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On-chain gaming series 3: "MUD & Dojo" - The Inheritance of Will.

2023-06-29 16:15

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Original Title: "Full Chain Game: Inheritance of Will - MUD & Dojo"

Original Author: Kaspar Chen, Mask Network

1. What is the "engine" of a full-chain game?

1.1 Game Engine

Just like the engine of a car is the power source for the vehicle, controlling all related modules such as fuel injection, ignition, and intake, and connecting to components such as the fuel tank and drive shaft, car manufacturers can produce various models of cars around the same engine without having to do a lot of repetitive work.

The game engine is essentially a set of code libraries and tools packaged by module. Game developers only need to call the interfaces of different parts of the engine to complete tasks such as graphics rendering, physical simulation, and network communication, without having to engage in relatively low-level and low-level programming, thus saving a lot of time and allowing them to better focus on game design and content creation. In the commercial game engine field, the most common ones are Unity and Unreal.

1.2 Full-chain Game Engine

With the increasing demand for game quality and the improvement of hardware performance, the architecture of 3D game engines has become extremely complex, usually including model editors, sound processing, ray tracing, physics simulation, and so on. The focus is often on the presentation of graphics, as this type of work is often heavy but plays a crucial role in the game's presentation.

However, the development of full-chain games is still in its early stages. Developers generally encounter problems such as the deployment and updating of smart contracts, interoperability between different contracts, and synchronization modes of clients, which involve interaction with the underlying blockchain.

Therefore, although the engine of the entire on-chain game is also a set of packaged solutions, the focused problems are more about how to handle state synchronization, how to efficiently add and maintain content in the blockchain environment, and how to interact more conveniently with other contracts, etc., in order to help developers focus on the game part without having to consider too much about how to be compatible with the blockchain, and even reduce the learning cost of Solidity.

Currently, most full-chain game engines do not involve physical simulation or graphics rendering functions.

二、都在说的 ECS 是个什么？

translates to

2. What is ECS that everyone is talking about?

When we start to try to understand the full-chain game engine, we often come across a term called ECS. As the architecture adopted by the two major engines MUD and DOJO, what is ECS?

2.1 Enity-Component-System Framework

ECS is actually a very classic framework in the traditional gaming industry. It is a layer built on top of a general engine, used to solve the relationship, interaction, and operation updates between game objects.

It was first proposed by Scott Bilas at the GDC in 2002 and was used in the ARPG game "Dungeon Siege" developed at that time. Due to its excellent performance, it quickly gained a lot of attention. In the following years, ECS has evolved into several different variants, with the most mainstream being the definition of ECS proposed by Adam Martin in his personal blog in 2007, which has become the framework adopted by subsequent mainstream AAA games.

Later in 2015, Apple introduced its cross-platform OS system game development API framework, GameplayKit, which also includes an implementation of ECS. What further helped the gaming industry embrace this framework was the adoption of this framework by "Overwatch" and the architecture design using ECS framework presented at GDC in 2017. In 2018, the leading game engine Unity also officially launched its own ECS standard.

2.2 What is ECS?

Before ECS, the game industry generally used the OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) processing method, which includes various Game Objects under the Class to inherit the attribute functions of the Class, thus establishing the entire data architecture. This pattern generally has several serious problems:

The relationship between game objects often needs to be set up at the beginning (which is almost impossible), otherwise it is often difficult to inherit when a new type of object appears and requires the functionality of multiple old classes.

With the increase of game content, there will be more and more classes, which will be very difficult to maintain.

For engines, there are many modules, and many of them are not related to each other. For example, rendering does not care about network connections. When all properties are put into one object, performance will inevitably decrease.

However, ECS takes a different approach by breaking down all properties into individual Component modules, such as health, position, elemental attributes, and so on. The Entity is simply a data identifier used to identify a specific set of components, such as the collection of components {"HP", "MP", ...} behind the "player" identifier. Neither Entity nor Component has any operational logic, which is all handled by the System modules. For example, the movement system handles the movement of entities, while the damage system handles the calculation of combat values.

Here, borrowing an example from an article by Boreal Games, let's compare the traditional OOP implementation with a game that contains only four elements: rocks, trees, enemies, and players.

OOP Implementation

And the implementation using ECS:

ECS Implementation

But continuing to make changes like this is not a good thing. Looking back at the development of traditional games, it can be seen that game engines play a strong leverage role as a basic infrastructure, allowing creators to achieve greater creative achievements at lower costs, thereby promoting the game industry to enter a period of rapid and vigorous development. As a new creative environment, blockchain obviously has not yet produced a relatively mature tool, and there is not even a framework that can be used in the entire EVM ecosystem. Therefore, Lattice has decided to build this important puzzle piece on its own.

3.2 MUD V1

Whenever a component performs an operation, the state is updated in the world contract. With the existence of Entity identifiers, it is only necessary to ensure that the entity identifiers on the client side correspond to those on the chain, in order to complete state synchronization by only listening to world contract events. The listening part of the work will also be completed by the Indexer provided by MUD, so developers do not need to rewrite the code. Through this world contract setting, MUD effectively solves the problem of end-chain synchronization.

