🚨 Multiplayer Optimistic Updates 🚨
Who says fully onchain games have to be slow and unresponsive? For Downstream we've built some infra that makes everything far more snappy, not just for your player but for everyone.
It looks like this.
In our onchain game, Downstream, we allow players to extend the game with new functionality which are deployed as smart contracts.
That new functionality shows up as buildings on the map and players get to choose what their buildings look like. Here's a WIP.
AA24 demos just wrapped. A huge amount of technical and creative energy produced 22 amazing hacks built over two days. All talks recorded, but this alpha cannot wait. Let's go!
Sometimes I get frustrated hearing non-redpilled game makers question whether blockchain adds anything new to game design, but equally don't think the redpilled do a great job of explaining it. Let me have a go... 🧵
Since it seems everyone's piling on, here's where I am on the Autonomous World community.
In traditional game dev I'm used to seeing new game mechanics, new business models and new distribution systems, but the new ideas in AW often pull back further and reframe what a game is
Digital physics in on-chain games.
When you're building an on-chain game with a game world that lives forever and encourages builders to add new functionality, then digital physics become really important.
🧵👇
Pretty sure there are two world firsts in this photo.
#1
first six year old to play a fully onchain game
#2
first six year old to deploy a smart contract
Today is the first anniversary of Loot.
It's rare that something comes along that causes me to think about game design in a completely different way.
@dom
thanks for starting what you started and
@TimshelXYZ
thanks for being a force for good in the community.
LOOT
- randomized adventurer gear
- no images or stats. intentionally omitted for others to interpret
- no fee, just gas
- 8000 bags total
opensea:
etherscan:
available via contract only. not audited. mint at your own risk
Here's the Building Configurator in Downstream.
People have asked me how you deploy a smart contract that extends Downstream without needing programmer knowledge. Here's an example of a factory. The code in the .sol can be modified to do fancier things, should you like.
I'm so excited about this.
Our lead designer just showed me that he'd put a bunch of enemies and factories in the game. They have different functionality; different attack patterns; different stats.
Everything is a permissionless smart contract constrained by digital physics.
Week 4 of
@a16zcrypto
CSX.
Confession time: I'm not a degen. Never have been. My daily "gm" never sat quite right.
I'm in web3 because I believe it's possible to use decentralised technologies to make better products. Everyone here, whether a16z or the 25 companies in our
At Playmint we created technology to allow vastly more computationally complex on-chain games without increasing gas costs, by using SNARKs and zk-proofs.
It's a clever, important piece of technology we call CLIENT SIDE PROOFS and it's story should be told...
I’ve yet to meet an investor with a deeper understanding of fully onchain games.
Go make a coffee and enjoy this. Read the full version, not the tweet summary.
Fully Onchain Games, or FOCGs, use the blockchain as a decentralized computing platform, not just as a way to track assets. Here’s how they could usher in the next major platform shift in gaming according to our very own
@NicoVereecke
🧵👇
What would happen if you introduced an autonomous AI agent to an autonomous world? I have a feeling we're about to find out.
Plans are afoot!
@CottenIO
@a16zcrypto
At Playmint we're building on-chain games. I've made lots of different types of games in the past but I've never built something that throws up this many new ideas.
Yesterday, we figured out something new about how we can let builders permissionlessly create new gameplay.
🧵👇
EthCC micro brain dump
- onchain games better understood and better explained than 12 months ago
- can’t work out if onchain games are now credible and exciting or whether my bubble has just got bigger
- too much infra; not enough games
1/2
Onchain games and autonomous worlds ask more of blockchains than any other web3 product, so it's encouraging to see so much progress on infrastructure, exemplified by the Redstone chain.
Proud to be part of the launch. 🔴🪨
The Autonomous Centipede. $BUGS harvested in This Cursed Machine are combined in Downstream with $DUST from Anybody Problem to create $ORBS to play Skystrife.
Interoperability between FOUR onchain games. An epic hack from the Playmint nerds at
@Worlds_AA
.
@movingcastles_
Downstream is coming to Istanbul! 🇹🇷
Building a performant, composable, fully on-chain MMO isn't easy (as it turns out) but the game's looking great and we'll be showing it at Devconnect.
A few years ago I watched San Junipero with my daughter and I made a pact with her that I'd wait for her in a digital world after I'd died.
It's a science fiction idea, but brain-computer-interfaces are progressing apace so it's a concept that warrants some thought.
🧵 👇
I'm in a reflective, end-of-year mood so here's a thirty two year trend I've noticed in the games industry that perhaps explains why I'm pumped about the kind of games we're making.
