Cubetopia - 'Minecraft style' Web3 Sandbox Game

General
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Cubetopia is a ‘Minecraft style’ sandbox game being built on the Internet Computer. The game breaks barriers by offering a seamless web browser experience—no downloads, accounts, wallets, or NFTs required. Just click and play, it’s that simple.

We believe that Cubetopia will be a powerful onboarding experience, attracting the attention of gamers across the web with a smooth experience they can access anywhere, on any device.

Our vision for Cubetopia extends beyond just gaming; we see it as a powerful onboarding experience for Web3, attracting gamers from all corners of the web with its accessibility across devices.

Cubetopia aims to address key issues hindering Web3 gaming adoption:

  • High entry barriers: No NFT gating or wallets required.
  • Lack of engaging gameplay: We focus on simplicity and fun.
  • Complexity: Cubetopia offers an intuitive experience for all players.
  • Community engagement: We prioritise an active, community-driven environment.

Moreover, we’re not just about solving Web3 issues; we’re also addressing shortcomings in Web2 gaming:

  • Fair creator incentives: We ensure fairness and transparency.
  • Streamlined experience: No bloated games or unnecessary downloads.
  • Ethical practices: We reject unethical advertising and revenue models.

As a result, we believe Cubetopia is positioned well to grow and become a dominant force within gaming.

We plan for the community to oversee creative direction of the Cubetopia game and will play an integral role in many of our proposed systems, such as moderation of user submitted content. We believe that forming a DAO would be the perfect solution to this.

Our goal is to build an extendable, fun, and inspiring game platform tailored for the Web3 community. With its voxel-based design, Cubetopia empowers players to sculpt their worlds to their liking, akin to Minecraft and Roblox but with a unique focus on community, accessibility, and fairness.

Game Modes

Parkour

In Parkour, players engage in a thrilling race against time, leaping through intricate obstacle courses set in stunningly designed worlds. This mode tests agility and precision, as players must dodge obstacles and reach checkpoints to save progress. Competitiveness is fuelled by a leaderboard system where the fastest times earn coveted rewards and exclusive loot.

Islands

Islands represent the quintessence of Cubetopia - a mode where creativity meets ownership. Players own their very own unique island on the blockchain, creating personalised spaces or on-chain art galleries with using NFTs from your connected wallets. These islands are easily shareable through links, allowing friends to visit instantly in a seamless, barrier-free browser experience.

Treasure Hunt(Coming soon!)

Treasure Hunt immerses players in a vast open world, where they embark on quests to uncover hidden treasures across diverse biomes. It’s a blend of exploration and strategy, encouraging teamwork and friendly rivalry as players or teams vie to unearth valuable loot and earn prizes.

Arena(Coming soon!)

Arena is the epitome of competitive gameplay in Cubetopia. Players face off in specially designed maps, utilising strategy, teamwork and an arsenal of weapons to gain victory. This mode combines skill and strategy, as players battle for honour, loot, and prestigious rewards in intense, action-packed skirmishes.

Pet Quests(Coming soon!)

Pet Quests add a strategic layer to the game, as players deploy their pet NFTs on missions with varied chances of success, guided by a nuanced talent system. This system requires thoughtful planning and a varied pet collection to improve success rates. As pets level up and gain power, they unlock more challenging quests, offering greater rewards. Players’ strategic decisions in selecting and utilising their pets’ unique talents directly impact their success, making each quest a blend of anticipation and strategy, deepening the gameplay experience and the player-pet connection.

Bitbox Game Engine

Over the past year, the Cubetopia team have built our own web based game engine to power Cubetopia. The Bitbox Game Engine is being built from the ground up to fill our specific needs. We found that Unity was not fit for our purpose anymore and by investing resources into building our own robust platform we would have a competitive edge over our competition.

Our Game Engine is built with a focus on web, using web technologies. We use THREE.JS to render our 3D world, and we have built out an intuitive Entity Component System using Typescript. Our modular approach to building allows developers to extend Cubetopia, adding new game modes, features, and entities within our world with ease.

One of the key benefits, is that we are able to offer far superior mobile support, gamers are usually quite impressed to see such a rich ‘Minecraft’ style world running so smoothly in their phones web browser. Furthermore, developing using web based technologies also allows for a superior integration with the Internet Computer, this way gameplay logic is able to directly communicate with the IC without the need for the intermediary React Wrapper which was previously necessary.

