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AW_ResearchDope Wars - A GTA Game developed by the Cartridge team on StarkNet.
Creator: @kaikaikk_ From: @AW_ResearchAI SummaryDope Wars is a fully on-chain Loot-style game based on StarkNet, with the Cartridge team as the core contributors. The game is built around a street-themed universe inspired by GTA (Grand Theft Auto). The first playable mode in the game is called "Roll Your Own," and the Cartridge team plans to remake it using the Dojo engine to enhance the gameplay experience and features. The Dope Wars ecosystem includes assets such as Hustlers, Items, and $Pa...
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Creator: @MsKiKiUrRT From: @AW_ResearchAI Summary:"Loot Survivor" is a Loot-style adventure experimental game that incorporates the Play2Die economic model. It is currently being tested on the testnet, with the chance to receive $Lords airdrops. The game is deployed on StarkNet, and although the current interaction speed is slow, it is expected to improve with updates to the Ethereum protocol, reducing interaction costs and enhancing network performance. The team behind Loot Survivor consists...
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AW_ResearchDope Wars - A GTA Game developed by the Cartridge team on StarkNet.
Creator: @kaikaikk_ From: @AW_ResearchAI SummaryDope Wars is a fully on-chain Loot-style game based on StarkNet, with the Cartridge team as the core contributors. The game is built around a street-themed universe inspired by GTA (Grand Theft Auto). The first playable mode in the game is called "Roll Your Own," and the Cartridge team plans to remake it using the Dojo engine to enhance the gameplay experience and features. The Dope Wars ecosystem includes assets such as Hustlers, Items, and $Pa...
AW_ResearchIntroduction to Loot Survivor, the Latest Fully On-Chain Game on StarkNet
Creator: @MsKiKiUrRT From: @AW_ResearchAI Summary:"Loot Survivor" is a Loot-style adventure experimental game that incorporates the Play2Die economic model. It is currently being tested on the testnet, with the chance to receive $Lords airdrops. The game is deployed on StarkNet, and although the current interaction speed is slow, it is expected to improve with updates to the Ethereum protocol, reducing interaction costs and enhancing network performance. The team behind Loot Survivor consists...
AW_ResearchDuper, how to pass the playground？
By: kaikai From: AW ResearchAI summeryDuper is a competitive on-chain game and esports platform built around a social war game with wagering mechanics. Using Keystone technology, it operates on Arbitrum One. Game modes range from casual to competitive, accommodating solo play against AI or multiplayer matches. Each session involves five players and lasts approximately 40 minutes. To participate, players must stake real ETH for gems representing their equity. Unlike traditional games, Duper di...
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Welcome to AW Insights, a character interview series presented by @AW_Research & Starknet Astro. Today, we have invited Tarrence, Cofounder of Cartridge, Lead Developer of Dojo and Cocreator of Dope Wars to explore Dojo, Dope War, and Cartridge to the Autonomous Worlds.
In this segment, we will delve deep into the realms of onchain gaming and the autonomous worlds, engaging in conversations with pioneers who have made significant contributions to these fields.
Our mission is to conduct exclusive interviews with the trailblazers, innovators, and visionaries of the blockchain gaming world. We aim to unveil their unique perspectives, gain profound insights into their innovative projects, and explore the intersection of blockchain technology and gaming.
Host: Kaikai
Guest: Tarrence
Dojo is an open-source toolchain to build onchain games leveraging the Starknet stack. Cartridge, Realms and Briq co-created this public good, and Cartridge has led its development since early this year. Dojo provides a foundation for provable games, providing an ECS framework, a migration planning and deployment tool with Sozo, real-time automatic indexing with Torii and a high performance, modular sequencer with Katana. Today, Dojo has a thriving community of builders experimenting with onchain games and new teams spinning up every week.
Useful links
Presentation of dojo: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hPY3vLmkJWRULVK4e8OvpJkufgTWevtmkeOKHJYZT3k/edit?usp=sharing
Community Notion: https://dojoengine.notion.site/Dojo-Engine-Community-Hub-d316194b998941c48ddf771a4dd5ff08#bcd6a32db1b2406cb6c325f3b700d45a
Cartridge is a team of blockchain native builders - world class engineers and designers - on a mission to bring onchain games and Autonomous Worlds to life. We're building games as well as the tooling and infrastructure to enable them. Over the past year, we have been heads down executing: rethinking the blockchain stack in light of the unique requirements of onchain games, working to solve challenging problems around scalability, reputation and hidden information, leveraging affordances provided by new technologies such as zkps, mpc and secure enclaves to do so.
Dope war-Roll Your Own
Dope Wars is a fully on-chain Loot-style game based on StarkNet, with the Cartridge team as the core contributors. The game is built around a street-themed universe inspired by GTA (Grand Theft Auto).
The first playable mode in the game is Roll Your Own. In the current version of the RYO game, the mechanism is PVE, but as development progresses, it will transition into PVP. Players will enter locations within Dope Wars, engage in arbitrage of drug prices across different regions, and strive to amass wealth and dominate the streets. The Roll Your Own game involves a sequential iterative process, and a version is currently available for players to experience.
AW Research:For the first question, can you please briefly introduce yourself to our audience and how you enter the crypto and why on-chain games?
Tarrence:I first learned about Bitcoin in 2013 when I was studying at the University of Michigan.Some friends had mentioned to me and I first learned about this concept and growing up in South Africa where we had the quite unstable currency in economy, the value proposition rise in Asia, that was kind of the start of my interesting crypto that I've been involved ever since then.About two years ago, we started a project called The Dope Wars, which is an on-chain gaming ecosystem, or just more generally, a gaming ecosystem that we issued NFTs for and has a strong community around it, it's kind of street culture oriented, and as part of The Dope Wars project, we started building a fully on-chain game.This is about a year and a half ago on Starknet, when Starknet was very early, was way too early to be building these types of games at the top of Starknet, but it opened my eyes to this idea of fully on-chain games.I need to enter autonomous worlds.Ever since then, I've been kind of hooked. We've been building a bunch of different stuff.
We started Cartridge a year and a half ago and now, just focused purely on building tooling infrastructure and games on top of Starknet.And we've built a few different things in that capacity. One of them is Dojo that we've been contributing to for the last six months.
Another is the Dope Wars, which is in playtesting right now. And a few other experiments that we've done around what is possible with today's technology, what types of games can you build that are fully on chain.
AW Research:At the beginning, it developed may be in August, 2020 and based on the information from the community the dope wars led by Perama.And he was quite skeptical about the gamefi play to earn model. Instead he likes the on-chain gaming paradigm that is composable. Because I had seen the discord community before. However, the progress of the game development has been delayed.And after that, Cartridge team took over the Dope Wars. So it’s very clear to see the game development direction in The Dope Wars autonomous world, right?
Tarrence:Yeah, that's generally in the right direction. What happened was that we created a DAO that had received secondary market donation and accumulated about a million dollars at the time to fund community projects and programs came to the Dope Wars discord and mentioned that they want to build a version of the fully on-chain game on top of Starknet, and so I helped them get a grant from the DAO to explore that.
It's much more an exploration of modularity and composability of fully on-chain games than focusing on the play to earn or the gamefi aspects of things.And I think Perama's work on Roll Your Own was the first on-chain gaming engine that was designed for this level of modularity and composability that enables this idea of autonomous worlds.So he's definitely an OG contributor to his space.
