Writer, Editor: VaporAviator (M), Jiahui (F)
Welcome everyone to {PotatoEng} 🥔! Lately, potatoes have been quite interested in the topic of “fully on-chain gaming”. We have discussed in our previous podcasts that due to factors such as “not fun enough”, “poor user experience”, and “attracting speculators rather than players”, blockchain games have been constantly criticized. Among them, fully on-chain games, which move all servers to the blockchain, offer even less user-friendly experiences. Hence, we’re curious about who is playing and creating these fully on-chain games, and what attracts investors to this field.
We are delighted to have David Amor, CEO of Playmint, one of the earliest projects in fully on-chain gaming, as our guest this time! He will clear up some of our doubts: What exactly is ‘fully on-chain gaming’? Who are the target players and what is the future market? Why does Playmint believe in fully on-chain gaming, and what are the technical implementations behind it?
Additionally, Playmint is hiring Solidity engineers! If you’re a suitable candidate, feel free to DM M. or F. to discuss further!
PS: The full text is generated by ChatGPT based on the transcription draft (Potato’s productivity is liberated 👏🏻)
🥔 Potato Guests
David Amor| CEO at Playmint
CoHost | F. Ex-theatermaker; Building Web3 infra
CoHost | M. Experience designer, Strategist in Web3 & immersive tech
Part 1 Summary
🟣 David 加入 Playmint 的心路历程，此前经历
🟠 David 提到: 单纯将PC游戏、手游等等移植到区块链上，并没有创造新的东西，也没有很好地利用区块链技术
🟣 全链游戏的定义：指的是将所有游戏资产、状态和逻辑都放在区块链而不是中心化服务器上。
**M** Hello everyone, and welcome back to Meta Potatoes. Today, we are delighted to have David Amor from Playmint as our guest to talk about on-chain gaming. Welcome, David.
**David ** Hey, good to be here. Thanks for the invite.
**M ** Let’s get started!
**David ** Okay, some people in the on-chain gaming world come from the crypto industry, while others, like me, come from the gaming industry. I started working for publishers at Electronic Arts in the early 90s and did that for about 10 years. Then I ran companies that made games for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and mobile free-to-play games for another 10 years. For the last 2 years, I’ve been running a blockchain games company. So in total, I have over 33 years of experience making games across various categories, and for the last couple of years, I have been building on-chain games at Playmint.
The first game I made was NES games (任天堂娱乐系统 Nintendo Entertainment System 上世纪80年代在欧美流行，日本版称“FC游戏机”或“红白机”). It was prior to the internet, and the game teams and memory sizes were tiny. There wasn’t much of an industry at that time, but it has changed so much since then. The games industry is always evolving, and it’s been a fun place to build a career.
**M ** Speaking of Playmint, how did you start the company, and what is Playmint all about?
**David ** In the middle of 2021, I was interested in blockchain or Web3, and I saw its potential. I was a fan of Bitcoin and what was happening on Ethereum, and I believed that there was something interesting that we could do with that technology in combination with video games. I’ve seen the games industry embrace something new before and build a different kind of game for a different kind of player, whether it was on home computers, consoles, PC multiplayer, Facebook canvas, or mobile free-to-play. So, even though I wasn’t entirely sure exactly what that new thing was, I thought there was enough potential to start a game company. We started Playmint and got some investment, and I brought together people that I liked working with, people who worked at Sega, Epic Games, Unity, and other traditional games industry companies. We wanted to build something new that the world hasn’t seen using blockchain.
**M ** That sounds really cool. But for our audience who may not be familiar with on-chain gaming, how does it differ from traditional gaming? And why did you choose to contribute to on-chain gaming?
**David ** I remember when I moved from making PlayStation games to mobile games, I made the mistake of just trying to port my PlayStation games onto an iPhone. **Even though it was tentatively impressive, it wasn’t creating anything new or taking advantage of new technology. **When we started Playmint, a web3 game company, we didn’t want to take the easy route of adding a token or an NFT to a traditional game. Instead, we asked ourselves, what weird new thing can we do that hasn’t been possible before? We were interested in an NFT called Loot, which introduced the concept of an interoperable game asset that can be used across multiple experiences. We wanted to learn more about that, which included writing in Solidity (以太坊上智能合约的编程语言), optimizing gas fees, and understanding interoperability. So, we threw ourselves into the deep end of Web3 games and found the idea of a fully on-chain game to be the most interesting.
