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SporeForge: Pioneering the Future of Fully On-Chain Gaming #61

Open bitpir8 opened 1 year ago

bitpir8 commented 1 year ago

Project Description

SporeForge stands at the vanguard of fully on-chain gaming innovation. This past July, we marked our entry into the domain with the launch of Taikoverse on Taiko’s Inception Layer – a groundbreaking, fully on-chain adaptation of Minecraft. As we speak, our team is laying the groundwork for a thrilling new multiplayer strategy game.

The dawning age of fully on-chain gaming is not just a fleeting trend but a seismic shift taking root across renowned ecosystems such as Starknet, OP, and Arbitrum. We're convinced that this represents the advent of "Game 2.0." In this evolved gaming landscape:

A unique phenomenon is the melding of players and developers into a singular, dynamic entity we term "gamedevers." This union fosters collaborative creation of diverse digital assets on the blockchain. There's an added assurance for these creators – their digital masterpieces are eternal, free from the fear of sudden disappearance. Such is the promise of Autonomous Worlds. Notable torchbearers of this on-chain gaming revolution include Dark Forest, with recent entrants like Sky Strife on OP and Words3 on Base making waves.

Our vision for SporeForge is twofold:

In essence, games are poised to be the potent accelerants propelling Taiko towards its next massive user influx. At SporeForge, we're gearing up to champion this transformative journey.

Category

Games

Timeline

We aim to make the most of the six-month duration of the Taiko Grant to complete the entire process of our second game, from design to development to operation. The milestones for this project are as follows:

  1. T + 2 months: Completion of game core mechanics design.
  2. T + 4 months: Completion of game development.
  3. T + 6 months: Conducting a series of public game tests.

In November of this year, we will showcase our demo at the Devcon workshop and begin the first round of internal testing.

Project Plan

1. Preliminary Testing and Iteration:

Fully on-chain gaming, though nascent, holds immense potential. To navigate this uncharted territory, we'll initiate a series of playtests, providing us both validation and invaluable player feedback. This iterative process, with community involvement, will pave the way for our mainnet launch.

2. Game Development during the Taiko Grant Period:

Our primary goal for this grant period is the development and playtesting of our second game, envisioned as a multiplayer strategy experience. The specifics include:

3. Collaboration with the Taiko Team:

In synergy with the Taiko team, we're eager to explore the potential of a Taiko game-specific chain. Our ambition is a high-performance system (envisioning 1s block time or less, with a 0.5B block capacity) coupled with cost-efficiency, all the while upholding decentralization principles. Such an infrastructure would empower players to innovate, free from fears of centralized interventions.

Long-term Vision:

Beyond the immediate goals, we envisage a sustainable ecosystem where players don't just engage but actively shape the gaming universe. By ensuring equitable revenue models, fostering developer communities, and continuously iterating based on feedback, we aim to position our on-chain games as industry flagbearers.

Project Impact

At the heart of our project lies the rich love of gaming found in the Loopring community, which SporeForge seeks to inherit and amplify. Our insights from the Loopring smart wallet have highlighted a burgeoning desire among users to seamlessly integrate gaming. Through our initial ventures with Taikoverse, the excitement and potential of creating on-chain game assets became evident. These assets, storable in the Loopring wallet, are more than just digital creations; they symbolize the limitless boundaries of creativity and innovation in the on-chain gaming world.

Unleashing Creativity: Our vision extends beyond just providing a gaming platform. We aim to unlock a universe where players don't merely participate; they influence, create, innovate, and evolve. Fully on-chain gaming focuses not only on player-generated digital assets but also on fostering the emergence of 'gamedevers'. With immutable world rules, the gamedever community is free to develop infinite MODs and extensions, creating a unified world that organically evolves. It's a realm where gaming meets boundless creativity.

User Experience Revolution: Drawing inspiration from smart wallets like Loopring, we're redefining the onboarding experience. Players can dive right into the game, oblivious to the complexities of private keys, mnemonic phrases, or transaction signings. This seamless integration ensures a focus on the game's essence, rather than its underlying mechanics.

Social Dynamics and Community: In this expansive universe, players are interconnected through their unique creations, be it digital assets or MODs. Take, for instance, Opcraft's comrade-plugin. It illustrated a novel social dynamic where players could opt for communal living, pooling resources into a shared smart contract. Such innovations lead to real-world discussions, debates, and connections, showcasing the profound social implications of digital assets and game MODs.

Economic Empowerment: Beyond gameplay and creativity, our vision extends to an economic paradigm shift. We're championing a system where game contributors partake in its profits. With a transparent royalty distribution mechanism, creators are aptly rewarded, contrasting traditional models where intermediaries often eclipse original creators.

