Hi everybody, long time DFinity follower here. We’re a small team working on a virtual world / game and looking for advice about exactly which parts of the project we could move over to the Internet Computer.
So my first project was Neopets.com, and like Dominic I made the inevitable transition from cute fighting pets to decentralised computation. For the past 3 years I’ve been working on Dragginz, it’s like Neopets meets a crowdsourced Minecraft world. It’s free to play, makes no profit and is governed by the users. We had aimed to launch on Ethereum but we know some of the DFinity team, are blown away by your progress so switching is a no brainer.
Dragginz is a very, very ambitious project that’s probably going to take 10 years to reach it’s full potential. It’s a 2000km cube of rock that our players hollow out from the inside, creating a very vertical fantasy world. Think Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, mines of Moria, Undermountain+Drow, plus a lot of other inspirations. Players work in teams to submit level design for 10 metre cube chunks, and as more mechanics get added to the game these chunks are iterated, making for a very dynamic evolving world.
Currently we have a level editor, and an API written in Go. There are 180ish entities in the design, and we’re using CockroachDB as the database. Most of the work has been put into creating a custom ORM that allows you to manage a huge number of database tables (1000+), and an automatically generated admin section with custom input pickers, validation and input sanitising.
For the front end we’re using Unity and we want to use SpatialOS for the multiplayer networking layer, it allows us to have a huge world with millions of people playing simultaneously. We’re also using Google Cloud, CDN CircleCI and Kubernetes for deployment.
So this is probably as complex as stuff gets in the non-blockchain world (at least we don’t have to do hard maths problems.) My question is, what parts of this can we use the Internet Computer for?
I was initially thinking that we’d have a native token used for buying in-game items (all proceeds go to paying for the game upkeep costs). We’d also allow items and pets to be tradeable on the blockchain. Since our initial thoughts were constrained by the current state of the Ethereum blockchain, I don’t think we’re aiming high enough. Take the Google CDN for instance, could I possibly put hundreds of thousands of assets on the blockchain and bypass it entirely?
Just to reiterate, there is no rush to launch this project. If the 5 year roadmap for DFinity allows us to host the majority of the game then that’s what we’ll design for.
I guess DFinity is designed to replace a lot of the stack that we’re currently working with. If you were designing something like the Oasis from Ready Player One, 5-10 years from now which parts would be decentralised and which parts couldn’t be.
Anyway, just wanted to introduce the project, sorry that it’s more of a brain dump than specific technical questions. I’ll be here in the forums asking questions. Thanks again for everything.
(and also to see what part of it – if not all – you will be able to host on the internet computer)