By fully on-chain game, I mean a game where all assets, game state, and game logic are stored on the blockchain instead of a central server. This is technically challenging, but we wanted to explore why it was important and interesting. So, when I refer to an on-chain game, I mean a game where everything runs on the blockchain.
Part 2 Summary
全链游戏令人兴奋的点在于：
🟣 创造一个去中心化永续自运行的世界：没有人可以停止这个游戏，即使开发团队消失游戏也会一直存在。
🟠 可组合性：任何人都可以无许可地贡献代码加入游戏开发。MMO游戏很适合用一个永续世界来承载，但全链游戏还远不到商业化的时候，目前更多是用来进行可交互操作游戏资产和游戏上链的实验目的。目前全链游戏的玩家往往也是游戏开发者，Playmint 认为，设置一定的技术门槛有利于提高玩家们的贡献质量。
**M ** I noticed that many current on-chain games are strategy games, puzzle games, or trading card games. Is this a trend limited by the current technology, or a marketing strategy to ensure the survival and evolution of on-chain gaming?
**David ** It’s a little bit of both. On the positive side, you could say that games that benefit most from being on-chain are those that have a persistent game world that lives forever, like MMOs — and we’re currently building a lightweight, simple MMO (大型多人在线角色扮演游戏 massively multiplayer online game). On the negative side, there are games that could never be built on-chain, even if you wanted to.
There are two reasons why we think building on-chain is interesting. Firstly, the game world we create doesn’t live on a server that we operate, but on a blockchain. This means that I can’t turn the world off even if I wanted to, and it will live forever in a decentralized way, which is fascinating. We’ve seen MMOs that have been turned off, and if you put a lot of time, love, and money into that world, seeing it turned off because of a licensing agreement doesn’t feel great. Secondly, there’s a point about composability, which I’ll talk about in a moment.
For a persistent game world, MMOs seem like a good fit, and it’s a shared world with everyone else, making it even more suitable. What on-chain games don’t suit is something that has a lot of transactions, like Street Fighter or StarCraft 2, where the action per minute is too fast for the blockchain to keep up with. While on-chain games are good and secure, they are also slow, so they don’t suit Twitch games. That’s why you see more strategy, more MMOs, and more CCGs (收集式卡牌游戏 collectible card games) in on-chain gaming.
**M ** Can you tell us more about the game called “The Crypt” that you built under Playmint?
**David** “The Crypt” was more of a proof of concept than a fully-fledged game. We built it in three months, partly to learn something new, partly to build something different to teach us. It was a simple dungeon crawler game where players had to find and collaborate with others who owned a Loot NFT, to raid the dungeons, and the people who defeated the dungeon would win a prize. If the game ran on Ethereum, each set of movements would cost a ton just for the gas price, so we had to design it in a way that most of the game happened outside (coordinating in Discord), and what you did on-chain was just executing. It was more about learning something new about interoperable game assets and running on-chain, not about monetization.
One of the things we learned from “The Crypt” was the idea of composability. **Since the game ran on-chain, anyone could write another piece of code that could connect to it. **In “The Crypt,” someone figured out a way to connect their piece of code, which determined the optimal raiding strategy for the dungeon, to the existing game we created. The game evolved not because I, as a game maker, continued to evolve it, but because people in the community added new things to it. We thought this idea of permissionless composability was a really interesting one.
**M ** Your project is an open-source project, right?
**David ** Well, it’s similar to an open-source project, but there are a couple of important differences. **One is that it’s permissionless, meaning anyone can add something to it without having to ask for permission. **In a typical open-source project, there’s centralized collaboration, with someone in charge of approving contributions, or permissioned development. **The other difference is that in an open-source project, someone compiles all the contributions into a single build. In our case, the game evolves without anyone needing to recompile, and the changes just show up for everyone. **We didn’t know this addition was coming, and nobody needed to refresh their browser or download something else. The game evolved in ways we didn’t expect, which is fun for the players and for us.
