Game3.js Newsletter #3
Updated onboarding, rethinking game economies, and Today's Open-Source Game: Mindustry
Welcome to Week #3 of the Game3.js Newsletter!
We started Game3.js with a vision:
5 to 10 years from now, what will fully realized Web 3.0 games look like?
Today’s blockchain games are just the early iterations of Web 3.0 games. A fully realized Web 3.0 game will need to be more compelling than web, mobile, console, and VR games. Their virtual economies will need to have the same utility as those of sovereign fiat currencies. They will need to provide more meaning in people’s lives than just being a vehicle for intrusive ads and forced in-app purchases.
To achieve this vision, we need to bring in more builders, and make it as easy as possible for them to start building games in this new Web 3.0 world.
Game3.js aspires to be the game framework that will lead the way 🔥
Thank you for joining us in this quest!
Updated Onboarding
To make it clearer how to start using game3.js, we’ve updated our onboarding readme with hopefully clearer steps and more information on how to start a game.
We’ve also added more information about how we use IPFS, mainly saving replays of game sessions. These aren’t fully integrated yet with the smart contracts, but we’ll fill up the documentation as we do so.
Rethinking Game Economies
For last week’s Gaming Guild Junto, we had a great discussion on bringing free-to-play players to blockchain games. One discussion point was how blockchain games always have an overarching game of increasing NFT value, and how it affects game design. Some primitives such as Re-fungible Tokens and Harberger Tax were discussed that might address these misaligned incentives, which we’d love to explore more in game3.js.
Next Steps
We’re still steadily working on the leaderboard and tournament features. Some additional work is needed as there have been a few new changes to our flow, mainly on adding token buy-ins for tournaments. Work continues on the feature/leaderboard branch, which we hope to merge as soon as it’s stable.
Today’s Open Source Game
Every week we’ll highlight an open-source game and imagine how they can be improved by decentralization and Web 3.0.
Mindustry by Anton “Anuken” Kramskoi
A fun and truly unique game, Mindustry is a cross between tower-defense and factory management. Players need to gather scarce resources and build powerful towers to defend against massive waves of alien invaders.
Factory management games like Mindustry, Factorio and Satisfactory excite me when I imagine bringing them to Web 3. The economic parallels are very clear: it’s all about building an efficient mining chain—i.e., building a virtual ecosystem.
Imagine opening up these economies to Web 3 🤯 The possibilities are infinite.
Another great thing that Anuken has done with Mindustry is its robust support for private servers.
What if we built an incentive system for these nodes? We could start with a community fund that rewards the best private servers, then build a DAO that governs this fund. Since the game is open-source, perhaps the DAO can be the route to an exit to community once it becomes sustainable enough.
Someday a game that successfully exits to the community will be more than just a vision!
Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to game3.js or have any questions, please reach out via Github or Gitter. To keep receiving Game3.js updates, just click the Subscribe button below.
Cheers and see you next week!