There was a heated discussion on blockchain games within the Creation Camp S1. We had a conversation with Huo Feng Chen Yuetian about the transformation from 2.0 to 3.0 (Only 3% of 167 high-quality game companies have transformed to Web3 | Conversation with Huo Feng Chen Yuetian). We also had a conversation with Tian Ran, the head of ecology and investment at Mask Network, about full-chain games. As a firm believer in on-chain games, what new thoughts and actions does he have?
The following is a partial transcript of the content on August 1:
Wanwudao: How did the full-chain game develop? What stage is it in now?
Today I will mainly share with you the development history of the full-chain game, and start with the two main camps, Dark Forest and Loot. I believe that anyone who has been in the industry for a long time has heard of at least one of them. Many people think that this thing is awesome when they know about them, but they don’t seem to know what they can do. In the full-chain game ecosystem, the development process of these two leading projects from their birth to the present is a very interesting history. After understanding this history, you will be more clear about why the full-chain game exists, what its significance, value and audience are.
Let's first look at the Dark Forest ecosystem, including 0xPARC, Lattice, and the Mud full-chain game engine. The Loot ecosystem first had Loot, a magical text-only NFT, and then some projects grew out, including DopeWar, Realms, and the Dojo full-chain game engine. As a result, Dark Forest and Loot also gave rise to the current two major game engine ecosystems, Mud and Dojo. If we use Web2 as an analogy, I think Mud is more like Unity, and Dojo is more like Unreal Engine.
Dark Forest was actually originally written by Brian Gu in 2020. He was a junior in college at the time and also worked at the Ethereum Foundation. During the research process, he found ZK very interesting. Then he happened to want to make a game, and ZK came in very important use.
There is a thing called fog of war in centralized games. Fog of war means that on a game map you can only see people nearby, but not the entire map. You also don’t know where your enemies are specifically and have to explore on your own, similar to Red Alert. This is very simple to do in a centralized manner, but very difficult to do in a decentralized manner because everything on the chain is open and transparent. But ZK can actually help you hide some information, so he used ZK to do the fog of war on the chain. The word Dark Forest itself was indeed inspired by The Three-Body Problem. He made a game form like The Three-Body Problem in which a spaceship explores a new world, in which ZK was used to hide the location. This game has been operating from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2022, with an average of one to two months for a round of battles. In the early days, there may have been only a few hundred people, and in the later days there were thousands of people, but the total number of accumulated addresses was only six or seven thousand.
Everyone feels that this is something very cool and interesting. After all, it is a form of game that no one has encountered before. Before, when people did not distinguish between full-chain and non-full-chain games, they all knew about Web3 games as GameFi. However, Dark Forest is different from the previous GameFi. It has no economic model and no NFT. It is just a group of technical geniuses who have a lot of fun playing it by paying some relatively low transaction costs. Because the ZK hidden location can actually run computing power, you can use your GPU to mine it. If you can mine faster, you will have a greater advantage in the battle. This matter is a bit of technology worship, so it attracts a lot of technical geniuses to come in every day to beat others.
Of course, the corresponding problem is that it is not that friendly for ordinary people to play. The initial interface is relatively broken. I personally played it in the early 2020s and thought it was quite interesting, but gave up after half an hour. This is also normal. I don’t know how many people think about it after playing it in the early days.
In general, it is a new game that is at the core of Ethereum and uses ZK's most cutting-edge new technology. Everything is written on the chain, which has inspired a lot of young talents to come in and explore, not only to play games, but also to explore various new uses of ZK. When they were operating in the early 2022, they felt that although Dark Forest had developed a very complete plug-in ecosystem, if this thing continued to rotate, the upper limit would not be high. Then they saw the broader application prospects of ZK, so they established a new organization called 0xPARC, which is mainly a research institute in the direction of ZK. Several very awesome ZK projects have also emerged from it. Friends who pay attention to ZK may know it. It actually originated from Dark Forest. The founder is also Brian Gu. If I am not mistaken, Brian Gu and Blur's boss Pacman are from the same class of MIT, both very young, probably in 1998.
At one point, they wanted to devote 80% of their energy to ZK and 20% to games, but later they found that full-chain games were also very interesting, so they shifted their focus to half ZK and half full-chain games. The full-chain game branch is called Lattice, which developed a game engine like Mud.
