Creator: @MsKiKiUrRT
From: @AW_Research
AI Summary:
"Loot Survivor" is a Loot-style adventure experimental game that incorporates the Play2Die economic model. It is currently being tested on the testnet, with the chance to receive $Lords airdrops. The game is deployed on StarkNet, and although the current interaction speed is slow, it is expected to improve with updates to the Ethereum protocol, reducing interaction costs and enhancing network performance. The team behind Loot Survivor consists of members from Bibliotheca DAO, DoJo, and Guildly. The game utilizes the StarkNet Layer 2 scaling network and the DoJo engine to provide a complex on-chain gaming experience. In terms of gameplay, players need to create a wallet, connect it, and embark on an adventure, engaging in exploration, battles, upgrades, and trading. With the development of the Autonomous World and the growth of the game, the full-chain game market will witness more exciting creations.
Game Introduction:
"Loot Survivor" has recently launched on the StarkNet Goerli testnet and is an adventure game in the style of Loot.
The game's captivating features include the text-based exploration reminiscent of Loot and the engaging game mechanics of the Play2Die economic model (explained in detail below).
The game has gained considerable popularity, with over 500 on-chain characters created as of June 2nd.
As both an avid player and a developer of the Survivor game, @LordSecretive had set a reward of 0.2 ETH for anyone who could surpass Son of Secretive in XP value before the end of June 3rd, UTC time.
Unfortunately, by the time this article was released, the reward had already expired. lol
In terms of interaction, the L2 network StarkNet has been consistently criticized for its slow and unstable speed. The Survivor game deployed on StarkNet faces similar challenges, with each interaction requiring a wait time of 3-5 minutes. To reach the top 50 rankings, a minimum of 3-5 hours of interaction is required. Developers have revealed that it took them around 6 hours to secure a spot in the top three, and given the current number of participants, the time required is likely to be significantly longer than 6 hours.
However, with the updates of EIP-4844 on Ethereum in the third quarter of 2023, the interaction costs will become cheaper, and the network performance will see significant improvements. This development raises higher expectations for the growth of games on L2.
Team Background
The Relationship Between the Team and Loot Survivor
First, it is important to understand the relationship between Bibliotheca DAO, Loot Realms, Realms: Adventurers, and Loot Survivor.
Bibliotheca DAO
Bibliotheca DAO is a decentralized game studio that emerged from the Loot Realms ecosystem. It functions as a development lab and incubator. It actively contributes to the development of the game engine DoJo and has deployed its own full-chain games on Ethereum and StarkNet.
Currently, Bibliotheca DAO envisions a Realms Autonomous World, an open, scalable, and everlasting Metaverse filled with exciting games. These games are designed to be composable, featuring interoperable characters, lands, weapons, monsters, and resources.
Realms serves as the home of the Realm Lords, acting not only as the core of governance but also as the venue for game competitions.
Loot Realms
It is also referred to as Realms.
It comprises a collection of 8000 NFTs generated programmatically. These NFTs serve two functions: they act as a "Deed" to a Realm, granting holders access to games developed by Realms, and they confer the title of Realm Lord upon the holder. Loot Realms NFTs also serve as governance tokens, enabling holders to participate in the governance of Bibliotheca DAO.
Realms: Adventurers
Play2Die, will soon be launch on StarkNet.
Adventurers are on-chain characters priced in $Lords, with low-cost minting.
Play2Die describes the scenario where adventurers become in-game characters to play blockchain games. Adventurers "carry" $Lords (like the principle of ERC-6551), and when adventurers are damaged or killed in the game, $Lords will be "dropped," and game designers will receive the carried Lords tokens.
Loot Survivor
Clearly, Survivor utilizes the Play2Die and has become an intriguing experimental game.
It is a fully on-chain survival game where players can develop RPG-style strategies and compete with other players to obtain loot, which helps them survive traps and boss battles. Players use $Lords to embark on an adventure journey. During the adventure, if your character survives and ranks in the top 3, every new adventurer entering the game will pay tribute to you in $Lords when they die, until your accomplishments are surpassed.
