Hosted by AW Research & ARPA Network

​This informal gathering is hosted by AW Research & ARPA for creators and enthusiasts of the autonomous worlds and on-chain games.

​This is an opportunity to gain firsthand insights into fully on chain games, extended AW narratives, and the creators behind them.

We have invited these incredible builders from the AW/FOCG to join our panel session on exploring Autonomous Worlds.

The recap will be divided into 4 parts, including Fireside chat, FOCG in AW, Tooling & Infra and WorldBuilding.

Moderator: Norswap From 0xFable

Panel Guest:

yijia from Curio

Baz From Tonk

piapark.eth From Herodotus

Yi Sun From Axiom

Luke From Web3MQ

Norswap: Let's get started. In today's panel, we will concentrate on infrastructure and the improvement of the gaming experience. Our discussion will revolve around the substantial impacts and strategies for achieving balance in gaming. I'd like to invite our panelists to introduce themselves and their projects.
Baz:Hello everyone. I believe I'm already familiar with many of you. My name is Baz, and I'm from Tonk. For the past two years, I've been involved in the decentralized space. Prior to this, I worked as a privacy infrastructure product manager at Epic Games, where I focused on building privacy features for Fortnite. Tonk specialize in integrating secrets into on-chain games and autonomous worlds, particularly through hidden information mechanics. Last year, we spent a significant amount of time experimenting in this area.What excites us about on-chain games is not just the opportunity to revolutionize a form of media, but also to use them as a playground for privacy. We see this as a crucial step in advancing privacy research and setting the stage for future developments in this field.

Yijia: Hello everyone, my name is Yijia, and I'm the co-founder of Curio, a company specializing in on-chain gaming. At Curio, we focus on developing both games and the necessary infrastructure. Our first game is a strategy title with rich social performance elements which we're excited to launch next year. In addition to game development, we're also working on a server-side game engine. Initially, this engine was developed for our internal use to facilitate the creation of on-chain games. However, we've decided to build it in a public domain, allowing others to access and utilize it for their projects.
Pia: Hello, I'm Pia from Herodotus. Our company is deeply focused on infrastructure, primarily enabling access to data across various blockchains in a trustless manner. Personally, I have a keen interest in the concept of autonomous worlds. I'm fascinated by how these worlds, from an infrastructure perspective, can be innovated to allow seamless access to diverse data across multiple environments. This intersection of technology and accessibility is what really captivates my interest.
Yi Sun: Hello, my name is Yi Sun, and I am one of the co-founders of Axiom. Our company enables smart contracts on Ethereum, and soon, robots, to access any data that has never been on the Ethereum blockchain. Additionally, we provide verification and computation services for this data using our end-to-end solutions.
Luke: Hi everyone, I'm Luke from Web3MQ. Let me give you a straightforward overview of what we do in the gaming sector. Essentially, we're focused on building trustless applications for gaming. This involves two key elements: advanced cryptography and sophisticated decentralization. These components can be balanced in various ways, either leaning more towards cryptography or towards decentralized communication. Our company tends to be on the other end of this spectrum. Currently, we're working on tangible contributions to gaming, particularly in developing new consensus protocols for Madara. These protocols are designed to enhance the chain's speed and, looking ahead, to make it more compatible with parallelized execution schemes. At the core of our work are messaging protocols, which are crucial for achieving more efficient execution and decentralization in app transactions, particularly in gaming.

