Game3.js Newsletter #4
KERNEL Midway Expo Week, The CONTRACTOR, and "Who Would Win In A Fight: Ronald McDonald or Thanos?"
Welcome to Week #4 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!
An MVP for KERNEL’s Midway Expo Week
Work continues apace on Game3.js, and we’ve set one of our milestone dates to coincide with the KERNEL Midway Expo next week!
We’re hoping to have an MVP of OP Arcade [tentative name 🚧], a tournament platform built on Game3.js, presentable during the expo. For those who want to follow along, we’ve made our Sprint Board on Trello publicly available.
There’s still a lot of work ahead of us but we soldier on! ⛑
Building Smart Contracts with The CONTRACTOR 🕴
While working on both our own tournament smart contract and helping an NFT project over the weekend, we decided to open-source some smart contract code and related development tools from Game3.js. Thus The CONTRACTOR 🕴 was born!
It’s a standalone project using the same code as Game3.js, but has scripts and documentation that are more geared towards easily creating and testing smart contracts. The first example is on creating an ERC-1155 NFT on Rinkeby Opensea, but hopefully we can all build on it to add other smart contract use cases.
Check out The CONTRACTOR 🕴 on Github!
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.
“Who would win in a fight between Ronald McDonald and Thanos?”, asked no one ever. Nevertheless M.U.G.E.N. has the answer to that question!
While not technically an open-source game, M.U.G.E.N. was definitely an open platform. It was a freeware 2D fighting game engine released back in 1999. The hacker fighting game enthusiasts adopted it as their own, creating wacky, over-the-top, imbalanced character matchups.
Even more than 20 years later, M.U.G.E.N. still captures the imagination of fighting game innovators. One particularly awesome use of the engine is SaltyBet.com. It’s a Twitch channel playing two AI characters fighting on a M.U.G.E.N. instance, where watchers can place bets and win virtual currency. The fights can get weird!
In 2013, Elecbyte closed down, ending support for the fighting game platform. If M.U.G.E.N. was built open-source with web 3.0 tech, we probably would have seen much more innovation from the engine.
What if we created a $MUGEN community token, designed so that the engine developers and the character creators are able to be supported for their work? The possibilities are many: We can support character creators with a $MUGEN bounty for which character the stakeholders want to be created for the engine. We can have tournaments with $MUGEN as the prize pool, and use $MUGEN to participate in SaltyBet. We can even create an NFT market where creators can accessorize characters with skins, adding another market layer on top of the characters.
Back in 1999 there were less options to sustain such a maverick idea like an open-source fighting game engine. This time, let’s build it on Web 3.0!
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!
It would really be cool if Mugen was browser based and you could log into it with web3 decentralized account, where you would have your unlocked characters along with items for them, as you said. Kinda like in League of Legends, where you have to unlock champions and such.
Saltybet seems like good stuff. Might come in very handy for Ancient Beast at some point :3