Web3 Game Design & Implementation with 14Numbers as a case study

Transcript

Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Peter Robinson and this is the Ethereum engineering group meetup. Um today Penelope and myself are going to talk about web 3 game design and implementation based on a game that we've created. Um and so before we dive into the slides um let's introduce ourselves. So Penelopey why don't you go first? Um, hi, my name is Penelopey. I'm currently a games design student, uh, studying and I have also recently co-founded a game studio and so I'm very excited to be here today.

Yeah. And um yeah, so I'm Peter. Um been involved in product development for an awfully long time, cryptography for 30 yearsish and um blockchain for more than a decade. So um yeah, with that, let's present some slides and talk about um web 3 game design and let's get the right set of things and share. So you can hopefully see these slides and of course our view on the world has suddenly shifted over there but it's all good. Let's just drag that here and I'm going to open up the chat again so we can see the chat whilst we're talking.

Ah the people's all good. All right. So um so I'm from Immutable. Um but you know the words here are my own. Um and Penelopey you're from I'm from SA University College. Y specifically the Boseman campus and all of my words are the accumulative from what I have learned and hopefully I get it right and um together um with um our family we've created what game studios and the first game we've got is 14 numbers um hence the 14 at the bottom right.

So um yeah so this talk is going to talk about the design and implementation of web3 games with a focus on immutable ZKVM. So um we've got a pretty big agenda um to go through. So Penelope is going to talk about just games and web 3 games. Then I'm going to dive into web 3 game aspects of um and then talk about other designing considerations and um you know how do these games try to make money and considerations that you need to be thinking about when you're looking at gaming platforms and then we'll dive into 14 numbers which is

the game that we created and talk about how it works and just use it as a case study. So, I'm gonna hand it over to Penelope. Okay. So, well, web three games are games. Some people get caught up in creating a web 3 game, but they don't exactly remember that they are actually creating a game first and foremost. A good game is something that someone makes someone feel something. However, it can't be described as by one singular piece.

which will not make the game fun. You can't describe a game fun as fun cuz then you've just lost sight of it all. Uh it will become your biggest downfall and fun is an incredibly basic description and what fun is will change person to person. Instead, you should think about what makes the game enjoyable and utilize that. What makes your game appealing is the question that you should ask yourself. Um, you cannot have a web 3 game before you have the core mechanics of your web two game. If your game is awful, people won't play it. When discussing mechanics, that's how does the game actually run? And it's

very it's a long conversation that's too long for now. Um, if you want to make a game, you want to do it so that you can see yourself playing it. Cuz if you don't make a game that you will play, then it will not go great and all it takes is an idea. Going back to the very start, you cannot have a web 3 game before you have the core mechanics of your web 2 game. However, the core mechanics of your game may very well be driven by web 3. If it works really well as a web 2 game and your web 3 game stuff just doesn't add to it, then what's the point in making a web 3

game. However, you can like design it behind web 3 games so that you actually make it that you have to have web three items within the game. So yeah, and a good game can be a good web 3 game. A bad game will be a bad web 3 game and a good web two game could be a very bad web three game. And web 3 does need to make sense within the context of a game. So items that you can get in the game at no cost don't make sense as like NFTTS.

Instead, you need to think of what will add. And a badly designed word free game could detract with the economy. And I am going to hand it over to my dad. Thank you. Thank you, Penelope. So, yeah. So, you can you can have a you've got to have a great game. Um, but a great game, you know, it it could it could come down to how it all inte integrates. And so it's easy to have a you can easily have a a b a good game that just doesn't really work in web 3.

So you really got to think about the whole thing together. So, you know, web 3 games, they're going to allow players to have ownership of tradable assets, the NFTts and also the ERC20s and the 1155s. And so, they can facilitate complex economies and improve multiplayer experience. So, you can imagine you're in some um some shooter game for instance and you've got some sort of skin on your I don't know your equipment and other people can see that and they can go wow they've got the gold equipment and so you know it's a way of trying to do status. Um, it's also naturally social as far as you you've got these things that are tradable. So,

you're you're interacting with people um and you're, you know, it it it improves the ability to um communicate within game. So, getting back to its core though, so what are actually web 3 games? And I think drawing back a web 3 game is a game that uses a blockchain or a chain like thing that's like a blockchain. Um and there are various aspects to this. And the first one that we're going to talk about are game assets. And so web 3 um games can use blockchain blockchains for assets. Sorry, I've got my slides slightly wrong. Yeah, assets,

trophies, currencies, and game logic. So looking at um game assets um they can be say um for a variety of things. So the the far left one is 14 numbers and so game assets are used for the background of the screen. The next one across is guild of guardians and each guardian is an NFT. The next one along is Norma in Metalland and you can have different normas. So essentially different dress styles. Um and they're the NFTts and then you've got hunters on chain and the hunters are