Meanwhile, the ECS framework is essentially a model that decouples data (components) from logic (systems), which ensures that subsequent content updates or logic changes do not require large-scale contract redeployment and data loss. For example, when the supply rate of a certain resource needs to be changed from 10/minute to 50/minute, it is only necessary to update and redeploy the corresponding System system contract, and since the system does not store data, there is no need to migrate the original data state, ensuring the efficiency of continuous content updates.

Regarding the issue of interoperability, in fact, all on-chain contracts are theoretically interoperable. The problem lies in the universality of the interface. However, MUD provides a universal interface through a standardized data structure and a framework that decouples data and logic. This means that anyone can easily read the status of any component in any world contract and deploy corresponding system contracts to achieve interoperability.

In addition, MUD also provides practical related code libraries including network logic and standard clients.

MUD V1

3.3 MUD V2

In order to achieve this goal, MUD needs to have higher compatibility and not be limited by a single data structure. Therefore, in the MUD V2 Alpha Version released on April 1st, improvements were made to its structure, emphasizing that it is not just a feature of ECS.

MUD Description Update

So how is it implemented? This requires mentioning two important adjustments of MUD v2:

1. Components -Tables

The most important thing is that it abandons the original key-value corresponding Components component setting and adopts a more inclusive Tables table setting. In MUD V1, developers must follow the data structure of the ECS form; but in MUD V2, the form of the data structure will be completely designed by the developers themselves, and MUD will also provide a code library corresponding to the ECS structure for selection.

2. Component Contract - World /... / Table.sol

Meanwhile, while maintaining the decoupling of data and logic, the storage form of data has also undergone changes.

In MUD V1, each Component is stored and accessed through an independent contract for data storage and access control. In MUD V2, the new Table does not require the deployment of a new contract. Instead, tables can be dynamically created through Solidity and stored in the World contract, much like a real database.

Currently, the development of MUD V2 is still ongoing, and the final form is subject to official documentation. If you want to further understand MUD V2, you can watch this Justin Glibert's introduction video on MUD 2 .

Four, Dojo

4.1 Dojo Origin

In fact, the earliest engine concept on Starknet originated from Dope Wars. In September 2021, Dope Wars began developing an engine called Roll Your Own (RYO) to create a game ecosystem for Dope Wars. Although this may be the first "engine" concept proposed in the entire chain game, it is not well known because it is not a general engine. In the following time, several active core projects on Starknet, such as Loot Realm, Topology, Influence, Cartridge, Briq, etc., tried to develop independently around the concept of the entire chain autonomous world.

The emergence of MUD undoubtedly injected new vitality into the concept of a self-governing world on the entire chain. At the same time, with the release of Cario 1.0, many contracts that were previously developed based on Cario 0 faced rewriting, which also provided an excellent opportunity for a full-chain game on Starknet to restart.

So shortly after Starknet announced Cairo 1.0 in November 2022, the core contributors of Loot Realms @lordOfAFew, the founder of Cartridge @tarrenceva, and the founder of Briq @sylvechv proposed the idea of developing a full-chain game engine on the Starknet network. By February 2023, Dojo was officially born.

Due to the lack of reference materials at that time, the design and performance of MUD were excellent, so the early development of Dojo was mainly based on the implementation of MUD in Cario language on Starknet. Loaf also acknowledged this in the early days, which is why there is a saying that Dojo is a ported version of MUD.

Although this behavior *caused some objections from Ludens, the founder of MUD*, as MUD attempted to break away from ECS and launch V2, Dojo also began to explore its own differentiated path.

4.2 Why Cario

But when it comes to discussing why we need a Cario version of the game engine, we need to consider what advantages Cario has over Solidity for the entire on-chain game. And for this question, we can get a glimpse of it from some of the views of tarrence.eth, a core developer of Dojo. If you are interested, it is recommended to read the original article here.

Firstly, Cairo is a Rust-like language that is Turing-complete and used for creating provable programs for general computation. It has some unique features:

1. Recursive Proof The Prove generated by Cario is recursive, which means you can prove the validation of a proof. Assuming you need to prove a series of calculations are valid, in Solidity, you need to provide the entire calculation sequence as Prove; while in Cairo, you can create a proof for each calculation and verify it, and then create a proof to verify all individual verification results, thus achieving a high degree of calculation compression, which is crucial for applications with high interaction frequency such as games.

2. Progressive Proof Cario can break down an execution into several smaller parts, each of which can be independently proven. For example, some verification can be done on the client side to hide user input, followed by on-chain verification. This achieves the protection of sensitive data and higher resource utilization efficiency, ensuring asymmetric information games can be implemented while maintaining the core game logic on-chain.

3. State Difference When a Cairo program is verified, two artifacts are generated: execution trace and state difference. The state difference is used to describe the state change that occurs during a computation. Unlike Optimistic and some other Rollups that choose to put an execution "input" into the DA layer, Cairo can put an execution "output" into the DA layer.

For the gaming industry, it also greatly improves the efficiency of verification and storage. For example, in a three-minute game of chess, there may be 50 moves executed. If using Optimistic Rollup, the "input" of each step is required; while in Cairo, only the final state of the game and the difference in state transitions need to be described.

