Our vision is to revolutionize the Web3 gaming landscape by providing a seamless, decentralized gaming experience that enables fair play and efficient rule enforcement, leveraging the full potential of blockchain technology and empowering both developers and players in the process.
What challenges do users face with Web3-based multiplayer games?
In Web3-based multiplayer games, ensuring fair play and rule enforcement is crucial to prevent players from gaining an unfair advantage and negatively impacting the gaming experience. However, current Web3 games are not effectively utilizing blockchain technology to address this problem, as the need for frequent crypto wallet interactions and waiting for transaction confirmations adversely affects user experience. Consequently, many Web3 games still depend on centralized systems for handling game logic processing and rule enforcement.
What obstacles do Web3 developers face?
Developing on-chain games presents unique challenges, such as determining which components to place on-chain, ensuring cheat-proof and secure off-chain client communication, and navigating uncharted territory without established guidelines. These complexities often hinder developers from focusing on their game logic.
How does GameJutsu aim to address these challenges?
GameJutsu tackles these notorious issues, enabling developers to focus on their core game development. The majority of communication between game clients occurs via game-specific state channels, infrequently anchored in on-chain contracts, similar to hybrid voting in DAOs. This process involves signing all actions with players' private keys and transferring them off-chain, while still providing the option to verify signatures in a contract. Importantly, GameJutsu incorporates a unique approach that eliminates the need for signing every game move with Metamask or similar tools.
How can one begin using GameJutsu once it's available?
Gaming platforms can effortlessly integrate GameJutsu's classical multiplayer games, tailoring the appearance to align with their brand. This offers users a seamless, web2-style experience while maintaining the advantages of trustless gameplay. For developers, GameJutsu supplies the essential components for building new trustless games without incurring infrastructure support costs. By deploying a contract containing game rules and a static web client to distributed storage, developers can overcome previous limitations that required players to send transactions for each move, enabling the creation of engaging multiplayer games. GameJutsu paves the way for developers to craft trustless multiplayer games that truly captivate players.
An overview, including technical aspects (in development):
We are currently developing a framework that aims to simplify on-chain game creation by leveraging state channels, highly formalized game rule definitions, and session keys, which eliminate the need for users to sign every move with their wallets.
GameJutsu, inspired by Magmo's ForceMove whitepaper, is being designed to be more developer-friendly and easier to use. While ForceMove is a robust protocol, its strictness and complexity can make it challenging for less experienced developers to adopt. Our in-development GameJutsu framework offers increased flexibility and allows for more freedom in client-to-arbiter communication, potentially requiring less intricate code in game definitions.
We are utilizing XMTP as the in-game transport layer, ethers.js for session keys, signatures, and contract interactions, Wagmi and RainbowKit for handling common front-end tasks, TypeScript and React for building webpages, and Solidity and Brownie for coding and testing contracts.
Is a state channel-based protocol necessary for on-chain games, and why?
The blockchain community has anticipated decentralized games since 2015. While CryptoKitties made waves during their time, many of today's on-chain games resemble the legendary NFT game in various ways. Some games focus on monetary aspects, featuring non-transparent yield-farming-style incentives or centralized structures, and others combine both.
So, why aren't more games harnessing the full potential of blockchain technology?
Candidly, coding on-chain game logic is challenging. For example, the ChainHackers team recently completed coding checkers on JSLigo, and it was far from simple. Players often find it disruptive to interact with browser wallet pop-ups and pay for every click, which significantly hampers the gaming experience. While the issue of sending blockchain transactions can be partially resolved by collecting multiple player signatures and verifying them in contracts later, it still requires a pop-up and button click per move, which is far from seamless.
Games can progress as swiftly as game clients exchange signed messages and process them. With message sizes under 1KB and today's internet speeds, this is considerably fast. The game ChainHackers developed for the ETHOnline 2022 Hackathon demonstrates an old-fashioned gaming experience with minimal extra clicks, proving the potential for creating engaging and decentralized games using state channels and session keys.
Don't miss out on the opportunity to revolutionize the gaming experience. Explore the potential of state channel-based protocols for on-chain games and join the movement in creating a more engaging and decentralized gaming world. Get started today!