The development of the Mud full-chain game engine was also inspired by Dark Forest, because Dark Forest is written directly on the blockchain, which is actually quite difficult to develop, and it is basically impossible to change it in the future because it requires a lot of troublesome interactions with the blockchain. So they thought that they should abstract the experience of Dark Forest into a framework or an engine for more people to use, and later they created Mud.
They also created a very good term for the full-chain game called Autonomous World. Let me explain a little bit about the advantages of this term. First, Autonomous, which is the A in DAO, uses blockchain to realize an automatic and autonomous infrastructure. World is not only the whole world, but also a designated world, as long as it has some specific rules, for example, Harry Potter is a world, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms is another world. So in general, as long as it is a world with specified rules and can be automatically executed, it meets the definition of Autonomous World, and it is actually similar to the earlier Metaverse. I personally think that the term Autonomous World may become Metaverse in a year, but in general it is a very well-made term. It covers many things, including games, NFT, DeFi, and DAO, because AW also needs governance and a financial system, which is also in line with ETH's vision of creating a Network state. Another distinction made by the people of mud is that DeFi is a simple on-chain application, and AW is a complex on-chain application
The first example was also made by their official team in November 2022, called OPCraft. It is a simple fork of MineCraft running on the OP chain. Basically, all your actions in Minecraft, such as digging a piece of land, are all on-chain actions, but OPCraft gave birth to a particularly interesting thing. It allows players to set some rules on it. Then one player set a rule similar to the land grabbing game, saying that everyone can surrender and take the resources in your hands to join a certain country, and then you can become a citizen of this country at the same time, and enjoy the same rights to these assets and land. It has a bit of a communist flavor, so many people joined to try it out. As a result, a communist society on the chain was formed. It is very interesting here. In fact, it is very simple from the perspective of writing rules, but after writing this rule, everyone really joined and it had the flavor of an autonomous world. The more important time point later was also in May when they finished Mud V2 and held a relatively large hackathon. 109 works were submitted at once. As far as I know, eight Chinese teams submitted them.
Another official Mod project is called Sky Strife, a real-time strategy game where each player leads his troops to attack the other side's position, but it requires four people to be online at the same time. They often organize a play test once a week, and you can play within that two-hour time frame. It's difficult to get four people together in the remaining time. Of course, this number of people is also telling. In fact, not many people can play the full-chain game.
Loot was created a little later, at the end of August 21, and it was the first text-type NFT. Before that, the bull market had actually lasted for about two months, so when Loot appeared, it was already the second half of the bull market. Before that, NFTs only had avatars. At this time, the emergence of Loot still gave the industry a lot of novelty, and they said that they deliberately did not draw pictures, leaving room for imagination to everyone. Each NFT of Loot has eight equipment described in text. Everyone thinks that this thing has unlimited imagination space. No one paid attention to it for the first few days after it appeared, but I remember that people started buying it from the third day, and I bought it on the fifth day myself.
Later, some people made a simple fork based on Loot. Some of them may have more ideas to do something specific in it. There are hundreds of derivative projects in total. Most of them are scam projects. They disappeared after one to three months. However, there are about twenty projects left. The quality is still quite good, and together they constitute the entire complete ecosystem of Loot. Among them, there are four important NFTs. The first is the ordinary character of Loot itself, the second is Genesis adventurer, which is understood as a high-level character, the third realm is a large land, including Chang'an, Luoyang, Suzhou, etc. The fourth crypts and caverns are small maps. At the beginning, a small dungeon map was made in it. This is a separate and particularly interesting project. He wants to make 8,000 random maps to make it a universal map, hoping that all kinds of dungeon games in the world will use the same map. You can arrange and combine them yourself.
These are the four key projects in the Loot ecosystem. There are also other interesting projects that will supplement the ecosystem, including those for building houses, channels, experience points, etc. Putting these together will form a relatively complete new world that is a bit like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
And think about it the other way around, if you were asked to recreate a new world on the level of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, how would you create it? Would you write a book like the author of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms? In my opinion, first issue an NFT with only text to arouse people's imagination, and then fill it with things, and eventually there will be a chance to create something on the level of the next Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Dojo was developed by Realm, Cartridge, and Briq on StarkNet. They saw that Mud was doing well, so they forked a version at the end of 22. Since StarkNet is not EVM, they rewrote it. It is purely compatible with ZK, which means that after you finish programming, it will automatically convert it into what ZK needs. It can make each step provable, which is an important attribute of ZK.
