The concept of full-chain games (FOCG), also known as Fully On-Chain Games, has long been anticipated as the next major application for blockchain technology within the crypto-native community. Unlike the GameFi trend, which primarily focuses on the financial aspects of gaming, FOCG places a higher emphasis on the gameplay itself. In FOCG, all core game logic and states are deployed on the blockchain and driven entirely by blockchain technology, without any centralized servers involved. Compared to traditional games, FOCG offers higher levels of openness, decentralization, and persistence.

The ultimate goal of full-chain games is to establish a fully autonomous and open gaming world, often referred to as "Autonomous Worlds." In such worlds, games can exist indefinitely without relying on any centralized operators. All rules, logic, and participation are conducted and verified through decentralized blockchain networks. Moreover, these autonomous gaming worlds can seamlessly interoperate, allowing characters and assets from different games to be used in others, creating a truly open and interconnected "metaverse" of games.

In this week's update, Dr. DODO will introduce you to some of the long-standing and noteworthy projects in the FOCG space that are worth your attention.

StarkNet FOCG Economy

The recently hyped Layer 2 blockchain StarkNet, which is rumored to issue tokens, is quite suitable for fully on-chain game deployment due to its technical features and development experience, with the following advantages:

• High Performance: StarkNet achieves high performance by using techniques like recursive proofs and state transitions to compress a large amount of computation and storage into a constant-sized proof. This greatly optimizes efficiency, enabling it to process millions of transactions per second or even more. This level of performance is crucial for meeting the demands of full-chain games.

• Fairness: Full-chain games require fairness in randomness, such as for card drawing or dice rolling. StarkNet natively supports this through the use of Verifiable Random Function (VRF) technology enabled after the Cairo V1 upgrade. This allows for verifiable random numbers, ensuring fairness in games.

• Coding Efficiency: Compared to Solidity, the most commonly used language on traditional EVM-based blockchains, StarkNet's official language Cairo is more suitable for complex projects. It results in less code and higher execution efficiency, reducing the complexity of full-chain game development and saving on expensive gas fees.

Now that we've discussed why StarkNet is suitable for full-chain games, let's introduce some projects developed within the StarkNet ecosystem:

1. Dojo: Dojo is an open-source game engine and toolkit designed for StarkNet. It uses the Cairo language to implement an efficient entity-component-system architecture, simplifying the game development process. It also natively supports zero-knowledge proofs, ensuring randomness and data privacy. Several games, including Influence, Loot Survivor, and Briq, have already launched using Dojo. The Dojo community is continuously expanding and planning to focus on L3 solutions, optimistic updates, and client-side proofs in the future.

2. Loot Realm: Driven by the Loot NFT community DAO, Loot Realm aims to create an open, scalable, and eternal on-chain gaming world. It includes multiple sub-games, such as the text-based adventure game Loot Survivor and the MMO full-chain game Realms: Eternum. Loot Realm represents the potential for full-chain games to achieve open sharing and autonomous operation.

3. Influence: Influence is a space-themed resource management and strategy game. Players can engage in infrastructure and economic activities in the asteroid belt. The game fully utilizes StarkNet's high performance to achieve a fully on-chain economy and model complex business logic. Influence is actively under development, with plans to release multiple sub-games in stages.

4. Briq: Briq is an open on-chain creative space often referred to as the "Lego of the blockchain world." Users can collect and assemble different blocks to create unique blockchain artworks. Briq showcases the potential of full-chain games to support user-generated content and metaverse-like spaces.

These projects within the StarkNet ecosystem demonstrate the exciting possibilities for full-chain games and their role in shaping the future of blockchain-based gaming.

MUD & Redstone Built BY LATTICE

Next is an introduction to the fully on-chain game engine MUD and the layer 2 blockchain Redstone tailored for fully on-chain games. But before we start, we need to introduce the team behind them – Lattice. Lattice is the core team of the open source developer community 0xPARC and participated in the development of Dark Forest, the world's first fully on-chain game, back in 2020. After Dark Forest, Lattice continued to delve deeply into the fully on-chain gaming vertical, and developed the MUD gaming engine after realizing the many pain points faced by FOCG developers during the development of multiple games.

The Lattice team called MUD a gaming engine exclusive to FOCG. A gaming engine can be broken down into two major parts: a smart contract application development framework + on-chain relational database. It has a built-in highly efficient EVM database that supports automatic on-chain and off-chain state synchronization, and encapsulates much of the commonly used gaming logic into the framework, which greatly simplifies the development process. Developers can define data structures through configuration, and MUD will automatically generate Solidity libraries. Currently, over 90% of EVM fully on-chain games are built with MUD.

As the number of MUD-based games grew, the Lattice team also realized that existing EVM chains struggled to support large-scale on-chain applications. So they independently developed the Redstone rollup solution. By submitting only data digests on Layer 1, Redstone greatly reduces costs. It is also specially designed to optimize compatibility with MUD, enabling high-throughput fully on-chain games.

Redstone represents a new generation of Layer 2 technology exploration tailored for fully on-chain games. Its deep compatibility with MUD has greatly boosted the growth of the entire ecosystem. The Redstone testnet is currently online, supporting multiple games including Sky Strife, and the mainnet is expected to go live in Q1 2024.

Argus & Paima

In addition to Dojo and the Lattice team, many other teams are actively laying out developments of fully on-chain gaming engines and dedicated gaming blockchains. The following introduces Argus and Paima, the leaders among them.

Similar to Lattice, Argus’ core team members also emerged from the Dark Forest developer community. Through the experience of developing Dark Forest, they understood the difficulties faced by FOCG developers under current blockchain infrastructure, thus founding Argus with the goal to build high-performance infrastructure tailored for blockchain games. They have obtained tens of millions in investments from top VCs like 1kx, Polychain Capital and Dragonfly Capital. Currently there are two main products:

• World Engine: Argus' independently developed Layer 2 solution for blockchain games. World Engine implements innovative sharding mechanisms that can scale horizontally to match real-time gaming loads, while custom Game Shards greatly improve execution performance by handling game state transitions.

• Cardinal: This is a gaming shard scheme built on World Engine. Cardinal is developed in Go language and implements an efficient entity-component-system architecture. It is highly compatible with mainstream game engines, allowing users to seamlessly integrate with Unity, Unreal and more.

While Argus focuses mainly on Ethereum and Ethereum L2s, another contender Paima has chosen to center its efforts around Cardano and Milkomeda instead. Paima has received millions of dollars in donations from the Cardano Foundation. Its flagship product Paima Engine is a universal development framework for blockchain games. It allows developers to directly deploy games on Paima's rollups to reduce scaling difficulties. At the same time, it also incorporates cross-chain mechanisms so the same game can be deployed across different chains and synchronize states between environments. In addition, Paima also provides automated smart game agents through its Shinkai AI layer, which can be seen as an open game "operating system".

Author’s Perspective

The concept of fully on-chain games is indeed very appealing. The ultimate ideal of Autonomous Worlds has a kind of geeky utopia feel. But whether FOCG can be the next multi-billion dollar vertical in the blockchain world remains doubtful. Due to their fully on-chain design, FOCGs naturally sacrifice many key metrics like performance and gameplay smoothness that today’s Web2 gaming giants pursue. Instead, they focus more on deeper gameplay and complex in-game economic issues. I believe FOCG can attract a group of real users, but it is unlikely to become a breakthrough for blockchain mass adoption. A small and beautiful path is more suitable for such projects. Therefore, community loyalty and stickiness will be critical indicators when evaluating high-quality FOCG projects. And for the overall blockchain world, I am not optimistic that FOCG will become the next big narrative with thousands of blossoming flowers.