**M ** That’s super cool! But how does it work, technically?
**David** Our code is on the blockchain, not on our servers, which means people can see what our code is doing and write code that talks to our code. Unlike a World of Warcraft server, where the code is not exposed in the same way. People have never seen the idea of composability in the gaming industry, and there’s so much more we can do with it.
**F ** We were just discussing permissionless composability. From my perspective, it blurs the lines between game developers and players. Some people don’t have the ability to add another piece of code to the small contract running behind Playmint on the blockchain, while others do because they’re essentially game developers. I’m curious about this boundary-blurring aspect and how ordinary gamers can contribute to the composability of your game.
**David ** That’s a good question. When we build things for this game, we have the same ability as anybody else. **Just because we made the original game doesn’t give us elevated status. We create parts of the game, but other people can create parts of the game that sit alongside ours **— they can modify what’s there or create something new in that world. We’re not the super developers with admin rights or anything like that. We’re just another builder in that space.
Regarding how technical it is to deploy a smart contract to add functionality, you’re right. You need to know Solidity and how to deploy a smart contract. We’ve been asking ourselves how important a no-code or low-code solution is. It’s something we talk about a lot, but I don’t have a finished answer yet.
One thing we’ve heard from talking to people is that the games that encourage builders like Roblox and Minecraft usually have some level of programming knowledge required. You can’t make a hit experience in Roblox without knowing how to code. So, I don’t think a no-code solution is necessarily where we need to get to. It has also been pointed out to me that the lower the barrier you set to allow people to build something new, the more you risk allowing lower-quality contributions. So I think that having some level of technical knowledge is important because it makes people think twice about whether they are committed to creating something worthwhile. People who have done this before in other games have said that the barrier to entry is not necessarily a bad thing because it keeps the quality of contributions higher.
I’m not sure if I explained that well, but it’s a great question about how easy we should make it for builders to create new things for the game. To clarify, if you’re a player, you can still use what other people have built. For example, if you built an AMM (自动做市商，根据算法定价自动交易，是 DeFi 领域的一大创新。这里指的是在全链游戏中内嵌 DeFi 机制 automated market maker) for the game — you go to the north of the map, build a building, and attach that smart contract to it — As game makers, we don’t need to write that smart contract, but now that it exists in the game, anybody can use it to add new functionality to that same functionality somewhere else on the map. We have the concept of players and builders — the builders who create smart contracts that allow the game to do different things, and the players who are playing the game and deploying these smart contracts around the map.
Part 3 Summary
🟣 全链游戏的参与者可以改变游戏的机制设计，而非故事。实际上，对于永续世界来说，使用传统叙事结构（开头-过程-结尾）本身已无意义。
🟠 Playmint 的重心不在 token 机制设计，他们的核心是创建一个永续并强调数字形式所有权和可组合性的游戏世界。
🟣 全链游戏领域不太存在“竞争对手”概念，因为目前所有开发者都共同将“链上游戏”作为一个类别在推广。
**F ** That’s pretty clear. I was wondering if all the changes you mentioned are about changing the in-game mechanism design, not about changing the storyline, right?
**David ** Correct. **To have a decentralized game that lasts forever, you can’t really have a game that includes a narrative, or at least you can have a law for the game, but you can’t have a beginning, middle, and end. **That doesn’t make any sense for a game that lasts forever. The nature of the gameplay is that it emerges and evolves over time.
I believe that our game should have some sort of goal for the players, otherwise, it would be just a sandbox where people are doing things for the sake of doing things. I think it’s important for our game to have a goal, but how people choose to get there, which could be just playing in a certain way or building new things that help you get there, is up to them. It could be something simple, like who has the most experience points at the end of the month. I do think it’s important that everybody is heading towards a goal, or at least we offer that in our game.
https://www.bankless.com/the-promises-of-blockchain-gaming* by Bankless*
**F ** I agree with the idea that blockchain enables a game to be perpetual and immutable, and some fundamental things have changed, like the absence of a narrative. Blockchain transforms gaming in terms of composability and perpetual immutability, but apart from changes on the backend, is there anything new added to the industry, for example, ownership and token economy design?