AW Research:Let's come to the first question updated to Roll Your Own. So what's the inspiration behind the Catridge team to build Roll Your Own?
Tarrence:What we wanted to demonstrate is the gap that existed a year and a half. Two years ago, when building fully on-chain games, and to start native navigation, it's possible to build the game that we wanted to build back then, but just wasn't feasible today.And then, a lot of us are just excited about the classic game,Drug Wars, The Original, one of the most popular games ever.A lot of people have the shared experience of playing it, and I think it fits quite nicely into the constraints of the blockchain, you can buy and sell products, and you can arbitrage it.It's very similar,at baseline to, like a gamefi version of Uniswap. And then we're continuing to expand the mechanism, we have a new version coming in the next couple of months.
AW Research: In the current version of the RYO game, the robbery mechanism is PVE, but as development progresses, it will transition into PVP, adding another dimension of interaction and competition among players. Could you provide an overview of what the PVP mode will be like? What engaging game mechanics and strategies are planned?
Tarrence:There's two pieces, one it's definitely a player versus environment. You spin up a new instance of the game and with new markets and you play it by yourself.We want to transition it to a shared market.That's just perpetual or shared world that's perpetual so that anytime someone joins for a round it's the same if you know people join it's the same exact round.And in that case, you'll be trading against other people.If you make a trade on a market, the slippage will change the liquidity or the market structure at that location.So other people interacting with it will change that comes for other people. So that becomes a little bit like zero sum in a sense.And so that there's some PVP mechanics there that are more implicit from having the shared context.There's some ideas that we want explore around, for example, mugging, allowing players to stay out locations and potentially try and mug the next person, and then to have essentially an auto-battle-er style mini-game embedded in it.So if you try to mug someone based on their items and what they're carrying, then there would be some auto-battle-er and result to some outcome.There's some emergent behaviors that we want to enable, this idea of people allow groups of people to create games or guilds inside of the game and to cooperate to own certain markets, potentially reputation.I think there's a lot of space for exploration. We don't have a very concrete set of things that we're definitely going to do.
As far as it relates to PVP, i think it's going to be a very experimental process that we're going to engage in with the community.I think that's part of the ethos of on-chain games and autonomous worlds is giving participants in these games the ability to propose things themselves and modify things themselves.And so a lot of what we want to focus on is enabling those emerging behaviors, allowing people from the community to come and say this is cool.
AW Research:From a technical perspective, what will be the challenges to seed the Dope Wars Autonomous World and to build ‘Roll Your Own’ on Starknet ? How do Cartridge team addressed them?
Tarrence:That's a great question, Roll Your Own is an instantiation of a particular game in The Dope Wars.Right now it's completely self-contained, but eventually it will consume a lot of these base primitives from the Dope Wars, which will be a bunch of different items.People don't know you have different equipment, weapons, rings,chains,gloves ,boots and stuff like this.Right now that isn't incorporated into Roll Your Own. I think those are some of the primitives that will form the base of the Dope Wars autonomous world so that different games can pull from those and build different interesting experiences on top of it.One of the challenges will be that currently all those assets exist on Optimism, and so we need to define them in dojo as entities and component systems so that people can easily interact with them in the Starknet ecosystem.And then we need to create some kinds of ways for people to bridge them from Optimism to Starknet. And there's a few different approaches that we can take there.
One of the ways that we're thinking about it in the short term is to allow people to bridge them with the storage proof, the assets still exist on optimism, but you'll be able to play with them on Starknet, which I think is like a pretty powerful construct you can build games with dojo in the StarkNet ecosystem that use assets from other chains without having people actually bridge them.So if you want to build a game on Starknet,like an NFT that's on Polygons,Optimism or Ethereum.You can initialize a game without the user having bridge it to Starknet.The other is figuring out decomposing the Dope Wars, what is the level of granularity?
Right now we have weapons and stuff like that. There's other invariants that you can place into the world around physics and locations.As soon as you put that stuff on chain.It becomes more concrete. There's a question of how expressive, how concrete should all of these things be encoded into the on-chain representation of the world and how much of it should be left up to interpretation by different experiences built on top of it.I think we'll naturally start to see some contention around the direction, if we're successful and there's a lot of different games build on top of it.The Dope World as a base platform will see different ideas of how to express it and directions that people want to take it and potentially people want to introduce it.Different new things are changing, modifying existing sets of items or rules that exist in the most base version. What is the process that enables that? That's going to be a big challenge.
AW Research:For the current version of RYO, can it be considered as an autonomous world? Could you reveal how you will build an autonomous world in future iterations? What will this autonomous world look like?
Tarrence:AW is a little bit ambiguous to define right now.I would say that Roll Your Own classifies as a fully on-chain game, because it's one particular instantiation of the Dope Wars universe. It has very well defined rules set, and there is one of the property of AW is the ability to be easy modability and composability. That exists with AW because it's built with Roll Your Own.Because it's built with Dojo, so people can propose and easily build deep integrations into the Roll Your Own game, at the smart contract level, that potentially affects the rules of the game.I would say that it doesn't classify as AW in that, the abstraction level is too high. I think an autonomous world should be a much lower level in the primitives it provides.So that's why it's part of our proposal for building a Roll Your Own in the Dope Wars. We have two separate requirements, the bridging of all the assets and stuff like that in the creation of these low level primitives into the Dope World.So I think what it will look like basically all of the items that exist inside the Dope Wars and existing inside of a single dojo world with components and systems and stuff like that describing some of their functionality.
AW Research: If a fully on-chain game becomes highly successful, allowing valuable in-game assets to be financially leveraged without requiring permission, it might result in the game ecosystem evolving into an intensely financialized system. What do you think of the economic system of the on-chain game? For example, how do you ensure the balance of game mechanics and economy?
Tarrence: It's something that we haven't spent a ton of time thinking about in the short term because it's not a problem that we face right now. It's an intrinsic property of something being connected to the blockchain and having this feature of permission with extensibility and composability with other protocols that people can build like DeFi primitives around it.What it looks like for a Dojo world will definitely be possible to different degrees depending on how the world is architected. There's always a way to do it, but some approaches involve a significant amount of overhead and may not be interesting to pursue.For example, you can have store-bound tokens, but then people might just trade the account that holds this store-bound token, which is true to an extent but also makes it much less approachable. So, I think it's very interesting to think about how we can enable these behaviors, and it will be equally interesting to consider to what extent we want to make it easy and which financialized protocols we want to facilitate integration with, especially for Roll Your Own, which is itself a financialized game.
So, I think it will be quite interesting to explore this, but it is a challenge, and there's a challenge in maintaining the balance of the economy. Even without these auxiliary financial protocols, balancing the economy internally is a significant challenge. For example, the reason we don't have a single perpetual shared world right now is that the economy would almost immediately become distorted.
AW Research:How do Dope Wars assets like hustlers, items, and paper provide the foundation on top of which the Dope World ecosystem can be expanded?
Tarrence: The space for integrating the original Dope Wars assets into the Dope Wars ecosystem is quite vast. For instance, if you join a game and you have assets like Air Force 1, they might provide advantages, such as allowing you to run faster and have a better chance of evading the cops if they're chasing you. On the other hand, if you're carrying a big weapon, it might increase the likelihood of the cops trying to bust you, but it's less likely that you'll get mugged.So, for us, integrating these base assets is about equipping your character with a set of items that grant specific properties. These properties change the probability of different events happening to you as a player in the game. I think this dimension of incorporating them into Roll Your Own is quite interesting.