This ability to compress input into programs enables cooler functionality, such as allowing players to participate in Starknet games using assets from other chains through the use of middleware like @HerodotusDev.

4. General-purpose Unlike Solidity, Cairo's generality allows it to be used for a wider range of applications beyond blockchain, including creating verifiable programs for cloud computing or edge devices, giving it greater scalability.

In addition, Cairo has many other features that make it more efficient and scalable than Solidity, allowing it to better handle large amounts of computation. This provides unparalleled advantages for applications such as games that require high-frequency interaction and are sensitive to latency.

However, for the entire on-chain gaming industry, its development is not only dependent on the efficiency of the underlying language. At such an early stage, the overall ecosystem's atmosphere and maturity are also crucial. Next, we will take a look at the ecological maps of the EVM system represented by MUD and the Starknet system represented by Dojo, respectively, to see the ecological development of the entire on-chain gaming industry.

Five, the ecological map of the full-chain game

5.1 Mud System

As mentioned earlier, whether as the first proposer of the concept of full-chain game engine in the EVM ecosystem or its pure Ethereum pedigree, MUD is undoubtedly the big brother and therefore has natural appeal and cohesion in the developer community.

From the Autonomous Worlds Winter '22 Residency hosted by 0xPARC in 2022, it was already evident that there were many groundbreaking full-chain games developed around MUD, including Dark Sea, Crypto Town, OPCraft developed by Lattice, and Sky Strife, among others.

And in the recently concluded ETHGlobal 2023, the Autonomous Worlds Hackathon hosted by 0xPARC attracted hundreds of developers, receiving a total of 109 hackathon project applications in just 5 days. This is a very impressive achievement for a relatively early-stage ecosystem.

AW Residency and Hackathon Overview

Here the author will select several interesting projects from the 22-year Residency and this year's hackathon award-winning works to briefly describe, in order to better understand the current situation of games in the MUD ecosystem:

1. OPCraft 1 & 2

First of all, it is necessary to introduce OPCraft, which, along with Sky Strife, belongs to the earliest official self-developed games. OPCraft, as its name suggests, is also developed by the OP Labs team of Optimism, who are also co-developers of the game.

OPCraft is a Minecraft-style 3D voxel sandbox game on the blockchain. The team completed the initial version of the game development in less than 2 days using MUD, and then spent nearly 2 weeks launching the earliest test version. This earliest and perhaps the most autonomous blockchain game to date achieved over 1500 participating players and 3.5 million+ on-chain records after 2 weeks of launch, with various large voxel creations and 5+ player-made plugins.

Speaking of the expression of its concept of autonomous world, we have to mention the "OPCraft Autonomous People's Republic", a social structure completely initiated and contract-managed by players that appeared during the earliest testing period.

OPCraft essentially only allows players to do 6 things, of which 4 are in-game actions: destroying voxel blocks, crafting voxel blocks, placing voxel blocks, and claiming a 16x16 piece of land (requires becoming the highest diamond pledger for that plot). The other two are customizing the front-end and deploying custom components and systems.

OPCraft Structure

In the early days of the game, players were enthusiastic about digging huge holes in the ground to trap other players, or building various large-scale artistic creations like Minecraft. Most plugins revolved around resource mining, in-game socializing, and visual presentation, until the emergence of a "supreme leader".

"Supreme Leader" suddenly appeared one day and claimed almost all the surrounding land plots by using one million diamonds they had mined. This prevented other players from building or mining on them. However, at the same time, they also created a "comrade" system contract. If players choose to swear allegiance to the republic and become comrades, they must give up all their personal property, which will be confiscated. In return, players will have the right to use all the assets in the national treasury and can build and mine on the land of the republic. During the process, players must use more resources to mine more resources, thus establishing a completely autonomous country.

OPCraft Autonomous People's Republic of China

And this wonderful presentation, which completely exceeded the official team's expectations, was achieved in just 3 steps: a "comrade" component, a "governance" system, and a front-end plugin system that links the two for presentation.

And in the recently announced OPCraft 2 at the AW hackathon, the team unveiled a new feature - the "Redstone System". Players who have played Minecraft should know the creative potential behind "Redstone", which can be used to build different logic gate components through binary input, and can even create a computer. Although the demonstration at the hackathon was still relatively simple, its features have been well demonstrated and it is highly anticipated for its future development.

2. Sky Strife

Sky Strife is an RTS game developed by Lattice, which is basically a prototype for the subsequent full-chain turn-based games. It is also the most richly designed, smoothest and most competitive full-chain turn-based game the author has experienced so far.

Sky Strife Early Game Interface

In the early days of gaming, the main mode was capture the flag. Players needed to deploy their troops, expand their influence by occupying different resource points on the map, and seize the crown in the center of the map. The player who successfully escorts the crown to the target location wins. During this process, players need to make strategic decisions such as adjusting their troops, utilizing terrain resources, and observing the relationships between different factions.

The earliest gaming experience can be seen in this tweet, but in fact, with several version adjustments, the game pace and many settings have been well balanced, so it is still very exciting to play. For specific introductions, please refer to this *official guide*.