Drawing inspiration from Unity, we began to develop an Entity Component System (ECS) for use within Bitbox. Entities can be defined, which are essentially a collection of components. Components are the driving force of the world, they feature the logic and data required to make entities interactive with the world, player, and game.

Why The Internet Computer?

Cubetopia’s choice of the Internet Computer as its platform is driven by a clear alignment with our vision and goals. Here’s why we see the Internet Computer as the perfect fit:

  • Reverse Gas Fee Model: The Internet Computer’s reverse gas fee model eliminates a significant barrier to entry for users. By removing the need for users to hold cryptocurrency or manage gas fees, we ensure accessibility for all players.
  • Internet Identity: With Internet Identity, users can authenticate themselves easily and securely, streamlining the onboarding process. This simplicity enhances the user experience and encourages wider adoption.
  • Chain-Fusion: Chain-fusion technology on the Internet Computer paves the way for seamless cross-chain integrations. This allows Cubetopia to explore opportunities beyond the platform itself, fostering interoperability and expanding our reach.
  • Typescript (Azle Canisters: Leveraging Typescript (Azle) Canisters enables us to write canister code in the same language as our client, streamlining the development process. This expedites game development, allowing us to bring new features and updates to Cubetopia more efficiently.

Links

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Couple of questions, if there are no wallets or nfts invloved how do you authenticate game players since you’re working on phases that allows players to face eachother and play against each other (I mean i dont want my enemy to play with my account)?

Are you planning to monetize your game, if yes what will be your revenue models?

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Hey, great questions!

In order for you to save your progress you would need to sign in - otherwise as you rightly point out it would be impossible to know who is who. We just want to emphasise that for users to get a taste of the game, no sign in would be necessary, similar to how https://krunker.io/ or most other ‘io’ games work.

When people ask what games or projects are being built on the Internet Computer, we want everyone to be able to link them Cubetopia - they should instantly be transported in browser to a fun, polished user experience. This possibility is not possible on any other chain and undeniably showcases the IC’s unique capabilities.

As for revenue models, we have a few options, the main which we are likely to focus on would be by selling cosmetic items, and monetising a creator marketplace - while ensuring we maintain a high level of fairness. However at this point we are prioritising growth and development rather than focusing on revenue.

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It would be cool to have a landing with proper URL.

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and what will be sign in options?

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Yes makes sense, focusing on the product development first and then building the monetization

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What we’ve currently developed but not yet published is based on a Google sign in, you then have the option of linking as many wallets as you like to that account. This is quite nice as it allows you to consolidate your entire NFT collection onto a single user account, but you can split your collection across different wallets for whatever reason you may have. This also gives us a way to onboard Web2 users who may not have a wallet or Internet Identity yet, though we could encourage those users to create one via an in game quest or incentive.

However, I think that there will be quite a few in the community who wont like this system, and will not like the integration of a centralised sign in. We are therefore considering alternatives that won’t require you to have a Google account, perhaps we will go for a system similar to Dmail or Bioniq.

If the community has any remarks to make on this issue, please let us know!

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Open Chat team has also been solving that problem with a set of different canisters, one of them being an email “signer” (no password, just email with coded link). You might want to take a look at such a system.

I personally think it’s more than fine to integrate with other Web2 tech (namely google sign in to start). But you could allow for setting a few as “sign-in options”, like II, Plug, Wallet Connect, Solana, etc.

Definitely, this sign in “registries” and code should be separate from the game, maybe an auth.cubetopia subdomain would be best :+1:

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Good write up, congrats and thanks for all the hard work and passion you bring to the IC ecosystem.

I have for several workshops been using Cubetopia (especially 3 JS version) as a great example of what’s possible on the IC.

I think you should grow your team and definitely see this game being a viable, self sustaining game in a few years. And for that a DAO could be a good next step, benefiting all.

Hope it all goes well, good luck :pray::shamrock:

PS: very much looking forward for that 3 JS experience on Islands and Treasure Hunt :star_struck::heart_eyes:

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Love the relatability of this write-up. Cubetopia is a sleeping giant on ICP. Dfinity could pump this and get so many people into this ecosystem!

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