When tasked with describing the current state of mobile blockchain games, I first had to look at the current state of web3 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 Philipines 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. So, in essence would this story be the same if the game was centralised? I would think not. There is something that I'm sure we can all agree on NFT's are the great divider. If you want to look into the future and try to define what mobile blockchains will look like. We only need to look at 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, and that’s what Decentralised Games is going after. Polygon another major bockchain, 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 that cryptocurrency platform is slow and expensive and costly when it comes to environmental effects.
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."
This uniqueness is what makes NFT's in decentralised 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 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 follow the video tutorial below.
If you have followed the tutorial and seen your account information, you have successfully configured ChainSafe Unity gaming. Follow the link below and get your POAP for completing this stage coming soon.
Next, we will go over the different prefabs we will be using to build out our decentralized game. The SDK provides you with prefabs that contain all the functionality you need to build out your game. The only editing you will need is to update your smart contract address and network that you deployed your contracts too. This will be covered also. For now let's look at how all these pieces work together.
TODO: Insert Video Deploying Building Minting NFT open sea testnet
TODO : Insert Video Building out simple Endless Runner in Unity3D with NFT as character
Thanks for following this intro tutorial to building decentralized games using the ChainSafe gaming SDK. We will be continuing this tutorials series. So please follow and subscribe to this following series.