the NFT. Um but then you also have so within this is um hunters on chain you can see that you have a whole variety of different types of things as well that are NFTTS and are useful in the game for various things and um say in Guild of Guardians here you can see you've got artwork so that's traditional NFT art you've got avatar so each player has an avatar and it can be a default one or it can be one of these special ones. You've got the guardians which we've talked about and then you've got pets um and you've got other and in other there's a whole group

of things and there's guild crafting which came along after I um stopped playing the game. So I've played the game a fair bit but I didn't get to guild crafting. So within other assets though you've got um some interesting styles of NFTTS here. So the energy token is something that if you possess then you are allowed to do more things. So there's some things in the game that you would normally get to do say 10 times in a day and this would let you do say 13 times for instance. Um the epic idol you can sacrifice that and then you will randomly get a guardian. And

because it's an epic one, I think you're going to get an epic or legendary with certain drop percentages. So, it's sort of like a loot box. The cracked heart is used um to upgrade a guardian. So, they've got various levels and you can upgrade it from a certain number of um essentially status points to a different number. So they've got more oomph in them based on sacrificing a g an epic um cracked heart and making it more powerful. And so you can see that there are quite a variety of things that you're using in game. It's not just um a player or a piece.

So, um, with these with these guardians, so we're seeing, um, images, but and then you're hear you're hearing NFTTS, but the end of the day, you've got, um, two types of NFT contracts. You've got the 721s and 1155s. And so, with 721s, each NFT has a separate ID. So, a separate um, 256-bit number, which is the token ID. And each NFT is different. So in a lot of games you might though have that you've got say a hundred or a thousand of the same character but they're represented by different ERC 721s.

And why that could be useful is maybe you want to be able to upgrade them. So you remember how I was talking about how within guild of guardians you sacrificed a cracked heart and then you could increase the power of one. So the power is represented in the metadata. Um so hence given that you want to you've got one metadata per NFT you need to have um separate metadata for each um guardian. Hence you um in that case having a 721 makes a lot of sense. A 1155 you have essentially NFT types and so each NFT type has a separate 256-bit ID

and so um game players can own one or more of each of these NFT types. And so it could be used for some sort of in-game currency possibly. um in 14 numbers we've used them as the background. So if I own you know token number 100 and say Penelope owns token 100 they are completely identical. There's no way that say the metadata will ever change or anything like that. Um so in the contracts you've only got ID numbers and which um address owns that ID. The metadata is where you have all of the information related to it. So

this is how you link the image that you're seeing. And so um for 721s it's each token and for 1155s it's each token type. And so those metadata files are in um JSON format. And so for instance, they'll have a name, they'll have an image, they'll have a token ID, and they'll have attributes. So, and there are a few other um basic um types that you can have as well, like I think you can have a video link and such like, but the attributes are completely up to the game itself. And so, for instance, in the 14 numbers, we've got series. So,

we've got gen one, gen two, maybe at some point we'll have Gen 3. We've got different rarity levels. Um, we state what the max supply is. So, obviously, this is something that is completely up to the the owner of the contract. So, we could theoretically mint as many of a token as we liked. Um, but we um for digital scarcity reasons are limiting the supply we mint. And because it's important to our game, there's also the artist involved.

Um, and so how the metadata files are linked to the contracts is a function in the contract. So in 721s, there's a token URI and in 1155s it's just URI. And um for 1155s, they can actually just return a constant string. Um and then uh users of that string then of the contract can then um work out what the actual um link to the specific token will be. And so for instance for token 314,592 it's this here. So this is the

hexadesimal um out to um 32 um or 256 bits um of the token ID. Um okay so with game assets they could be representing ownership. So which player can you say which guardian which character um in game or which um which and game player has a power token for instance and that's represented by an NFT.

Um you could also um to do with it you can also have minting so an issuance so you you um give ownership but in certain situations. So you could have a free mint where anyone can just mint an NFT. You might mint um based on after 30 days of game play. Um you might have another way where you can claim an asset. You might have you might mint um as people um do something in game or you might u mint and then transfer. So different ways of doing things. Another thing you can do with the assets is burn the

assets. So maybe something happens in game and that asset gets destroyed. So the thing with this is that as we all know blockchains are are permanent. And so if by mistake you burn someone's asset um by mistake due to a bug in your code in your game, then um that's going to be a really messy situation to try and sort out. Um, another thing that can happen is you can update the metadata. And so, you know, this is like I was saying about the capabilities of the asset changing.

