We will bring a simple dungeon game, Chaintrap, to Optimism Goerli. We are requesting a modest grant to achieve this. After the successful completion of this project, we anticipate to be well-positioned first (1) to deploy Chaintrap to mainnet and then (2) to bring a more ambitious project to Optimism: our ultimate goal is to build a multi-chain game development platform. With this project, we take a modest first step towards that ultimate goal.
Why propose a simple game project if our end-goal is to build an on-chain game development platform, you may wonder?
Chaintrap, our dungeon game, will serve as a laboratory to understand the needs of game developers building on-chain as well as the preferences of players. It will include what we think are a number of cool new features that on-chain gaming offers, which we hope will convince a greater number of game developers to integrate on-chain features into their games. Building this game on Optimism Goerli will help us make sure we are building what Optimism’s (gaming) community needs the most.
Chaintrap will use ERC-1155 (multi token) and ERC-2535 (diamond proxy) contracts in combination with decentralized storage approaches (such as IPFS or Arweave) as the basis for game and game content ownership.
It will showcase simple uses of both generative AI and VRF-seeded procedural generation. The VRF procedural generation is used to make dungeon maps which are entirely navigable on-chain and which the creator can demonstrate authorship for. The generative AI is used to enable easy personalisation of the created maps and in-game items. We intend to take that further in time (beyond the scope of this particular project) to include content beyond the pre-production demonstrator level envisaged in this project.
Chaintrap’s gameplay is based around a ‘commit /reveal’ model. The dungeon creator hosts a session and in classic “D&D” style tells players the consequences of each move or turn. At the end of play, the map and its configured traps and rewards are revealed. A transcript of all dungeon master statements and player choices is compared against the revealed map and rewards or penalties are handed out accordingly.
The map, each game session transcript, dungeon traps and rewards are all minted on an ERC-1155 contract. Winning the game grants ownership of the record of victory (“You got minted, mate!”). Hang the record of your victory on your wall forever.
We feel that this relatively simple offering gives us a way to focus clearly on the needs of players and gives us visceral experience of the pain points of developers, even those who may not care one way or another about blockchain. Illustrating these mechanics in a simple game is a stepping stone to producing a platform and SDK which generalises these facilities for on-chain games.
We operate our own SAAS to host content generation services for convenience. To provide trust in the generation we plan to open source the (deterministic) generation tool.
As part of our journey we looked hard at alternate consensus approaches that could better meet the needs of on-chain gaming. While advancing this is not our focus, we currently host a test net operating our implementation of “Robust Round Robin” consensus. The demo we have currently can run on this network and on Polygon (which, as our demo shows, makes the game look broken), and - we expect - any ethereum-compatible chain