2023.4.11 - update

In recent years, a number of games have emerged under the label of fully on-chain games, which attempt to build a more open and autonomous game world by putting all the game logic on the blockchain. The core reason why we like fully on-chain games is that this type of game truly carries the ideal of decentralization, allowing players to achieve true control over game assets, and giving players and developers great autonomy to build the game ecosystem. We also prefer to call this type of games decentralized games due to our preference in values.

Among decentralized games, Dark Forest is a very special one. Dark Forest, as a decentralized massively multiplayer online real-time strategy (MMORTS - perhaps a dMMORTS) game using zero-knowledge proof technology, has influenced almost all subsequent blockchain games in some way or another. To our knowledge, as of April 2023, Dark Forest is the only game that hosts the largest number of players in its genre (500+ players simultaneously in the most recent official beta round, v0.6.5) . The experience of developing and operating the Dark Forest game has also greatly influenced the on-chain game engine MUD values setting, and MUD's development team, Lattice, followed up with the concept of Autonomous Worlds.

However, after the official beta round v0.6.5 ended in February 2022, the official Dark Forest team has not launched a new round for over a year. During this year, 277dao, AltLayer Official and a few others have held community rounds. These community rounds were held to help flourish the ecology of the game and underlying blockchain infrastructure, but there is little innovation regarding the design of game mechanics; dfdao designed and developed the arena system which can support modes such as MOBA, showcased minor gameplay changes at Devcon Bogotá, and held a series of activities, such as Grand Prix. These activities were loved by hardcore players, but the fast-paced game mechanics design did not catch on in the broader player base, and dfdao did not continue to operate related activities after September 2022; ordengg has proposed a business plan for df0 in early 2023, hoping to build a large PVP RTS game based on Dark Forest, however it may take until the second half of 2023.

Right now, we believe it's a good proposal to regularly hold Dark Forest community rounds .

There are three main reasons :

First, as an experimental blockchain game, Dark Forest has a good first-mover advantage. During its three years of development, and ever-since, Dark Forest has had a high reputation in the Ethereum community and boasts a high-quality community ecology. During the official test rounds, community players maintained and contributed a large number of plugins, while a variety of interesting experimental projects were blossomed (refer to the wrap-up after the official beta round on the Dark Forest Blog). We believe in the power of community, and the community ecology of Dark Forest will continue to attract more friends participants in the building of the blockchain world.

Secondly, Dark Forest game serves as a testing ground for a variety of innovative projects. In fact many innovative projects have emerged during Dark Forest's three years of development that require further development and maintenance, as well as more player use to provide timely feedback. Take Nightmarket for example, a plug-in built with zero-knowledge proof technology that allows players to trade planet coordinates, the design of this trading system needs more feedback from players to optimize and adjust, while the real needs of player feedback can also inspire game designers and developers.

Finally, projects within the Dark Forest ecosystem are open and can contribute to the building of blockchain infrastructure. The first example is the infrastructure software developed by Project Sophon: hardhat-circom, hardhat-diamond-abi, etc… which greatly reduces the threshold for developing a complex, decentralized application and facilitates blockchain developers to build these decentralized applications by utilizing the latest technologies. A second example is ARTEMIS, which is a demand aggregation platform, similar to Uber, for task publishing and corresponding incentive issuance. If other blockchain games implement a function interface to determine the task completion status, then ARTEMIS could be quickly ported to other blockchain games.

In terms of technology, we believe that there are six aspects that can continue to be explored, namely:

1. Zero-knowledge proof technology & related applications

2. Decentralized collaboration & decentralized social

3. Decentralized game mechanism design

4. Social experiments on open economic models

5. Blockchain platform infrastructure development

6. Applications of generative AI in blockchain games

We will elaborate on our understanding of the technical development direction of these six aspects in subsequent articles.

Therefore, based on the above considerations, we have decided to hold DF ARES — seasonal Dark Forest community rounds with new game mechanics.

THE DECENTRALIZED GAME EXPERIMENT MUST GO ON !

More Information: DF ARES Main

Welcome to follow our office twitter and join our discord 😉

Welcome to communicate with us 👨🏻‍💻

Welcome to donate and support our project 🙉

Welcome to cooperate with us in various ways 🐼