@aloothero @starknetdev @cryptobish69 @lordOfAFew and @LootRealms contributed to the game's design.
Loot Realms recently revealed some of the developers involved in Survivor, and a quick look at their Twitter backgrounds reveals that they come from Dojo Engine, Guildly (a decentralized protocol for managing shared accounts and user assets in Web3), and Bibliotheca DAO.
Survivor has also received support from Loot. On June 1st at 24:00 SGT, Loot Survivor held its first AMA on Loot's Discord channel.
Let's talk about the technologies used in full-chain games - StarkNet L2 and the DoJo.
At the 'Autonomous Anonymous Summit' event, an interesting meeting took place between the Realms team and representatives from DoJo, StarkNet, Cartridge, and CairoLang.
What is an Autonomous World (AW)?
Autonomous Worlds, a concept proposed by 0xPARC and Lattice, primarily aims to expand the narrative aspect of on-chain games. An Autonomous World is a system composed of entities and objective rules enforced by blockchain. It has well-defined narrative boundaries and formalized rules, requiring no privileged individuals to maintain its existence. Autonomous Worlds make subjective realities possible by imparting objectivity and rigidity to shared intangible realities. As a foundational infrastructure, blockchain brings significant autonomy to the world, placing it on par with systems like language or physics. An Autonomous World can be observed through "telescopes" constructed by anyone, and its entities remain narrative and cannot be disconnected. Given the verbosity of "blockchain-based world," we now refer to these systems as Autonomous Worlds.
Why on StarkNet?
Firstly, Bibliotheca DAO aims to develop games on the Ethereum network. Ethereum is currently the most decentralized and secure smart contract platform. StarkNet, as a layer-two scaling solution, makes computationally intensive gameplay feasible. The team chose StarkNet because it provides more on-chain computational capacity, enabling the development of complex games.
StarkNet utilizes the Cairo programming language, and the team believes Cairo maximizes the potential of Rollup technology. StarkNet incorporates zero-knowledge features, meaning the game's logic and state can be kept on-chain while protecting user privacy. The team considers StarkNet and Cairo to have the best technology, and when their game is ready for the mainnet, they believe the entire on-chain gaming market will be prepared as well.
Why use Dojo engine?
DoJo is a community-driven open-source and verifiable game engine that provides a comprehensive toolkit for building verifiable games and autonomous worlds. It is written in Cairo 1.0 and Rust. DoJo aims to address the complexity of on-chain game development, allowing developers to focus on the game itself rather than the infrastructure. The Realms project is integrating the DoJo on-chain game engine/toolchain and adding it to their SDK, enabling developers to use it when developing games related to the Realms on-chain game universe.
By sharing the DoJo engine within the StarkNet ecosystem, it encourages developers to build a market for Autonomous Worlds and on-chain games, fostering collaboration in development, maintenance, creativity, auditing, and security. It is an open-source initiative, and the team is proud to be working with such incredible engineering talent.
In summary, Bibliotheca DAO chose to deploy on StarkNet and utilize the DoJo engine to leverage its performance, security, and development toolchain, enabling a complex and innovative on-chain gaming experience.
Designing Gameplay for Full Blockchain Games - Randomness
One common predicament faced by full on chain games, or On-Chain Games, is how to introduce randomness into the game. This is because there is no centralized server to intervene, and randomness cannot be generated on the chain.
In the core gameplay of Loot Survivor - Travels, players control characters who adventure through the fog. They may encounter monsters, or find equipment, introducing a certain degree of randomness. But how is this achieved?
The official team has not disclosed this part, and the contract is not currently open source. The following content is purely personal speculation. Everyone is welcome to provide their own opinions.