Norswap: What do you think are the biggest technical challenges currently faced when building on-chain games?
Pia: Today, I had a discussion with the team at Smallbrain. They're running their game on the Base chain, but this setup requires users to constantly migrate their assets from the Eager interface whenever they want to use them on the Base chain. This got me thinking: perhaps using a solution like Herodotus could address this issue.In the current gaming landscape, the primary aim is to enhance the fun factor, improve user experience, and ensure good design. Therefore, the technology or blockchain chosen shouldn't be limited to specific functionalities. My view is that we should be able to leverage different communities and technical advantages across various chains. However, the multitude of different rollouts, including various Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions, complicates the process for game developers who need to access data across multiple chains. I believe that solutions like Herodotus, which provide speed and proof of activity in data handling, could be a game-changer. Imagine playing a game on the Base chain while being able to seamlessly verify an NFT on Optimism or Ethereum. This kind of interoperability and ease of data access is crucial, especially from a UX perspective.
Yijia: The biggest issue in on-chain gaming, as I see it, is the fundamental question: why should people play on-chain games? The root of this issue lies in the lack of compelling products in the space. We don't yet have standout on-chain games that clearly demonstrate their unique value proposition or intuitively explain their benefits to players. This is a clear indicator that the industry needs to evolve. The core problem,from my perspective, is twofold: it's about game design and technical limitations. Focusing on the technical aspect, on-chain games are often confined to highly constrained execution environments with limited scalability. Many developers in this space are still grappling with how to overcome these limitations. For instance, the reliance on the EVM, which was designed around 2013-2014 for a different purpose, poses significant challenges. It lacks features like parallelization, which are crucial for modern gaming environments. This limitation impacts the ability to support a large number of players smoothly. Even managing a few hundred players can be a challenge, not to mention the issues with transaction costs and gas fees. These are significant barriers to achieving consensus and scalability in on-chain gaming. We're addressing these challenges with Keystone, our server-side game engine, which I'll discuss in more detail later. Our focus is on enhancing scalability and flexibility, moving beyond the traditional constraints that currently hinder the development of on-chain games. In my opinion, scalability and the ability to think beyond existing limitations are the most pressing technical challenges in launching successful on-chain games. This version improves the readability and structure of your original text while maintaining its original intent and information.

Norswap: I've got some thoughts. Regarding your product, what does it enable that wasn't possible before? For Yijia, you've had firsthand experience in building games, and you've developed engines based on that feedback. This was something you couldn't do before, but now, with your engine, you're able to do it.
Yijia: That's actually a great question for us because we started building Keystone due to the challenges we encountered with Treaty, our previous project. Treaty was a 4X strategy game set on a map where players controlled troops, buildings, and had continuous troop movements. The objective was to capture central tiles in a battle royale style. Eventually, we had around 70 to 80 players on the same map, each with their own troops. We had several player functions like movement, and initially, we wrote everything using Solidity, deploying our own EVM instance for the game, arguably the fastest approach with EVM. However, the gas consumption was enormous, averaging tens of millions of gas for each production in our single EVM instance. With about 20 players online, it typically took around 20 seconds or more for each turn to process, and shorter times like 10 seconds for each operation. Imagine that experience – each movement represented a small pile, so if you wanted to move from point A to point B, breaking it into eight smaller movements, each taking 20 seconds, players would literally sit there questioning their life choices, like 'Why am I playing this game? Am I actually moving this thing?' It was a terrible experience for players and represented the most complex thing we had built up to that point. It really tested the limits of player patience, even among on-chain gamers, who are among the most patient gamers compared to traditional gaming. So we faced a decision: either stop building on-chain games and shift to web 2.5 games, or find a more scalable way for transactions. After January this year, we started exploring alternative execution environments and potential modifications. We realized that games require a different type of execution environment, optimized for their specific needs compared to other crypto use cases like DeFi. That's when we settled on this idea of taking the EVM and adding a game engine that processes all the state changes, like movements and army production. This system can be integrated with creative files, which we'll delve into as well. We managed to build a system that combines the best aspects of EVM – its security – with high performance. We even built a game demo using Warcraft 3 assets, moving them on-chain to create a Warcraft 3 Keystone version. It's similar to Age of Empires in some ways, an RTS where you can move tens or hundreds of troops simultaneously across the map, all within on-chain transactions. This approach doesn't sacrifice security but adds performance. This direct takeaway from our experience with our own game pushed us to think beyond the current limitations.