So, the guardian gaining more capability. So, um, crafting is the idea that you can combine multiple assets together to gain another asset. And so in um Guild of Guardians, again using that as an example, you can have um multiple rare and epic guardians. You combine them together and you get a cracked heart. And then that cracked heart can then be used to um to build up um and you know like increase the um the capability of one of the guardians. So, it's a whole economy there of um getting these um some guardians working together to

create a cracked heart and then using that to improve another guardian. So, with game assets, there are some gotchas that you need to be careful of that um might not exist so much in web 2 games. And probably one of the most complicated ones is asset sync. So, if um I if I've got an an NFT, so I've got a really particularly good um guardian and I sell that guardian um when should I stop having the use of it in game and um or if I transfer it again, you know, when should I um stop

having usage and if I buy it or I acquire it, when can I start using it, you know. So, could it be, you know, so in GOG they were seeing that, you know, someone would have a really expensive guardian and um which would be really powerful and let them do great things and they do a run of the game and then they transfer it to another player who would then do a run of the game. And so, you know, do you ended up introducing a 24-hour cooling off period? So essentially you require a guardian and then you have to wait 24 hours before you can use it. Um so yeah, it's a complicated one and

something to think about. How does it fit into your game play and could people use it to try and you know like play with the system and advance better? Yes, Guardian Flash loan maybe. Um, another really big thing to ponder with the whole web 3 is, and this is this applies to an extent to web 2 as well, is can someone who's brand new to the game spend a hundred or $1,000 and suddenly, you know, they can wipe out people who've been playing the game for a year. So, you've got free to pay people, free to play, should I say, and they haven't paid for anything. Um, but maybe they know other people who, you

know, they say, "This is a great game. You should play it." And then that other person plays it and they spend $20 or $100 or $1,000. And so, you know, like you having your cultivating your freeto pay, free-to-play people is important because they might know a whole heap of other people. They might become an influencer for the game talking about how awesome the game is. So, you don't want to make them feel disenfranchised. So there's got to be ways of in designing the game so that maybe you have some paid people, you know, who've got really good capability end up in one cohort playing and or one leaderboard and there's a different leaderboard

essentially for people who don't have as good guardians cuz they haven't paid. Um, so you've got to still make everyone still feel part of the whole journey and part of the game and not feel disenfranchised. Another gotcha with assets is you've got to think about game life cycle. So, you know, the I've said you along the bottom axis here, I've said it's in days or maybe weeks, but for some games it could even be in hours. Um, hopefully not.

Hopefully it's at least days because you know each game takes an awful lot of effort to create. And so um the idea is though that you know games often go through this peak curve where no one's playing it. You launch it and then suddenly there are a lot of people playing it. Suddenly, you know, lots and lots of people playing it. And then after some time, days, weeks, months, the number of people playing it drops off and eventually you hopefully get to some, you know, time where you've got people continuing to play it for like in a year or two, but you know, that is going to be not as good as the peak. Um and sometimes you can um work on having a double hump or a triple hump by doing

say new launches of a you know version two or some expansion pack or something. um but and that that might cause you a double hump. But um as far as game assets are concerned though, so assume that you know everyone ends up having an NFT in the game and so that means that you know at the peak everyone's got an NFT doing something with that NFT and your game. But then when you suddenly have say a fifth of the people playing the game, you're going to have a glut of NFTts. Sure, some people will earn them and keep them and not do anything with them, but there'll be a whole heap of other people who will um try and sell

them. So, if everyone tries to sell them all at once, then the price of them is just going to crash and um people will feel burnt because they'll have spent some money and suddenly the thing they spent money on is worth nothing and so people will get grumpy. So, what you've got to do then is have a way of people essentially um using up the excess um NFTts and um so, you know, you need to have some way to combine them. So, in Guild of Guardians, you had that thing where you'd have multiple rares and epics and you'd combine them together and then you create this cracked heart. And so you're

essentially burning NFTTS, burning excess NFTTS to create this new thing which is then used to boost a another character. And so it works on reducing supply. So that's one mechanism. And but you need to consider having something like this in the game otherwise you're likely to end up having at least some of your um collection being worthless. and then some people being disenfranchised cuz they'll feel that they've been ripped off or something.

Another thing to think about is do you ever need more than one NFTt? Um so for um for hunters on chain you have these hunters and the thing is that you know there were a range of other assets you could have but really the hunters are the thing and you only ever really need one hunter. So if you buy a better hunter for um then what you're going to do is you're going to probably get rid of or sell your weaker hunter because you don't need it anymore.

There's never really seems to be a reason. So, I've played Hunters on China like for a few months um about a year ago and so the game may have progressed since then, but at least at that point that was how it appeared. And so in Guild of Guardians, you um you you end up having say 20 or 30 guardians. Um but generally have the core five, strongest five you have really are sort of all you need. And there are some circumstances that they've tried to work into the game where in this situation, you know, when you're in this area, you need another guardian, but it's it's very um on the

periphery of the game really. And generally, if you say had the set of five that are on screen right now, um you'd be good to go in 99% of situations. Um, and so I I think the when you're designing a game trying to have um, so this these two people here are um, playing paper scissors rock. And you know, if you think of paper scissors rock, the best thing to have is situational. It's really going to depend on, you know, what the other opponent comes up with. And so if you can have a way in your game that maybe in this scenario it's good to have this one and

in this scenario it's good to have that one or you know and that way you end up wanting to own a variety of NFTts a variety of I don't know guardians or whatever to allow for the various situations that you might be in. Another gotcha that I see a bit is capability inflation. Um, so you go from gen one to gen two to gen 3 where gen one's just this normal thing, gen two's got a few more things on it and gen 3's got yet more. And because you know, you do your gen one sets of NFTTS um related to your game and then you