**David ** I think a really obvious use case for blockchain gaming is digital ownership. If I own a bicycle that I bought from a store, then I get to do whatever I want with it. But in the digital world, I know it’s something that I own but I can’t sell it or loan it out. So we’ve ended up with a weird version of digital ownership, and I think the blockchain allows us to have a better form of ownership with more functionality, like loaning things out — it’s not something that we put front and center of what we’re building, but it’s something that’s in our game.
Many games are leaning into the play-to-earn idea, but we’re not spending much energy on that. Instead, we’re focusing on creating a game world that lives forever and emphasizes digital ownership and composability.
As for the token economy aspect, our team has had extensive discussions on this topic. We’ve seen examples of token economies that haven’t worked, and it’s hard to point to one with confidence that it will work. While I’m sure someone will eventually develop a great token model for games, we decided that it wasn’t the most important aspect of our project. So we’ve chosen a simpler way of monetizing the game that doesn’t involve fluctuating token prices, which often cause more problems than they solve in Web3 games. In summary, we’re focusing less on the token aspect of gaming.
**F ** In the fully on-chain gaming field, we know there are Lattice, who built Mud, a framework for complex Ethereum applications like games; Topology, built on top of StarkNet; and more. How do you view the competitive landscape, or there’s no “competitive landscape” because each fully on-chain game is essentially different?
David Currently, there are around 30 on-chain games among a thousand blockchain games in the world, which amounts to only 3% of Web3 games. However, this number has significantly increased from the three games last year. We’ve met many developers in the on-chain gaming community, and we share our experiences and discuss how to improve the building process. **While some may see us as competitors, I view us as working towards the common goal of advancing on-chain games as a category. **My main challenge is to ensure that the gaming industry understands the potential of on-chain games, regardless of whether they prefer our game or another company’s game. Currently, the number of players in the on-chain game market is very small, with less than 5000 players worldwide. Therefore, my goal is to have any on-chain game break through and show people why this industry is so fascinating.
Part 4 Summary
🟣 目前全球链游玩家只有5000人左右，因为目前没有太多可玩的、容易上手的链上游戏。
🟠 链上游戏领域的开发者们做得不够好的一点是：“向外界传达链游到底好在哪?” 大家并不会因为一个游戏是基于区块链上的而来玩。
🟣 当大家谈论 Web3 游戏的时候，往往所指不同：全链游戏、GameFi、手游等等。
🟠 数字形式资产的所有权在游戏行业其实已经存在，但区块链技术让数字所有权真正可延展出更多形态：买卖，租赁，以更安全的形式确认归属和交易等等。
**M ** I have many friends who play traditional games like League of Legends, Dota, Apex (https://www.ea.com/games/apex-legends), etc. They are mainly PC gamers and they indicate that they probably won’t play on-chain games because it’s currently not fun enough or not playable enough or it’s visually not appealing enough. And I’m wondering, how do you think on-chain gaming can compete with the current games? Are these types of gamers still the target customers for on-chain gaming?
**David ** Good question. I wouldn’t blame them. **I talked about there being 5,000 people playing on-chain games, why is it so small? Because there aren’t many good, approachable on-chain games. **Like if my friend who currently plays League of Legends says, “Great, I wanna play an on-chain game. Which one should I play?” It’s not clear to me. I think I’ll probably say, “You might wanna wait 6 months.” And there are on-chain games that are inspiring to me, like Dark Forest, Curio. And so I’m not suggesting giving those games a hard time, but I think we’d all admit that they’re not very approachable. They don’t look great. They’re hard to understand how to play. I think Dark Forest is engaging when you get into it, but most people can’t get that far. So the truth is the games need to be better before we attract a wider audience.
Now, the other question that you asked is, do we expect to bring more traditional gamers to on-chain gaming? I think the way I see it for our game is, at the beginning of this year, we attract the people that like on-chain games. Next year, I hope that we can reach beyond that and reach people that like playing strategy games or other MMOs. But before we do that, the game just needs to be fun and not have a bad UX. But also, I found that when there’s a new category of games in the games industry, then it’s usually a new type of player, like the people that play Candy Crush are not the same people that play Call of Duty. And that’s good, not bad. It means that each time there’s a new category, we bring more people into the world of gaming.