As for paper itself, it could be used as a currency within the game. People might buy into rounds with paper, or it could serve as rewards for players who win a round. The specifics of how paper is used can be decided by the community. For example, there could be seasons of the game, and at the end of each season, a portion of the pot could be distributed to the top players on the ranking.
There are several intriguing mechanics to explore. One idea is a hardcore mode where you play the game with real-world assets, and if you die, you lose them, or if you get mugged, someone can take your items or the paper you use for trading products in the game. This could add an interesting dynamic, but it also introduces challenges, such as a potential play-to-earn aspect. We need to carefully consider how this would work to maintain a balanced and fair gameplay experience.
AW Research:If the blockchain elements were removed from on-chain games, would it affect the game's entertainment value and user experience? Would it be more enjoyable? Additionally, in the game design of "RYO," which aspects make full use of the characteristics of blockchain technology?
Tarrence: It's a great question. I think from a technological perspective, you can certainly build a very similar game, whether it's on-chain or off-chain. There's no inherent reason why RYO has to exist off-chain. From a developer experience perspective, incorporating blockchain introduces some interesting elements and makes it easier to build these types of games, as we don't have to set up the entire backend infrastructure.
However, the elements you remove when transitioning from an on-chain to an off-chain game could potentially impact the entertainment value, user experience, and the ability for players to permissionless expand and integrate with the game world. Blockchain technology allows for the creation of new experiences and ideas that might not have been possible in a more traditional client-server architecture.A significant aspect of incorporating blockchain technology is the community aspect it brings. It fosters a core group of stakeholders who deeply appreciate the gaming ecosystem and want to collaborate to push it forward, building unique and engaging experiences.
This community-driven approach has been evident in the Dope Wars ecosystem. If we had developed it as a standalone game without blockchain components, it might not have garnered as much interest. However, because of the shared ownership and the strong interest in its development, we've seen thousands of games started and played in the last few weeks, demonstrating the potential of blockchain technology in creating engaging gaming experiences.
AW Research:Currently, TheDopeWar has two playable games, Dope Frenzy and RYO. What visions do these two games represent for your team? Could you please share the future development and plans for both games?
Tarrence: Dope Frenzy is actually a project led by someone else in the Dope Wars community, and I'm not very involved with their roadmap. Dope Frenzy is essentially an arcade-style game where it's more in the realm of web 2.5. It allows you to use asset ownership on-chain and bring it into a more traditional game environment. Players can load their hustlers from Optimism into the game and interact with them. However, the game rules themselves are not encoded on-chain in the same way RYO is.As for the future roadmap of Dope Frenzy, I don't have specific information, but it's beneficial to explore different approaches and possibilities within these ecosystems.
For RYO, the plan for the next couple of months is to incorporate more dynamics into the game loop. This includes introducing more decision-making elements to make the game less easily solvable just by looking at on-chain market prices and forming an optimal strategy. Additionally, there are plans to introduce various in-game events.Currently, RYO is deployed on a Layer 3 substrate but is still on a testnet. The goal is to deploy it as a full mainnet Layer 3 rollup with checkpoints onto Starknet itself.
AW Research:How you prioritize and balance among Cartridge, Dojo and Dope War. How to allocate individual and team energy?
Tarrence: Balancing and prioritizing among Cartridge, Dojo, and Dope War can be challenging at times due to our relatively small team size. Currently, there are eight of us on the team. We recently brought on board two full-time engineers who are primarily focused on Dojo. We also have engineers like Brudy, who is full-stack and has been working on developing RYO while also contributing to Dojo and Cartridge as needed.
Over the past six months, we've had around three to five full-time engineers who have been primarily focused on bringing Dojo to a level of maturity that allows developers to build interesting games and deploy them on Starknet easily. This has been a significant focus for us in the Dope Wars ecosystem.
RYO has been the primary focus within the Dope Wars ecosystem.In terms of balance, it often comes down to where the most significant needs and opportunities lie. Currently, Dojo has two full-time developers working on it. Our focus for the next six months will be more on the Cartridge side of services, specifically building the next layer of integration on top of Dojo at Cartridge. This will enable developers building on Dojo to bring their experiences to market more effectively. Our goal is to maximize the impact of our efforts in building a vibrant ecosystem.
AW Research:Cartridge is referred to as the on- chain Steam. Have you considered developing enhanced user experience features for the future, such as online battles, server hosting, community interactions, etc. Could you share your future plans and visions?
Tarrence: Cartridge is often likened to the "on-chain Steam," but it's important to note that our vision goes beyond just being a gaming platform. While it's a simplification, it's an easy way to convey what we aim to achieve. Here are some insights into our future plans and visions:
We envision a future where we vertically integrate the ecosystem to provide the best experience for both developers and players. This integration will enable complex backend infrastructure and gameplay to scale seamlessly while ensuring coordination with players.
Currently, our primary focus is on enhancing the developer experience. This includes managed infrastructure for activities like setting up playtests, forking worlds for modifications, testing with friends, and reintegrating changes into the mainline game.
Server hosting is an essential component of providing a robust gaming experience. We are working to ensure that Cartridge offers server hosting capabilities to meet the needs of developers.
We recognize the importance of community interactions and plan to create distribution channels for fully-onchain games within the autonomous world. One of our upcoming products is the World Explorer, designed to serve as a blockchain explorer specifically tailored to fully-engineered games and autonomous worlds. This tool will make it easy for developers to showcase their worlds and for players to discover and interact with them, even in the early stages of development.
Our overarching goal is to create a rich ecosystem that seamlessly connects developers and players while providing the tools and infrastructure needed to build and enjoy fully-onchain games. As we continue to develop and expand our offerings, we look forward to supporting the growth of the autonomous world and the broader blockchain gaming community.
AW Research:Do you have any suggestions for developers or those who are currently building on-chain games? Especially building on chain games on starknet using dojo?
Tarrence: For developers who are building on-chain games, especially on StarkNet using Dojo, here are some suggestions and resources to consider:
The Dojo Discord community is a welcoming and helpful place. You can find many people willing to assist you with technical questions, game design challenges, and more. Engaging with the community can be invaluable.
Dojo offers various resources, including documentation, tutorials and code examples. For instance, there's a Dojo Book that recently underwent a complete overhaul. Additionally, community members contribute examples and tutorials, such as building games like Dojo Chess using GameKit. The Roll Your Own codebase is another valuable resource.
Consider exploring grant programs available to developers. Different organizations and projects within the blockchain space offer grants to support innovative projects. Keep an eye on opportunities provided by organizations like StarkNet, and potential future grants from Cartridge.
Hackthon are excellent opportunities to experiment with building games, collaborate with others, and showcase your skills. Cartridge is organizing a 72-hour hackathon at the end of the month, with a $5,000 prize for the top team. It's a fantastic chance to try your hand at game development.
Overall, my advice is to get involved, learn from available resources, and don't hesitate to seek help from the community. Building on-chain games can be a rewarding experience, and there's a supportive ecosystem ready to assist you along the way. Good luck with your projects!
AW Research:What are Dojo's plans for the second half of the year in terms of developer community, eco-projects, funding, and game engine tech stack?