In general, its advantages also include that the ecosystem is not just about games. Its developer community is very loyal and powerful. It has three flagship projects, one of which is the most well-known StarkNet's EVM Kakarot, followed by Madara, a sequencer, and finally Dojo, a game engine. Recently, StarkNet also announced that it would build an application chain, and Madara and Dojo may be directly integrated into it.
Another advantage of Dojo is that its team is relatively complete. There are several projects with complete teams and IPs in the Dojo ecosystem, such as Influence Space Games. Although the hackathon may be two months slower than Mud, the core game team of Dojo is more mature than that of Mud. In general, most of Mud's projects are hackathon teams, with low quality but larger quantity.
The first game on Dojo is Loot Survivor, which is a relatively lightweight game. It is made for everyone to try. The general logic is that you can control a Loot character, and then encounter monsters and fight them. You can add equipment to yourself. It is a classic arcade game. Because it was made by the original team of Loot, it also completely inherited the entire Loot setting, including countries, races, generals, counselors and so on.
The above is an explanation of the development history of the full-chain game using Dark Forest and Loot as examples. The PPT link for this sharing is as follows. You can expand your reading: link
Wanwudao: Why did you enter the full-chain game in the early stage and stay there firmly?
For me, part of the reason is that I bought Loot early and have been in the community for a long time. In addition, I found that this field is quite magical. Simply put, the full-chain game in 2023 is very similar to Defi in 2019. Cefi and GameFi are both semi-centralized things, which let everyone initially realize that blockchain is very interesting and can do a lot of things, but in the end everyone also found that they are both half-baked. If everyone wants to start a new project now, they will definitely turn to Defi, and everyone has also seen the prospects of Defi.
StepN did create a big wave of enthusiasm, but it eventually cooled down. However, without this process, people would not have realized that full-chain games are the next big thing. Therefore, the process from Cefi to Defi is the process from GameFi to full-chain games.
And as I just said, full-chain games are complex applications on the chain, and Defi is just a simple application on the chain, so there is also a sense of obvious difference.
People tend to divide Defi into two camps. One is projects that have received money from big American VCs, and the other is community-driven or even fair launch projects. These two camps are arguing with each other. Another interesting analogy is from the gaming industry. Mud feels particularly like the first type. Dojo, the progeny of Ethereum, is obviously community-driven.
As for Mask's participation in the full-chain game, I personally only bought some Loot at first, and then I accidentally invested in some game projects in the StarkNet ecosystem, so I was exposed to four of the five flagship projects of StarkNet at an early stage. Then at the end of 2022, everyone gradually discovered that the full-chain games on StarkNet seemed to be pretty good. Mask is a social networking company, but we actually have a lot of social components or protocols here, and we have invested in a lot of application layers. The main thing related to Autonomous World is to put things in the Mask protocol layer. For example, Mask's own product is Next ID, which can help everyone bring together various identities on various chains. The application direction in the full-chain game is actually easy to understand. For example, in the first game, you may reach level 100, and you are a very high-quality player. Therefore, the second game will deliberately attract you to say that you can start from level 30. This is the application that DID can be used in.
The second one is Web3MQ, which is a communication layer protocol. It can not only facilitate person-to-person communication, but also machine-to-machine communication. When used in games, it can become a messaging solution across different games.
The third one is MetaForo, an application layer product for forums. Its specific functions include providing a fair grant voting platform and subsequent related autonomous events, so it is a community governance-related solution.
The fourth one is to use RSS3 as feed. Taking the most classic example of its application scenario in the gaming field, your QQ space or Renren will notify you that your food has just been stolen. These are actually things that can be done in the game feed.
This covers a relatively complete picture of what we are thinking of doing in the entire chain. I think that in general, social networking and games are inseparable. I often say that Mask may want to become the Tencent in the Web3 world, and now with the Autonomous World, I think this story is even more likely. In the past, it was the social part of Tencent, and later it became the very powerful Tencent strategic investment. Now with the addition of the Tencent game part, I think it is relatively logical.
In the full-chain game ecosystem, there are relatively few that have received investment so far. Generally speaking, it is still in a very early stage, so everyone is mainly in the stage of receiving grants.