think, oh, look, we really need to sell Gen two. And so how you sell Gen 2 is you make it more capable and then you end up making Gen 3 even more capable. And I think to an extent you um burn people who've you know invested in say gen one um because then they go oh you know now now I need to you know buy gen two and maybe that disenfranchisizes people a little bit and um I I was talking with James Finlay or we were talking with James Finlay yesterday and he actually said no no you need to break it down into power inflation and attribute inflation. So power inflation would be where the character say has 100% in gen one and they have 110 and

then in gen 225 in gen 3 and people can really see you know straight out oh look it's just that that's got a boost and so you know it's really blatant that we're saying you need to buy the new guardians otherwise you're just not going to be competitive whereas attribute inflation. Maybe there's some new capability that's completely separate that allows you to operate better in this circumstance. So, it's not an not meaning that you know every gen 2 is going to be better than every gen one. Um, it's a way of trying of doing a similar thing but different.

Are there any questions before I go any further? Okay, perfectly clear. Brilliant. Another use of NFTTS is badges or you know trophies, awards and these are essentially soulbound. So you give someone something saying you know you were part of the first cohort to play the game. It's a non-tradable asset. It I think for some game players this has utility. Um but generally it has limited utility I

think. Um but I have seen talk of it used as a way of giving something to the game player that then later on they can sacrifice. So, it's essentially a way of um saying, you know, showing that they did something at some point that later on they can do something with, but you don't want them to be allowed to say sell it. So for instance, you say people who've played the game in the first six months they get this NFT, this soulbound trophy badge thing and then in a year's time um they'll be able to sacrifice it and do something.

So um current currencies so you game currencies can be represented as ERC20 tokens but you know like when should you do that is a really hard question and um so if you want the token to be tradable that's a great idea um and you know it would need to be an ERC20 but you know if you um if the game if the token's going to have really rapid balance changes, um then you know maybe you don't want it to be an ERC20 because you know if it's going to change say once every say minute then that's going to be an awful

lot of blockchain transactions when you end up um having lots and lots of players. So maybe you'd want to have a primary currency that's an ERC20 and a secondary one that's actively used in game. So maybe you have gold or something that goes up and down and with that gold you can buy diamonds and so that would mean maybe your primary currency that's the ERC20 you know maybe at most you might have one transaction a day from a game player whereas maybe there are hundreds of um currency changes for the secondary currency or balance changes should I say. Um, another one way that of approaching this

sort of scene is that you force people to acrewue currency in game and you only allow them to convert to ERC20 once they've got a certain amount or maybe after a certain amount of time or maybe they've got to play the game five times and then they can convert to the ERC20. So, it's all about trying to limit how much how many transactions are going to have to hit the blockchain because, you know, at the end of the day, if you're going to do lots and lots of transactions, then, you know, you're going to end up having to pay for it one way or another.

So, again, with the game currencies, you've got to look to the pay to- win um thing is a is a problem. Another issue is um if you you've got to have utility um and this is the same with any um coin, memecoin or you know altcoin that if you create a currency people have got to be able to use it for something and you end up if you end up say giving it to game players as you know each week we're going to hand out I don't know 20,000 um game coins um if there's nothing for the people to do what they're going going to do is they're going to go to a DEX, swap it, and then, you know, for um fiat currency essentially or, you know,

hard currency like ETH or IMX or something. And so if everyone's dumping your currency because there's no utility, it means that the price is always going to have a downward pressure. So, you know, you don't want to be in that situation. Another thing that you can do um would be to have the game logic on chain. So you know you can put a lot of logic on chain or a little bit of logic on chain or no logic on chain and um so having logic on train chain it's very transparent what's happening everyone can understand how the game works um you know and if there's some reward structure it's really open as to what's

going on and so you know like it's you it's sort of I don't know open mazair as it will all your cards are on the table Um but you know there are some issues with this. So if you've got a lot of logic on chain then that is going to result in a lot of transactions potentially and if your game becomes popular you know will the blockchain be able to keep up? Um you know how you if you have to end up paying for those transactions how are you going to pay for them? Are they going to be economic? Like is each transaction going to have enough economic value to warrant that transaction?

Another aspect is attackers. So if you've got all your code on chain or even some code on chain, then attackers are going to be able to look at it and find bugs in the code potentially and exploit it. So you need to be really careful about looking at um you know if there are bugs in the code on chain. Um the other thing is that you you know you might want to you know games evolve quite rapidly and changing say the game logic in your app say on your on the iPhone or Android is much easier than changing a upgrading a contract on chain and so that's got to be another factor to consider.

