The Mainstream Blockchain Game Infrastructure – Ben Heidorn

Hey hey guys doing so thank you all for coming this talk is very blandly named the mainstream blockchain game if it's not sure I'm going to try to inform you a little bit of how we build our games and our instruction behind the games how do you make blockchain mainstream yeah so a bit about me I'm then hydron I was at Penn State for three years doing my PhD of science until Margarite CEO said hey you want to work on a video game and I said yes and then I dropped out and I felony cryptocurrency I saw the encrypted puzzles and if you know anything about my guruji background is coin artist she has the adventure of the crypto puzzles genre so he just made perfect sense eventually we started working together and I bring that up partially because two years ago when we announced the odd district I put out this puzzle called the function core that absolutely tortured the entire community for a while I thought that I was crazy and nobody would ever solve it but on the way here actually the few days ago somebody finally solved it and it took 748 days and they got like seven thousand dollars in aetherium it's friggin awesome alright so a bit about our team we have a really dope ass team we it took two years to kind of find all the right people fill in all the pieces we have great game designers who worked on the precursor to hearthstone they're actually one of them was a Magic the Gathering pro player and the 90s you can actually find it on MTV it's really cool and we have executive producers who've worked Disney for 10 years is one of the leading experts in mmo's so we have a fantastic team and then we just have really great blockchain engineers developers so I'm really proud of everyone whose works on everything that we're doing here so a bit about the games that we have if you are familiar at all with blocky games some of these games might be new to you so the first game we put up is called pineapple arcade it was a series of cryptic puzzles just came out a few months after we had sort of the company the art district is what we almost know for is a cyberpunk role-playing game we had an early version of the game came out in June of last year and we're going to be doing a full release on Steam and July we put up plasma beers last year and I actually did my talk here last year about plasma beers and how we integrated a way and a fun little game called Lego salvo which is an homage to Legend of Zelda and then we have two new games coming out one of them was a development for a while called cast mechs and we're making it official announcement about that soon and we have another game coming out very soon called codename metal boss so real quick I want to show off like some of the cool dorky little things that we did this is like for asylum like I said it's a knowledge to let them sell that but it has a lot of Bitcoin references to it so there's bugs your hearts are actually nodes in a blockchain there's all of these weird leftist it's my personal favorite thing the market making game you can never win I made this in the bottom of the beer market I was not happy some of our puzzles are homages to the puzzles that brought me into this space one of the boss is a cryptic kitty and this is my personal favorite boss is a bunch of blockchains and the only way you can beat it is by having a double spend we were hanging out it because if you use your fork you just wind up duplicating the chain it just starts attacking you and then you also have to fight Satoshi light and then a final boss is made a tour with wielding a be cash symbol sim yeah there's a lot of fun what is the cool thing about the game though it's not the game itself it's the technology behind it this was the first game that you could actually buy your etherium tokens using the Lightning Network and it would immediately mint right to your account so you would could you could play the game only having Bitcoin never had any use to thorium at all and the other really cool thing about it is we let people make their own characters and you could build one character send it to us and we have meant it to you and you can play through the entire game with characters that you made and then another popular game we put out plasma beers last year and the entire idea behind slash bears is how do you make it for free-to-play game experience with blockchain without any of the user experience problems at all so right there someone just logged in using Facebook and you can actually play the game on Facebook which made the game really appealing in the first two months we had over half a million n of T is minted 18,000 it was crafted and at the peak we had 600 800 people playing today and this was without any marketing at all this was all word of mouth and people sharing tokens with each other and then we had people playing from like kuba three years old all the way up to my grandmother which is freaking awesome to get an email about that and it wasn't how do I play this it was I'm added a lot of fun playing this and that's what we want people to do and then we are very experimental company so I wanted to bring up this new project that we just started working on with with Alex Absalom and it is called mule WTF it is a discord wallet where people don't realize they're actually using a cryptocurrency wallet at oil you just you register a mule and then you as a gamer just think of everything inside of a pack mule and you travel around with it and we actually just released the white paper we put a lot of work in this please please read it and fund our company okay so what I really want to talk about given the time that I have left is the developer platform that underlies everything it's not just the games that we're building it's how do you make mainstream games on blockchain now this is a tech oriented talk so I do want to get into some of the details but I'm not gonna