#27 State of On-chain games w/ Neeraj and Shula

Summary: The State of Fully On-Chain Games/Autonomous Worlds

Major Themes:

• Evolution of Fully On-Chain Games: The conversation highlighted the transition from traditional web2 gaming to the innovative sphere of web3, focusing on the development and potential of fully on-chain games. These games, where both the game state and logic exist entirely on a blockchain, represent a new frontier in gaming that combines technology, finance, and community in unprecedented ways.
• Challenges and Opportunities: Building fully on-chain games introduces unique challenges, such as designing game mechanics that are engaging yet feasible within the constraints of blockchain technology. The financial aspect of these games, where player actions and assets have real-world value, adds complexity to game design and economy management. However, these challenges also open up opportunities for creating more immersive, lasting, and community-driven gaming experiences.
• Permissionless Design: A key focus was on the development of permissionless games, which allow for anyone to build upon and interact with the game's ecosystem without central oversight. This approach fosters a more inclusive and dynamic gaming environment, where the community plays a significant role in shaping the game's evolution.
• Sustainability of Game Economies: The sustainability of game economies within fully on-chain games remains an area of exploration. Designers and developers are experimenting with various models to create balanced and lasting economies, drawing parallels with real-world economic systems and the challenges they face.

Memorable Quotes:

• "The potential of a game that lives on forever is just, uh, mind-blowing." - Host
• "You don't start to imagine the things that we had to overcome to build a Fully On-Chain Game, man. It's a lot." - Shula
• "These games can live forever." - Neeraj
• "Game design is a total shift of what Web2 game design is... You need to start thinking and framing every possible thing that you are doing with your game, everything that you are designing." - Shula

Actionable Takeaways:

• For Game Developers: Consider the unique opportunities and challenges of building fully on-chain games. Focus on creating engaging game mechanics that are feasible within the blockchain environment and consider the financial implications of your game's design on the player economy.
• For the Web3 Community: Engage with and support the development of fully on-chain games. These games represent a significant step towards more autonomous, community-driven gaming experiences that could reshape the industry.
• For Investors and Stakeholders: Recognize the potential of fully on-chain games as a growing segment within the gaming industry. Consider investing in projects that are exploring innovative ways to tackle the challenges of game design, economy, and sustainability in the blockchain context.

This episode shed light on the state of fully on-chain games, highlighting the exciting potential and inherent challenges of this emerging field. Through the experiences shared by Shula and Neeraj, listeners gained insights into the evolving landscape of web3 gaming and the collaborative effort required to push the boundaries of what's possible in this space.

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Transcript

NoAutopilot: 0:00

Hey, this is Noel Autopilot, founder of the Gaming Startup Collective and host of the Token Takeover podcast. In today's episode, we're sharing a conversation about the state of fully on chain games slash autonomous worlds and what this burgeoning area of Web3 could mean for the future of gaming. Enough of me talking. Let's jump into the content. Hello, hello everyone. What's up, Shula? What's up, Dungeon Knight? Hope you're both doing well. Shula, let's get you up on the stage. Just get you a little invite there. And then while that's happening, let me, uh, let me tag our other guest, our other guest speaker. Can't lie, I'm, uh, I'm quite excited about today's episode. Can you hear me? Yes, yes, I can hear you well. Okay, cool. Let me send out a couple quick announcements and then we'll

Shula: 0:45

roll right in. Uh, Shula, thank you again. No worries, man. Everything related to Fully Unchained Games, you have me on there. I like to talk about it.

NoAutopilot: 0:54

That's a dangerous proposition, man. I might, uh, I might make a monthly series or something out of this. Like, there's just so much to unpack, and I know like there's still a ton of challenges and hurdles and technical limitations, but the potential of a game that lives on forever is just, uh, mind blowing. You don't, you don't start to imagine the

Shula: 1:10

things that we had to overcome to build a Fully Unchained Game, man. Peace. It's a lot, but yeah, uh, sure. Um, Anything that, that you need, if I can share my experience at least and help others,

NoAutopilot: 1:22

I'm down, man. You gotta love Calendly. Calendly is nice because it allows you to like auto schedule meetings, but then it doesn't allow you to edit where the meeting is happening.

Shula: 1:29

I don't, I don't usually use Calendly because on paper, the idea of someone like being able to manage your time. I don't know. I'm kind of, I don't know. It might, it might sound weird to me, but I know it's, Yeah. Yeah. Of course, it's really useful and a really useful tool for the community.