Um, another one of course is that if your game logic is complex, then it's going to be super complex encoding that into a contract. And so, you know, you want to be pretty careful about that as well. Um, and then finally, it's about the off-chain and onchain state need to be kept in sync. and trying to think about how that's really going to work is can be quite complicated because you know you um so I think the great example of this is um around um there was a firsterson shooter and someone worked out that the um number of bullets you were using wasn't being kept in sync. So they hacked the game client and had

infinite bullets and were able to do a thousand bullets a second. And so they then ended up just spraying bullets everywhere and, you know, winning when um and that meant that, you know, the onchain state wasn't keeping up with the off-chain state. They weren't being kept in sync. So that was a problem. And maybe that could have been done with um a server and the the client, but it it certainly makes things complicated. So there are other considerations as well.

Um probably one of the big ones is when to sign in. um which you know like sounds um you know like if if you're coming from a um like a enterprise app you know of course everyone signs in but you know if you're playing a game do you really want to sign in and some people will be happy to sign in I think people have got quite used to signing in for say sign in with Google sign in with Facebook but other people maybe they don't want to sign in until they've played the game a bit so What you could do is you can say um maybe you do a sign in when you need to do a s to do something that needs um you

to sign in. Um and that that's an approach. So um you've got generally more control if you force everyone to sign in and um certainly a lot of games that's what they do. They there is only one button. You either click that sign in or you might as well uninstall the app. So it's um a choice point. Um, so another thing to consider is is how playable is the game for free-to-play players? And so this is typically going to be most people when they first play the game. They're not going to have any assets in game. And so, you know, if the game is a bit naff, if you don't have any NFTTS, then that's

going to be the initial experience that everyone's going to have. So, you've really got to be thinking about how to have a good game that becomes better um with NFTTS. Um longevity is a really important thing. And so, um you know, some people will only want to buy NFTts um if they're sure that the game's going to be around for a while. And um you know so you know some people will buy them buy them no matter what but some people they really want to experience the game and then they look at it and they think can I see myself playing this in a year's time or do I think other

people will is there going to be resale value in these NFTts and it's a funny thing that I that you know I'm saying this because there are a lot of web two games all the web two games you buy something in game and there's no way you're ever going to sell it to anyone. So suddenly you've got the option to sell it and then people think about the resale value. But I think that's a psychological thing that some people do. Another consideration is radical transparency. So there's a um website called DAPRAR and DAPRAR um essentially counts the transactions that are hitting a contract. And so

historically it was for things like um um dexes and um some sort of DeFi application. And so you'd list the contracts, but you um can also do it for games. And so you list out all the contracts that are related to your game and then every transaction that hits your contract counts towards how many people are used playing your game. So on the right hand side you've got transactions and the left hand side is the UAW which I think is active wallets in a yeah I think it's user active wallets or something. Um, and so, you know, really off to the left hand side

is how many people are actually playing your game. And so, because this is public, it's good because then when you're trying to fundra, you can say, you know, like what 40 35,000 people each day are playing my game. And then, you know, the people you're fundraising with say, "Ah, are you sure? You know, are you telling the truth?" And you can say, "Look at DAP radar. It's, you know, there it is right in front of you." Um and the thing to think about though with these numbers is that they can be gamed to an extent. So you can um you know like I could create say a thousand wallets and I could pay for transactions to be submitted or I could create a

thousand um passport wallets much harder but I could do it and I could be submitting transactions each day. um wouldn't actually help the game, but it would help manufacture these numbers a bit. Um yet another thing is the Apple and Google App stores. Um so Google Play and Apple App Store. So they've got some complex web 3 policies and um the thing is the policies weren't necessarily written for web 3. And so, you know, it's very it's a bit complicated when you first walk through it. Um I giving advice on it is complicated because um

the questions that get asked change quite regularly as laws um you know are enacted around the world and you know things come and go. So the thing to think about is though that you got to be really careful to be adhering to what the policy is. Um because otherwise you know you might get taken off the store. So which would be you know massive for a game. So it's um something that you've got to keep in mind is working out exactly what you want to do and then trying to understand the policies of Apple and Google. And they're not the same either. they have different policies and um which result in different things in different parts of

the world. Are there any questions at this point? Um, if trading of the game cryptocurrency is not desired, wouldn't the freeze and wipe function work as in USDC? I am not um I am not across the freeze and wipe function.

If you can explain it then I can maybe answer it or we can take it offline and ask we can do it talk about it later. Okay. All right. We'll talk about it later. Um yeah. All right. Let's do that. Okay. How do web 3 games make money? So this is not a definitive guide. This is my own observations.

So web 3 games can use good old web two game methods to make money as well as you know normal web 3 stuff. So they can um have inapp purchases of things. Um but they can um also do you know sell NFTts and ERC20s in app or um they can also have primary sales off outside of the app. Um you can also have royalties um on secondary sales of NFTts. Um and um you could also sell the ERC20 token as well.