Hosted by AW Research & ARPA Network

​This informal gathering is hosted by AW Research & ARPA for creators and enthusiasts of the autonomous worlds and on-chain games.

​This is an opportunity to gain firsthand insights into fully on chain games, extended AW narratives, and the creators behind them.

We have invited these incredible builders from the AW/FOCG to join our panel session on exploring Autonomous Worlds.

The recap will be divided into 4 parts, including Fireside chat, FOCG in AW, Tooling & Infra and WorldBuilding.

Moderator: Norswap From 0xFable

Panel Guest:

yijia from Curio

Baz From Tonk

piapark.eth From Herodotus

Yi Sun From Axiom

Luke From Web3MQ

Norswap: Let's get started. In today's panel, we will concentrate on infrastructure and the improvement of the gaming experience. Our discussion will revolve around the substantial impacts and strategies for achieving balance in gaming. I'd like to invite our panelists to introduce themselves and their projects.
Baz:Hello everyone. I believe I'm already familiar with many of you. My name is Baz, and I'm from Tonk. For the past two years, I've been involved in the decentralized space. Prior to this, I worked as a privacy infrastructure product manager at Epic Games, where I focused on building privacy features for Fortnite. Tonk specialize in integrating secrets into on-chain games and autonomous worlds, particularly through hidden information mechanics. Last year, we spent a significant amount of time experimenting in this area.What excites us about on-chain games is not just the opportunity to revolutionize a form of media, but also to use them as a playground for privacy. We see this as a crucial step in advancing privacy research and setting the stage for future developments in this field.

Yijia: Hello everyone, my name is Yijia, and I'm the co-founder of Curio, a company specializing in on-chain gaming. At Curio, we focus on developing both games and the necessary infrastructure. Our first game is a strategy title with rich social performance elements which we're excited to launch next year. In addition to game development, we're also working on a server-side game engine. Initially, this engine was developed for our internal use to facilitate the creation of on-chain games. However, we've decided to build it in a public domain, allowing others to access and utilize it for their projects.
Pia: Hello, I'm Pia from Herodotus. Our company is deeply focused on infrastructure, primarily enabling access to data across various blockchains in a trustless manner. Personally, I have a keen interest in the concept of autonomous worlds. I'm fascinated by how these worlds, from an infrastructure perspective, can be innovated to allow seamless access to diverse data across multiple environments. This intersection of technology and accessibility is what really captivates my interest.
Yi Sun: Hello, my name is Yi Sun, and I am one of the co-founders of Axiom. Our company enables smart contracts on Ethereum, and soon, robots, to access any data that has never been on the Ethereum blockchain. Additionally, we provide verification and computation services for this data using our end-to-end solutions.
Luke: Hi everyone, I'm Luke from Web3MQ. Let me give you a straightforward overview of what we do in the gaming sector. Essentially, we're focused on building trustless applications for gaming. This involves two key elements: advanced cryptography and sophisticated decentralization. These components can be balanced in various ways, either leaning more towards cryptography or towards decentralized communication. Our company tends to be on the other end of this spectrum. Currently, we're working on tangible contributions to gaming, particularly in developing new consensus protocols for Madara. These protocols are designed to enhance the chain's speed and, looking ahead, to make it more compatible with parallelized execution schemes. At the core of our work are messaging protocols, which are crucial for achieving more efficient execution and decentralization in app transactions, particularly in gaming.