Leveling the Playing Field: The advent of fully on-chain gaming evokes memories of electronic gaming's early days—a vast frontier ripe for exploration. Both established studios and aspiring developers find themselves on an equal footing. We believe Taiko can spearhead this exploration, offering a platform where innovation is not just encouraged but celebrated.

A Sustainable Ecosystem: Drawing from our Taikoverse experiences, we envision SporeForge as the gold standard in on-chain gaming. A thriving ecosystem where creativity isn't just currency, but community collaboration is its beating heart.

In essence, our project is poised to redefine the gaming landscape by equipping creators with the tools, platform, and economic incentives they rightfully deserve. In doing so, we aim to foster a balanced and vibrant environment that truly reveres the essence of gaming.

Team Information

Bitpir8 (tech): He is a core developer behind several DeFi protocols and an active contributor to various dApps and DAOs. He has been a winner in several EthGlobal hackathons and is a crypto entrepreneur. Furthermore, he is a builder within the Taiko ecosystem, having previously constructed a popular product and proposed several protocol enhancements for Taiko. Prior to entering the crypto space, he was the creator behind an app with millions of users.

Tom Hamilton @loop_hammer (community) : He is a professional community coordinator and a skilled game streamer. He is deeply passionate about blockchain technology and gaming. With a strong belief in the transformative power of zkEVM technology, he has been an early advocate and supporter of Taikoverse and has watched it grow from its inception. With his dedication and professional care, Taikoverse has become a warm and creative community. He is deeply familiar with both Taiko and Loopring communities, providing invaluable insights and support in navigating their landscapes.

Point of Contact

@taikoversehq | sporeforge@outlook.com

Previous Work

Taikoverse

Taikoverse is a fully on-chain Minecraft that runs independently on the Taiko AppChain (Taiko Degen Chain, as we will discuss below). We forked Opcraft and launched this game during Taiko’s A4 testnet mainly for fun and as an opportunity to promote the concept of Taiko Inception Layers, which is incredibly cool. Taikoverse has garnered a lot of popularity among players, who have created countless interesting structures within the world, imbued with Taiko's culture. Two weeks after its launch, we introduced the Creative Mode and organized a building competition. We have conducted six game live streams within the community. So far, the game has been running for 50 days, with a total of 425 players, over 266,000 transactions. We have built a strong community. These experiences have accumulated valuable lessons for our future projects.

Frame 1taikoverse (7)

Taiko Degen Chain

In order to meet high-performance requirements, we made Taiko a bit more optimistic. we forked Taiko to achieve a block time of 1 second and a gas limit of 300 million (1 second when there are transactions, and 2.5 seconds when there are no transactions). We primarily made modifications to the logic of the proposer and driver, enabling the proposer to generate blocks simultaneously while proposing them. We customized the genesis by forking taiko-geth and temporarily bypassed the on-chain verification by modifying the TaikoL1 contract, which was necessary because otherwise a lot of prover machines would be required for achieving 1-second block times and would cost a lot. This optimistic Taiko fork operates on Sepolia in parallel with Taiko's A3 testnet, and we refer to it as Taiko Degen Chain. This fork lacks zk-proof or fraud-proof, making it somewhat insecure temporarily. We haven't had the opportunity to develop a cost-effective proof system to support a block time of 1 second. Moving forward, our goal is to explore a high-performance, cost-effective, and moderately decentralized Taiko AppChain solution.

Frame 2explorer (1)

Taiko Dashboard

Bitpir8 is the author behind a series of popular Taiko testnet dashboards: Askja (A2), Grímsvötn (A3), Eldfell (A4). These dashboards showcase comprehensive information about Taiko, helping the community to better learn and utilize the Taiko protocol. They also highlight the outstanding performance of Taiko across the various testnets. Bitpir8 is an active wizard on Dune Analytics, so he originally intended to build the dashboards on Dune. However, he discovered that Dune does not support the Sepolia testnet. Then he built the entire data science infrastructure, from data pipelines to indexers, and the design of different charts.

Frame 1dash (2)

Additional Information

Q: Did you receive any help from other teams while building Taikoverse? A: We sincerely appreciate the technical support by the Taiko team on the nodes and the financial support during the operation of Taikoverse from Aoraki Labs. We see this grant application as a valuable opportunity to introduce ourselves, and we are open to any assistance from those willing to help us transform our ideas into products. Without support from the community, we won't go far.