In recent updates, the team has redesigned the game's UI, added initial hero settings, and also introduced the "chicken dinner" mode. The overall development progress is quite impressive. Interested friends are recommended to join the official Lattice Discord to participate in periodic testing rounds for a better experience.

3. Autonomous Game of Life

The Autonomous Life Game is the final shortlisted work of this AW hackathon, developed and implemented by @Komorebi8888 and @yamapyblack. Using the MUD v2 engine, it not only brings Conway's Game of Life to the entire blockchain, but also develops a cellular automata module that allows anyone to quickly build their own cellular automata model.

Autonomous Game of Life game interface

In the versions of Komorebi and yamapyblack, players can compete against each other. Players can set up the initial life form by arranging cells, and the form will randomly wander. When cells come into contact with other cells, more cells surrounded by their own cells will survive. The winner is the one who survives in the end.

Unlike common game types, the Game of Life is a very unique category, and it also has a relatively rich ecological system. When it enters the world of the whole chain, it is very much looking forward to what kind of sparks will be collided in the future.

4. Netherscape

Netherscape is a full-chain RPG game developed by @DFArchon. It is not only a finalist in this AW hackathon, but also won the Best Creative Implementation - Gold Award issued by MUD.

Netherscape refers to the player-controlled characters as PC (Playable Characters). Using the ECS framework of MUD, each PC is constructed as an entity embedded with many components and systems, allowing players to manipulate them for exploration, collection, combat, consumption, and other behaviors. At the same time, this also allows teams and third-party developers to create various more complex interaction rules, such as market trading systems, combat enhancement systems, new maps, and so on.

Netherscape Demo 演示

Netherscape Demo Demo

What's interesting here is that because the power to manipulate PCs has been abstracted into a component, players can now engage in a PC trading and leasing market with each other. During the demo, founder @BriefKandle demonstrated a quick rental operation within a battle.

This pattern is actually very common in mobile games. It allows games to lower the entry barrier for new players while maintaining a high level of complexity. It also enhances the social aspect of the game. For fully on-chain games, this is a very beneficial implementation and we look forward to the official release of the game in the future.

5. Realm of Pepe

Realm of Pepe is a very interesting experimental example of a fully on-chain game combined with flow payments. It has also been shortlisted for the AW Hackathon, supported by Superfluid.

It is an ARPG game with a pretty good art style. The game content is very simple. When players create a character, a variable NFT Profile will be generated to record the player's status. When players interact with map resources, the Profile will also be updated. After specific requirements are met, the next level can be unlocked.

The overall logic of the game is simple and straightforward. Personally, I think the most interesting part is that it uses a streaming payment method to distribute various resources. Although it is recorded on NFT in the game, for some MMORPG or STG games, tokenizing some special resources and distributing them to players in the form of streaming payments may have a good enriching effect on the overall resource and economic system of the blockchain game.

Realm of Pepe Game Demo Interface

Due to limited space, we cannot expand on other projects from this AW hackathon. There were many interesting fusions and experiments, which resulted in some fascinating outcomes such as Layer, Mud Social Plugin and Werewolf, Courtroom, GPTMud, Agent Arena, and more.

In fact, in addition to this hackathon, there are many interesting games developed around MUD, such as Word3 by 0xSmallBrain and their new work Network State developed in collaboration with 0xhank and Moving Castle; Rhascau by stokarz, Muddy Frost by Tetration Labs, Museum Heist, tax cuts by the former Critterz team, and Primodium, a game similar to Factorio developed by Emerson Hsieh, all of which are worth paying attention to.

Finally, for those interested in the MUD ecosystem, you can follow the AW House initiated by Komorebi. Currently, the AW Impact Grants application is open at the same time, as well as the recruitment for Hacker House during the 2023 ETHCC.

5.2 Starknet System

As mentioned earlier, in the Cario 0 era, most of the on-chain games in the Starknet ecosystem were in a state of cooperation but operating independently. It wasn't until the announcement of Cario 1.0 that a large number of contracts faced rewriting. At this time, the emergence of Dojo provided an opportunity for all parties to unify their efforts in the gaming industry.

However, due to the short time, whether it is Dope War, Influence, or the recently released Loot Survivor, they are still using Dojo for the remake of Cario 1.0. Therefore, the Dojo ecosystem on the surface has not yet formed, so the Starknet system is temporarily used for summary. Moreover, the core contributors of Dojo are also mainly composed of active contributors in the overall ecosystem of Starknet, and perhaps in the future, the term Starknet system will continue to be used.

Given the close relationship between the various projects in the Starknet system, this section will begin by introducing the teams behind each project. First and foremost are the three families behind the Dojo engine: Realms, Cartridge, and Briq.

5.2.1 BibliothecaDAO

Firstly, the development team behind the Loot Realms series, BibliothecaDAO, is a very important organization in the Loot ecosystem. In the article "Thousands of Words, From Dark Forest and Loot to Explore the Peak of Chain Game Forms: Full-Chain Games", some relatively important introductions are also made.

