has a built-in efficient EVM database, supports automatic on-chain and off-chain state synchronization, and writes the logic commonly used in many games into a framework that greatly simplifies the development process. Developers can define data structures through configurations, and the MUD engine will automatically generate Solidity libraries. Currently, more than 90% of EVM full-chain games are built on MUD.

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As the number of MUD-based games increased, the Lattice team also found that the existing EVM public chain was struggling to support large-scale on-chain applications. That’s why we developed our own Redstone rollup solution. Redstone dramatically reduces costs by only submitting data summaries at Layer 1 and is specifically designed to optimize compatibility with MUDs, making high-throughput full-chain gaming viable.

Redstone represents a new generation of Layer 2 technology exploration for full-chain games, and deep compatibility with MUD has greatly promoted the development of the entire ecosystem, and the Redstone testnet has been launched, supporting a number of games including Sky Strife, and the mainnet is expected to be officially launched in Q1 2024.

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Argus & Paima

In addition to the Dojo and Lattice teams, there are many other teams that are developing full-chain game engines and full-chain game public chains, and Argus and Paima are among them.

Similar to Lattice, the Argus team members also started out in the Dark Forest developer community, and from Dark Forest’s experience, they understand the difficulties of today’s blockchain infrastructure for FOCG developers, so they founded Argus with the goal of building a high-performance infrastructure for blockchain games, and have also won 1kx, Polychain Capital, and Dragonfly Capital and other top venture capital tens of millions of financing, and the current two main products are:

World Engine: This is Argus’ self-developed Layer 2 solution for blockchain games. World Engine implements an innovative sharding mechanism that scales horizontally to match the game’s real-time load needs, while dramatically improving execution performance through custom Game Shard transitions. Cardina:* This is a game sharding scheme built on top of World Engine, Cardinal is developed in Go to achieve an efficient entity-component-system architecture. It is highly compatible with mainstream game engines, allowing users to seamlessly integrate with commercial game engines such as Unity and Unreal.

Unlike other teams, Paima focuses on ETH or ETH L2, with a focus on Cardano and Milkomeda, and has received a million-dollar donation from the Cardano Foundation, and its main product, Paima Engine, is a universal development framework for blockchain games, which allows developers to deploy games directly within Paima’s rollups, making it easier to scale games. At the same time, it also has a built-in cross-chain mechanism, so that the same game can be deployed on different public chains to achieve state synchronization between environments. In addition, Paima provides automated, intelligent game units through the Shinkai AI layer, which can be seen as an open game “operating system”.

Author’s point of view

The author thinks that the concept of omnichain games is indeed fascinating, and in the end the ideal Autonomous Worlds has a geeky utopian feel, but it is doubtful that FOCG can be the next $10 billion track in the blockchain world.

Due to the fact that the design of the whole chain naturally has to sacrifice a lot of important indicators pursued by today’s Web2 game manufacturers, such as performance and smoothness, and replace it with more gameplay and how to balance the financial issues of the in-game economy, the author believes that FOCG full-chain games will definitely be able to attract a group of real users, but it will not become a breakthrough for blockchain Mass Adoption.

The small and beautiful route is more suitable for this type of project, so community loyalty and adhesion will be a key indicator for exploring high-quality projects on the FOCG track, and as far as the overall blockchain world is concerned, the author is not optimistic that the FOCG full-chain game will become the next wave of big narratives.