Game3.js Newsletter #5
OP Arcade MVP, a new look, and Today's Open-Source Game: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Welcome to Week #5 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!
The OP Arcade MVP
We were working furiously on an MVP of OP Arcade for the KERNEL Midway Expo, and were able to churn out a version on play.outplay.games!
There’s still a long way to go though, and most of our UX and smart contract interactions are still built to work on a locally deployed ganache instance. The gameplay of our sample games like TOSIOS and World of Mines are already up though, and can be tested via the site. Hop on over to play.outplay.games for a short demo!
A New Look
Through the weeks of development we’ve been using several other open-source technologies in game3.js, and haven’t been able to spend significant time unifying our front-end with the OP Games branding.
We’ll focus on it a bit this coming sprint though! Below is a tiny gif of our current homepage, which we’ve also already applied on our play.outplay.games MVP.
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.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) is an open-source roguelike, a genre that started with the game Rogue in 1980s. Usually characterized by finding valuable loot and permadeath, the genre has evolved and has been the inspiration for some of the most successful modern games such as Diablo.
The roguelike is deeply rooted in open-source. There are other actively developed projects such as Tales of Maj'Eyal, Nethack, and Angband, just to name a few.
One unique thing that DCSS does is it makes good use of the web, allowing people to play using their browser and even stream their gameplay.
One of the promises of Web 3.0 is the interoperability of your owned assets. We saw this happen initially with Cryptokitties, where developers started building mini-games and cosmetics around the ERC-721s. This was possible because it was a permissionless standard built on an open network.
What if the open-source roguelike communities had a similar standard, which allowed cross-game functionalities? It doesn’t have to stop at virtual items — what if we have a common monster or dungeon standard, usable over a network, that can allow these disjointed worlds to communicate with each other?
Another idea is what if we consider doing a dungeon run as a proof-of-play, where a successful game session where you retrieve the Orb of Zot gives you that Orb as an NFT? With an NFT being tradable on item exchanges, and with roguelike games being notoriously difficult to complete, these dungeon runners are the precursors to real-life Gunters!
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!