NoAutopilot: 1:46

Yeah. So Shula, actually, I don't think you're in there, but, uh, so I run a community called the Gaming Startup Collective, a bunch of gaming founders, uh, private community gaming founders, just trying to help each other, you know, uh, launch your projects a little bit more successfully. But as part of that, I have given my account link to like 200 people. Yeah. I know. Looks like we got Zoom Links coming in. What's up Zoom Links? Yeah. Hey, how are you guys? Good, man. Yeah, so I guess to set the table a little bit, um, Again, so I run the Community of the Gaming Startup Collective. It's purpose is to help three gaming founders on their journey. Just a little bit, right? Can't promise a ton, but maybe if we can help you with networking, your best practices, or just kind of cheerleading you on in your journey to ship a really cool game, that's where we kind of plug in and play. I had the team from Moonstream. to, uh, reach out to me in my DMs. ZoomLinks here, who is their founder and has not only shipped a bunch of different projects in web three, but has. Some really interesting insights around fully on chain game. And so I said, sure, let's, let's, let's have a space on this topic. I've been interested in, in the concept of fully on chain games for about six months or so. And this is a fantastic opportunity to kind of slow down and actually uh, dive into it a bit as part of it. I dropped a DM, uh, or a message, I should say, in the Found Discord, uh, which is ran by Nico over at BitGraph. And I said, hey, all you fully on chain game folks, uh, we're gonna hold the space, if you have some interesting opinions to share, or just like the topic of chain games. I'd love to have you join us. And so we had Shula go ahead and, uh, reach out to me. And so they are our panelists for the day. All right. So table is set. So maybe the first thing we should do, uh, Shula, if you don't mind, can you just kind of a quick introduction to yourself and maybe like your, your experience with, uh, fully on chain games? Sure, man.

Shula: 3:30

Yeah. But my name is Juliano from Argentina. And yeah, I've been like, I have a background on systems engineering. So I've been working with, uh, game. Um, Games and studios and other software companies for, uh, my whole career. And in the last five years, I took a deep dive into gaming. I started on web2 gaming, of course, quickly transitioning to web3. And my last experience was working with Star Atlas. I'm sure you guys heard about the project. At least once, if you are, if you're in the space and I worked, uh, as a, I work, you know, how is this on, on a startup that you, you get to, uh, wear many hats, right? And I started doing some engineering stuff, but quickly also transition into doing some design. Game design stuff, system design stuff. And I found myself designing Sage. Sage stands for Strataslas Golden Era, which is a fully on chain game of Strataslas, which you can play on the web. And today, Sage brings about 3 million USDC of volume transactions on the marketplace. So it's arguably one of the best, if not the best, fully on chain game out there. So yeah, that's a brief. A brief overview about me and my work.

NoAutopilot: 4:46

Okay, Zomglings, if you don't mind, can you also do a quick introduction to yourself, please?

Neeraj: 4:49

Yeah, yeah. Um, I'm Zomglings. I'm the founder of Moonstream. We've been building fully on chain games since 2021. Uh, we've launched four fully on chain games so far and we're launching our fifth one, uh, in March. It's called Full Count and it's a fully on chain. We got into fully on chain games because, you know, we started out Moonstream as, you know, fundamentally it's like a LiveOps product for games. For web three games. And, um, basically, you know, the way that, the way that web, most web three games are built right now, you have like a single company, like, you know, a company that's like responsible for the game development, and they're also responsible for like keeping the economy healthy. Um, and the way that they need to act in this situation is they need to act in a very similar way as the federal reserve acts in the U S economy, right? There are central like central bank acts in a national economy. We started out, we were just giving them tools to basically keep their economies alive, like, you know, just reward distributions, leaderboards, stuff like this. And increasingly we realized they want it, but basically like they need is more autonomous tools. And we started building those that basically autonomous to manage a game economy on chain. And so OnStar first fully on chain game, uh, into one of our customer, uh, game universes in January of 2022, I think it's been the most successful. I, you know, I'm not very familiar with the Solana ecosystem, so I'm not sure how it is with the Star Atlas fully on chain game, at least on EVM chains. It's been like the most engaging, uh, fully on chain game that ever deployed. So the contract was funded, uh, they basically use it as a way to distribute their tokens. It was called Crypto Unicorns, the Dark Forest. And, um, they released their utility token to their players from January 2022 to March 2022 for two months. And, you know, I woke up one day and all of a sudden there were a hundred million dollars worth of value locked into the contract. And like, you know, while that, while there was like, you know, Their utility built in on the contract. We did close to 2 million transactions on Polygon, close to 10, 000 daily active users. It was just like, it was just like this thing where, you know, we didn't realize that we put fully on chain gaming and we actually ran a successful fully on chain game and, and that turned us into fanatics basically. And so we've been, we've been building these things ever since. So, so that's a little bit of my journey into fully on chain.

