What is DAW? The development dilemma and prospects of full-chain games

Abstract

DAW, the "Developer App Store", is a platform for independent development and operation of games. It makes it easier for developers to create and publish games by providing developer tools and resources. However, the development of full-chain games faces some difficulties. First, developers face fierce market competition and high user acquisition costs. Secondly, gaming platforms need to face various complex technical and business issues. Despite this, the emergence of DAW has brought new development opportunities to the game industry, and it is expected to usher in a more prosperous situation in the future.

DAW is still in its early stages of development. In its short development history, the most noteworthy one is OPcraft.

On-chain game engines are currently the most important technical bottleneck on the DWA track. Currently, the representative projects are mainly MUD, Dojo, World Engine, and Keystone.

The development difficulties of DWA mainly include: lack of game development framework, lack of code reusability, and lack of data composability.

In the next bull market, a number of popular applications are likely to emerge based on the uniqueness of blockchain technology. SocialFi and GameFi are worth looking forward to.

What is DAW?

DAW (decentralized Autonomous Worlds) is a type of full-chain game. It is a full-chain, open game with no preset gameplay. By providing a publicly accessible programming interface, players can freely create, enhance, and expand their gaming experiences within the boundaries of digital physical reality, further expanding the game's story.

In Web2 games, they can be simply divided into Web2 non-autonomous world games and Web2 autonomous world games (CAW). Web2's non-autonomous world games include games such as "Honor of Kings" and "League of Legends". These games usually set some specific goals within the game, such as "rank" and so on. A typical representative of Web2 Autonomous World games (CAW) is "Minecraft". In "Minecraft", players do not have a clear ultimate goal of the game. Free creation is encouraged in the game, which brings many new ways to play. Players can not only build houses and raise animals, but also engage in advanced gameplay, such as "survival mode", "adventure mode", "multiplayer online" mode and so on.

The main difference between DAW in Web3 and CAW in Web2 world is the degree of decentralization. In DAW, game assets, elements, gameplay and logic are stored in the blockchain network. Compared with other full-chain games, DAW has more features and gameplay, and players have stronger autonomy in the autonomous world, which improves playability.

Note: "Digital physical reality" refers to the system of basic laws that exist in the computing world. Each world contains its own set of basic laws that govern everything that happens in this world. , these laws are the physics of that world; in addition, physics here generally refers to the system of basic laws that exist in any "world".

The important development history of DAW

DAW is still in the early stages of development. In its short development history, the most noteworthy one is OPcraft.

In October 2022, OPcraft, a fully chained 3D Minecraft-themed game created by the Lattice team of Dark Forest.

In OPCraft, a simple set of rules is developed. Players can only perform four in-game operations, including breaking blocks, synthesizing blocks, placing blocks, and claiming a 16x16 piece of land (becoming the highest diamond staker in that block). In addition, players can also use the officially provided open plug-in system to customize the front end and deploy custom components and systems. In just two weeks since its launch, it attracted more than 1,500 participating players and more than 3.5 million on-chain records. It also triggered various user-generated pixel art, individual player-made plug-ins, and a series of spontaneous competitions, games, Group governance activities, and even some malicious and friendly player behavior.

On October 29, two days before the OPcraft test was about to end, a player named SupremeLeaderOP announced the establishment of a world government on Discord and Twitter. This player mined a large number of diamonds through various methods (135,200 according to official information), and claimed a large number of plots in the game through diamonds (after the plots are claimed, other players cannot build without permission and farming).

In DAW games, infinite possibilities spread, and the occurrence and evolution of anything are beyond anyone's control. Based on this freedom, the game has also derived more fascinating gameplay. Compared with the early GameFi that focused on "Play to Earn", DAW has taken an important step in game playability, and in some places it is not inferior to Web2 games. Since the launch of OPcraft, many DAW games have begun to appear, such as the LootRealms series, ISAAC, and Topology.