Q: Why did you fork Opcraft? A: We became curious about autonomous worlds earlier this year, and that's when we heard about Opcraft. When Taiko announced the upcoming release of the A4 testnet, we thought, "The concept of inception layers is so cool. Why don't we run our own inception layer and build a game on top of it?" We noticed that Opcraft used on-chain procgen to generate the entire world's terrain and designed fantastic gameplay mechanics on top of it. We wanted to delve deeper into understanding them. Moreover, it is licensed under the GPL 3.0, so forking it was not an issue. We learned the technology behind Opcraft like dismantling and reassembling a fun toy, and successfully got it running on Taiko. We have deep respect for Lattice's genius work. We will be using their Mud V2 engine to develop a new game.

Q: Who made the Degen chain A: We created the Taiko Degen Chain because Taikoverse requires running on a high-performance blockchain. The Taiko team taught us how to operate a customized Taiko node.

Q: What challenges did the team face while customizing the Taiko Degen Chain for high performance, and how were they overcome? A: Our main goal is to achieve faster block generation and higher block capacity. Therefore, based on the Taiko solution, we have advanced the work of the driver, which means that the execution engine starts executing the content of the block at the same time the proposer submits it. This requires modifications to both the client and the consensus contract. We have had extensive communication with the Taiko team. They have helped us successfully run our modified nodes, which have remained stable throughout.

Q: With focus on a new game, what type of support or new upgrades to Taikoverse could we expect. A: We are mainly doing a series of game developments and playtests to test the border of fully on-chain games. We will run all of our games on the Taiko Degen Chain. We will stop developing new features for Taikoverse for a short period as we work out the finer details for the next Big Taikoverse Update. Ideas and experience will add up and we’ll eventually put them all together to invent something we have never thought of before.

Q: How does the team envision the transition from traditional gaming to fully on-chain gaming? Are there any specific challenges the team has identified in their journey so far, and how do they plan to address them? A: In many traditional games, we’ve already seen thriving UGC(user-generated content), but users have never been able to feel secure about their creations. Centralized game developers have the ability to modify game parameters or even shut down the game. In the context of blockchain, the rules of the game world are fixed, and the code is completely open, which can further fuel creativity. The challenges we face are: 1. How do we perceive games in this new medium, where the content we create in games is permanent. 2. Is it still the same as the games we used to know? Do traditional game mechanics still apply? 3. Previously, we consumed content from game developers, but now we are the game creators ourselves. How will players find joy in this new paradigm? These are open-ended questions, and we will fearlessly explore the answers through the process of creation.

Q: How does SporeForge plan to handle user feedback and implement changes in a fully on-chain environment? A: Initially, we will conduct a series of playtests until we determine that the rules of the world are stable. Additionally, we will establish a DAO to allow the community to decide changes and upgrades within the game. We will be working closely with the community to find the best course of actions for our games.

Q: How will the on-chain pricing model impact gameplay? For instance, will it affect player strategies or in-game economies? A: Yes, the cool thing is that we can build on-chain reality. We will simulate a market similar to the real world. When the first player acquires resources at a lower price, it will change the supply and demand of resources, resulting in subsequent resources becoming more expensive. This will create competition among players, allowing them to choose different development paths based on various resources.

Q: How will the random generation of game accounts impact the user experience? Will there be any challenges in ensuring users can reclaim or manage these accounts later? A: The game's address is automatically generated in the cache on the client side, which is secure. However, if players need to use this address for purposes such as transferring funds, we will provide a wallet that connects to the private key associated with the cached address.

Q: The mention of a potential game token is intriguing. What would be its purpose and how might it be integrated into gameplay? A: The specific mechanism hasn't been finalized yet. However, there is a token that can serve multiple purposes. For example, it can provide players with tangible rewards. Additionally, the token associated with the AppChain can be used to capture value on the chain, ensure the security of the chain, and facilitate DAO governance. We will carefully consider the impact related to it.

Q: What is the team's future vision for their projects after the grant period? A: We will continue to learn from the innovations of the fully on-chain games, iterate our products, and accumulate experience in development and operation before we release a popular mainnet. Most importantly, we will always stand with Taiko and grow together with the Taiko ecosystem.

Q: Are there plans for further collaborations with entities like Aoraki Labs? A: We maintain a close relationship with Aoraki Labs. They primarily focus on zero-knowledge proof R&D. We hope that our future products can achieve synergies with theirs, such as protecting the security of the Taiko Degen Chain through the ZK computation provided by Aoraki Labs. We are grateful for the trust and support that Aoraki Labs has given us in the early stages.

Agreement