It's Christmas, so I'll do the long, fireside story version. Pull up a chair. 🥃
1/38 🧵 👇
I’ve been travelling a lot this year so we planned a family break to Puerto Rico 🏄♂️
A sundowner in a beautiful location is a chance to think about where Playmint has come from and where we’re going as a business.
Your part of the games industry is proportionally smaller than you think it is.
Every time one of these Newzoo reports comes out I'm reminded just how big mobile is compared with console and PC, and reminded how small the west is compared with the east.
@5p0rt5BEArD
caught up with a bunch of onchain game builders at EthCC and shared some notes with the rest of the Playmint team today.
He's on a camping trip right now so I'm gonna steal them while he's not looking. 👇
Mistakes should be attributed to him, not me.
Another Friday reminiscence.
Back in 1996 or 1997 when I was at EA I decided that I wanted to make a 3D driving game for the original PlayStation.
3D cities long before GTA. 🧵
Hey look! We've got Extractors working in Downstream. Players need to extract Goo from the map in order to build buildings.
The team assure me the Goo is red and not pink. They're gaslighting me, right?
For a long time I'd describe myself as an fully onchain maxi, but as time has gone I've come to realise that there are other ways of achieving decentralisation. Each way has its own advantages and disadvantages, which can be applied according to the use case.
Always evolving.
That’s a wrap on CSX London 2024! Over the past 10 weeks, we hosted 25 web3 teams at our a16z London office for our third
@a16zcrypto
startup accelerator. The teams came from around the world and spanned from infrastructure to applications, and from DeFi to DeSci to AI to gaming
Thanks
#BITKRAFTSummit23
for putting on an incredible event. Three days of future-gazing with smart, carefully-curated people in a beautiful location.
Proof, in case it were needed, that some of the best ideas only emerge after the third bottle of wine. 🍷
Hey look! We can turn Downstream game items into 1155 tokens so that they can be transferred to, then moved between, metamask wallets.
It's one of many efforts we're undertaking to allow people to build cool things in the game.
CEO of
@PlaymintUK
David Amor (
@damor_eth
) on building fully onchain autonomous world Downstream, and why decentralization is the way forward in games.
I was at lunch with a friend yesterday. He asked what I'm working on and I explained that we're figuring out the best software architecture for digital worlds that we can live in after we die.
Note to self: start with a simpler explanation, especially after a bottle of wine.
Today we’re announcing the full cohort for CSX Spring 2024 in London
Our Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) Spring 2024 program kicks off this week, with the founders of 25 promising early-stage startups gathered in London. Over 10 weeks, they’ll learn from each other and receive
Making games is hard whatever kind of game you choose to make. At Playmint we decided to work on new hard things rather than old hard things.
Yesterday we had a two hour meeting discussing the diegetic boundaries of an autonomous world. My brain got fried. 🍳
Q: What's more impressive than the labs team at your VC building their own on chain game.
A: Writing that game in two different onchain engines.
Nice work, Ben.
Last month I was at
#BITKRAFTSummit23
where I got to hang out with
@raphkoster
and got schooled on MMO economies. He was kind enough to share some papers.
A week or two later our inhouse economist is sharing findings with the team.
I love making games.
With the help of
@justinglibert
and
@heylukegibson
I've been thinking about the concept of Autonomous Worlds.
It's a planet-sized idea that I don't think we'll achieve in my lifetime, but I think we can take some significant steps along the way. Mind-boggling.
Kudos to Peter and his team for doing, while many were just saying. Here's what they built within Downstream and what they learned along the way. Genuinely impressive!
Learnings and reflections from the
@1kxnetwork
team's experience from building on top of
@DownstreamGame
by
@PlaymintUK
. The first of a series: 'Modding Worlds', focused on exploring the realities of composability with fully onchain games and worlds.
At Playmint we're building an on-chain MMO, where game logic, game state and game assets are stored in smart contracts on a blockchain. A good question is "why?"
There are several reasons, but one is COMPOSABILITY and deserves its own twitter thread. 🧵
"What's your token model?" is a question I'm asked about once a week.
For DawnSeekers we decided our token system needed to tick five tickboxes and it's taken us to a player-friendly token model that is rarely seen in web3 games.
🧵👇
If you’re hosting an industry event sometime soon, here are my polite requests
- quiet music, intelligible convos
- a good amount of space
- networking and presentation areas separate
Thx!
Matt’s a game industry veteran who’s been nerdsniped by onchain games.
But he still wears a hat lined with healthy cynicism, so let’s see where this goes.
Next week, I'm launching a newsletter. It's called Dark Tunnels.
