COSMOS for Blockchain Game Development?

COSMOS for Blockchain Game Development?

 02.16.2021 -  Bruce Kroeze -  ~3 Minutes

I’ve been considering how to implement a blockchain game I think would be very fun and competitive.

One problem in development of such a thing is the awkward nature of Smart Contracts in Ethereum   . They’re deliberately kinda clunky and not all that agile or flexible. That makes sense for financial instruments, it also makes creating a game very difficult.

So, I’ve been looking for a solution and I may have found it in Cosmos   .

A Roguelike

The game I want to play/make almost happened in Ethercraft   , but that project if it still continues, is continuing in a way that I’m not interested in following.

What I want is to have a set of procedurally or hand-generated dungeons, for a Roguelike adventure where characters enter trying to gather loot. The characters succeed and get XP and Loot, or fail and get hurt or die, dropping their carried treasure.

Further adventurers can pick up that dropped loot, and so on.

It would all play out on the blockchain, and at various intervals, the player would be able to retreat out of the dungeon, realizing the XP and loot gain at that time.

The Challenges

Obviously, there are a lot of challenges to getting this done:

Assets

There are fungible and non-fungible tokens now on ETH. This is the low-bar requirement. Preferably there would be flexibility in issuance, with consensus/governance-driven updates for these assets. Also preferably there would be a free or easy to set up DEX for exchanging assets among players. Cosmos Gaming Hub   offers most of this in its whitepaper   .

How to fairly represent/handle randomness with repeatability?

Use an Oracle perhaps, or else simply seed a random-number generator with the XOR of the transactions involved. I am not sure if the ABCI style state-machine of Cosmos allows for pseudo-random generators like that, but I think it does. Ethereum’s Solidity definitely would not.

How to keep fees so low they are not an issue to play?

This is what drove me off my initial experiments with smart contracts. The fees to deploy and to utilize were just too high. With ETH hitting $1,900 this week, it is obvious I can’t go that route.

I had considered using an ETH clone such as ELLA   , but the limitations of Smart Contracts would still be problematic. Not so much for the asset portion, but for the actual dungeon-runs.

This is where a custom chain will really help drive down costs. The chain itself does the work, and the more expensive backbone transport chain for interoperability (ATOM or similar) would only be used to transform in and out of the ecosystem.

How to drive interest in the loot

Exchanging it would be a big step, especially if it had a decent interface. Also, if Cosmos Game Hub gets their way, it is even possible that items from this game could be used in others.

Reading their whitepaper, it definitely looks like things such as potions or swords would be simple to transfer.

Cosmos to the Rescue?

I’m not sure, but I do know that I like what I read so far. I very much like the mature, open way it seems that the whole ecosystem is being created.

I am going to do some cross comparison research with offerings available in Polkadot and possibly one or two other newer chains to see what other features I may be missing out on with COSMOS. I’ll update this article when I’ve added them.

Resources

(Photo by Štěpán Vraný   , it is a chain, not a blockchain but it looks nice, I think.)

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