Implementation of Randomness in Core Logic
When creating an adventure, players can choose different races, divinities, weapons, etc. Beyond this, the choice of 'HOME REALM ID' - the home realm ID caught my interest.
According to the official guide, players can randomly select one number from 1-8000, which will become the ID of your starting exploration realm.
It's reasonable to infer that this realm ID is a random seed chosen by the player. With this inputted random seed, the creation of the player's level is completed. Even during the creation of the level/character, in addition to the player's chosen realm ID being used as a random seed, it's also possible to introduce other objective/differentiating data such as "player's operation time, IP" as random seeds to approach randomness.
The randomness in creating the level determines the difficulty of the entire game. Of course, players can also change the final outcome through pre-battle and post-battle strategies. But I think that after the random seed of the realm ID has been inputted, the upper limit range for each clearance has already been determined. So, the player's experience becomes one of potentiality and a gambler's mentality with each playthrough.
Returning to the attributes of the adventurer, I am curious about the design and calculation methods of dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and luck. If third-party random numbers are integrated, the development cost would be high. So I guess that the most reasonable solution should be implemented through the combat formula. For example - escape event: each time, calculate whether to trigger escape based on factors like damage taken or inflicted, remaining health, and dexterity coefficient. Similarly, ambush, critical hit, and dodge can also be implemented in this way.
Gameplay:
Step 1: Create Wallet & Claim Water
1/ Make an ArgentX or Braavos wallet:
ARGENT
BRAAVOS：
2/ Get some goerli eth from the Starknet faucet (or ask in discord) https://faucet.goerli.starknet.io
Step 2: Connect your wallet
1/ Enter the Loot Survivor game.
2/ The game is deployed on the StarkNet Goerli testnet. Connect your wallet and change to testnet.
3/ Enter the Loot Survivor game.
Step 3: Create an Adventure Journey
1/ Click on "Create Venture" to create an adventure journey.
2/ Character Setup
3/ Click "Start" to begin the game.
4/ I have also translated the official documentation, which you can click to view specific game value settings.
Step 4: Into the Mist
1/ Start the adventure, Navbar - ACTION - INTO THE MIST
2/ Bye health, Navbar - ACTION – HEALTH
You can buy one health point for 6 units of currency (KAATSNOOTSTU), which are in-game trading coins with no contract or liquidity at the moment. One health point is equivalent to 10 points of health. The price of purchasing health points may be adjusted by the developers as the game progresses to increase the difficulty.
3/ Battle/Flee, Navbar - BEAST- ATTACK BEST! / FLEE!
If you encounter a monster, you can either BEST or flee.
Step 5: Upgrade - Trading Market – Equipment
1/ Upgrade: Only during the upgrade, the player is allowed to allocate skill points. Navbar - UPGRADE -? - Navbar SHOW LEDGER - SUBMIT.
Each skill point has a different purpose, choose according to your needs. *Note that adding skill points requires an on-chain transaction. Click SUBMIT to interact on the blockchain.
2/ Navbar - MARKET - BID / CANCEL? - Navbar SHOW LEDGER - SUBMIT.
All items in the trading market are provided by players for trading, with the option to set listing duration. Choose according to your needs. *Note that listing items requires an on-chain transaction. Click SUBMIT to interact on the blockchain.
3/ Navbar - INVENTORY - ? - Navbar SHOW LEDGER - SUBMIT.
Click on the item to equip it. *Note that equipping items requires an on-chain transaction. Click SUBMIT to interact on the blockchain.
Step 6: View Action History
1/ Navbar - ENCOUNTERS
Here, you can view all your game actions history.
Item Description
Click to view:
Reference:
《对话 Loot Realms：如何打造一款世代永存的全链上游戏协议》, https://mirror.xyz/starknet-zh.eth/mvQl3KegyWwoQmSe2_kcvBD3ENWk_z2CcyB1LXOuE3U
‘Autonomous Worlds (Part 1)’, https://0xparc.org/blog/autonomous-worlds