Um okay. What is the benefit of a web 3 game to have its own utility token instead of a stable coin or other major crypto currency such as BNB and if that's required or not. Okay, so this is an interesting one. Um, so some games it makes a lot of sense. I mean the reason why you would probably have an ERC20 is that you've created a token out of nothing. So me or you know our game studio What came studios creates a token and say if we sell a million dollars worth of that token somehow then we've made a million dollars which is you know so if we had u if we used say USDC or um

ETH then we wouldn't be making that money because we wouldn't be able to sell it and we'd have to buy it to sell it. So, hence we're better off using a a currency that we've created rather than a currency that already exists. Does that answer your question? Um, okay. So, that answered the question. So, the mainstream gaming community seems deeply skeptical of web 3 gaming.

Mainly, I think because of pay to win and earlier scams. agree. Is that changing? I'd say that um it's changing. Um I think um so leaning on my um immutable knowledge here, I think a lot of major studios and a lot of minor studios are really passionate about um web 3 and um you know see that that is a great opportunity and something for the future. So I think that um the pay to win is an issue in web 2 as well as web 3, but you know, so that's something that does happen. Um it's also to do with we aren't taught it currently and

so it's a very new technology even though it's been around for a while. When uh people are getting taught about it, then it's going to become more mainstream because people know about it. However, it is still worth knowing about. Oh, most certainly. I I think so. I think all of the major game studios are getting into it. Yeah. All right. Look, I'm gonna keep on with the talk and we'll answer the other questions more towards the end. Okay. So, imagine yourself um you you've got a a game that you've downloaded. You realize it's a web 3 game. You go to Token Trove. How much money are you

going to be prepared to spend on an NFT in this new game to you? $1,000 one cent.1 cent and you know and the the thing is how much is that NFT worth? Is it worth the game selling an NFT to you for 1 cent even? So it's a really complicated one and really what it shows is that it's all comes down to marketing. So um you know the the perception of value comes down to um people um you know people's perception of you know is it do I have

does it have utility? So, you know, if if we think of Beanie Babies, um you know, they're these little fluffy things. Um but then some people ascribed $100,000, you know, this little fluffy things worth. And so it's similar similarly, if you have a big marketing effort, then um it will help people know about your game and then people ascribe value to the NFTts in it, so they're more likely to buy those NFTs to play the game. Um otherwise, you know, you're relying on people playing the game and then deciding, hey, my enjoyment of the game would be made better if I owned these other things.

So, you know, really what you want to be doing is building a community which then drives you having passionate game players and then you try and sell them something. So trying to sell them something before you've got the community and the passionate game players um is going to be a hard sell. You know, it's not impossible, but it certainly is going to be hard. And you know, people need to be, you know, like passionate. Like if you're a large game studio that everyone's heard of, people are far more likely to say, "Oh, look, I trust that they're going to produce good game. I trust that the game's not is going to be around for, you know, in years to come, so I'm happy to get involved." Um but if it's a smaller thing, building the community is going

to be what's required. Okay. So what about blockchain um infrastructure considerations? So when you're looking at a platform, what should you be thinking about? And so I'd say probably one of the first things to be looking at is Ethereum virtual machine EVM um is probably the thing you want to be looking at. I think you know there are other VMs out there but going off to some other VM means you know you're not going to be tapping into people who know about Solidity smart contract development. The best tools are for out

there for EVM and you probably want your contracts audited and you know auditors know Solidity know EVM or all of them do whereas you know if you're off in other places then it might be much harder for you. Another thing to consider is finality. Um, so you know, when you have a blockchain transaction, it's final once the block that it's included in is final. And, you know, that means that it can never change. And so, if you're designing a game, having to design where, well, maybe this thing that I've, you know, locked in changes and isn't locked in anymore makes, you

know, that makes life really complicated. So um it's um better to have um you know like single block finality and fast finality. You know you don't want to be um having someone to wait 10 minutes to open a loop box whilst the transactions becoming final. So you know you need it to be pretty snappy. So a a good blockchain has single slot finality. So, as soon as a transaction's in a block, it's done. And hopefully you've got something like 2C block time.

Um, another thing that you want to have is um, if at all possible, free transactions or sponsored transactions. So, you don't want to have to have your game players have to own ETH or IMX before they can play your game because, you know, that that's put a massive bar in the way. So, even, you know, so what what you really want to do is you want to have it that um the game player doesn't even know they're using a blockchain necessarily when they're first using the game. And so they need to be able to not have to pay for gas.

And so maybe it is, you know, so a platform would be good if it gave you free transactions or maybe it says, look, once you're above this threshold, we're going to get you to pay, but once if you're just in small indie game that's just starting out, don't worry, you get, you know, get yourself going and then we'll get you to pay. So, um, you know, that's what you really want to be looking at is, you know, h is there a way for that to happen and can you sponsor the gas for your game players if you become big.