show a whole lot of code the whole notion behind the developer platform is we want people to be able to build a blockchain game and deploy it to any game ecosystem at all it could be a Nintendo switch you can be mobile it can be a downloadable and steam like it does not matter where it doesn't matter what's blockchain it is you should just be able to make a great game so some of what we offer is we're trying to allow people to analyze all the addresses that a user has and then get immediate information about all the NFT s they have we have cross chain asset transfer support I'm gonna be demoing a little bit of that at the end of the talk hosting on ipfs actually splitting the data between chain and just you centralized data outside and then a whole bunch of other things including the Lightning Network integration so this specific talk I'm gonna talk about three things that I personally been working on a lot lately and it has to do with custodial on-boarding and off-boarding how do you get people to play a game without knowing anything about cryptocurrency but then when they start to realize that those value they can offload and then I'm gonna talk about nmt state state cash how do you read the blockchain give real-time data as quickly as possible knowing that there are problems with the blockchain where you might have a reorganization and that will change what the state of the data is and then of course I want to talk a bit about the entity transfers so after we did a text arts program last year I went home and I sketched out I had in my mind everything that we were going to have to build and I suggested all that on a giant whiteboard and it took us about eight months and we finally have all of those pieces working now which is quite remarkable and this is probably a more informative version of what I just showed you this is the entire infrastructure for the odd district every independent system involved so where's the platform fit it is not the blockchain layer we are not building a blockchain we're not building the game we're building everything that interacts between the blockchain layers you write to it do you read from it and then if you are game servers and the game itself so everything that has a common API they should be able to plug into to build your game without having to think about the blockchain aspect of it that's what we're building and it is to fulfill this promise that we want to give our users which is we want them to play a traditional game get all the value of playing a mainstream game all the fun all of the free-to-play aspects and we want you to get all the benefits of love chain we want you to own your assets we want you be able to trade them we want to be able to have the plate up or an aspect that we're all promising right now so what this means is we want to give people free to play onboarding with for neon district all you do is download the game and you start playing that's it other blockchain games right now you have to go to the whole user experience issues you have to download the wallet you have to own cryptocurrency have to understand how this works and there's a 99 plus percent drop-off rate for that so we want to completely eradicate all of that and that allows us to have a revenue model that actually focuses on the free-to-play mechanics that are so popular right now and the other thing is it should not matter what kind of game you're building you could have a game that's entirely on chain only playable on open sea sorry about that Alex or you can have a game that is partially on chain logic where you have the contract as most of the logic then you have a UI that facilitates a lot of the interactions that you have on chain or what I think is going to happen is most mainstream games when major players still coming in they're going to want the NF cheese to be on chain but they're going to want to control all the game logic elsewhere that's kind of where I think that's going to go and I just lost my visual okay we're good all right oh and we basically want the platform to support all of that so we have first principles that we build everything on the first is you should always have mainstream onboarding nobody should ever have to learn anything that they don't want to learn before they start playing the game it should just be a game we want uncompromised quality which means every part of every bit of complexity should be hidden it should be automatic and it should be seamless for the player and finally we want free to play games that enable play to earn so our entire development thesis which some people may or may not agree with is we are building for the Mason user first and as the technology gets better we keep decentralizing yet to produce trust on us to give people the freedom basically to have everything basically to have their cake and eat it too so seamless news our onboarding step one we let the player play the game before doing anything uh familiar Oh No [Music] in tight [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right my new shiny Oracle friend let's find that bastard [Music] [Applause] oh that one developer for twenty two thousand eight hundred dollars which is quite incredible at the time still is today step two let players sign up without knowing what a blockchain is so here we have the registration screen for the neon district portal which is live right now which supports all season one you go in you sign up the username a password you verify through an email and then as soon as you're in all you do is just start collecting assets so right here you get a free character as soon as you sign up and we don't mind if people make you know thousands of emails and start collecting these characters their base characters you collect them and you grow them over time this we're play to earn concern step three we want people to pay to play the game if they want to but without owning any crypto at all so here