So there’s a part of me wondering if we can create a game that is interesting to a new set of players. We’re focusing on building a game that’s engaging, fun, approachable, and has new features that games haven’t had before. Initially, we might target on-chain gamers and then widen it to strategy gamers, but I hope that we can eventually appeal to people who don’t currently play games.
**M ** I was talking to my gamer friends, and they indicated that for on-chain games, many players consider the money-earning part more important, which limits the expectations of players, and may lead to game makers focusing more on the token design than the visuals and gamification. Is that true?
David One thing I’ve learned in the last two years is that when people talk about making Web3 games, it can mean all sorts of things. It could be mobile, desktop, browser, play to earn, interoperability, a game for speculators, or fully on-chain games — and they’re pretty different.
There are many people building games that have tokenomics that make them suitable for speculators, I look at those as a different way of playing the stock market. It’s taking the same idea and gamifying it further. Those games will be appealing to some people, but that’s not the type of game we’re making. We’re doing something different, which is creating an MMO that lives forever and that the people playing the game can evolve over time. When I’m playing our game, I own assets in the game, such as a character that I can move around the map, and the character levels up over time. I own that digitally, and I can imagine buying it for $10, leveling it up, and selling it for $100. There’s an earning element, but we’re not building the game around it. I think you’re right, there are a lot of people building Gamefi, and some of those will be successful. That’s not what we do.
**M ** That brings me back to the last question my friends asked. They don’t understand how blockchain technology can help make this game better or more playable. In current games, such as CS:GO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), they already have the ability to trade assets in the secondary market, then for a game that has its own market, what can blockchain technology add to it?
**David Digital ownership exists in some form already, but there are limitations of what you can do with it — Can I put them on eBay? Can I loan them out? Can I get a rental income from it? Is it possible for people to change the nature of what I have without asking me? …**I think there are different forms of digital ownership that can be achieved without blockchain. However, blockchain provides game makers with more options. When I completely own that digital item, and all the game is doing is just seeing which digital items I own, it feels like a better sense of ownership, rather than a game centrally tracking who owns what in their own database. I agree that it’s not like we don’t have some form of digital ownership already, but I think there’s probably more we can do with it. It’s maybe fairer, but there’s still a long way to go.
**M ** I also think that having options is very important not just in gaming, but in the entire Web3 industry.
**David I think that Web3 games haven’t done a great job of explaining why they are interesting, including us. We’re building on-chain games. So what? Who cares? **You have to give players a reason to care about that. Whether it’s about composability or a different kind of digital ownership, it has to be something desirable for the player. It has to be clear and it has to be desirable. **Nobody’s going to play a game just because it’s on a blockchain. **There has to be something interesting for people to want to get involved.
Part 5 Summary
🟣 全链游戏可能并不是给现有的游戏产业锦上添花，而是创造了一个全新的游戏类别。我们也从没经历过“permisionless”的游戏开发，这比手游等传统游戏行业更让人感到兴奋，因为它的创新程度和迭代速度都是前所未见的。
🟠 创建一个全链游戏难度很大，因为区块链技术并不是专门为游戏服务器设计。
🟣 Playmint 对基于哪条链的选择的考虑是：去中心化，低 gas fee，高交易速度。在安全性和去中心化程度上有一定妥协，但最终应该会落地在一条 L2 链上。
**F ** I want to circle back to the fundamentals of fully on-chain games. I was wondering if it also changes the notion of “game” because we move the whole server from a centralized server to a decentralized world computer like Ethereum? You mentioned you’ve designed games for different platforms like PC, mobile, and due to specifics of that machine, you actually have a game design framework that is native to the machine. Then what is the native game design for Ethereum?
**David My friend believes it’s quite possible that blockchain doesn’t add anything to the games we know today, but it enables the creation of new types of games. It’s quite hard to imagine a type of game we haven’t seen before. **Sometimes it’s not even about the game itself. For instance, if we were to imagine a world before iPhone and someone said there would be games you could play on your phone, we would probably think of games we already knew, like Pac-Man, on a phone. But mobile gaming turned out to be so much more than that. The industry’s size, the variety of games, how they work, how they’re monetized, and marketed — all of it is completely different from what came before. Now that we know what mobile games are, we can look back and see how everything makes sense.
