How does Starknet promote the development of games on the chain?

Author: StarkNet Chinese

Using Cairo, Starknet's native language, further enhances the ability of on-chain games to succeed as they can handle massive amounts of computational data, perform ultra-efficient verification, and provide a silky user experience through account abstraction.

Featured Quick Facts

• Starknet is redefining the crypto gaming industry by providing fast, low-cost and secure transactions on Ethereum.
• On-chain games such as Realms and Influence developed on Starknet show the potential of crypto games.
• Starknet leverages Cairo, an ergonomic, developer-friendly Rust-like language for game development.

Crypto games, which give people the ability to own and transfer in-game assets, have been touted for years as having the potential to transform the gaming industry. Ownership is only the starting point for blockchain games, and the greater potential is reflected in the DeFi-style revolution in the decentralization and interoperability of on-chain games. Unfortunately, the slow and expensive reality of blockchain transactions prevents this potential from being fully realized.

Starknet is changing that by enabling fast, low-cost transactions while providing the security of Ethereum. The throughput of Starknet has increased significantly recently, and there are already a number of on-chain games under development that are about to realize the potential of on-chain games. Two of those games are Realms and Influence. Below we’ll talk about what those two games are, what Starknet features are helping them build next-gen systems, and how you can get involved with both games!

First, let’s take a quick look at how Starknet is enabling on-chain gaming.

Starknet and Cairo

Starknet is a powerful rollup layer (L2) built on top of Ethereum. This means that transactions are not only fast and cheap (since they are aggregated on L2), but also secure. Recent Starknet upgrades have dramatically increased the number of transactions per second (TPS). This is critical for a transaction-intensive industry like on-chain gaming.

Cairo is a Rust-like smart contract language that allows developers to easily build provable applications that fully exploit the scaling potential of STARK. Several game projects (such as Influence, Realms, Topology, Briq, Cartridge, Dojo game engine, etc.) are using Cairo to build on Starknet. The Cairo 1.0 release makes Starknet more user-friendly than ever, so if you last coded in Cairo 0, it's time to try Cairo 1.0. Check out this developer guide on how to go from Solidity to Cairo.

Now, let's explore the upcoming challenges and new possibilities of the first public releases of these two big games on Starknet - Influence and Realms.

Realms

Realms.World is one of the pioneers in the field of on-chain gaming. They are developing multiple games and building a "creator studio".

Realms is inspired by a project launching on Ethereum in 2021 — Loot. The project aims to lead the development of a fantasy world to be owned and built by the community on the blockchain.

The idea of collectively building a fantasy world on Ethereum using smart contracts as building blocks has attracted many developers and gamers who realized the potential of decentralization, open source, and self-hosting for games.

In creator-centric Web2 games such as Minecraft and Roblox, game users are still visitors to the publisher's world. And the game world built on the chain, once deployed, they are independent of the original deployer, and anyone can build on it. For gamers, the promise of games on the chain is not limited to the "right to adapt games" and the ownership of game assets, but a new way of building and playing games together.

Inspired by these possibilities, the Realms community formed the Bibliotheca DAO to facilitate the development of an on-chain game world that includes both the lore of Loot and its own lore. The DAO and Realms projects were early adopters of Cairo and Starknet, as well as early explorers of the new possibilities that Cairo and Starknet offer for on-chain gaming.

Eternal Realms 和 Loot Survivor

Eternum is a strategy game that combines gameplay from popular browser games like Travian and Tribal War with game modes from board games like Catan and Risk, with some economic references. The 8,000 Realms of Eternum are separate realms, managed and developed by the lord of each realm. Eternum is an eternal game, which means that as long as Ethereum is producing blocks, it will continue to run, and what happens in this world will determine the direction of the game.

Loot Survivor is a session-based game and one of the first complex, fully-on-chain games to run on any L2. In this game, every step of the way players will encounter beasts, traps, and opportunities to upgrade their weapons and armor. The complexity of the game benefits from Starknet's fast, low-cost, and verifiable computing power. Loot Survivor is the first instance of an "immutable arcade machine" backed by a zero-knowledge proof (ZK) circuit.

Influence

"Influence is a highly strategic, socially interactive space colonization game where players vie for dominance and control of colonies within the newly formed Adalian asteroid belt."

— Chris Lexmond, CEO of Unstoppable Games and founder of Influence

After escaping a dying Earth, humanity's new frontier is the asteroid belt of the Adalia galaxy. These 250,000 asteroids, each with their own unique mineral composition, are orbiting the Adalian star in real time. Players will compete in many ways: mining, building, trading, traveling, researching and fighting.

In the first version of the game, Exploitation, the player's focus was on establishing a colony in the Adalia galaxy and laying the foundation for a player-driven in-game economy.

In the next stages of the game—"Discovery" and "Conflict"—the player's focus is on technological advancement and the conflict between asteroids. By this time, the game will have evolved into a fully fledged PvP war experience.

Influence gives players the freedom to choose whether to have their own asteroid, or start their journey on Adalia Prime. Adalia Prime, the largest asteroid in the system, is an open land where all players can mine valuable resources and start expanding their influence. Interestingly, the structure of the asteroid belt follows the principles of real-world orbital physics.

Unstoppable Games is about to launch the first fully playable version of the game on the testnet, known as a "pre-release".

Currently, more than 15 independent applications are being built with Influence Contracts at their core, and this is only possible with an open, permissionless framework like blockchain.

Blockchain Game Revolution

1. Eternity: Both Realms and Influence are designed to be eternal games. As long as the logic of the game remains on-chain, and the underlying blockchain on which the game is built remains active, the game will exist forever and can run independently of the game developer. Additionally, since the entire game logic exists on-chain, others can build on top of the game code.
2. Empowering players and third-party contributors: Going beyond the boundaries of traditional games, players can play an important role in the design and development of the game, including creating analysis tools, resource managers, or DPS dashboards, etc. This player-driven evolution helps the game continue to grow and creates a vibrant ecosystem.
3. Strengthen the control of game assets: Players can freely buy, sell and trade assets without being restricted by central institutions.
4. The Power of Dojo: For Realms creators, building games with Dojo, the world's first proven game engine, makes life a lot easier for game developers. Click to learn more about Dojo.
5. Use Cairo as a bridge: From the Realms codebase it's obvious that the game is written in Cairo. As the game industry shifts from Web2 to Web3, Cairo, as a Rust-like language, can play a vital role in Starknet's game field: game developers familiar with Rust-like languages can transition to blockchain game development, and Cairo can be used in this In this case, it acts as a bridge.

“Starknet is playing the long game, and in software, the long game is the game you want to play. Because there are a lot of optimizations coming to CairoVM in the near future.”

— Realms Developer

in conclusion

Blockchain-based games empower players and lead the game industry into a new era. These games are based on decentralization, foster a player-led economy, and promote the vitality of the game community. Additionally, it encourages innovative gameplay, resulting in a vibrant and growing ecosystem.

Using Cairo, Starknet's native language, further enhances the ability of on-chain games to succeed as they can handle massive amounts of computational data, perform ultra-efficient verification, and provide a silky user experience through account abstraction. Additionally, transaction costs will be further reduced as enhancements like Volition and native account abstraction are integrated into Starknet. As Starknet's orderer continues to improve, transactions will also become faster and faster. With the continuous progress of the entire ecosystem, the game industry and Starknet have shown a bright future beyond imagination.