we had to kind of do some maneuvering in order to fit the current rules of the current system we allow people to buy an in-game currency the way that you do in a normal free-to-play game and you can do it using the square so you can use square normal credit card buy as much of the singing currency you want and then you can buy loot boxes which contain the actual entities inside of them or you can buy consumables just like a normal free-to-play game and then what this allows is we have an entire transaction queue an issuance system that runs in the background and that means no matter how many boxes you buy you immediately still hold your assets right then and there and in a queue there then minted to you to your account step 4 let the player owned their own items when they're ready to do so don't force them ahead of time so here we have an advanced feature which is you have to enable this manually it allows you to set your wallets that you have on aetherium loom Matic network whichever we support you can assign a transaction or sorry sign a message proving that you own a wallet and then we can MIT directly to your wallets and we can enable the transfer gateway to those wallets so basically you can be a normal player just play a game you don't have to think about the blockchain aspect at all it will still all be on chain in your custodial wallet but when you're ready or even the moment you sign up you can just start clicking the assets directly your ownership so moving on to the next point the fundamental question of everything we build how do you build a reliable if it's toxic given all the trade-offs the blockchain so there are some fallacies about the infrastructure that we're working with the first that we assume may be blockchain is reliable that the network is always available that latency is zero we know this is not the case block x exists the minimum that you have to wait on theorem is 15 sec well not minimum but the added is 15 seconds the end with absolutely not infinite we have to worry about not only how much data you can transfer but how much you get fit into a block the network is secure that's fairly true that's fairly true actually topology doesn't change not at all everything is completely different every system is completely different there's even parity and gap and all the different nodes so you can run what administrator not a clue transfer cost is zero obviously not you have to pay for every single transaction and of course never saw much eNOS is the same as the previous one so the cap theorem is what we think about when we think about just to get networks there there was a theorem where you have to pick more or less two out of these three principles you can have a consistent system where every read always gets the most recent right you can have availability where you always get a non error response meaning every time you read you should always get an answer but it might not be the most recent one and finally your partition tolerance what happens when the network starts to break down what happens the notes go offline the way that block chains are designed most of them are incredibly strong in partition tolerance not i/o time but if your even block C or your coins definitely and that's the whole purpose of Bitcoin is you have to be able to tolerate when people are attacking the network when forks happened the network should always remain live and that means you also have availability but what you do not have is consistency there are trade-offs here so depending on the length of time in which you're looking at the blockchain do you have eventual consistency meaning eventually you'll get the most recent line or do you have strong consistency meaning you always get it in lock chains it is probabilistic after end blocks happen you eventually approach strong consistency and this works for pretty much everyone building defy apps building anything that depends on blockchain directly but if you need immediate data the model is eventual consistency because you have three organizations transactions can move around they can be dropped entirely so the fundamental problem that we have here is it is fine for fully decentralized high security and latency tolerant applications to use blockchain out of the box but game companies cannot do that we need immediately an available consistent data for our users right away so how do you handle that you have to understand the nature of blockchain and you have to make a cache that can adapt to it so what we're doing is providing immediate data in our cache and then we separate the data from the views from all the side effects of that so if you think about when you process data and you have results to come out of that there are always going to be side effects you have to build your system such that the side effects are minimal or non-existent at all so here's an example this is a script trying to find whether the organization happens I was reading the tether USD contract here and here you can see a bunch of transactions that came in the previous block were all moved to another block and actually happens twice in a row so we have a reorganization happening in real time and it doesn't just mean that you're missing transactions or it doesn't just mean that they're moving around you're also missing them and that's not good because you could be reading everything from a certain block height and if you lose those transactions that is data that you do not have available to your system it breaks everything so you have to handle both simultaneously so what we have now is a system where we will read in the blockchain cache and we will always read it in for the last end blocks and the end block is going to be where you can eventually assume for the most part that you have strong consistency so here we're reading in from two chains loom base chain and if you Liam a nap and there are seven contracts being read in right