Tarrence:
Dojo is focused on improving the developer experience and onboarding process. They plan to enhance documentation, examples, and resources to make it easier for developers to start building games on Dojo.
Several teams, including PARC, are in the early stages of building on top of Dojo. Dojo's plan is to continue supporting these projects and help them create new and interesting experiences on StarkNet.
Dojo is well-funded through grants from organizations like the Mask Network, and the StarkNet Foundation. Cartridge also funds a significant portion of Dojo. In the longer term, additional sources of funding may come from projects and contributions within the ecosystem.
Dojo has several exciting developments in its tech stack. One notable project is the Torii client, a Rust client for Ethereum that aims to provide compatibility with WebAssembly for use in browsers and integration with platforms like Unity, Unreal. The Torii client will help synchronize client state with the blockchain state efficiently.
Dojo is working on implementing optimistic updates, allowing transactions to be executed optimistically on the client and immediately displaying updates to users. This will enhance the user experience and responsiveness of Dojo-powered games.
Another exciting development is client-side proving, which will enable the local verification of code on a user's machine. This technology will enable private information to be introduced into games securely, similar to how privacy coins like Zcash work.
These developments reflect Dojo's commitment to improving the developer experience, expanding the ecosystem, and enhancing the capabilities of its game engine tech stack.
AW Research:Will Dojo consider guiding the developer community to build more optional modules for the Dojo engine in the future? Such as voting, account management, AMM, etc.
Tarrence: There's already some creations that are available, like we have the ERC, like the first thing that was done is the ERC20 and ERC1115 and we have actually an AMM model, have a dojo defi. Right now with an AMM model inside of it.
There's some issues that would be great in voting, like DAO tooling, I think it will be super interesting as well.Like, how do you manage these larger communities and contributions? That's going to be a big, open question and a place for contributions.
Joseph Xu(Midaswap): I am a developer from Midaswap Protocol, which is an NFT AMM DEX. I am really interested in fully on-chain gaming. And I am wondering how the gaming assets trading system integrates in the Dojo. Does it work as a plug-in or a module in the game engine?
Tarrence:It doesn't necessarily have to be a plugin to the game engine. What I was mentioning earlier is that we have ERC20 and ERC1155 compatible implementations.So people can have those types of assets in the game.Some AMMs can be directly integrate in Dojo.We have built the implementation of different kinds of token.Developers’ can use the interface to build the marketplace which can get access to trading experience.
Maxlion(StarkNetAstro):Does Dojo have a plan to go to China to teach Dojo or for Chinese developer?
Tarrence:We don't have a plan for that right now. This is our first kind of engagement with the Chinese community, but we would love to support developers in China building on top of Dojo.One of our teammates as Chinese, he lives in the US.So we don't have a great presence in China, and so if anyone wants to help partner with us or lead the effort, we would be more than happy to support it.
Luke Wang(Web3MQ): I'm just really curious as a core contributor, what kind of contributions and involvement you would be looking for from the Asia-Pacific community, such as plug-ins, infrastructure, or specific games?
Tarrence: One of the challenges with those is that we're in Cairo, and it's a new ecosystem. There are many things in the Ethereum ecosystem that don't exist in Cairo yet. For example, a gradual Dutch auction algorithm and various DeFi primitives that people could introduce to add interesting mechanics to their games. We want to make them easily accessible for experimentation. So, I think contributions of any of those types of primitives would be really appreciated.There are some core issues and a bunch of open issues on the repo related to the roadmap of improving the Dojo stack, which requires relatively deep technical expertise to execute. But if people have the required skill set and want to contribute to it, I encourage them to take a look and let me know. I'd love to help open some space for contributions.For me, I don't have a deep understanding of the Asia-Pacific market and the types of experiences that people are gravitating towards. I think that's probably one of the larger contributions that people in that area, who are immersed in it every day, can make. They can try to build experiences on top of Dojo games and the necessary primitives to enable them. Or they can communicate to us where the gaps are in building those types of experiences so that we can assist. Building cool games on top of Dojo that the communities in that region would be excited about engaging with is crucial. This is a big gap for us because our team is mostly Western-focused right now. Having someone who understands the environment, culture, and the types of experiences people are excited about in that region would be invaluable.Additionally, on the developer experience and developer onboarding side of things, we're interested in helping more developers be productive in the Dojo games system.
Luke Wang: It's actually super helpful. And I think definitely, you know, I think DeFi primitives, those are something that Asian developers have been working on a lot during the last few market cycles, so that could definitely be a good synergy. As for the community, I should mention that I'm Chinese, but I grew up in the Western. I'd love to see how we can build better bridges. And I also want to give a shout-out to Taylor. He's been working quite a lot on bridging the Chinese ecosystem with StarkNet and Dojo. It's an exciting journey ahead, and I'm delighted to hear that Dojo is enthusiastic about it.
Taylor Zhang(MaskNetwork): Lots of contents has already been translated or at least moved over to the Chinese community, and they read it pretty often.I guess lots of people also know me because I've been in the Loot community long enough to witness the journey of Dojo, from its inception to where it is right now. It's pretty amazing to see how it started and where it is today.I have an additional question since we received a storytelling article this morning in English from @fangtingeth. She posted it in Chinese a few days ago, and it was quite popular. I just want to know your take on the storytelling part about launching games, since I think many developer questions have already been asked and answered.
Tarrence: Yeah, I haven't had a chance to dive into it yet. It's on my reading list, and I did give it a quick skim. However, I strongly believe that storytelling is one of the most challenging aspects of building a gaming ecosystem. While there are technical gaps in developing these types of games, we are determined to close them and create a great engine like Dojo. We aim to provide excellent primitives and much more.These gaming experiences serve as a new medium for expressing creativity. In cases like these, storytelling is vital to craft a compelling narrative that resonates with people and fosters a strong community around it. It's a great avenue for various individuals in the ecosystem to contribute without encountering high technical barriers.I believe storytelling can make or break an intellectual property, franchise, or gaming ecosystem, even an autonomous world. Experimenting with different models and structures for creating the lore, background, and history of these universes is incredibly important.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Dojo or Dojo system is the informal lore that has already been created around the different personalities in the Discord community during the early days and the various items.I think storytelling is a critically important element that deserves more attention, especially as we reach a point where the experiences we want to build are possible. Now, we must focus on creating compelling experiences that capture the audience's imagination and offer top-quality, cohesive universes for people to immerse themselves in.
Taylor: That's absolutely true. Thanks for the answer. The talent part initially was Loot, which brought me here, and it also brought many other Loot and autonomous world enthusiasts.
Tarrence: Yeah, and I think that's a valuable point. I think that's also an intriguing area for technical contributions. We should consider what tools and structures are necessary to formalize some of this lore and encode it on-chain, enabling people to collaborate in a way that hasn't been extensively done before. I mean, it might resemble something akin to Wikipedia in some aspects. But should we develop tooling that makes it easier for existing players to understand the existing lore when they join a game?This would help them quickly get up to speed with the universe, characters, different storylines, and so on. I think this could be a fascinating area for experimentation as well.
Taylor: Yes,lots of folks in the Chinese community began testing Loot Survivor, which is one of the very few games already living in the ecosystem, they got really interested. They noticed that the items in Loot Survivor looked similar to the original Loot items. They became curious about the relationship between the original Loot stuff and Loot Survivor. They were quite surprised and intrigued by how the Loot ecosystem and the original Loot lore have evolved.