NoAutopilot: 6:41

Okay. Yeah. So the powerhouse team here. So I guess for like, for folks who maybe haven't, And following along with fully on chain games, I know it's like a deep topic to kind of explain, but do either one of you want to maybe take a swing at just hitting it from a high level? Like what's different from fully on chain game to like a blockchain game or web3 game? Either one of you mind just kind of clarifying that piece for us a bit? You want to tackle it? So yeah,

Neeraj: 7:05

I can, I can sort of describe my understanding. But this is something that needs to be a larger conversation because there's like a lot of categories, like subcategories. Um, but. But just the most basic definition is that a fully on chain game is a game in which all the game state, in which the entire state of the game, is represented on a blockchain. That's it. You know, there are a few examples of this. Most fully on chain games, at least on EVM chains, are pretty simple. I suspect that Solana fully on chain games are quite a bit more, like, sophisticated in terms of the functionality that they offer. But, you know, across all chains, the definition is that everything about the state of the game, right? The state of the game, the state of a player in the game, it needs to be represented on a blockchain. That's the, that's sort of it.

Shula: 7:42

One hundred percent. I will also add the, or at least my experience tells me that also the logic, right? It also needs to live on chain on the contracts, on the EBMs. Uh, for instance, in Solana and the programs, right, they also need to live on, on chain. And this, of course, breaks its own sets of problems, right? When you, when you put everything on chain, then you need to start thinking and framing every possible thing that you are doing with your game, everything that you are designing. It has to shift from your traditional thinking.

Neeraj: 8:13

Making of games, let's say. Definitely. And actually, one of the biggest shifts is, you know, you can build fully on chain games that are pretty permissioned. You know, you can say that, you know, only these addresses have permissions. They're like admins, they're mods, they have like extra authority relative to the game. But for us, the most interesting fully on chain games are the ones that are completely permissionless, where there are no Privileged parties when it comes to the game state or the game logic. So, uh, the kinds of games that we build now that we did this, there's just been an evolution of our approach to fully on chain games, but the kind of games that we build now are totally permissionless. So even though we build the games, we have no privileged status when it comes to like the game rules or the game state or like that,

NoAutopilot: 8:51

Hey, are you a builder looking for a grant to build your ideal web3 gaming startup? If so, you should take a look at the Arbitrum Grant Program. With grants up to 25, 000 and a specific focus on supporting early stage indie game devs, it could be the perfect fit. Link is in the description, make sure to check it out. Now back to the podcast. Now, I guess that's kind of where like the, the potential promise comes in. I'm sure a lot of folks here have participated in modding communities. Yeah. They played games that like the servers have eventually went offline. And so the potential here is. If the game is fun, uh, which I guess the definition of fun is kind of up for, like, the audience, but if a game is fun and it's permissionless to build on top of, these could potentially, you know, survive indefinitely and just continue to be iterated on by, you know, more and more community members who participate in the game. That's right. Yeah. These games can live forever. Uh, sorry, go ahead,

Neeraj: 9:49

Shula. You, you wanted to say something.

Shula: 9:51

No, no. Yeah. I was about to mention the same thing, right? Uh, and it's a good distinction to make the one that you mentioned earlier. You have a fully unchanged game that falls under the definition. Uh, for instance, Sage, the one I was about earlier, But it's not permissionless, right? You cannot build on top. So it has to be maintained by the, not the community, but by the developer itself, while these, these on chain games that you're talking about are more like autonomous worlds, right? Like you compose on top of them. permissionlessly and that is a powerful tool.