Another part is the crypto wallet. So, you know, with MetaMask, every time um you do a transaction, you have a popup. So if you're in game play, having some cryptocurrency pop up will completely break the game, you know, like loop that working in the game. You here you are, you're in the game and suddenly you've got this thing popping up be horrible. So um you know, you don't want to have in-game popups. Um and you know, preferably you want social login as well. You don't want people having to have some sort of cryptocurrency thing um where they've got to remember some big long password. So being able to just

loging in with Google or login with Facebook or login with Apple is far better. Um and the wallet needs to be NFT friendly. So it needs to show the people what their assets are. And ideally this is their game home. So they have all of their assets there and they have their money there. So they play your game and they play some other game. Maybe they sell some of the assets from some other game or your game and they play yet another game. And so the idea is that they're cycling their all their assets and the essentially the hub of it all is the wallet. And so it's the home.

Um a good game platform needs to enforce royalties. It needs to make sure that no one's operating a marketplace that bypasses your royalties because royalties are going to be a big part of how you make money. Um, another thing you've got to watch out for is the SDN list. So um essentially you don't want to be um being a money laundering e um place for people from North Korea or you know drug people or whatever.

So somehow or other you've got to respect the SDN list that's put out by the US Treasury Department. And so a good blockchain will help you do that and um mean that you don't have to worry about it. they'll just say, "Look, it's all good. We've sorted it out for you." Um, ideally, you will have um example contract tracks and presets that have already been audited, so you don't have to worry about auditing contracts. And um hopefully there's got lots of tools and on-ramps and things so that you've got a whole ecosystem of tools to use the blockchain.

Um and and Probably one of the most important things is a good platform has to have a lot of players. More players means more people who could play your game. And those players need to have lots of games to play. So a good platform is going to have a lot of games too. And um the a good platform also has a lot of money on it. So if um you know you really want to have a platform where there's lots of money so people can um you have got money to spend on your game and you know there's not friction of um say moving money into it or you know

you've got lots of ways of moving money in that's low friction I guess is what I'm saying. Um yeah. Okay. So before I hit the case study, let's I'll go through some more questions. Um so if you own a currency, um you require a listing and liquidity to support ongoing value um of your own gain token. Um which could be a problem. Um what do I think about this? So if you're trying to become get on a centralized exchange, it's going to cost you money for sure.

Um, if you're going to be on a decentralized exchange, then you need to have some liquidity. You can design your liquidity pool though, so you have just a little bit of say USDC or IMX and a lot of the game token. Um about a year or two ago now, look in the YouTube channel, I did a talk on dexes and I talk about how to set up a dex pool where you're only offering a little bit of or no currency. So essentially, you might only have game token and no or little um other token and that can be still a way of people trading the coin.

And then Mark said, "Any thought on EIP1 191712 signed messages as a way of working around the gas issue?" Yes. Um you can do that and in fact um it's actually quite widely used as a way of people um submitting signed data as a way of not having to pay for gas. So that is something that's used um yeah or it is a mechanism.

All right 14 numbers. So as I said Penelopey and I um with help from Elizabeth and Kathy have been working on 14 numbers for about 6 months. And so 14 numbers is a puzzle game. And so everyone in the world is trying to solve the same puzzle each day. You have 14 numbers. So 1 to 10, 25, 50, 75, and 100. And you've got to try and solve three equations for a daily target number. So for instance, on day 170, um the um target was 303, 175 was 430. And so day one was um the 1st of December 2024.

And so the target numbers go between 250 and a thousand. And um so some days it's easy. Um some days are a bit harder. Um I can say that some people are really super passionate about the game. They really love the game. And some people hate the game. They say it's too hard and they say essentially say there should be easy modes or you know there should be ways of getting help. And um the other people though who love the game, they say, "No, it's not possible.

You cannot let anyone um have a you know, we cannot have an easy mode. That's just not possible." Um you know, so it it's really interesting um just seeing the how people react to the game. Um so because everyone's got the same target number each day, um you've got this shared experience thing happening. Um, and it's um, it's a really interesting thing where you can talk to other people about, you know, how you went and um, you know, they can chat to you about it. So, so it's a bit of a social thing as well.

Um, there are free scenes. So, the scenes at the top, the coffee, the um Swedish dogs, and the um fish, the koi, um they're um free. And um then you can have um a range of NFTts that you can own and they're ERC1155s. And um to create digital scarcity, there's a max supply of the different types of NFTts.

And so each day um or each 30 days of game play, you get to claim an NFT. And um when you claim it, it's um randomly selected. and I'm going to do a talk in about a month's time or rather in two weeks time that talk about the claim contract. Um, a requirement for publishing on iOS is that if you've got a loot box, which this is sort of a loot box, maybe it isn't. Um, because people don't have to pay anything to use it. Um because of that um you have to publish the drop probabilities.

The scenes can be also bought on token trove and given we're giving them away we decided we charge 10%. Um, and so you know, earlier I said, well, do you need to own more than one NFT? And the answer to that is you could just play with the free scenes, but some people um like to switch scenes every few days. And people like say different scenes depending on how they're feeling.

And so what I've found is that actually having a variety of scenes actually makes the game more enjoyable. The thought was so we just do Gen One and then um then and that was done really early in game development and then excuse me then as we got closer we to launch we realized that we needed more NFTTS in the game. So, we've minted Gen two.