Technical principles behind DAW

Different from traditional off-chain games or on-chain and off-chain hybrid games, every action, transaction and progress in on-chain games is recorded on the blockchain, which will Making it very different from Web2 games, it is no less than a new game revolution. In DWA games, players truly own their game assets, which can be traded, sold, or used across different games as NFTs; game rules and mechanisms are open and verifiable to anyone, and third-party builders can rest assured Create a unique experience on top of the core game; assets and progress can be used across multiple games or platforms; players can Play to Earn; and the game is no longer controlled by a single entity. With the development of Layer 2, the performance of blockchain has been greatly improved. In the process of realizing the above functions, the on-chain game engine, which is different from Web2, has become the main technical bottleneck.

The game engine is essentially a set of modularly encapsulated code libraries and tools. Game developers can complete graphics rendering, physical simulation, network communication and other tasks by calling various interfaces of the engine without having to get involved in relatively low-level and low-level programming work. This feature greatly saves time, allowing developers to focus more on game design and content creation. In the world of commercial game engines, the most common engines include Unity and Unreal. The issues that on-chain game engines pay more attention to include: state synchronization, game security, gas fee efficiency improvement, and ensuring composability and interoperability to the greatest extent. There are currently four main DWA game engines: MUD, Dojo, World Engine, and Keystone.

MUD: MUD is built by the Lattice team. It is an open source framework for developing on-chain applications, suitable for games and more fields. Currently, the largest number of on-chain games are built on MUD. Representative games include OPCraft, Skystrife, Kamigochi, etc.

Dojo: Dojo is a game engine and technology stack optimized for autonomous world games on Starknet. Dojo leverages Cairo, making it a powerful tool for developers trying to create complex and transparent game experiences on Starknet L2. Choose, the main representative games are: Roll Your Own, Influence.

World Engine: World Engine was developed by Argus and aims to be a sharded rollup technology stack to support and expand on-chain games.

Keystone: Created by the Curio team, Keystone is a rollup framework built on top of the OP stack to facilitate high-performance on-chain gaming. Specifically designed for real-time strategy games such as Age of Empires. It will support various data availability (DA) layers, starting with Celestia, whose representative games include: Treaty, etc.

DAW’s Development Dilemma and Future Prospects

In the early GameFi games, the playability was relatively poor. Users mainly wanted to Play To Earn. Once the game tokens were mined in large quantities, along with The value of game tokens has declined, and game players have also begun to experience a cliff-like decline, thus forming a vicious cycle and making the GameFi project unsustainable. On the one hand, DAW games need to improve the playability of the game. On the other hand, they also need to establish a relatively stable internal economic cycle of the game. In addition, they also need to introduce diversified and durable resources through external business expansion, so that the game has a strong vitality. In addition, from a technical point of view, to truly realize DAW, several core problems of on-chain games need to be solved:

1. Lack of game development framework: Each development team generally adopts a self-built method, which leads to creates inefficiencies and fails to take full advantage of shared system knowledge to solve the same problem and continuously optimize the best solution.

2. Lack of code reusability: Taking many blockchain games currently being developed as an example, only a very small part of the game code can be reused to create different games. The lack of clear distinctions between the different layers and components of different games limits the potential to use similar code bases to build next-generation games.

3. Lack of data composability: How to solve the problem of sharing blockchain state between blockchain games, and how to achieve the ability to effectively use the data in game A and game B to build each other, is still is a challenge to be solved.

Summary

With the development of Layer 2, Layer 2 such as Op and Starknet have demonstrated superior performance, and the technical bottlenecks that restrict the development of blockchain have been effectively alleviated. In the next bull market, a number of popular applications are likely to emerge based on the uniqueness of blockchain technology. In addition to SocialFi, which has exploded recently, GameFi is a very promising track. With the emergence of OPCraft, the DWA track has become a new focus of attention. With the further development of game engines in the future, Web3 games are expected to compete with Web2 games on the same stage, thereby promoting the blockchain industry to move towards the traditional market.

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