Game3.js Newsletter #10
Game3.js Newsletter #10
A Milestone, A Better Developer Experience, and Today's Explorable: Order Books
Welcome to Issue #10 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!
A Milestone!
Gitcoin Grants Round 7 has officially ended, and once again we want to thank all the builders and supporters of Game3.js 💖 We’ll keep on improving Game3.js further with everyone’s support.
This being the 10th newsletter is also a momentous event, thank you for taking time out of your day to read it 🙏 We hope to continue being the bridge for game developers to Web 3.0, and are looking forward to the next 10 issues!
A Better Developer Experience
Our previous sprint has been focused on mobile usability, and we’re happy to say that we’ve been able to successfully improve the mobile experience for our demo games.
A mobile joystick for TOSIOS and a full-screen interface for the Unity games
We were hoping to address gas costs this sprint as well, but this was a technical decision that required significant research on our part. There are numerous ways we can do this, and we’ve been weighing out the best way to achieve it, mapped against our goals for Game3.js.
One of our brainstorm diagrams during our gas cost sprint discussions
As we look at the other projects in the space though, we’ve also come to see some awesome projects that have better developer experience than ours. We listed a few down in last week’s newsletter.
One challenge with game3.js currently is it’s tightly integrated, making it more complicated to start building other games on top of it. For this sprint we’ve decided to break down the project into more manageable services that developers can more easily run as separate docker containers. This will improve our developer experience and help ease in developers to the framework.
Today’s Explorable: Order Books
To mark our 10th issue, we’ll take a break from highlighting open-source games and instead dive deeper into Web 3.0 using explorables.
There are a lot of concepts in Web 3.0 such as Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) that may be new to game developers, and there’s no better way to become more familiar with them than through play 🎮
Our first explorable will be something familiar to players and game developers on Steam, especially if they used the Steam Community Market. This is the Order Book.
The chart at the bottom is the order book for Zagreus Trading Card to Steam Dollar trades. Let’s call them ZTC and $ respectively.
The Order Book is simply a record of buy and sell requests for one asset in exchange for another. The blue area shows the number of buy orders for ZTC, while the green area shows the number of sell orders for ZTC. The X axis shows the amount of $ that the buyers / sellers are willing to trade them for.
In Web 3.0, you’ll usually see the Order Book in places where you can trade one token for another. An example is MakerDAO’s Oasis app, where you can exchange Ethereum for their stablecoin DAI (pegged at 1 DAI = 1 USD). It’s the one called the Depth Chart.
To see an order book in action, we’ve created an explorable for it using Observable.
Check out the source code here!
Web 3.0 has made it easier than ever for game developers to integrate an Order Book functionality with their games. Stay tuned as we build these functionalities in future versions of game3.js!
Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to game3.js or have any questions, please reach out via Github or Gitter.
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Cheers and see you next issue!