Wanwu Island: The full-chain narrative is far away from the Chinese ecosystem. Do you have any suggestions?
The whole chain is not just about narrative. Everyone still wants to do something, but the whole chain is also a place that emphasizes narrative. Mud created the term Autonomous World, and Loot itself is a huge narrative. It is difficult for Chinese people to create narratives and tell them to Europeans and Americans. You can do things within existing narratives. There are indeed examples suitable for Chinese entrepreneurs. For example, I helped connect MetaForo, the forum I mentioned just now, so after getting deep enough in the community, you can see that there are opportunities to do things there.
In addition, I also told many friends who went to Paris that you can try to block the door directly, find ways to communicate with those bosses who are in charge of the entire chain, try to contribute based on their development, and join them to get things done first.
The Loot ecosystem itself is a big funnel. At the beginning, there were 300 or even more worthless projects, and then about 30 of them were relatively good. After a year, most of the 30 were out of money, leaving a few that were doing it for love. Such a huge loophole finally left some very good projects. Although Mud did not raise funds, I am willing to give Mud a valuation of 300 to 500 million US dollars. I think 10 billion US dollars is foreseeable in the future. I think Dojo is a little worse, but it is definitely 200 to 300 million. So what is left in the end of such a funnel has built a complete set of the flavor of the Loot version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
But I personally think that Mud's lack of IP is a big flaw, but Mud's orthodox performance ensures that it attracts thousands of developers to build things on it. Then the core IP of Loot on Dojo's side can attract many people, and especially for Chinese projects, basically every project faces a big problem of how to do Western marketing. They all hope that this project is a project recognized by the West and financed by good Western money. One big advantage of the Loot ecosystem is that you participate in it relatively early, and when the ecosystem is established, Westerners will come in on their own. In other places, you have to create a new IP to make Americans think that your product is good.
For example, StepN is basically a Chinese IP. In fact, not many Americans know what StepN is doing. But although Loot has been deserted for a while, when everyone comes back, they will feel that it is still being worked on after two years, and someone has actually made the product. There will be a lot of Western attention, which can solve big problems, especially for Chinese entrepreneurs.
Wanwu Island: Who are the people who need full-chain games the most?
To be honest, no one needs a full-chain game now. This is something that obviously needs to be done first to make it decent and then pushed to users. If you have to say it is needed, I think it is the more hungry VCs who think this is something new to invest in and then start to play. So maybe every project party is a user of each other, and the current user level is probably at this level.
The user stickiness of Dark Forest is not very high. This is actually part of the reason why the official Dark Forest did not continue to make games but made Mud, because they felt that the upper limit of a single game might not be high.
Wanwu Island: What new ways of playing the full chain are possible that Web2.0 does not have at all?
There is an example that I particularly like to cite. In the past, there were many Three Kingdoms games produced by different manufacturers. Cao Cao or Zhuge Liang in each Three Kingdoms game was not the same person. Then in Web3 games, I think there must be 50 or even more games in the Loot ecosystem, just like there are countless games in the Three Kingdoms, but in this case Cao Cao or Zhuge Liang will be the same NFT. This is actually a great demonstration value achieved by Loot. In the past Web2.5 games, everyone also said that monkey avatars could be used in games, but now Monkey’s own games are just like that, and there are no other games that use monkey avatars, because in essence Web2.5 games still manage their own servers, and they are not so interested in being compatible with others, and they have not formed a complete ecosystem, so monkey games can only be made by monkeys themselves.
Another good time point in my opinion is when the PFP logic is almost dead, and everyone will really want to find new things. They will find that the entire chain seems to be a more advanced story. The same Zhuge Liang in countless Three Kingdoms games is a very meaningful thing. Of course, it can also be the same Luoyang and Suzhou.
Wanwudao: What is the definition of full chain? Does it have to be 100%, or can part of it be off-chain?
First of all, if you look at the infrastructure of the chain, you will find that many people are working on the so-called application chain infrastructure, making it easier for everyone to launch chains with one click, but more than half of them are modified from OP Stack, so strictly speaking, each chain is quite centralized, but the ZK chain strictly speaking needs to run mining machines to achieve decentralization, such as Opside of Wanwu Island is doing this.
I think people are quite tolerant of the entire chain now. If you follow the general industry rules and use their things, people will not say anything to you even if there are some centralized elements elsewhere.