Derrick: The authorization between a component and a system is by name. If a system owner upgrades its system after authorization, is it safe enough for the component owner?
Tarrence: I think it's something that we probably need some tooling to understand better. Currently, the way authorization works within Dojo involves two roles: owners and writers. Writers can grant access to a system. A system represents the logic of the world, a piece of gaming logic, while components represent the state of the world.For instance, if a system wants to modify a component, such as reducing a player's health, and someone proposes a change, like something falling from the sky and hitting a player, then reducing their health, the owner of that component might accept it as a modification to the game dynamics.However, the owner of the system that created this logic can upgrade the system. Unless they revoke ownership or transition it to a DAO or someone else, like a multisig, they can potentially modify the system to do something malicious, like increasing their own health.
So, there are considerations around when you would want to approve writer status for a system. You probably wouldn't want to allow a new external contributor to introduce a system that can write to core game state without a mechanism for ensuring they can't simply update that system. It may be necessary to require that they transition system ownership to a multisig or some other process before granting them write access to a component.This is indeed a significant consideration and one of the challenges in the idea of fully-autonomous worlds. Managing access control is a complex task, and we can provide more tooling and infrastructure to help facilitate this process, ensuring that changes to the world don't lead to unintended side effects.
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Welcome to AW Insights, a character interview series presented by @AW_Research & Starknet Astro. Today, we have invited Tarrence, Cofounder of Cartridge, Lead Developer of Dojo and Cocreator of Dope Wars to explore Dojo, Dope War, and Cartridge to the Autonomous Worlds.
In this segment, we will delve deep into the realms of onchain gaming and the autonomous worlds, engaging in conversations with pioneers who have made significant contributions to these fields.
Our mission is to conduct exclusive interviews with the trailblazers, innovators, and visionaries of the blockchain gaming world. We aim to unveil their unique perspectives, gain profound insights into their innovative projects, and explore the intersection of blockchain technology and gaming.
Host: Kaikai
Guest: Tarrence
Dojo is an open-source toolchain to build onchain games leveraging the Starknet stack. Cartridge, Realms and Briq co-created this public good, and Cartridge has led its development since early this year. Dojo provides a foundation for provable games, providing an ECS framework, a migration planning and deployment tool with Sozo, real-time automatic indexing with Torii and a high performance, modular sequencer with Katana. Today, Dojo has a thriving community of builders experimenting with onchain games and new teams spinning up every week.
Useful links
Presentation of dojo: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1hPY3vLmkJWRULVK4e8OvpJkufgTWevtmkeOKHJYZT3k/edit?usp=sharing
Community Notion: https://dojoengine.notion.site/Dojo-Engine-Community-Hub-d316194b998941c48ddf771a4dd5ff08#bcd6a32db1b2406cb6c325f3b700d45a
Cartridge is a team of blockchain native builders - world class engineers and designers - on a mission to bring onchain games and Autonomous Worlds to life. We're building games as well as the tooling and infrastructure to enable them. Over the past year, we have been heads down executing: rethinking the blockchain stack in light of the unique requirements of onchain games, working to solve challenging problems around scalability, reputation and hidden information, leveraging affordances provided by new technologies such as zkps, mpc and secure enclaves to do so.
Dope war-Roll Your Own
Dope Wars is a fully on-chain Loot-style game based on StarkNet, with the Cartridge team as the core contributors. The game is built around a street-themed universe inspired by GTA (Grand Theft Auto).
The first playable mode in the game is Roll Your Own. In the current version of the RYO game, the mechanism is PVE, but as development progresses, it will transition into PVP. Players will enter locations within Dope Wars, engage in arbitrage of drug prices across different regions, and strive to amass wealth and dominate the streets. The Roll Your Own game involves a sequential iterative process, and a version is currently available for players to experience.
AW Research:For the first question, can you please briefly introduce yourself to our audience and how you enter the crypto and why on-chain games?
Tarrence:I first learned about Bitcoin in 2013 when I was studying at the University of Michigan.Some friends had mentioned to me and I first learned about this concept and growing up in South Africa where we had the quite unstable currency in economy, the value proposition rise in Asia, that was kind of the start of my interesting crypto that I've been involved ever since then.About two years ago, we started a project called The Dope Wars, which is an on-chain gaming ecosystem, or just more generally, a gaming ecosystem that we issued NFTs for and has a strong community around it, it's kind of street culture oriented, and as part of The Dope Wars project, we started building a fully on-chain game.This is about a year and a half ago on Starknet, when Starknet was very early, was way too early to be building these types of games at the top of Starknet, but it opened my eyes to this idea of fully on-chain games.I need to enter autonomous worlds.Ever since then, I've been kind of hooked. We've been building a bunch of different stuff.
We started Cartridge a year and a half ago and now, just focused purely on building tooling infrastructure and games on top of Starknet.And we've built a few different things in that capacity. One of them is Dojo that we've been contributing to for the last six months.
Another is the Dope Wars, which is in playtesting right now. And a few other experiments that we've done around what is possible with today's technology, what types of games can you build that are fully on chain.
AW Research:At the beginning, it developed may be in August, 2020 and based on the information from the community the dope wars led by Perama.And he was quite skeptical about the gamefi play to earn model. Instead he likes the on-chain gaming paradigm that is composable. Because I had seen the discord community before. However, the progress of the game development has been delayed.And after that, Cartridge team took over the Dope Wars. So it’s very clear to see the game development direction in The Dope Wars autonomous world, right?
Tarrence:Yeah, that's generally in the right direction. What happened was that we created a DAO that had received secondary market donation and accumulated about a million dollars at the time to fund community projects and programs came to the Dope Wars discord and mentioned that they want to build a version of the fully on-chain game on top of Starknet, and so I helped them get a grant from the DAO to explore that.
It's much more an exploration of modularity and composability of fully on-chain games than focusing on the play to earn or the gamefi aspects of things.And I think Perama's work on Roll Your Own was the first on-chain gaming engine that was designed for this level of modularity and composability that enables this idea of autonomous worlds.So he's definitely an OG contributor to his space.
AW Research:Let's come to the first question updated to Roll Your Own. So what's the inspiration behind the Catridge team to build Roll Your Own?
Tarrence:What we wanted to demonstrate is the gap that existed a year and a half. Two years ago, when building fully on-chain games, and to start native navigation, it's possible to build the game that we wanted to build back then, but just wasn't feasible today.And then, a lot of us are just excited about the classic game,Drug Wars, The Original, one of the most popular games ever.A lot of people have the shared experience of playing it, and I think it fits quite nicely into the constraints of the blockchain, you can buy and sell products, and you can arbitrage it.It's very similar,at baseline to, like a gamefi version of Uniswap. And then we're continuing to expand the mechanism, we have a new version coming in the next couple of months.
AW Research: In the current version of the RYO game, the robbery mechanism is PVE, but as development progresses, it will transition into PVP, adding another dimension of interaction and competition among players. Could you provide an overview of what the PVP mode will be like? What engaging game mechanics and strategies are planned?