Neeraj: 10:21

And it's still very early, you know, we're still, I think, collectively developers who build fully on chain games and especially like autonomous worlds permissionless games are still figuring out like, you know, exactly what it looks like. But I think about it is that if you're building a game fully on chain, like if you're building a fully on chain game, you're imposing a lot of friction onto your users. It's hard for players to play a fully on chain game, right? Like, if you think about it, They need to be able to, like, there needs to be a way for them to like submit transactions on a blockchain. Somebody has to front the gas. There's like, you know, all of this UX friction that you accept when you build a fully on chain game. So there needs to be a really good reason that you're doing it. And of course, different games have different, really good reasons for it. But for us, you know, what we see is. Like it's been impossible to build a digital permissionless game. Right. Because digital games, like, you know, video games or like MMOs, like whatever, someone has to run like the server infrastructure in order to like provide these game experiences to players. And so that's that until Chains existed, it was impossible for someone to build these digital game experiences permissionlessly. But now it's possible and like blockchain technology just keeps getting better and better. And so, you know, we want to build like the digital version of chess, a permission. Like when I say chess, I don't, you know, what you play on chess. com. Chess. com is just like client, the physical game of chess. But, you know, we want to build like the digital, like a digital strategy game similar in nature to chess, right? Like that, that's sort of like what we're going for.

NoAutopilot: 11:37

I guess the concept of like EYUX and like the complexity of getting players into it. And certainly that's a struggle, but. Like, there's an audience out there that loves Dwarf Fortress. Like, millions of players that love Dwarf Fortress, even though, you know, to the mainstream player, it's, it's not playable. And so it is, it is kind of exciting to think about, like, the folks who are cutting edge, into Web3, blockchain, into gaming. Getting in there and kind of experimenting with these types of projects. Okay. So I guess we're, we're up to speed on the industry so far now, a few challenges that I've heard and I haven't built a fully on chain game, so feel free to course correct me if I get off topic here. But, um, so the user interface, onboarding, all that kind of crypto stuff that a lot of web 3D games struggle with, there's concerns around botting. Right. So if you have this like fully autonomous world, obviously you're quite prevalent in Web 3. And if there's money on the line, it likely would be even more so potentially an on chain game. And then of course, we haven't even gotten to like, uh, regulation or legality of these types of things, but I guess any other challenges, big challenges that you guys are seeing, and then any thoughts on. Some of them that I've, I've mentioned so far.

Shula: 12:43

My experience, game design is a total shift of what Web2 game design is, right? It's like from a Web2 perspective, you can build anything, almost any mechanic you think of, right? You can have, I don't know, 100 players playing at the same time, you know, interchanging and shoots and what not. And everything, like the technology has come to a place that you can build that yourself. You know, if you know the basic stuff, you say, okay, now I want to do the same thing web free on like a fully on chain game. And you will have a lot of issues if you want to do that. in their web 2. 0 style, you know.

Neeraj: 13:19

I think this problem is, the biggest problems are actually the ones that you mentioned. You know, once your game is fully on chain, like, you know, if your game state and game logic is represented on, fundamentally your game becomes financial. In the sense that anytime a player wants to make a move in the game, someone has to spend money, someone somewhere has to spend money in order to make that move possible. It might be the player themselves, maybe like, you know, their parties like guilds or, you know, other, other people who are like willing to spend the gas to, to like make those transactions happen. But the point is, you know, once the game state In game logic, what's the only way to make changes in the game is on chain. It's already financial in the sense that somebody has to spend money to make moves. And usually it's more financial than that because you know, your moves will involve game assets. And all of those game assets are represented on the blockchain. And that means that all of those game assets are worth, you know, some dollar amount of money or some like, you know, ETH amount or Solana amount of money, and so your game becomes really financial and that's, that's something that's hard to work with for most people. Because when you're working in a web two game or like, you know, it's a single player game or something, your game economy. As you know, as a game designer, your game economy is just a tool for you to improve player engagement, right? Once everything becomes financial, your game economy is a real and uh, you can just like, you know Increase the drop rate of some item to like because players really want it or whatever At will because if you do that, you're gonna bring your economy crashing to its knees And so that financialization aspect is really important. It's it's just hard work with for everybody in the states, right? It's like nobody's really built a sustainable economy yet. So that's one thing. And I think bots are really interesting because, uh, I personally don't see bots as a problem. I think, you know, you need to have a plan for how, you know, what role bots play inside, inside your game ecosystem. But, uh, for example, for us in our games, since the games are completely permissionless, we can't monetize the games themselves, uh, but we do monetize the bots around those games. And that's, that's like a pretty big deal, right? So, um, It's just a different way of thinking about things. So, you know, some of those things are real challenges to deal with, and other things like the bots, I personally don't consider them. I consider them a different kind of challenge than the one that you mentioned. You don't want to shut them down. You just need to figure out how they can sort of actively participate in your game.