Norswap: What do you think are the biggest technical challenges currently faced when building on-chain games?
Pia: Today, I had a discussion with the team at Smallbrain. They're running their game on the Base chain, but this setup requires users to constantly migrate their assets from the Eager interface whenever they want to use them on the Base chain. This got me thinking: perhaps using a solution like Herodotus could address this issue.In the current gaming landscape, the primary aim is to enhance the fun factor, improve user experience, and ensure good design. Therefore, the technology or blockchain chosen shouldn't be limited to specific functionalities. My view is that we should be able to leverage different communities and technical advantages across various chains. However, the multitude of different rollouts, including various Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions, complicates the process for game developers who need to access data across multiple chains. I believe that solutions like Herodotus, which provide speed and proof of activity in data handling, could be a game-changer. Imagine playing a game on the Base chain while being able to seamlessly verify an NFT on Optimism or Ethereum. This kind of interoperability and ease of data access is crucial, especially from a UX perspective.
Yijia: The biggest issue in on-chain gaming, as I see it, is the fundamental question: why should people play on-chain games? The root of this issue lies in the lack of compelling products in the space. We don't yet have standout on-chain games that clearly demonstrate their unique value proposition or intuitively explain their benefits to players. This is a clear indicator that the industry needs to evolve. The core problem,from my perspective, is twofold: it's about game design and technical limitations. Focusing on the technical aspect, on-chain games are often confined to highly constrained execution environments with limited scalability. Many developers in this space are still grappling with how to overcome these limitations. For instance, the reliance on the EVM, which was designed around 2013-2014 for a different purpose, poses significant challenges. It lacks features like parallelization, which are crucial for modern gaming environments. This limitation impacts the ability to support a large number of players smoothly. Even managing a few hundred players can be a challenge, not to mention the issues with transaction costs and gas fees. These are significant barriers to achieving consensus and scalability in on-chain gaming. We're addressing these challenges with Keystone, our server-side game engine, which I'll discuss in more detail later. Our focus is on enhancing scalability and flexibility, moving beyond the traditional constraints that currently hinder the development of on-chain games. In my opinion, scalability and the ability to think beyond existing limitations are the most pressing technical challenges in launching successful on-chain games. This version improves the readability and structure of your original text while maintaining its original intent and information.

Norswap: I've got some thoughts. Regarding your product, what does it enable that wasn't possible before? For Yijia, you've had firsthand experience in building games, and you've developed engines based on that feedback. This was something you couldn't do before, but now, with your engine, you're able to do it.
Yijia: That's actually a great question for us because we started building Keystone due to the challenges we encountered with Treaty, our previous project. Treaty was a 4X strategy game set on a map where players controlled troops, buildings, and had continuous troop movements. The objective was to capture central tiles in a battle royale style. Eventually, we had around 70 to 80 players on the same map, each with their own troops. We had several player functions like movement, and initially, we wrote everything using Solidity, deploying our own EVM instance for the game, arguably the fastest approach with EVM. However, the gas consumption was enormous, averaging tens of millions of gas for each production in our single EVM instance. With about 20 players online, it typically took around 20 seconds or more for each turn to process, and shorter times like 10 seconds for each operation. Imagine that experience – each movement represented a small pile, so if you wanted to move from point A to point B, breaking it into eight smaller movements, each taking 20 seconds, players would literally sit there questioning their life choices, like 'Why am I playing this game? Am I actually moving this thing?' It was a terrible experience for players and represented the most complex thing we had built up to that point. It really tested the limits of player patience, even among on-chain gamers, who are among the most patient gamers compared to traditional gaming. So we faced a decision: either stop building on-chain games and shift to web 2.5 games, or find a more scalable way for transactions. After January this year, we started exploring alternative execution environments and potential modifications. We realized that games require a different type of execution environment, optimized for their specific needs compared to other crypto use cases like DeFi. That's when we settled on this idea of taking the EVM and adding a game engine that processes all the state changes, like movements and army production. This system can be integrated with creative files, which we'll delve into as well. We managed to build a system that combines the best aspects of EVM – its security – with high performance. We even built a game demo using Warcraft 3 assets, moving them on-chain to create a Warcraft 3 Keystone version. It's similar to Age of Empires in some ways, an RTS where you can move tens or hundreds of troops simultaneously across the map, all within on-chain transactions. This approach doesn't sacrifice security but adds performance. This direct takeaway from our experience with our own game pushed us to think beyond the current limitations.