Tarrence:There's two pieces, one it's definitely a player versus environment. You spin up a new instance of the game and with new markets and you play it by yourself.We want to transition it to a shared market.That's just perpetual or shared world that's perpetual so that anytime someone joins for a round it's the same if you know people join it's the same exact round.And in that case, you'll be trading against other people.If you make a trade on a market, the slippage will change the liquidity or the market structure at that location.So other people interacting with it will change that comes for other people. So that becomes a little bit like zero sum in a sense.And so that there's some PVP mechanics there that are more implicit from having the shared context.There's some ideas that we want explore around, for example, mugging, allowing players to stay out locations and potentially try and mug the next person, and then to have essentially an auto-battle-er style mini-game embedded in it.So if you try to mug someone based on their items and what they're carrying, then there would be some auto-battle-er and result to some outcome.There's some emergent behaviors that we want to enable, this idea of people allow groups of people to create games or guilds inside of the game and to cooperate to own certain markets, potentially reputation.I think there's a lot of space for exploration. We don't have a very concrete set of things that we're definitely going to do.
As far as it relates to PVP, i think it's going to be a very experimental process that we're going to engage in with the community.I think that's part of the ethos of on-chain games and autonomous worlds is giving participants in these games the ability to propose things themselves and modify things themselves.And so a lot of what we want to focus on is enabling those emerging behaviors, allowing people from the community to come and say this is cool.
AW Research:From a technical perspective, what will be the challenges to seed the Dope Wars Autonomous World and to build ‘Roll Your Own’ on Starknet ? How do Cartridge team addressed them?
Tarrence:That's a great question, Roll Your Own is an instantiation of a particular game in The Dope Wars.Right now it's completely self-contained, but eventually it will consume a lot of these base primitives from the Dope Wars, which will be a bunch of different items.People don't know you have different equipment, weapons, rings,chains,gloves ,boots and stuff like this.Right now that isn't incorporated into Roll Your Own. I think those are some of the primitives that will form the base of the Dope Wars autonomous world so that different games can pull from those and build different interesting experiences on top of it.One of the challenges will be that currently all those assets exist on Optimism, and so we need to define them in dojo as entities and component systems so that people can easily interact with them in the Starknet ecosystem.And then we need to create some kinds of ways for people to bridge them from Optimism to Starknet. And there's a few different approaches that we can take there.
One of the ways that we're thinking about it in the short term is to allow people to bridge them with the storage proof, the assets still exist on optimism, but you'll be able to play with them on Starknet, which I think is like a pretty powerful construct you can build games with dojo in the StarkNet ecosystem that use assets from other chains without having people actually bridge them.So if you want to build a game on Starknet,like an NFT that's on Polygons,Optimism or Ethereum.You can initialize a game without the user having bridge it to Starknet.The other is figuring out decomposing the Dope Wars, what is the level of granularity?
Right now we have weapons and stuff like that. There's other invariants that you can place into the world around physics and locations.As soon as you put that stuff on chain.It becomes more concrete. There's a question of how expressive, how concrete should all of these things be encoded into the on-chain representation of the world and how much of it should be left up to interpretation by different experiences built on top of it.I think we'll naturally start to see some contention around the direction, if we're successful and there's a lot of different games build on top of it.The Dope World as a base platform will see different ideas of how to express it and directions that people want to take it and potentially people want to introduce it.Different new things are changing, modifying existing sets of items or rules that exist in the most base version. What is the process that enables that? That's going to be a big challenge.
AW Research:For the current version of RYO, can it be considered as an autonomous world? Could you reveal how you will build an autonomous world in future iterations? What will this autonomous world look like?
Tarrence:AW is a little bit ambiguous to define right now.I would say that Roll Your Own classifies as a fully on-chain game, because it's one particular instantiation of the Dope Wars universe. It has very well defined rules set, and there is one of the property of AW is the ability to be easy modability and composability. That exists with AW because it's built with Roll Your Own.Because it's built with Dojo, so people can propose and easily build deep integrations into the Roll Your Own game, at the smart contract level, that potentially affects the rules of the game.I would say that it doesn't classify as AW in that, the abstraction level is too high. I think an autonomous world should be a much lower level in the primitives it provides.So that's why it's part of our proposal for building a Roll Your Own in the Dope Wars. We have two separate requirements, the bridging of all the assets and stuff like that in the creation of these low level primitives into the Dope World.So I think what it will look like basically all of the items that exist inside the Dope Wars and existing inside of a single dojo world with components and systems and stuff like that describing some of their functionality.
AW Research: If a fully on-chain game becomes highly successful, allowing valuable in-game assets to be financially leveraged without requiring permission, it might result in the game ecosystem evolving into an intensely financialized system. What do you think of the economic system of the on-chain game? For example, how do you ensure the balance of game mechanics and economy?
Tarrence: It's something that we haven't spent a ton of time thinking about in the short term because it's not a problem that we face right now. It's an intrinsic property of something being connected to the blockchain and having this feature of permission with extensibility and composability with other protocols that people can build like DeFi primitives around it.What it looks like for a Dojo world will definitely be possible to different degrees depending on how the world is architected. There's always a way to do it, but some approaches involve a significant amount of overhead and may not be interesting to pursue.For example, you can have store-bound tokens, but then people might just trade the account that holds this store-bound token, which is true to an extent but also makes it much less approachable. So, I think it's very interesting to think about how we can enable these behaviors, and it will be equally interesting to consider to what extent we want to make it easy and which financialized protocols we want to facilitate integration with, especially for Roll Your Own, which is itself a financialized game.
So, I think it will be quite interesting to explore this, but it is a challenge, and there's a challenge in maintaining the balance of the economy. Even without these auxiliary financial protocols, balancing the economy internally is a significant challenge. For example, the reason we don't have a single perpetual shared world right now is that the economy would almost immediately become distorted.
AW Research:How do Dope Wars assets like hustlers, items, and paper provide the foundation on top of which the Dope World ecosystem can be expanded?
Tarrence: The space for integrating the original Dope Wars assets into the Dope Wars ecosystem is quite vast. For instance, if you join a game and you have assets like Air Force 1, they might provide advantages, such as allowing you to run faster and have a better chance of evading the cops if they're chasing you. On the other hand, if you're carrying a big weapon, it might increase the likelihood of the cops trying to bust you, but it's less likely that you'll get mugged.So, for us, integrating these base assets is about equipping your character with a set of items that grant specific properties. These properties change the probability of different events happening to you as a player in the game. I think this dimension of incorporating them into Roll Your Own is quite interesting.
As for paper itself, it could be used as a currency within the game. People might buy into rounds with paper, or it could serve as rewards for players who win a round. The specifics of how paper is used can be decided by the community. For example, there could be seasons of the game, and at the end of each season, a portion of the pot could be distributed to the top players on the ranking.
There are several intriguing mechanics to explore. One idea is a hardcore mode where you play the game with real-world assets, and if you die, you lose them, or if you get mugged, someone can take your items or the paper you use for trading products in the game. This could add an interesting dynamic, but it also introduces challenges, such as a potential play-to-earn aspect. We need to carefully consider how this would work to maintain a balanced and fair gameplay experience.
AW Research:If the blockchain elements were removed from on-chain games, would it affect the game's entertainment value and user experience? Would it be more enjoyable? Additionally, in the game design of "RYO," which aspects make full use of the characteristics of blockchain technology?
Tarrence: It's a great question. I think from a technological perspective, you can certainly build a very similar game, whether it's on-chain or off-chain. There's no inherent reason why RYO has to exist off-chain. From a developer experience perspective, incorporating blockchain introduces some interesting elements and makes it easier to build these types of games, as we don't have to set up the entire backend infrastructure.