Loot (for Adventurers) is an experimental project released by @Dom Hofmann on August 28, 2021. Due to its bottom-up, completely community-created and self-grown characteristics, it has high plasticity and almost unlimited possibilities, attracting many ecological contributors and derivative series in a short period of time.

However, with the decline of speculative heat, most of these projects have disappeared without a trace. As a community-driven project, Loot Realms has been actively contributing to the Lootverse since its launch on September 1, 2021. Its core contributor, @lordOfAFew, has become a spiritual leader in the Loot ecosystem alongside @TimshelXYZ. If the underlying narrative of Loot is like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, constructed by the contributions of many members such as Timshel, then the first project of Realms, Eternum, is like the game "Records of the Three Kingdoms" that carries the narrative.

Under the promotion of BibliothecaDAO, Loot is no longer just an IP with textual content, but has richer interactive forms. However, as a game, it also faces the underlying performance issues that all blockchain games will encounter.

In approximately November 2021, the team decided to migrate to Starknet for further development after considering multiple factors. In early 2023, the alpha version of Realms: Eternum was officially released, and the first "play to die" Roguelike game, LootSurvivor, was released at ETHGlobal Lisbon in May 2023. Both of these games are among the first fully on-chain games written in Cairo 0, making BibliothecaDAO a well-deserved veteran of on-chain games on Starknet.

Due to its community nature, BibliothecaDAO has not carried out any institutional financing, but instead chose to issue its own ecological governance token $LORD in December 2021. On February 1, 2023, it completed a round of private placement financing for the community based on Proposal 7 (BIP-7). Thanks to its strong community cohesion, it ultimately achieved an over-subscription of 6.35 times.

1. Realms: Eternum

Eternum is a full-chain sandbox-style strategy simulation game similar to "Civilization". Even before the concept of "Autonomous World" was proposed, BibliothecaDAO aimed to create an "Eternal Game" and began development shortly after the NFT issuance in September 2021. The name Eternum is derived from the first half of "Eternal" and the second half of "Ethereum".

Realms: Eternum

The game was originally developed around the ERC-2535 diamond standard proposed in 2020 and deployed on the Arbitrum network. However, as the development process encountered various issues, the team found that EVM and Solidity seemed unable to meet their vision for the eternal world at the time, so they decided to migrate to the Starknet network.

In the game, players need to hold at least 1 Realms to play. After entering the game, players will play the role of the lord of their own territory, and increase the strength of their own territory by obtaining and operating resources. The process will involve building, trading, invading, and defending between players. The game has launched a testnet version in January 2023 and can be experienced.

Based on the overall experience, the game has a relatively clear structure and logic. Although there is still room for improvement in terms of interaction experience, and due to the current limited speed of the Starknet test network, the time for L2 to return L1 transaction confirmation is too long. However, as one of the few fully on-chain games so far, Eternum still shows a pretty good performance.

Meanwhile, the economic model has also completed its initial design, which can form a good linkage with the NFTs of the Loot ecosystem and its own ecological tokens. After being launched on the mainnet, holders of Realms and C&C NFTs can receive continuous asset output, and the assets can also be sold for $LORD.

Currently, the asset AMM market has been completed in the game. With further integration into the Loot ecosystem, the game's modes and scale will become richer in a short time. We believe that there will be a good presentation in the future.

2. Loot Survivor

Loot Survivor is a text-based Roguelike game, with core developers including the co-founder of Genesis Adventurers, @aloothero, and the founder of the on-chain gaming guild protocol Guildly, distracteddev. It was first officially unveiled at the on-chain gaming summit in Lisbon on May 25, 2023, and quickly became the most popular on-chain game at the event, attracting a large number of enthusiasts in the field.

Loot Survivor game screen

However, its roots can be traced back even earlier. The core concept of "Play 2 Die" was first proposed in February 2022. The Realms team originally planned to develop this idea as the first expansion of the Realms series, named "Realms: Adventurers". The early game design combined Stable Diffusion to generate player characters, and the developers designed the levels. When a player died in a level, the assets lost would be obtained by the level developers.

During this process, developers need to balance the level design, which means they cannot set the difficulty too high, otherwise no one will play, nor can they set the difficulty too low, otherwise no one will die; while players need to balance the choice between continuing to be greedy or taking what they have, continuing to pass the level may get more loot, but they may also end up with nothing. This mode creates a unique relationship between players and developers, where they engage in a game of strategy.

Early concept of Play2Die

With the emergence of the Dojo engine, the team's understanding of the full-chain game gradually deepened. In the process of iterating Realms: Adventurers, the team decided to quickly create a smaller-scale single-player full-chain game as a test case for the "Play 2 die" concept. During this process, more existing encryption primitives were added, such as weapon settings for Loot and on-chain characters. Thus, Loot Survivor was born.

It is worth noting that the development of Loot Survivor has received the support of loothero, a co-founder of Genesis Adventurers. The position of GA in the Loot ecosystem has been briefly described in previous articles, and it has laid a solid foundation for the entire Loot universe. loothero is one of the creators of many settings in Loot, and many of the races, factions, and numerical systems in Loot are derived from him.

