Mid-term Review: Let’s Rumble on This Taiko 🥁

All roads lead to Autonomous Worlds. 2 Weeks, 3 Million Txns, 300K Gamers

This blog is derived from a casual team meeting held two weeks after the launch of Crypto Rumble on the Taiko A6 (Katla) testnet, as part of their community campaign on Galxe. It reflects my personal insights on our progression towards Autonomous Worlds, including the challenges of FOCG adoption & implementation, DAO-ifying the game’s development, zkEVMs from a dapp dev’s perspective, and more.

Numeri loquuntur: 3 Million+ Transactions in 2 Weeks

Let's start with some milestones. The numbers speak for themselves:

🌟Over 200,000 players from 30+ countries

🌟More than 900,000 games played

🌟Over 3 Million transactions conducted 

🌟Over 268,000 participants joined @Galxe campaign 

A recent data source shows that the Web 2.0 gaming industry is valued at $150B with 3B users, while Web 2.5 Games (GameFi) are worth $2B with 2M users; in this sense we are close to capturing [redacted :) ] percent of the user base. 

If you’ve already joined Taiko’s Galxe campaign, be sure to also participate in Zypher’s add-on rewards:

• Every gamer who completes 3 levels earns a Mainnet Mystery Box, which can be claimed when Crypto Rumble goes live on the Taiko Mainnet.

• The top 100 gamers on the leaderboard will receive correspondent $USDT and $Gold Point rewards.

• There's also the chance to earn an “early-bird” #GalxeOAT together with our ongoing $300 @Galxe Raffle.

If you’re new to the game & would love to rush in, we’re here to help:

Taiko Galxe link | Playtest Announcement | Taiko Playtest   | Gamer’s guide | Video Tutorials | Crypto Rumble Origin story

Anyway, what is Crypto Rumble? 

Crypto Rumble began as a Proof of Concept built with Zypher’s AW (autonomous world) Game Engine, a modular framework designed for developers to hyper-scale games vertically. The demo was delivered in just 3 days during the BNB Chain Hackathon Istanbul and was crowned the 1st place winner. Read more about the origin Story.

Crypto Rumble combines classic tile-matching rules with an SLG mechanism. Players summon heroes for battles, earning rewards to level up and summon new heroes. It's one of the first fully on-chain tile-matching games that uses ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) for game-log aggregation, providing a Web 2.0 level user experience

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What Makes Being Fully On-chain Special?

A fully on-chain game means every aspect of the game logic is executed via smart contracts on chain, rather than on centralized servers. This ensures that all in-game actions are recorded and executed as transactions, leading to fairer, more provable, economically sustainable, and decentralized gameplay. However, this approach does come with compromises, such as potentially lower user experience due to gas fees and block time limitations.

In comparison to games like Candy Crush Saga, Crypto Rumble offers several distinct advantages:

• Provably Fair Gameplay: The rules of Crypto Rumble are embedded in smart contracts and executed on the blockchain, ensuring that neither players nor the game developers can manipulate outcomes. This stands in contrast to games like Candy Crush, where the developers could potentially alter the leaderboard or game difficulty without notice.

• Censorship Resistance: Crypto Rumble is decentralized, meaning no single entity can shut it down. Developers can create clients that are independent of the provided front-end, whereas Candy Crush, hypothetically, could be shut down in a 'parallel universe,' resulting in the loss of all game history.

• Gamer-oriented Ownership: Players of Crypto Rumble have true ownership of their in-game assets, such as XP, badges, and heroes, which are tokenized and can be traded on marketplaces. This design encourages a more rewarding economic model for players, a feature that many on-chain games are adopting.

Building #FOCG can be Challenging. 

Traditionally, building a fully on-chain game involves recording each move as a transaction that must be approved and signed by players, leading to a disrupted game loop. Before moving to the next game state, the blockchain needs to synchronize with the last confirmed state among the players. This process repeats throughout the game, resulting in increased response times and second-level tick rate.

Since the launch of the 'world computer,' various scalability solutions have been explored to improve infrastructure performance for high-frequency applications like gaming. Ethereum has evolved into Layers rolling up Layers, Modules interfacing Modules for different use cases. Yes none of the existing solutions in production can meet the specific needs of Gaming’s high tick rate & responsiveness.

Crypto Rumble leverages Zypher’s AW Game Engine SDK, enabling the integration of certain game logic components through circuits rather than directly within EVM. This SDK utilizes the battle-tested Groth16 protocol, allowing the game to generate verifiable proofs based on users' game logs at the conclusion of gameplay which is provable with the verifier. This method significantly reduces gas fees and operational friction compared to the traditional approach of recording each move as a transaction.

The game engine offers flexibility based on the unique requirements of different games; developers can either employ circuit templates or utilize supported zkVMs (Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines) to craft their own circuits. For instance, developers have the option to adopt the SDK used in Crypto Rumble and tailor their own game rules. This adaptability allows for the creation of complex rulesets that can underpin the 'widely acknowledged rules and diegetic definitions' characteristic of any autonomous world.