However, the elements you remove when transitioning from an on-chain to an off-chain game could potentially impact the entertainment value, user experience, and the ability for players to permissionless expand and integrate with the game world. Blockchain technology allows for the creation of new experiences and ideas that might not have been possible in a more traditional client-server architecture.A significant aspect of incorporating blockchain technology is the community aspect it brings. It fosters a core group of stakeholders who deeply appreciate the gaming ecosystem and want to collaborate to push it forward, building unique and engaging experiences.
This community-driven approach has been evident in the Dope Wars ecosystem. If we had developed it as a standalone game without blockchain components, it might not have garnered as much interest. However, because of the shared ownership and the strong interest in its development, we've seen thousands of games started and played in the last few weeks, demonstrating the potential of blockchain technology in creating engaging gaming experiences.
AW Research:Currently, TheDopeWar has two playable games, Dope Frenzy and RYO. What visions do these two games represent for your team? Could you please share the future development and plans for both games?
Tarrence: Dope Frenzy is actually a project led by someone else in the Dope Wars community, and I'm not very involved with their roadmap. Dope Frenzy is essentially an arcade-style game where it's more in the realm of web 2.5. It allows you to use asset ownership on-chain and bring it into a more traditional game environment. Players can load their hustlers from Optimism into the game and interact with them. However, the game rules themselves are not encoded on-chain in the same way RYO is.As for the future roadmap of Dope Frenzy, I don't have specific information, but it's beneficial to explore different approaches and possibilities within these ecosystems.
For RYO, the plan for the next couple of months is to incorporate more dynamics into the game loop. This includes introducing more decision-making elements to make the game less easily solvable just by looking at on-chain market prices and forming an optimal strategy. Additionally, there are plans to introduce various in-game events.Currently, RYO is deployed on a Layer 3 substrate but is still on a testnet. The goal is to deploy it as a full mainnet Layer 3 rollup with checkpoints onto Starknet itself.
AW Research:How you prioritize and balance among Cartridge, Dojo and Dope War. How to allocate individual and team energy?
Tarrence: Balancing and prioritizing among Cartridge, Dojo, and Dope War can be challenging at times due to our relatively small team size. Currently, there are eight of us on the team. We recently brought on board two full-time engineers who are primarily focused on Dojo. We also have engineers like Brudy, who is full-stack and has been working on developing RYO while also contributing to Dojo and Cartridge as needed.
Over the past six months, we've had around three to five full-time engineers who have been primarily focused on bringing Dojo to a level of maturity that allows developers to build interesting games and deploy them on Starknet easily. This has been a significant focus for us in the Dope Wars ecosystem.
RYO has been the primary focus within the Dope Wars ecosystem.In terms of balance, it often comes down to where the most significant needs and opportunities lie. Currently, Dojo has two full-time developers working on it. Our focus for the next six months will be more on the Cartridge side of services, specifically building the next layer of integration on top of Dojo at Cartridge. This will enable developers building on Dojo to bring their experiences to market more effectively. Our goal is to maximize the impact of our efforts in building a vibrant ecosystem.
AW Research:Cartridge is referred to as the on- chain Steam. Have you considered developing enhanced user experience features for the future, such as online battles, server hosting, community interactions, etc. Could you share your future plans and visions?
Tarrence: Cartridge is often likened to the "on-chain Steam," but it's important to note that our vision goes beyond just being a gaming platform. While it's a simplification, it's an easy way to convey what we aim to achieve. Here are some insights into our future plans and visions:
We envision a future where we vertically integrate the ecosystem to provide the best experience for both developers and players. This integration will enable complex backend infrastructure and gameplay to scale seamlessly while ensuring coordination with players.
Currently, our primary focus is on enhancing the developer experience. This includes managed infrastructure for activities like setting up playtests, forking worlds for modifications, testing with friends, and reintegrating changes into the mainline game.
Server hosting is an essential component of providing a robust gaming experience. We are working to ensure that Cartridge offers server hosting capabilities to meet the needs of developers.
We recognize the importance of community interactions and plan to create distribution channels for fully-onchain games within the autonomous world. One of our upcoming products is the World Explorer, designed to serve as a blockchain explorer specifically tailored to fully-engineered games and autonomous worlds. This tool will make it easy for developers to showcase their worlds and for players to discover and interact with them, even in the early stages of development.
Our overarching goal is to create a rich ecosystem that seamlessly connects developers and players while providing the tools and infrastructure needed to build and enjoy fully-onchain games. As we continue to develop and expand our offerings, we look forward to supporting the growth of the autonomous world and the broader blockchain gaming community.
AW Research:Do you have any suggestions for developers or those who are currently building on-chain games? Especially building on chain games on starknet using dojo?
Tarrence: For developers who are building on-chain games, especially on StarkNet using Dojo, here are some suggestions and resources to consider:
The Dojo Discord community is a welcoming and helpful place. You can find many people willing to assist you with technical questions, game design challenges, and more. Engaging with the community can be invaluable.
Dojo offers various resources, including documentation, tutorials and code examples. For instance, there's a Dojo Book that recently underwent a complete overhaul. Additionally, community members contribute examples and tutorials, such as building games like Dojo Chess using GameKit. The Roll Your Own codebase is another valuable resource.
Consider exploring grant programs available to developers. Different organizations and projects within the blockchain space offer grants to support innovative projects. Keep an eye on opportunities provided by organizations like StarkNet, and potential future grants from Cartridge.
Hackthon are excellent opportunities to experiment with building games, collaborate with others, and showcase your skills. Cartridge is organizing a 72-hour hackathon at the end of the month, with a $5,000 prize for the top team. It's a fantastic chance to try your hand at game development.
Overall, my advice is to get involved, learn from available resources, and don't hesitate to seek help from the community. Building on-chain games can be a rewarding experience, and there's a supportive ecosystem ready to assist you along the way. Good luck with your projects!
AW Research:What are Dojo's plans for the second half of the year in terms of developer community, eco-projects, funding, and game engine tech stack?
Tarrence:
Dojo is focused on improving the developer experience and onboarding process. They plan to enhance documentation, examples, and resources to make it easier for developers to start building games on Dojo.
Several teams, including PARC, are in the early stages of building on top of Dojo. Dojo's plan is to continue supporting these projects and help them create new and interesting experiences on StarkNet.
Dojo is well-funded through grants from organizations like the Mask Network, and the StarkNet Foundation. Cartridge also funds a significant portion of Dojo. In the longer term, additional sources of funding may come from projects and contributions within the ecosystem.
Dojo has several exciting developments in its tech stack. One notable project is the Torii client, a Rust client for Ethereum that aims to provide compatibility with WebAssembly for use in browsers and integration with platforms like Unity, Unreal. The Torii client will help synchronize client state with the blockchain state efficiently.
Dojo is working on implementing optimistic updates, allowing transactions to be executed optimistically on the client and immediately displaying updates to users. This will enhance the user experience and responsiveness of Dojo-powered games.
Another exciting development is client-side proving, which will enable the local verification of code on a user's machine. This technology will enable private information to be introduced into games securely, similar to how privacy coins like Zcash work.
These developments reflect Dojo's commitment to improving the developer experience, expanding the ecosystem, and enhancing the capabilities of its game engine tech stack.