Therefore, despite the relatively small size of the game, Loot Survivor fully inherits the cultural heritage of the Loot system in terms of content continuity. It is believed that in the foreseeable future, it will also be able to see its linkage with Genesis Adventurers.

For a more detailed introduction about the game, we recommend reading this article by AW Research (EN Version).

5.2.2 Cartridge

Cartridge is a Steam-like gaming platform launched on Starknet on May 9, 2022, integrating decentralized identity, reputation, and game publishing. It completed its seed round financing in June 2022, with investors including Fabric Ventures, Valhalla Venture, and Chapter One.

Cartridge

And the connection between Cartridge team members and game engines is actually even richer, which can be traced back to another Loot series project - Dope Wars.

1. DopeWar

Dope Wars is another active and important derivative branch of Loot, in addition to Loot Realms. It was launched on the ETH mainnet on August 31, 2021 by @Dennison.og, with a total supply of 8000 Loot-style Free Mint projects. On September 4th, 125,000 $PAPER tokens were airdropped to each NFT holder.

Dope Wars

Different from the magical color of Loot, Dope Wars takes the street style route of GTA. Once it was launched, it attracted many enthusiasts. Perhaps due to its cultural attributes, the community atmosphere is very active and quickly began to develop towards the direction of the game.

Inspired by the classic game Drug War, Dope Wars hopes to build a GTA-style game universe that is in line with street culture from the bottom up, and achieve modular expansion through the characteristics of blockchain, while retaining the content in the a link. Therefore, the first fully on-chain "game engine" - RYO, entered development after the fourth proposal in the community, initiated and led by @perama, and the founding team of Cartridge, @tarrenceva and others, also became core contributors to the project in the later stage.

RYO is not actually a general-purpose game engine. Instead, it provided a modular set of standards and interfaces around the content of DopeWars in the environment at the time, allowing developers to develop more efficiently within the DopeWars ecosystem. It's a bit like a set of MOD development tools. However, this unique experience undoubtedly brought Cartridge team a lot of valuable ideas in game engine development, and therefore became a very important contributor to the Dojo Three Families in the future.

After Dope Wars, the team migrated their assets to the OP network and developed their own visual Marketplace. They also launched the game Dope Frenzy on the Starknet network. However, as the market cooled down, the development of the game came to a standstill. With the emergence of Dojo, the Cartridge team officially announced in June 2023 that they would remake RYO based on the Dojo engine. It is expected that soon, the shelved full-chain version of Drug War will return to everyone's attention.

Cartridge announces RYO remake

5.2.3 Briq

Briq is a Starknet project that was born at the *ETH Lisbon hackathon* in October 2021. Its founders are @sylvechv and @wraitii, and its goal is to create an on-chain Lego system. Users can combine the most basic "blocks" to achieve any creative idea and can disassemble them at any time.

Briq

Due to its highly modular nature, it can be easily integrated into NFT/game projects, especially in the Loot-themed Starknet ecosystem. At the same time, Briq is also an active contributor to the Starknet ecosystem, giving it the opportunity to use Briq to establish a 3D voxel-based visual presentation for NFTs, as mentioned earlier in the case of Dope Wars.

Dope Wars in Briq

Briq has also achieved great success in the recent collaboration with Argent's Xplorer, selling nearly 3 million Briqs and earning nearly 450 ETH in revenue.

5.2.4 Influence

Influence is a game with a significant volume in terms of time span, game content, and economic mechanisms. Perhaps I will write a separate article in the future to provide a more detailed introduction.

In short, Influence attempted to generate a massive random galaxy using smart contracts as early as 2018, but then went silent for a long time until the project was restarted in February 2021. In March, they proposed the concept of building a large-scale space strategy sandbox MMO game based on this galaxy, along with some game value settings, and launched it on the Rinkeby test network. At the same time, they partnered with the game project Parallel and announced that they would allow Parallel cards to have interoperable experiences in the game.

Partial setting about planetary resources

The game combines elements of 4x, management and open-world RPG, allowing players to freely explore, gather resources, build, and engage in battles in the Adalia galaxy, while constructing their own interstellar empire. All game assets and core game logic are deployed on the blockchain.

Due to the overall concept and large scale, the game is divided into 4 stages: "Arrival Release", "Exploitation Release", "Discovery Release" and "Conflict Release". Currently, the game is still in the "Arrival Release" stage and is expected to enter the "Exploitation Release" stage in the summer of 2023.

The earliest Arrival Release was officially launched on April 17, 2021. The main content of this version completed the generation and issuance of core assets Asteroids planets, Crew members, and SWAY tokens. In March 2022, the official released a 41-page game guide about the "Exploitation Release", which includes rich and comprehensive parts of game mechanics and content settings. Even compared to traditional games, it is not inferior at all.

In August 2022, the team announced that they will launch on Starknet and held the final asset sale event "Prepare for Launch Sale" before the Exploitation Release in March 2023. They also revealed the latest token economic model.

Regarding the community, there are currently 14 third-party developer applications officially included, among which there are also other active projects in the Starknet ecosystem such as Guildly and Cartridge. There are also 6 Grant projects on the list that are officially sponsored. At the same time, the story settings written by community members are also quite rich, accumulating tens of thousands of words of text content, and the quality is quite good.

