Author: Jingyi.xyz, Fang Ting
From the "ancient" era of games such as BitQuest and Huntercoin, to the short but prosperous era of Axie and Stepn; from sandbox to Play-to-earn, restricted by infrastructure, the WEB3 game track has never been able to complete the final leap and become a bridgehead for mass adoption of Web2 users. Game developers in the blockchain industry have gone from being spontaneous to conscious, and have gone through the "financial arena" period of unconsciously using tokens or simply putting assets on the chain, and are now facing the deep-water issue of "what is a game" in the blockchain industry.
And real innovation often comes from the moment when we step into deep waters together.
Now it is 2023, and the concepts of full-chain games and AW are making a comeback. Is it "telling the story of blockchain again with chain games"? Is it old wine in a new bottle or rebirth from the ashes?
The answer lies in the technical imagination of blockchain, but more importantly, in the practical infrastructure. The recent success of Arcade Accounts has once again confirmed this point: a single point of technological progress cannot support the prosperity of the entire field. Only a technological wave that connects the dots can create a vibrant development ecosystem.
In the following, we will answer what kind of technological gravity triggered the tidal effect of full-chain games, and also answer the questions of "why now" and "why full-chain games".
Innovations in the full-chain infrastructure (I) AW game engine
One of the most important infrastructure advances is the emergence of the well-known MUD/Dojo game engine. In the Web2 world, the emergence of game engines has greatly saved developers time when creating new games, and has made repetitive tasks interfaced. A major feature of MUD/Dojo and full-chain game engines such as Cairo and Argus is that they need to interact with the blockchain. In the virtual world separated by the blockchain, its internal time flow, computing resources, synchronization status, etc. all need new designs. In this new "on-chain reality", interoperability has been raised to an unprecedented level of importance, which ensures the consistency of the "world". The unified development framework makes each game world not a black box closed to each other. By analogy, it has a unified "speed of light" constant. Once a simple physical framework is set in the game world as a "constant" or "axiom", the depth of this game world far exceeds the game itself, and is different from the world cage carefully built by centralized teams such as "World of Warcraft", and has a deep time potential. In its latest article, MUD has demonstrated the potential of AW in the time dimension: its development is not just about development, but about investigating how to build time-aware and timeless worlds.
There are already a lot of introductions about MUD/Dojo. You can go to the developer interface of mud.dev or Dojoengine.org to view its technical details in detail.
2. Technological Transition of Layer2 such as Starknet
Starknet is the most suitable Layer2 for full-chain game development and the most abundant full-chain game ecosystem. Full-chain games are sensitive to TPS and gas, and the performance ceiling that can be achieved by the core algorithm STARK used by Starknet is almost unlimited. Its ability to package high-volume transactions also spreads the cost of transactions in the same batch and reduces overhead; at the same time, its customized proof allows the existence of L3 App-specific chains, giving full-chain games a higher degree of development freedom. In early July, Starknet Alpha V0.12.0 was released, and CSPS increased from 30,000 to 220,000. The significant increase in throughput revealed the starting point of its performance upgrade. Realms and other games written using Cairo on Starknet have proved the superiority of Cairo in processing computing data and verification, while the account abstraction native to Starknet has the potential to solve the pain points of the overly cumbersome user experience of full-chain games. If Autonomous Worlds needs to find a physical foundation, then Starknet is one of its best current habitats.
For the relationship between Starknet and full-chain games, you can refer to this article: "How does Starknet promote the development of on-chain games?"
3. Arcade Accounts: Based on Session Keys
The "playability" of full-chain games has always been one of the most concerned topics. Currently, more people are using blockchains than "players": users focus on the satisfaction of specific functions and have a higher tolerance for the friction of on-chain technology; while players have higher requirements for the immersion of the application and need to minimize friction.
Infrastructure is often improved in places that people cannot see, until it really brings a qualitative change to the gaming experience. As infrastructure, session keys have gone through such a development process. It has been years since the idea was proposed, the hackathon was participated in, and the next step of development was continued. In an article in Matchbox last year, they called the implementation of session keys the "broadband moment" for usability. In the past two days, the LootRealms team completed the implementation of session keys on Starknet for the first time. Realms players can create their own arcade accounts, pre-confirm transactions and ensure security at the same time. We can see that the "broadband moment" predicted a year ago has arrived.
To experience the comprehensive upgrade of user experience brought by the arcade account to the whole chain game, you can go to Loot Survivor for a trial play.
4. High-speed rail network Trustless Relay: AW network economy
It is worth emphasizing again that, as we mentioned at the beginning, the gaming sector has failed in its impact on the top of the mountain time and time again, but it will reappear in another posture each time, accompanied by a clear upward shift in the growth center, whether it is the industry TVL or the number of applications and users. In the Gamefi trend, although the simple and crude X-to-earn model cannot escape the doom of the death spiral from an algorithmic point of view, we did see the phenomenal Axie infinity in the last round in countries/regions such as the Philippines. In some parts of the world, games are no longer the single entertainment activity they used to be, but the concept of being highly tied to production and economy has been deeply rooted in people's minds. Therefore, although user experience and convenience are indeed limiting factors for more traditional users to enter the blockchain game, they are not the only factors that attract users to enter.
The era of AW will ignite the network economy, and different game worlds will grow freely on the unified game engine framework, just like independent city-states. Trade between city-states will accelerate with the emergence of high-speed rail networks. The programmable open world grows in an ecological way, bringing not only a fair, trustless and verifiable player world, but also these composable metaverses/games will be like the various city stations connected by high-speed rail. Data, information, and assets will generate secondary economic value in circulation, and the stock of M0 assets will be activated. This will be an opportunity for the system to increase the money multiplier and leverage.
As the most important communication relay track in the interactive infrastructure, the only protocols that are technically fully decentralized and have been put into operation are WAKU and Web3MQ. Due to the high technical barriers of decentralized information transmission, XMTP, a leading project focusing on social protocols, chose to build its own application on WAKU instead of native development. At the same time, Web3MQ has realized the deployment and implementation of the Web3 network of Pub/Sub. Pub/Sub is an asynchronous and scalable message service that separates the message processing service from the message transmission service. It is a very important and basic function in traditional Internet information services and supports high concurrency and low latency information transmission. Web3MQ has been committed to serving the AW ecosystem, working closely with Starknet officials, and launching developer ecosystem co-construction content such as co-learning, striving to become one of the first AW Railway network infrastructure builders.
Finally, the progress of infrastructure is constantly pulling the full-chain game from the cloud narrative to reality. Infrastructure is divided into several categories: one is "civilian water and electricity". Starknet provides excellent civil water and electricity facilities to make construction possible; and game engines such as MUD/Dojo are builders, providing developers with basic building materials, so that they don't have to start all over again every time they develop. The emergence of the "high-speed rail network" has brought arteries to this static world, and further, it has brought turnover, and therefore a macroeconomic outlook. In ancient times, transportation hubs were often the most economically developed areas, and the emergence of high-speed rail has driven the economy and its chain effect, which is the best answer to "what does interoperability mean": interoperability is real, it means freedom, and it means prosperity.
In the foreseeable future of AW, before users enter this beautiful new world woven by code, the infrastructure here has been quietly updated. As the first residents to witness the scenery here, the developer "workers" will continue to bring new news to the off-chain world in the coming period.