So, now we're going to um probably have more people play the game, do a bit of marketing, and then eventually we'll have Gen 3 and four. And the idea is that there will because say the mythical Gen 1's, there are only 10 of them. When you've got say thousands of game players, it'll make them super rare. And so, um anyway, that's the theory. We'll see. So how we use the blockchain is knowing who owns what scene.

Um they um we have a checkin each day that your g of game play and that is to update DAP radar stats and also to accumulate towards that 30 days of claim. Um, and then when you do claim, that's another blockchain transaction. And publishing the best score each day is another blockchain transaction. The we chose to use passport as the identity provider. Um, and this is good because then we don't have to worry about any PII.

Um, and we give the game players the option to skip, but then they can sign in when they need to do a blockchain thing. Um, and so Passport does allow us to get the email address, which we could use for marketing. Um, but we don't gather it. And I think we really need to have some sort of little tick box somewhere saying, "Hey, are you happy for us to use your email address to market to you?" So, we don't do that. So we don't gather the email address. Um so we um needed to to in comply with some UK law um the new crap new crypto asset rules to drive growth and protect

consumers to have a an investor warning. And so um it's funny that um even though we've just got NFTTS which are you know like and surely people and then people are getting them for free to comply with Apple's requirements and the UK law we needed to have that little investor warning button that took people to this web page here which then told them essentially that watch out you could lose all your money.

Um, we also needed to have a delete my account feature. And so, um, we if people click on delete my account, it takes them to a page that explains to them how to delete their Google account, Facebook account, Apple account or immutable passport. We use Unity. So in um on Immutable um I think the observation's been that we've got I think it's 80 or 90% of games are built using Unity. Um we use Nthereum for um doing view calls on the blockchain because um Unity uses C. We use immutable passports um unity SDK

um and we've bought licenses for all the images from Shuttertock. Um another implementation note is that you know you need to manage the um blockchain transactions and so they can take about 8 seconds and um sometimes they do time out. So if the chain's really um being hammered um maybe or maybe your network connection's not quite right, not quite working, then maybe the connection times out. Um so you need to be able to resubmit transactions.

You need to handle reverts. So if the contract reverts, then a transaction is going to fail. So you need to be able to handle that. And you also need to be able to handle passport signin status. So we're using um orth zero and orth zero at times can require a relog in. So the user the game player could you know say log me out on all these devices and all these situations and so that means that at any time you might need to have relog the user in and you got to be able to handle that.

So things that we've decided to avoid um but we might add later maybe is so we're not doing any inapp purchases at all. So on Apple and Google if you do an inapp purchase of an even of an NFT or anything else you've got to give them 30%. Um and um we don't have a direct link from the game to Token Trove um or any other secondary marketplace. And so historically um you you know this is banned if you're an app on Apple or Google. However um the um a game studio large game studio

has won a big court victory in the USA. So now if your app's in the when it's in the USA, you can have a link. And exactly how that works. If you've got an app that's global, I don't know. Do you have a special version for the USA that links to Token Drove? I'm not I'm I think it'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the coming year or so. Um if you had an inapp secondary marketplace, then Apple or Google would want to take 30%. And so, you know, I don't think that works really because that means that someone would be trying to sell something to another game player and, you know, you're going to want to take some cut for your royalty and then

Apple are going to take 30%. Um, which seems like a lot. We also don't have any in-game currency in ERC20 either. Um, I I'd really encourage you to download and play the game. It's a great game. Um, it's something that you can play every day and it's really good. So, in summary, um, I think rather than being obsessed with creating a web 3 game, be obsessed with creating a good game, a great game.

Um, you know, you don't get overly obsessed with web 3 game. Think about I'm creating a game. Web 3 gaming brings great opportunity. So, you know, you've got um game players, they're getting ownership of their assets. Studios, you know, they've got this resale value that may lead um some players to more heavily invest. Um and you know, you've got these royalties. Um but it brings complexities. You got to interact with this blockchain. You got this crypto wallet to worry about. And you know, you've got to think about how to handle play to win or pay to win. So, you know, it's complicated to make this work.

The um the the merch store for the meetup is still open and we have got a stack of um talks coming up. Um in fact, the next one is on at 9:00 um next week um next Wednesday and it's on subgraphs and data pipelines. Um then a week after that I'm doing the NFT claim contract and talking about how I've got to do um random onchain and it's secure. And then we've got like a whole stack of talks as you can see. And if you're here watching this live, there's the YouTube channel. If you are um on YouTube and you want to ask tricky questions live,

please um um register and come along to the meetup. Um and with that I will stop sharing and say so are there any questions? Solid. Ah solid. Yeah, we've we've someone's going to ask a really complicated question in the YouTube comments, I think. So, Michael, how are you? And what complicated questions do you have for us?

Um, I'm fine. And, um, I'm all good for the moment. My brain is full. There you go. All right. Look, um, thank you everyone for coming along today. Um, have a great week and talk to you all later. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thanks.