The Moloch Simulation is an on-chain turn-based cooperative MMO where players will have to join forces to conquer new territory by defeating dungeon keepers and thus obtain precious resources.

Players will use their UBI to acquire new worlds to explore and craft robots to harvest resources and destroy their enemies.

Will you contribute to the common goal or run away with the precious resources?

Welcome to the first dev blog of the on-chain game The Moloch Simulation

Every Monday, I'll make a post to share with you the progress of the game, as well as in-depth explanations of the different technologies I'll be using. My English is not very good, so I will try to make quick drafts to illustrate what I am saying.

For this first post, I will quickly introduce myself and the basics of the game.

I'm Nolan Vanmoortel, 24 years old Belgian freelance developer specialized in artificial intelligence. I've been following the evolution of cryptos for more than seven years, and I had the chance to be an early adopter of many decentralized finance protocols.

This opportunity allowed me to be safe financially. Now I wondered about the usefulness I could have to make things move forward. I wanted to have a positive impact on the poorest. I'm not very good at social things(autistic), so I will limit myself to what I'm good at, coding.

The best way I've found to impact the poorest is to use Proof of Humanity's universal income, UBI. Since the UBI has no use at the moment, it has decreased enormously in value. Due to the Ethereum transaction fee, it has even become inaccessible for the poorest. I think validity rollup will solve this problem (StarkNet). So I decided to create a game using this currency, and I hope to give it back some value.

The Moloch Simulation is an on-chain turn-based cooperative MMO where players will have to join forces to conquer new territory by defeating dungeon keepers and thus obtain precious resources.

Players will use their UBI(UBI=Time=Free-to-play) to acquire new worlds to explore and craft robots to harvest resources and destroy their enemies.

Each world is an NFT that the player can buy(with UBI). There are different types of worlds with various difficulties, resources, and dungeons. A world is split into different zones with limited resources and dungeons. To reach the next zone, you must increase your influence.

The influence increases when you win a fight against a dungeon keeper. Once your influence is strong enough, you will unlock new zones. You will have to coordinate with other players to continuously beat the guardians because your influence will automatically decrease with time.

When your influence drops, you will lose control of the zones. Once it drops to 0, your enemies will destroy the world and all the robots on it.

To progress, the world owner will have to invite players to join him. But these players will also be able to collect as many resources as possible and run away to sell them, leaving a world without any resources to harvest for the adventurers still present.

To participate in this adventure, each player will need a robot represented on-chain by an NFT. This robot can be freely bought from another player or built. The player will need a single-use recipe, sold by the DAO(UBI) and specific resources to build a robot. There are different types of robots with specific combat abilities and characteristics. Some robots are specialized in attack, others in defense, map control etc. or even resource harvesting.

The robots will gain levels by winning battles, which increases their characteristics and allows them to evolve. When a robot is ready to evolve, you need to buy the recipe and get all the required resources. The evolved robot will be back at level 1 but will be much stronger than the previous one at the same level, and it will be able to unlock new evolution.

The battles in the dungeons are turn-based, which makes them 100% on-chain, so no cheating is possible, and no server is required. We will use StarkNet, a layer two on Ethereum (Validium/volition), to reduce costs and latency. Each turn, the robot will have a certain number of action points, which it can use to attack or move.

The enemies will destroy all robots (NFT burn) when a fight is lost. A program under the control of the DAO of the game manages enemies, using, for example, multi-agent recurrent neural networks. This program will be open source to ensure the same difficulty for all players. Players can seize the decentralized court of Kleros in case the DAO would advantage one player by facilitating the fight.

Each zone has resources that grow naturally. Resource gathering is completely on-chain, and is represented by fungible tokens. The smart contract will control the harvesting requirements(time to grow and to harvest). When a player harvests a resource, this resource disappears, leaving you with resources and sometimes seeds to replant (quantity depending on characteristics).

We can reduce the impact of bots by restricting the access of unverified humans to the first zone. The player will need to be verified on Proof Of Humanity to access the following ones. It is also possible to launch random fights during the harvesting to make the automation more complex.

All players can collect resources on the world, so you have to be careful about who you invite to your world.

The DAO will be responsible for selling the world, as well as the robot recipes(UBI). The DAO will also need to adjust specific parameters to balance the game(quantity minted of world and recipe, price, incentives, etc.).

The quantity of each type of world (or recipe) minted can be adjusted, for example, depending on the number of active players. These worlds will feed an AMM to allow the price to vary according to the demand, so if the players strongly appreciate a world (interesting resources for resale?), it will increase in price and vice versa, for example, by making a reverse auction with continues liquidity.

The DAO may also offer UBI rewards at the end of a dungeon to encourage players to fight and consume resources to build better robots.

This week I will start working on the design I would like for the game. For the moment, I'm thinking of going for 3D Moebius-like. The Babylon js library allows building 3D games directly in the browser. The Moebius style should be pretty light to run because there is not much lighting. I can use a fixed camera(isometric view), allowing optimization by removing non-visible polygons.