It’s a bit of a non-answer. To be honest, I don’t know everything they can be. What’s really exciting and new is the idea of **a game world that lives forever, a digital world where people create things to entertain each other. **That’s cool, and it’s not owned by anyone in the same way that the internet isn’t owned by anyone. It’s a decentralized place where people build cool stuff to entertain one another.
The second thing is the idea that **new things are being built all the time without having to go through a central party. **Imagine if, for the internet, every time someone wanted to create something new, like publish a website, they had to ask permission from an internet governing body. **What’s fun about the internet is that people can go wild and create things we’ve never seen before, **like TikTok, World of Warcraft, YouTube, and countless other experiences, because they’re free to build whatever they want. **Now, what happens when you allow that to happen in a game? We haven’t had that degree of permissionless game development before. **What happens when it’s a shared space that everyone’s in and never going away? It’s a digital world where people can build whatever they want, as long as it follows the rules of that world, just to keep things working.
I honestly don’t know what that’s going to look like or feel like. I think it will feel different. Being part of a digital world that isn’t owned by anyone, where I can build cool, weird stuff to impress people or play a game in an interesting new way, and have everyone experience the world if they want to, is both weird and new. But if you ask me to describe what our game looks like in 5 years, I have no idea. The play patterns might be similar — fighting dragons, searching for resources, planting crops, and joining clans — but it will just feel different, weird, and new. Or it might not. But what I like about this is that it feels like there are some new things that haven’t been tried in games before. Although I can’t predict exactly what that looks like, I feel confident that there’s something new there, and we’re just going to have to build it.
**M ** It’s the excitement of exploring this entire endless new world, right?
**David ** Perfect. I was most recently making mobile free-to-play games. **And I wouldn’t say people have run out of ideas, but they knew that the rate of innovation and new ideas is much higher in on-chain games compared to mobile. **There are so many new things that haven’t been tried out yet. It may not be us who builds it, it could be someone else. But that’s why I’m happy to be part of a company that’s building on-chain games.
And there’s no playbook for building these games, which makes it very challenging. There are no YouTube videos to watch or GDC (游戏开发者大会) presentations to attend. This is all brand new. So we’re at a point in this category of on-chain games where everything is based on first principles. That’s why connecting with other people doing the same thing and sharing each other’s source code is essential — we’re all figuring this out together.
**F ** Another technical question I want to ask is on which chain you choose to host the game? Other on-chain games mentioned that for offloading computation they chose to build on StarkNet or move the game assets to Data Availability layer (数据可用性层。模块化区块链中的概念). For Playmint, which chain are you building on and what’s the reasoning behind that?
**David ** Our first game, The Crypt, was released on Ethereum mainnet at the beginning of last year. Then we moved to StarkNet, which uses the Cairo programming language. However, we felt that StarkNet was not mature enough for us to ship our game., even though we’re impressed with what the StarkWare team is doing. So we moved to Polygon Proof of Stake, which is an EVM-compatible chain. It’s a side chain, not a Layer 2, but we knew that the gas fees would be about 3 cents per transaction, and transaction times would be around 5 seconds. **We made compromises in terms of centralization and security, but it means that we can build and ship the game, which I think is optimal for now. **However, I don’t think that’s our final destination, we’ll probably end up on a Layer 2 sometime. As a team, we’re letting the dust settle on the great competition amongst Layer 2s, as everyone is working hard to create the best possible chain. When the optimal choice becomes apparent, we’ll move to that chain.
As you mentioned, we built some technology that takes computation away from the blockchain and moves it client-side, onto the player’s computer. It then builds it into a zk-proof and has that verified on-chain. Without getting too technical, this allows us to ask a blockchain to do more without necessarily putting more load on it.
As we try to build this game, we come across technical problems like dealing with MetaMask pop-ups, gas fees, and the fact that blockchains are expensive to run computation on. However, we have smart engineers, and we’re building solutions while also sharing them with other on-chain game builders. In the blockchain space, there’s so much great infrastructure being built that even problems that seem insurmountable are gradually being resolved within a few months. Building a completely on-chain game is challenging since blockchains aren’t really designed to be game servers. However, I believe that the ongoing development of technology will continue to remove the obstacles that make it impossible.