away or however many they are there and then this is the boring stuff I apologize and then here we're actually showing all the asses to people own so here are some random addresses that are just being brought in from the cache and then we can actually pull in the count of assets that they have across all the contracts that we're watching at this time actually I don't have much time so I'm gonna see if I pass that but you can kind of get where I'm going with this so how do you scale this the objective is from mainstream users and mainstream games have millions of players all the time this is not a phenomena these are not highly successful games these are normal independent games they just haven't have millions place all the time so how do you scale that using current blockchain technology or a few thousand people break the network so their base can do this you can do this on the protocol level which is what a lot of people are working on here at F Denver or you go back on the application level and frankly we are application developers for game developers that is what we have control over we cannot control the protocol we let other people do that who know much better than we do so what we can do there is minimize the contact complexity so that we can manage more transactions at the same time and we also do things like minting on demand so there are certain considerations that you have to have here for aetherium there's a large number of slow request Apple information if you're pulling directly from watch-chain you have to be cost of transaction signing you have to pay for everything you have to wait for everything you have that leases manual private keys these are all the drawbacks of using a main blockchain right now but you can scale by using a side chain like the mattock with the loom network and that will give you zero cost to the users where the developers are paying you know a fee just to support the network it means that they get the immediate convenience to get incredibly short block tightness everything feels like it should in a normal game and in order to support bridging those two together you need to give people all the benefits of using a side chain and all the liquidity benefits of using a main net and that's where you have to provide cross chain transfer protocols the one that we're working on right now is a transfer gateway and we're trying to make it as decentralized and trustless as possible so why a trifle gateway well for one thing we're not a blockchain we have to build things that will work across multiple networks we only verified across the intentions of our own tokens and the only parties involved are the player in the gateway so we minimize this the risk profile of using the transfer gateway and finally it is not required to use so if you don't want to use what we are providing you if you want fully trusted systems you can use size in the cache you can use the systems that exist already so here's an example if you have at what time I have a few minutes so this is an example of the system that's live right now when it pushes out to production probably in a few weeks when I'm done coding the updated cache that I was showing you earlier here you can log in using your wallet and you can pick the item that you want to transfer this is all on main net by the way this is all live so this is the real time transferring happening on the loom network side going into the transferee contract and then it there's an Oracle that just reads the data and signs of proof saying yes I own the asset now I can release it on the other side so now here you have the person the owner of the asset now manually paid the transaction while I was submitting the data for the signature in the proof and when they do this and of course I abbreviated this because you do have to wait a bit you immediately get your asset so here we have our sludge feed drone it's now available on open sea and you can go over there and now you can trade it freely so what happened on the high level we had a token approval you have to give the contract the ability to transfer on your behalf then we have the deposit is where the magic happens the deposit amidst all the information required so that you can have the signature which is step 3 the Oracle reads the data yes I own the asset and provides you with the proof which then you manually Veliz on the other side but it doesn't just have to be you you could have anyone release this for you so you can use the etherium gas station network you can have just your friend submit this for you and it will securely end up in your wallet and you don't have to pay for it at all so this is the same process going backwards there are two items here that are on the etherium chain and you can connect your wallet and you can read all of the items that you have and you can pick the one that you want to transfer over so it should have made these videos a little faster I thought I was gonna speak slower and I forget that I talk really fast when I give a talk see here now you're actually doing those transactions that happen on the loom network side automatically for you oh do I have to cut it cool that this is the last one yes so here's the deposit and then you can firm it once again you pay for both those transactions and the rest of this all happens on a loom network side yep then you finalize the auricle signs it the loo never side wall that meant directly back to your account it's done when you connect to your wallet again you'll see the token no longer exists in your wallet but when you go to view the asset it's now back in the side chain for that theorem a logo that was on the right hand side of that it's gone now and it's back in your wallet so that's the entire talk that's everything we're working on right now there's a crap ton of stuff and if you want to ask any questions they're talking over afterward just come find me thanks [Music] you [Music]