Community member contribution content setting

Influence, as a full-chain game, can be said to be an excellent project in all aspects. With the launch of Dojo, the official team is currently trying to use Dojo to remake the game. We are very much looking forward to the upcoming Exploitation Release and what kind of performance it will have.

5.2.5 Topology

Topology is a very unique team founded by @guiltygyoza and @iamkunhokim. Unlike most teams that focus on full-chain games, engines, or other developer tools, they focus on the implementation of the underlying "rule layer" in the fully autonomous world.

Topology『s Mission

Topology believes that games that are completely built on the blockchain are no longer limited to the definition of "games". Based on the characteristics of borderless access and tamper-proofing, we can replicate or create constraints similar to the rules of nature. These rules are not owned by any entity and are impartial to all entities. Therefore, when these underlying rules have sufficient depth and complexity, the entire on-chain game will be able to establish a "chain reality", and Topology will be committed to assisting in the construction of this rule system.

This is undoubtedly a grand and avant-garde vision. From the current product form of Topology, it is already exploring in this direction, and currently leaning towards a complete on-chain physical engine. As of now, Topology has launched three highly experimental projects, each of which has an implementation of certain rules/physical models behind it.

其中 ISAAC is a collaborative construction game combining "The Three-Body Problem" and "The Expanse", officially launched on June 24, 2022. Players team up to enter a planet in the Three-Body System, where they need to work together to use the resources on the planet to build a propeller and escape the environment to win. In ISAAC, the team has built a real-time simulation of the physical model of the planet and the positions of three suns, and introduces the player's actions as parameters, increasing the chaos and complexity of the system, providing players with a deep gaming experience.

And then on November 7, 2022, they launched MuMu, a numerical physics simulator based on algebraic expressions. After adding audio functionality in the second season, it evolved into an instruction-based programmatic digital music generator.

And at the recent STARKTokyo event in April 2023, the team also unveiled their latest project "Shoshin", which is a strategy-based combat game where each side needs to set their own Mind (battle strategy) for their Agent (character), and the Agents will engage in battle based on these rules. Each decision and battle result in each frame will be verified and settled on the chain.

Shoshin Demo Screen

This is a very interesting way of presenting rules, which brings a different color to the full-chain games that are almost occupied by traditional RTS and SLG types. This setting of thinking has a taste of inserting cards to learn fighting in The Matrix. And Topology's goal is far more than just a game. The team is currently remaking Cario 1.0 and developing towards a highly modular specific application VM. If you are interested, you can check out its introduction on STARKTokyo.

Currently, Shoshin has opened applications for *early Playtest*, and those who want to experience it can directly fill out the form to try it out.

Other than the aforementioned projects that focus on game ecosystem construction, there are many other active projects in the overall Starknet ecosystem that are worth paying attention to, including Madara, which focuses on building Sequencer, Kakarot, which focuses on zkEVM, and Lambda Class, an ecosystem contributor, among others. The aforementioned three are also active contributors to the Dojo engine.

Lambda will also host the LambdaZKWeek hackathon during the 2023 ETHCC, sponsored by official organizations such as Dojo, Starknet, AZtech, Mina, etc. Interested friends should not miss it.

5.3 Dark Forest vs. Loot Continuation: MUD vs. DOJO

At this point, the introduction of MUD and Dojo is almost complete. Looking back at their origins, it can be found that both are almost extensions of the two major starting points in the full-chain game, inheritors of each other's will, and practitioners of their own beliefs. The deep roots of both sides have been discussed by the author in "A Ten Thousand Word Essay on the Peak of Full-Chain Game Forms: Full-Chain Games from Dark Forest to Loot". Comparing, thinking, and observing the new works of both sides once again is a very interesting thing, with a taste of witnessing the confrontation between different inheritances.

MUD & Dojo Timeline

Since we've come this far, as a spectator, it wouldn't be very satisfying if we didn't compare the two sides. Here, the author will make a simple and subjective comparison from three dimensions: style of work, ecological infrastructure, and content resources. This only represents the author's personal and limited views.

Style

MUD's background ranges from its Dark Forest to 0xPARC to Lattice, and its strong ideology, solid product concept, strong developer recruitment ability, and goal of building underlying infrastructure all make it feel like a very pure Ethereum-based open source project approach.

One hand builds narratives, spreads ideas widely and preaches; on the other hand, it showcases in-house products and continuously holds hackathons to recruit developers to contribute, achieving a balance between theory and practice. From the current results, it can be said that they are doing quite well.

And if MUD is the Ethereum school, then Dojo is the grassroots faction that inherits the bottom-up concept of Loot. It can be seen from the fact that Dojo was initially drafted by three different projects that its style is more inclined to collaborate, unite, and form alliances between different projects and communities.

This is also one of the reasons why there are relatively fewer Starknet ecosystem developers compared to the Ethereum ecosystem. At the same time, it is also because of the excellent web3 native IP, Loot, which provides strong inclusiveness and connectivity, allowing for more freedom and collaboration with different project communities.

Ecological Infrastructure

Here, the resources referred to are more about the resources within the ecosystem, including content reserves, infrastructure improvements, and the attention of core developers, among others.

