The Beginning
In the spring of 2021 we started talking about how blockchains could be used to make a new kind of game. Between us we’d built more than 100 games in our careers already, but we were taken with the idea that this web3 thing offered a genuinely new design space.
Early on we took the view that we should focus on games that wouldn’t be possible without decentralised technologies. Designing new kinds of game experiences is a harder task than revising existing ones, but then as now, we feel it leads to a more interesting destination.
Game 1 - The Crypt
Shortly after signing an office lease and making some great hires, the Loot NFT was released. An onchain game asset generated from a smart contract, designed to be used in game projects. It challenged the idea of what a game asset should be, and felt like a good idea for us to cut our web3 teeth on.
We built The Crypt, a fully onchain game running directly on Ethereum, whose gameplay involved collaborating with other holders of Loot to defeat onchain dungeons. It was a co-op game that made use of a new feature for videogames: interoperability.
We learned how to write a smart contract in solidity, how to optimise it, how to design a game with a two-minute transaction time and how to handle community-owned IP. A whole set of things that you don’t have to consider when making a PlayStation game.
The result proved really popular. All dungeons were defeated within 15 minutes, so we did what any self-respecting game developer should do after a successful game launch - we went to the pub.
We continued developing chapters of The Crypt, trying out new ideas like ‘gas-less’ transactions (using a Polygon relay) and dungeons that required a combination of Loot-derived NFTs to succeed.
Composability
A surprise in Chapter 3 of The Crypt was when an unknown developer extended our onchain codebase to find optimal raiding strategies. The idea of modding is not new to games, but seeing your core game experience evolve permissionlessly was. The composablilty of onchain games became a key area of interest to us in subsequent games.
Game 2 - Dawnseekers
After a seed investment round led by Bitkraft, and a mixture of game- and web3- focused funds, we started thinking about our next game. We wanted to extend the world of The Crypt, but needed to work with the constraints inherent in blockchain technology. So real-time combat was out, but a slower-paced game in a persistent shared world seemed like it could work. Let’s make an MMO! How hard can that be?!
We moved blockchain from Ethereum to Starknet and created some early prototypes, which focussed on exploring an onchain map. We also met a whole bunch of people working on similar projects, brought together by the idea of Autonomous Worlds. Along the way we built infrastructure to compensate for the shortcomings of using a blockchain as a game server, including client-side proofs and account abstraction.
Game 2 - Dawnseekers Downstream
By Christmas 2022 we recognised that the scope of Dawnseekers was getting too large, and that our key feature of composability was getting buried. We took a step backwards to go forwards, stripping back the game and bringing composability front and centre. Downstream shares DNA with Dawnseekers but is much clearer in its mission.
Games like Dark Forest and OPCraft included composability, where the community had expanded the functionality of the game. We wanted to take that idea further by building composability into the game design itself, so that the game’s features and strategies would evolve as the community built new parts of the game. Furthermore, we wanted all players to see these new parts with a minimum of headache, so we built technology that presented them to all players as they were deployed.
This, we believe, is a first in the games industry. Mods that show up for all players automatically is not something we’d seen before. It was a good day in the office when we finally got it working!
Mainnet Launch
As part of the launch of the Redstone layer 2 blockchain, we released a version of Downstream for builders and players. Although primitive, it included many features which were world firsts.
- A game world that lives forever on a blockchain.
- A digital physics system built from atomic units, which dictated the rules of the world.
- A no-code system that allowed anyone to deploy a smart contract that extended the functionality of the game.
- A custom bundler and indexer that optimised transaction times.
- A form of decentralised publishing that allowed people to own zones, where they could build experiences.
A community of builders proved that talented people could and would build in Downstream. They built a version of Among Us, a strategy game, a single player quest, a game that connected four separate onchain games into one, an AI agent and many other weird and wonderful experiences. It featured heavily in the Autonomous Anonymous conference.
Playerchains
After the launch, we got together as a team and asked ourselves what we’d want to improve. We’d learned that people preferred to build discreet experiences rather than experiences in a shared world, and asked ourselves whether we could approach decentralisation in way that allowed us to create a more performant experience. After all, a two-second transaction time is incredible if you’re used to transaction times on Ethereum but slow if you’re used to playing videogames at 60 frames per second.
Our solution involved rethinking blockchains entirely, by making the players of a game the nodes in a blockchain, rather than using a different set of computers that took time to reach consensus and needed to be incentivised with gas fees. We called this idea a ‘playerchain’.
This is infrastructure that we will use to power the next version of Downstream. It’s technology that will allow for updates of 50ms instead of 2000ms, plus some other affordances that address issues we uncovered in the last two years.
As of writing, we’re building a simple proof-of-concept game called Space Shooter that proves to ourselves and anyone else curious, that there’s more than one way of approaching decentralisation in videogames.
The Long, Dark Corridor
Building decentralised games is hard for a number of reasons: there are no playbooks to follow, the tech is immature and nobody has much product/market fit.
But we’re some way down a long, dark corridor that leads somewhere different. We’re pushing in a direction that we believe will result in new experiences, and although that often feels like hard work it’s a small price to pay for changing the world!