When tasked with describing the current state of mobile blockchain games, I first had to look at the current state of Web 3.0 gaming. If you have had any exposure to the blockchain gaming ecosystem, you have probably heard the words Axie Infinity, Blankos Block Party, and the one that started it all - CryptoKitties. Okay, so, honestly, this is a nothing burger. So what differentiates the current centralised game development from decentralised game development?
Well, for one, I recently read an article about people in the Philippines playing play-to-earn games full time during the pandemic . In many cases, the people are making more money playing a video game than the jobs they had before. On the contrary, would this story be the same if the game had been published by a single publisher with a centralized, silo'd off ecosystem? I would think not.
There is something that I'm sure we can all agree on - NFT's are the great unlocker, or something to that effect, sounds more inclusive and collaborative. We may also want to explain what potential it unlock>
If you want to look into the future and try to define what mobile blockchain gaming?" will look like, we only need to look to the present. Play-to-earn is a model for games where players can earn real money or other rewards by playing. And that’s just one of the games that has potential in the play-to-earn space - that’s the kind of market Decentralized Gaming is going after and will completely disrupt.
Polygon - a major sidechain - meanwhile has created a full-stack Ethereum scaling solution. That means that it has created its own layer of technology that offloads transactions from Ethereum, as Ethereum can often times be slow, expensive to transact over, and costly for the environment (under the proof-of-work regime). The current state of blockchain games is being squeezed out by high gas fees. Gas fee refer to the amount one has to pay on a particular platform. There are many options that run ontop of Ethereum these chains are called L2's "layer two" that allow for lower gas fees. There are many currently on the market that alleviate this, although Polygon seems the be the winner currently.
Here's is a snippet from Wikipedia for those that are new to the concept.
"A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable.[1] NFTs can be used to represent items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files. However, access to any copy of the original file is not restricted to the buyer of the NFT. While copies of these digital items are available for anyone to obtain, NFTs are tracked on blockchains to provide the owner with a proof of ownership that is separate from copyright."
In other words, for the first time in the history of computing, blockchains have unlocked both digital provenance and provable scarcity on otherwise infinitely reproducible digital assets.
That's yuge.
This uniqueness is what makes NFT's in decentralized gaming so interesting. If you have played games as I have, you may have imagined this character you built up and the possibility of using that character (or their equipped items) in another game and/or blockchain. A description of NFT's is a rabbit hole I wish not to get into. For games having a unique item stored on the blockchain that could have records of all battles played living forever is an interesting thought.
Well, in this series of tutorials on building blockchain games with the ChainSafe Unity Gaming SDK. We will do both:
- We are going to need to download the SDK and set up our development environment.
- We will walk through the SDK and get you up to speed on everything you need to know and the ChainLegos needed to create your decentralized games.
- We will work with marketplaces and apply the knowledge we have gained from learning the fundamentals and will apply this into our own creation.
- We will lay the foundation for our endless runner game that will start as a WebGL browser game publishing this to the web, "the current state of decentralized gaming," and then port that game to give our users a mobile experience "the future".
We are going to need to download the SDK and set up our development environment. We will walk through the SDK and get you up to speed on everything you need to know and the Prefabs needed to create your decentralized games.
We will begin by downloading the SDK from GitHub and then creating a starter project to get the players account information from our MetaMask wallet and display it on screen.
- Follow the link provided and then follow the video tutorial below.
Please visit the link below and follow our newly released documentation and build your first blockchain game.
Lastly, do you want to take a look into the future of Web3 mobile gaming? Check out this updated video from our Head of Gaming.