Shula: 15:17

I 100 percent agree with that. I also, I think they're helpful in some regards when you are designing your game. About bots, I use them as a rule of thumb when designing on chain games. So if I create a game loop or a mechanic that is botable, that is someone that can do it afk or, or you can create a bot to perform it better than a human, then I might, I might have to tweak something there in order to make that happen. Mechanic or that game look more engaging. Yeah. Um, with regards of the economy, I think, uh, that's an excellent point. No one was able to yet come up with a sustainable economy. What we did on, on Sage, we, we always keep tweaking it, right? We get, we have stability there. But still, um, we had issues from time to time where we had to adjust the value or lever, as we call it, and, and then we had to gush, gush the consequences of that adjustment, right? We did this in a, in the most deliberate ways possible for us to not affect the economy. This, I don't see this as a failure, right? Because If you compare it, for instance, to countries, countries have the same levers and the same board that we have when we make the, when we made the game. And they seriously have been messing up things in the economy a lot. So if they can fail, so be it. And I think it's a learning process, right? We might get there stumbling.

NoAutopilot: 16:40

Uh, so Zomlings, I see you're requesting permission to join the stage. I haven't accepted it, uh, but I think Elon is in the back toggling a button. Uh, he doesn't want us to chat. So we do have five minutes left in this space. I want to be respectful of our panelists time here. So community, if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat section, comment section, thank you, uh, below the, the space here. And then I guess while folks are doing, uh, Zomlings, if folks want to get in. touch with you, learn more about what you're doing or support what you're doing. Where should they go? What should they do?

Neeraj: 17:14

Uh, our Twitter accounts are pretty good. So you can just click on my Twitter account and you see it. MootStream is also a listener in this, uh, in this space. If you click on that one, the Twitter accounts are good. And we have a discord where you can reach us pretty easily. So, uh, that's probably the best. And Shua, how about you?

Shula: 17:26

I'm working on an undisclosed project for now, and it will be like that for a couple of months. So I cannot refer to any Twitter account or website yet. But, uh, we'll make sure to, to do that in the future. The game I'm working on is going to live on chain part of it, but, uh, some other part of it is going to be off chain. Still, of course, it's going to be web free.

NoAutopilot: 17:46

Very cool. Okay. We'll have to get the alpha out of you, uh, maybe next month or the month after. Yeah,

Shula: 17:52

probably, man. Hopefully, uh, we can start releasing stuff there. The things that we've been working on are pretty legit, to be honest. Uh, the team are capable and they are smarter than me. So they, they are a bit working hard on a lot of stuff. Hopefully we can release that soon.

NoAutopilot: 18:06

Very cool. Now I, uh, I did at one point during our session, Dungeon Knights, I'm so sorry. I know you requested to be added to the stage and I added you. But then I asked if you had a question or statement, but before we close out, I want to at least give you a chance, uh, Dejanite, did you have anything you wanted to share to the conversation?

Shula: 18:23

I did have a question, but I'm caught up in another space still, so I'm listening to both and bouncing between both. Nah, you're all good fam.

NoAutopilot: 18:29

I feel like we just barely scratched the surface of, uh, on chain games. I know that we have a handful of on chain game builders within our community. This might be something we spin up into a series. I don't know if you guys are game for, uh, for more of these, but we may, we may try and get another one of these put together and invite some more friends from, uh, the fully on chain game space to, uh, to chat about it.

Shula: 18:51

Yeah, I'm down to him.

NoAutopilot: 18:52

All right, folks, I guess that's it. So, so there's your primer on fully on chain games. Follow all of our socials. We'll get follow up spaces coordinated soon. If you have specific questions you want to ask or things you want to dive into to help you on your builder journey, building a fully on chain game, don't hesitate to drop those in the comments and I'll reference those for, uh, for booking our follow up spaces. Zomlings, Shula, thank you so much. Appreciate you joining today. Thank you for inviting me, man. This has been great. Yeah, man, for sure. Oh, and join the community. If you're not joining the, uh, gaming startup collective, if you're not in there, it's a, it's a private community. So when you get in, you won't be able to see anything, but, uh, just type up a quick introduction and then I'll add you to the pool community. We'll do man. We'll do. Thanks. Thanks everyone.