**F ** From my understanding, based on what you said earlier, you think that the deciding factors for choosing which chain to build on are still the speed and gas fees, right?
**David ** Well, let’s put that into context. As you’re playing the game, each move you make is a transaction, and each of those transactions requires gas. Now imagine that it costs $1 in gas, if I’m making 100 transactions a day, then it’s going to cost me $100 a day just to play the game. That’s one reason why you don’t want to be running on the Ethereum mainnet.
So it’s good to have a blockchain that costs ¢3. It would be better if it’s ¢1. There are lots of things we can do to bundle things up, but certainly, you don’t want to make a move and have to wait 2 minutes to see your character start moving. So gas costs are important, as are fast transaction times. But just to make things difficult for ourselves, I don’t think there’s any point in being on a blockchain if it’s very centralized. If you’re running on 2 or 3 computers all in the same location, then as one of our engineers said, that’s just a server with extra steps. Decentralization is important to us. We need to find the best blockchain that is decentralized, has low gas fees, and fast transaction times.
Part 6 Summary
🟣 虽然现在这个时间点就开始建设全链游戏可能还为时过早，但做先行者还是非常让人兴奋的。
🟠 全链游戏的引擎还未成熟。客户端可以使用 Unity, Unreal 等传统游戏引擎，而服务器端则需要自建，或使用业内其他引擎，如 Mud.dev 等。
🟣 Playmint 几乎每月都会发布新版本，不过迭代速度其实和 web2、web3 无关。游戏行业需要快速更新、快速获得反馈、快速迭代，且用户一般会对游戏的早期版本有较高的包容度。
🟠 这个行业目前面临的最大挑战是行业规模，“如何创造更具吸引力的游戏并向外界展示” 是目前最大的难题。
**F ** Playmint is one of the first fully on-chain games being developed. So, I was wondering how you decided, back at the starting point, that it was the right timing to do this experiment?
**David I don’t think the timing is right. We’re too early. **What did they say? There are around 5,000 people in the world playing on-chain games. Why on earth would you create a business that has a potential audience today of 5,000 people? It’s a bad idea.
I’m not sure the timing is right in that sense. I mean, obviously, we see it as a category that will grow. When we were setting up the company, we looked at the various things we could do. We could take other games we used to make on PlayStation and add a token to them. But to us, that wasn’t very interesting. I don’t think that’s a new kind of game. I think that’s just an old kind of game with an NFT or a token in it. So, we saw more potential by going further into Web 3, and we can create something more interesting. Also, speaking selfishly, I prefer to be involved with a company that’s trying to do the impossible. I mean, intellectually, the conversations I’ve had and the people I’ve met who are trying to do the same thing are amazing. It’s genuinely exciting. We’re building a rocket to go to Mars. It’s never been done.
**M ** I think the technology for building fully on-chain gaming is still on the way. So, do we already have a solid game engine, like Unreal and Unity in Web2, or do we integrate those into the on-chain game development?
**David We talk about on-chain game engines, but we talk about it in a confusing way. **To be clear, our game uses Unity. The 3D graphics you see on screen when you play our game, the interface, and the fact that it’s in a browser are all built in Unity. Our CTO is from Unity. That part could be built in Unreal, Unity, or any other game engine. The bit that’s new is not the client-side, not the part that runs on the player’s computer; it’s the server. So, ordinary Unity or Unreal or any other game engine has two parts to it, one client-side and one server-side.
Now, if there is no server part, then we’ve got to build the server part ourselves. **When you’re building a Unity game, if you say, “Hey, we need a server component,” it asks, “Great, which Amazon Web Server would you like me to run on?” There is no checkbox that says, “Blockchain, please.” **It’s just not designed for that. So, in the absence of a server component from Unity or Epic or other game engines, we have to build that ourselves. At this point in time, there are maybe 4 or 5 on-chain game engines being worked on, and some of them share code between them. MUD is one you mentioned earlier, and Dojo is something similar for Starknet, Arc is for Solana, and then we have our own game engine. We needed to build our own engine because when we started, no on-chain game engine existed. So there was nothing we could use even if we wanted to. And even now, the engines that are available don’t allow us to do everything we want with our game. I’m sure there’ll be a point in time, in one or two years, when you can use on-chain game engines in the same way as you can use a Unity game engine today. But that’s not 2023, that’s 2025.