AW Research:Will Dojo consider guiding the developer community to build more optional modules for the Dojo engine in the future? Such as voting, account management, AMM, etc.
Tarrence: There's already some creations that are available, like we have the ERC, like the first thing that was done is the ERC20 and ERC1115 and we have actually an AMM model, have a dojo defi. Right now with an AMM model inside of it.
There's some issues that would be great in voting, like DAO tooling, I think it will be super interesting as well.Like, how do you manage these larger communities and contributions? That's going to be a big, open question and a place for contributions.
Joseph Xu(Midaswap): I am a developer from Midaswap Protocol, which is an NFT AMM DEX. I am really interested in fully on-chain gaming. And I am wondering how the gaming assets trading system integrates in the Dojo. Does it work as a plug-in or a module in the game engine?
Tarrence:It doesn't necessarily have to be a plugin to the game engine. What I was mentioning earlier is that we have ERC20 and ERC1155 compatible implementations.So people can have those types of assets in the game.Some AMMs can be directly integrate in Dojo.We have built the implementation of different kinds of token.Developers’ can use the interface to build the marketplace which can get access to trading experience.
Maxlion(StarkNetAstro):Does Dojo have a plan to go to China to teach Dojo or for Chinese developer?
Tarrence:We don't have a plan for that right now. This is our first kind of engagement with the Chinese community, but we would love to support developers in China building on top of Dojo.One of our teammates as Chinese, he lives in the US.So we don't have a great presence in China, and so if anyone wants to help partner with us or lead the effort, we would be more than happy to support it.
Luke Wang(Web3MQ): I'm just really curious as a core contributor, what kind of contributions and involvement you would be looking for from the Asia-Pacific community, such as plug-ins, infrastructure, or specific games?
Tarrence: One of the challenges with those is that we're in Cairo, and it's a new ecosystem. There are many things in the Ethereum ecosystem that don't exist in Cairo yet. For example, a gradual Dutch auction algorithm and various DeFi primitives that people could introduce to add interesting mechanics to their games. We want to make them easily accessible for experimentation. So, I think contributions of any of those types of primitives would be really appreciated.There are some core issues and a bunch of open issues on the repo related to the roadmap of improving the Dojo stack, which requires relatively deep technical expertise to execute. But if people have the required skill set and want to contribute to it, I encourage them to take a look and let me know. I'd love to help open some space for contributions.For me, I don't have a deep understanding of the Asia-Pacific market and the types of experiences that people are gravitating towards. I think that's probably one of the larger contributions that people in that area, who are immersed in it every day, can make. They can try to build experiences on top of Dojo games and the necessary primitives to enable them. Or they can communicate to us where the gaps are in building those types of experiences so that we can assist. Building cool games on top of Dojo that the communities in that region would be excited about engaging with is crucial. This is a big gap for us because our team is mostly Western-focused right now. Having someone who understands the environment, culture, and the types of experiences people are excited about in that region would be invaluable.Additionally, on the developer experience and developer onboarding side of things, we're interested in helping more developers be productive in the Dojo games system.
Luke Wang: It's actually super helpful. And I think definitely, you know, I think DeFi primitives, those are something that Asian developers have been working on a lot during the last few market cycles, so that could definitely be a good synergy. As for the community, I should mention that I'm Chinese, but I grew up in the Western. I'd love to see how we can build better bridges. And I also want to give a shout-out to Taylor. He's been working quite a lot on bridging the Chinese ecosystem with StarkNet and Dojo. It's an exciting journey ahead, and I'm delighted to hear that Dojo is enthusiastic about it.
Taylor Zhang(MaskNetwork): Lots of contents has already been translated or at least moved over to the Chinese community, and they read it pretty often.I guess lots of people also know me because I've been in the Loot community long enough to witness the journey of Dojo, from its inception to where it is right now. It's pretty amazing to see how it started and where it is today.I have an additional question since we received a storytelling article this morning in English from @fangtingeth. She posted it in Chinese a few days ago, and it was quite popular. I just want to know your take on the storytelling part about launching games, since I think many developer questions have already been asked and answered.
Tarrence: Yeah, I haven't had a chance to dive into it yet. It's on my reading list, and I did give it a quick skim. However, I strongly believe that storytelling is one of the most challenging aspects of building a gaming ecosystem. While there are technical gaps in developing these types of games, we are determined to close them and create a great engine like Dojo. We aim to provide excellent primitives and much more.These gaming experiences serve as a new medium for expressing creativity. In cases like these, storytelling is vital to craft a compelling narrative that resonates with people and fosters a strong community around it. It's a great avenue for various individuals in the ecosystem to contribute without encountering high technical barriers.I believe storytelling can make or break an intellectual property, franchise, or gaming ecosystem, even an autonomous world. Experimenting with different models and structures for creating the lore, background, and history of these universes is incredibly important.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Dojo or Dojo system is the informal lore that has already been created around the different personalities in the Discord community during the early days and the various items.I think storytelling is a critically important element that deserves more attention, especially as we reach a point where the experiences we want to build are possible. Now, we must focus on creating compelling experiences that capture the audience's imagination and offer top-quality, cohesive universes for people to immerse themselves in.
Taylor: That's absolutely true. Thanks for the answer. The talent part initially was Loot, which brought me here, and it also brought many other Loot and autonomous world enthusiasts.
Tarrence: Yeah, and I think that's a valuable point. I think that's also an intriguing area for technical contributions. We should consider what tools and structures are necessary to formalize some of this lore and encode it on-chain, enabling people to collaborate in a way that hasn't been extensively done before. I mean, it might resemble something akin to Wikipedia in some aspects. But should we develop tooling that makes it easier for existing players to understand the existing lore when they join a game?This would help them quickly get up to speed with the universe, characters, different storylines, and so on. I think this could be a fascinating area for experimentation as well.
Taylor: Yes,lots of folks in the Chinese community began testing Loot Survivor, which is one of the very few games already living in the ecosystem, they got really interested. They noticed that the items in Loot Survivor looked similar to the original Loot items. They became curious about the relationship between the original Loot stuff and Loot Survivor. They were quite surprised and intrigued by how the Loot ecosystem and the original Loot lore have evolved.
Derrick: The authorization between a component and a system is by name. If a system owner upgrades its system after authorization, is it safe enough for the component owner?
Tarrence: I think it's something that we probably need some tooling to understand better. Currently, the way authorization works within Dojo involves two roles: owners and writers. Writers can grant access to a system. A system represents the logic of the world, a piece of gaming logic, while components represent the state of the world.For instance, if a system wants to modify a component, such as reducing a player's health, and someone proposes a change, like something falling from the sky and hitting a player, then reducing their health, the owner of that component might accept it as a modification to the game dynamics.However, the owner of the system that created this logic can upgrade the system. Unless they revoke ownership or transition it to a DAO or someone else, like a multisig, they can potentially modify the system to do something malicious, like increasing their own health.
So, there are considerations around when you would want to approve writer status for a system. You probably wouldn't want to allow a new external contributor to introduce a system that can write to core game state without a mechanism for ensuring they can't simply update that system. It may be necessary to require that they transition system ownership to a multisig or some other process before granting them write access to a component.This is indeed a significant consideration and one of the challenges in the idea of fully-autonomous worlds. Managing access control is a complex task, and we can provide more tooling and infrastructure to help facilitate this process, ensuring that changes to the world don't lead to unintended side effects.
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