Dark Tunnels is a business-oriented exploration of fully on-chain games, autonomous worlds, and the uncertain path to get there.
a short🧵👇
Brutal.
This table from the most recent Newzoo reports how hard it is for new games to push past the forever games.
The average age of a game in the PC top 10 is ten years. 💀 We need some innovation!
I have a sixteen year old daughter and we were talking about her frugal brother. She described him as having an “infinite money hack”.
A busy day in town she described as being “overrun with NPCs”.
I love how videogame culture has seeped into our language.
Now that eight projects have committed to Redstone Mainnet launch (🏁🔴🪨) we get to watch the tension that occurs when ambitious software plans meet with immovable deadlines.
Oh, and let's throw in a jolly to Lisbon between now and then.
See you next year, GDC.
Always a privilege to catch up with old friends and make some new ones in the sunshine. A highlight was our Fully Onchain Meetup where our numbers were stronger than ever.
I've been spending about an hour a day thinking and talking about decentralisation and trust, challenging assumptions that I previously felt were important. It's a lot of work.
My goal is to be able to describe a new way of thinking by the time I get to EthCC.
☼ Announcing the Autonomous Worlds Assembly, taking place in Istanbul, November 15-16, during Devconnect.
At AWA, you will participate in talks, game presentations, discussions, and workshops devoted to advancing the plot of AWs.
Here are some onchain game related events at EthCC next week that are on my radar.
📅 Onchain Games Meetup, hosted by Playmint, Cartridge, Bitrkaft and Komorebi. Wednesday night.
📅 Komorebi's Hacker House, hosted by Komorebi. All week.
User generated content in Roblox is fundamentally different from composability in an onchain game.
The former fractures the world into different experiences for different players. The latter extends the game world for all players.
@apixtwts
I've done a lot of game budgeting. For production costs it's broadly $100K per person per year over the duration of the project, minus a staff ramp-on. Then ongoing live ops costs.
My PS3 era AA games were teams of about 50 over two years = $10M, minus ramp-on.
When I came back from GDC, the rest of the Playmint team had decided to commit Downstream to Redstone Mainnet launch.
Not only that, but a version of Downstream that allowed people to deploy their own zones with their own experiences inside.
Incredible work over seven weeks ❤️
1/ 🔴🪨🧪The
@DownstreamGame
Community Spotlight is LIVE! Build in a post-singularity civilisation simulator, where you can:
- Create and play bitesize games in your own zones
- Explore the zones other people have made
- Modify and remix zones
Post Redstone launch, Playmint has been spending a lot of time talking about what we need to do to help people build decentralised games that don't suck.
We've inherited DeFi technology that often isn't fit for purpose but (good news) better options are available.
More later!
Web3 game ideas. 2022 vs 2023.
Interoperability: ↔️
Composability: ⬆️
Permissionlessness: ⬆️
Incentivised Player Behaviour: ⬇️
Governance as Metagame: ↔️
Asymmetric Game Design: ↔️
Permanence: ⬆️
Play to Earn: ⬇️
Agree? What did I miss?
A likely future architecture for decentralised games is Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant CRDTs. It's been something we've wanted to progress at Playmint for about a year so it's great to see
@guiltygyoza
pushing this in talks at AA24.
With the noise and energy of the hacks it was hard
If you care about Autonomous Worlds then you're either
a) coming to this event
b) making a mistake
Downstream and the Playmint team will be there in force. Don't let us down.
Over 120+ attendees have been accepted, only 20 more days to go, until we kick off the first fully onchain games hackathon!
████████████▒▒▒▒ 80% event loading...
We implemented a sequencer in DawnSeekers so that the game signs transactions and spends gas on the player's behalf. It means that this is the only Metamask popup the player sees. Session keys are a huge UX win.
In 1994 I was making games at EA when this French dude showed up from nowhere. He joined a did design and production work, while telling us that he was gonna make an Ultima game and work with Richard Garriott.
Okay Raf, whatever.
Next week in Brighton is the Develop conference.
On Tuesday at 11am Justin Glibert is talking about Autonomous Worlds.
On Wednesday at 3pm I'll be talking about VC investments.
@developconf
The death of E3 has me reminiscing of E3s past. Here's my diary (in two parts) from 18 years ago and a photo of me wandering around West Hollywood at that time.
🎙️ X Spaces 🎙️
Explore Fully On-Chain Games with the G7 Community. ⏬
@ProofOfPlay
,
@0xCitadel
,
@PlaymintUK
will discuss:
🤔 Fully Decentralized Game Studio Dilemma
💰 Funding Models & On-Chain Commitment
🙋♀️ AMA