Anticipating the #CandyCrush Moment of Web3 Gaming 

Blockchain-based gaming is poised to be a leading narrative in the current cycle, alongside trending topics like ERC404, AI, DePin, Modularity, and more. While many high-profile games (AAA or AA) may initially adopt blockchain mainly for cosmetic minting in economic systems, we foresee a future where fully on-chain games go beyond being mere narratives or memes.

Our aim is to bring blockchain integration to any game, from AAA titles like Fortnite and Hearthstone to popular independent games like Angry Birds and 2048. Collectively, these games boast an audience of 3 billion users who have yet to experience gaming on decentralized servers or truly own their digital assets. Infrastructural improvements with ZKP opens up new paradigms and possibilities for those games, extending beyond the confines of GameFi to create a unified ecosystem that includes gamers, guilds, DAOs, and developers.

Why Build on the Taiko Network…You May Ask? 

We first met the Taiko team at a ZK Hacker Camp in August 2023, where CEO Daniel presented a thorough overview of Taiko's Rollup Design and the technical decisions leading to their current implementations. The team's open, technically savvy, and decentralized approach was very impressive.

Taiko operates as a decentralized, sovereign, Ethereum-equivalent (Type 1) ZK-Rollup. This level of compatibility is crucial for our ZKP-powered game engines, particularly the support for certain elliptic curve (EC) pairings. Taiko's technical design, which incorporates a multi-proof methodology, provides an optimal balance between security, cost-efficiency and developer friendliness. Given Taiko's successful deployment of four test networks with extensive community testing at the time, we chose to deploy on an upcoming Taiko testnet, which would also help us with testing our game engine’s performance. 

Reflecting on the recent 10 days, the processing of 2 million transactions—80% of which were complex ZKP-related operations—serves as a robust indicator of Taiko's scalability and security. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Taiko team for their extensive support, from onboarding and confirming campaign specifics to assisting with testing. We’ve experienced great vibes with our community who are building initiatives like a small faucet channel for Katla ETH, where users support each other with test tokens.

CR II: All Roads Leads to #AW (Autonomous Worlds)

Throughout the playtesting phase, we've been fortunate to receive a wealth of constructive feedback from our community OGs (we call this small group of users PlayerOne). This feedback is instrumental in shaping the development of Crypto Rumble V2 and laying the foundation for a more structured framework for DAO governance.

It's important to note that the current deployment serves merely as a prototype of the game. We encourage our community to rigorously test and 'break' aspects of the game, enabling us to accelerate improvements. Some of the proposed features on our Discord forum include: the introduction of additional hero categories and levels, new battle tiers, daily check-in incentives, a mining system based on Proof of Performance (reflected by leaderboard standings), among others.That said, a new paradigm of games is not simply a “Candy Crush” with more embedded assets.

The next iteration of Crypto Rumble will see a vast step towards Autonomous World. It will be decentralized with open level configuration and open rewards pooling. Gamers gain DAO-based staking-governed, collective ownership of map-editors, enabling new games to be created and evolved with customized aspects such as maps, rewards rules, countdowns, and VIT settings. This new gaming paradigm further amplifies some of AW’s much-anticipated features in terms of design and capable of supporting thousands of concurrent players in terms of implementation:

• Smart-contract Encoded

  CR II’s game logic is entirely encoded in smart contracts for on-chain execution, ensuring tamper-proof, truest-less game loops. Everything from buffing/debuffing to game results are provable with zk.

• Infinite Endurance
  CR II allows the community to create new levels & game rules beyond predefined rules, independent of developer-provided clients. Any Dev contributor can spin up new game interfaces without permission.

• Economic HyperStructure
  Verifiable attestations and asset programmability grant gamers true, composable ownership of their in-game achievements & assets. Tokenization and governance primitives are integral, aligning & streamlining monetization flow for developers and players.
  

In addition to Crypto Rumble, we are also working with a few dev teams on finalizing several mini-strategy games and AA-level TCG (Trading Card Game) titles , which are currently undergoing internal testing on the Katla platform.

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About Zypher Games 

Zypher Games is building the next-generation infrastructure for Autonomous Worlds, featuring a suite of ZKP-powered game engines from Sovereign Layer 3 Rollups to ZK-as-a-service SDKs. Our technology provides decentralized games with the required composability, programmability, scalability, and cryptographic primitives. It empowers game developers to craft rich, interactive worlds, emphasizing scalability, fairness, and the intricacies of game strategy.
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Editor Info: Maggie Wang, Content Contributor at Zypher Games. The views expressed herein are my own and should not be considered financial advice.
If you're keen on contributing to our efforts in the early stages of the Autonomous World, please don't hesitate to get in touch at hello@zypher.game. If you are exploring career opportunities, please visit our Opportunities page.