From the perspective of infrastructure, there is no doubt that the infrastructure system of the EVM ecosystem is more complete, and the tools and reference materials available for development are also more abundant. However, due to the wider development of the EVM system as a whole, with more hot directions and tracks, the attention of the entire EVM ecosystem has not yet focused on the relatively early field of full-chain gaming.

As for Starknet, it places relatively more emphasis on supporting games on the entire chain. Founder Eli Ben-Sasson has mentioned this multiple times in his speeches in Montenegro. Therefore, Starknet will undoubtedly invest a higher proportion of its infrastructure and resources in supporting games on the entire chain.

At the same time, combined with the Dojo's strategy of teaming up, it enables the quick construction of new scenarios and solutions with the help of different communities. Currently, among the core contributors of Dojo, we can often see developers of infrastructure projects active on Starknet, such as Madara, Kakarot, and others.

Content Resources

At the content level, both sides have their own advantages and awkward situations. For EVM-based MUDs, although ETH is the largest NFT hub, most of the formed IPs have a tendency to dominate their own territories, resulting in poor inclusiveness and interoperability. In addition, there is a lower desire to explore the whole-chain games and autonomous worlds, and there is no relatively effective way to connect and leverage these content resources. Therefore, it can be seen that the games of most MUDs are turn-based games with small volume and more emphasis on game logic and gameplay.

For Starknet, the advantage is undoubtedly having Loot as a very strong content IP, and under the contributions and leadership of Timshel, loothero, and others, it has already possessed very rich textual content and a set of co-creative underlying narratives. This is relatively friendly for new developers, who can spend less effort building games with a certain level of content hierarchy.

Meanwhile, independent projects such as Dope War and Influence have a deeper and more complete narrative than games like MUD, making them more appealing to hardcore players, except for Realm and Loot Survivor, which are expanded through Loot.

But the slightly embarrassing thing is that, although the openness of Loot is good, the guidance and co-creation process of content, such as document-type materials, are relatively lacking, and not many people can quickly understand and use this part of the resources. On the other hand, the developer documentation of Dojo and Cairo themselves still needs improvement, and frequent updates make it difficult for many developers to focus on content creation.

Comprehensive

Overall, both sides have their own strengths. The advantage of MUD lies in its pure bloodline and the ability to attract developers. Currently, there is no doubt that there are far more developers developing full-chain games based on MUD than Dojo, making it easier to come up with interesting ideas and innovative projects.

However, due to the limited resources available at the content level, it may be difficult in the short term to see games with larger volume and deeper content levels, as the content creation, economic mechanisms, and complex game logic involved will pose great challenges to independent developers or small development teams.

However, it is reported that CCP Games, the company behind EVE Online, is very interested in MUD. Currently, they have started developing the EVE Web3 version, which may use MUD for development in whole or in part. According to the CEO, a Play test version is expected to be launched in September. In addition, 0xCitadel and ShatteredEON also have decent content, but since they have not been launched yet, we can only wait and see (neither of them are fully on-chain games developed using MUD, but there may be opportunities for collaboration in the future).

And the advantage of Starknet is that it has a richer content IP. Developers can quickly integrate their own ideas with the help of resources such as Loot, Dope War, Realm, Briq, and more. For example, the recently popular Loot Survior is a collaboration with Loot GA. Additionally, the Starknet ecosystem is more concentrated, providing developers with more opportunities for communication and collaboration.

However, the problem is also very obvious. Although the Cairo language has better performance, the underlying language is still in a frequent update and iteration stage, which brings considerable uncertainty to development work.

Chapter 6. Conclusion

Regardless of the style and resource differences between MUD and Dojo, they have an extremely similar commonality, which is that they naturally attract a considerable number of geeks and developers to continue contributing, thinking, and innovating in the ecosystem based solely on their ideas.

Borrowing a metaphor from a senior who has experienced Defi Summer, @tianrangzhang: "The atmosphere of the full-chain summit in Lisbon in May 2023 is basically like the atmosphere of the defi.wtf summit in October 2019. If L2, zkEVM, zkVM are compared to alt L1 at that time, middleware such as Axiom and Herodotus are compared to Link and GRT at that time."

That MUD is to the application layer what Uniswap is to content creators, greatly unleashing their creativity from technological limitations. Uniswap's one thousand air coins correspond to one thousand small games in MUD, and MUD's style and lineage are similar to UNI's orthodox and coinless stance in the past. Dojo, on the other hand, is more grassroots and down-to-earth like Sushi/Aave with a fair launch.

At the same time, when we look back at the development history of traditional game engines, we will find a positive cycle: from launching infrastructure to building self-developed game examples, attracting developers to build ecosystems, and then producing popular games, which in turn attracts more developers to participate. The formation and strengthening of this ecosystem has released tremendous energy and supported the success of famous commercial engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine.

And when we look back, we will find that MUD and Dojo have already taken their own steps in different ways. With this trend, it is not difficult to foresee that the era of the next generation, based on the fully on-chain autonomous world of Unity and Unreal Engine, is coming.

And where will you be when this grand performance begins?