I think the people working on that are solving a slightly different problem than us. We are building a game, and to build that game, we need to create an engine. But others are trying to make an engine that is suitable for all kinds of games. There’s a lot of work going into the infrastructure of on-chain games. As I said earlier, a lot of that is about user experience as well, which involves avoiding pop-ups, making it less scary for people, not needing to worry about cryptocurrencies, and making it run quickly on a blockchain even though blockchains aren’t very good for those kinds of things. These are all things that game engines should be designed to address, in order to create a better experience for the player.
**F ** I noticed that you release a new version of a game on a monthly basis. So I was wondering what would be the thoughts behind that.
**David ** You only really learn about your game when you put it in the hands of players. It’s a bad idea to work on games that take three to five years to make and then finally say, “Here it is,” and people either like it or they don’t. I think it’s better to get something early into the hands of people. If they think it sucks, then you either fix it or you kill it and work on something else.
So, with The Crypt, we wanted to do small iterations and see what people thought of them, and learn from it, rather than spend ages in isolation trying to build the perfect game. Truthfully, I think as a company, we’ve taken too long to make this next game. We started by saying, let’s make a little proof of concept game based around Loot, and for the second game, we decided to make an MMO, which is way more complicated. If I were to do it again, I might have done something simpler between the first game and the next game.
**F ** It can also be seen in the thinking of Web2 and Web3. In Web 2, you continuously polish your product and roll it out to the market to impress people. But in Web 3, you constantly push out even non-mature products to the market to receive community feedback and continually iterate based on that feedback.
**David ** Exactly, this isn’t unique to Web3. In my experience in the games industry, you put something out and have a plan for what you’re going to work on next. That plan always changes. As soon as you put it in the hands of people, they don’t care about the thing you were going to work on next, but they care a lot about some other aspect of the game, either because it’s terrible or because it’s great. It really changes what you choose to work on next. So I try to get the game into people’s hands as quickly as possible because you learn so much by seeing a community play a game. People are quite forgiving about early versions. If you say, “This isn’t finished; We’d love to get your opinion on it and tell us what you’d like to see next,” the fact that it has a few rough edges or isn’t feature-complete, as long as it’s fun to play.
{. }
**M ** We’re coming to the last part of our questions, which is about the future of on-chain gaming. Considering that it is still in the experimental stage, what do you think is the biggest challenge?
David The size of the market. But linked to that is creating engaging games that appeal to people beyond just on-chain gaming fans. We need to start seeing games that are fun and engaging, and we can’t expect people to play them just because they’re on-chain. Why would a player care about that? Whenever I see another on-chain game builder, I always ask, “Why does the player care that your game is on-chain?” If you can’t answer that question, they’d be better off playing a different game.
So, I think that’s what’s next. There are enough people building things that we’ll see some success, and they’re well-funded. Getting funding now is easier for on-chain projects, and there’ll be more interest from investors in this category as time goes on. That’s positive. But we need to continue delivering on-chain games, making them engaging and demonstrating why it’s interesting that they’re on-chain.
**M ** Our last question will be, what can we expect from Playmint in the next couple of months or next year?
We have a version of the game that we’re playing internally. We still need to work on the game loop, but certainly, in the second half of this year, we’re going to open up it for people to play and build on. I mentioned the idea of the community extending the game. I’d like to see people playing this game and adding new things to it. **If we have both, we’ll have something interesting — a game that evolves because the community is thinking of cool things. **Our goal is to get that version out later this year, even if it’s simple.
**F ** It’s time for us to wrap up this episode — David, do you have to say to our audience?
David The only thing is, if you’re interested in what I’m talking about and know Solidity to the point that you can add something to what I’m describing, I’d love to hear from you. Come and be part of our community.
All the pictures are from the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author.
Follow Meta Potatoes at metapotatoes.io
Engage with our community on Discord or TG
Any questions/comments/feedback? Write an email to us at metapotatoes@gmail.com or DM us on Twitter