An introduction to various technologies and high-level techniques you can use to get started in building your own blockchain integrated video games.

So maybe you’ve heard all the craze about blockchain gaming and Metaverse tokens, which have taken the world by storm recently.

This guide will cover some of the relevant technologies, libraries and give a high-level overview of Web3 concepts to help you get started in building your very own blockchain integrated video game!

Disclaimer: All views expressed are personal opinions and are in no way tied to any of the external products or projects referenced.

I’m sure many game developers new to blockchain and crypto will ask — why?

Possibly one of the most known advantage of blockchain gaming, is the difficulty to spoof/hack items or the system, since as a developer you are able to make sure that your video game logic verifies the user has the item, according to the blockchain.

This also adds value to your items outside the gaming world, for example NFTs as gaming items can now be traded between players on a market place such as OpenSea. If you are using a well supported currency (e.g. ETH) then players would be able to exchange items for real life rewards.

Traditionally, you would probably store all of this info for a multiplayer game in the cloud and pay to host it. In this case, the blockchain itself will also act as your data store, so it’s also one less thing to worry about.

If you are new to the programming world, I would first take a look at some example projects for 2D / 3D games using known game engines, which will let you build and ship games for Desktop, Mobile and Web platforms such as:

If you are already familiar with game development, then you will probably feel right at home!

Of course you can always build your own game engine, but I would not recommend this unless you are already experienced with graphics and physics simulation.

As you will probably know, the key thing about blockchain gaming is the integration with the blockchain. Although you will be using traditional game engines, you can use various API’s and SDKs to interact with Web3.

If you are building your game in Unity or Godot, then most Dotnet libraries will work. The following are frameworks for access various blockchains from C#:

A good example to get started is Nethereum’s Unity Hello World guide.

You will be able to use these various SDKs directly within your game development code in C#, for Unity and Godot.

Similarly, for Unreal engine you can interact directly with blockchains similarly via several C++ SDKs, or even using blueprint libraries such as Etherlinker for no code!

Most of the functionality will remain the same across different APIs, such as creating wallets, interacting with smart contracts and sending tokens.

Now that you are able to communicate with your desired blockchain of choice, what do you do with it?

Well this is up to you as a developer what kind of information you want to store on the blockchain, whether its individual items, characters or anything you can think of.

A good example, could be to store an item (of some kind of rarity) as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token), for example on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC721 Smart Contract. What this would mean, is that when a player logs in, you would need to check the contents of the player’s wallet to determine what item’s they have, and load/render it accordingly in the game.

But don’t let your imagination stop you with simple items as NFTs! You can create Smart Contracts to represent data of almost any form such as experience points, levels etc. and read and write to these from your game.

Naturally, these techniques discussed are game type agnostic so you can use them for every game from 2D side-scrollers to VR FPS/RPGs.

Now that you understand the basics and some of the tech in getting started to build your own blockchain game, I would recommend following up with some of the tutorials I have mentioned above, alongside learning more about blockchain fundamentals: