Sep 27, 2022 5 min read exothiumworld

Exothium World Updates W35-W36

TL;DR

Phaser - Item Tooltip
Phaser - Action Card
Phaser - Character Creator (off-chain)
Concept Dimension Card
Concept Dimension Builder
Concept Sleep Action
[Update XD]
Concept - Game intro
Decisions about off-chain free-to-play
Hype about StarkNet

Introduction

These last weeks have been a little slower than usual since some of us took some days off but now we are back with full energy to keep building and designing Exothium World.

Game engine components

3 new game design components were added:

Item Tooltip
Action Card
Character Creator

These components will be available in the next POC update and we will be out online soon.

Action Card

With increased information we had to restructure the design and compressed everything to show only the important stuff. We are satisfied with this new design since it's easier to read and also displays more information about the type of action, success rate, cooldown and the item/s that can be used.

OLD:

NEW:

Character Creator

This window will be available on the off-chain free-to-play game and allow us to customise our own character. This will not be possible in the on-chain competitive game.

New Components Design

Iterating every in-game action we found that we needed to design a couple of new screens and components:

Concept Dimension Grid
Concept Dimension Card
Concept Dimension Builder
Concept Sleep Action

Dimension Grid + Card

To enter the game and choose or create a dimension to play, we design this grid view that shows us a dimension card with its characteristics. This concept is not fully finished and we will add more information to the card:

In Queue (the number of players in the queue)
Playing (players already exploring the dimension)
Dead Players (nº of dead players)
Join Button
Spectate Button

Sleep Action Component

In Exothium World we can use items for nearly everything, and sleeping is one of the most important actions that our character needs because without it we can't recharge the stamina that is needed for basically every action. Since we can have an harsh environment, our character can build a sleeping bag to protect him from losing HP during the cold nights.

Game intro

We are trying to mimic the style of intros that other native games have, to show our sponsors, community members, and open source tools we are using. This visual space will be dynamic and a spot to show our gratitude for them.

Off-chain free to play

As we all know we think that is important to onboard gamers from the web2 world and give them a nice experience without friction. With that, we can play and give important feedback that can be embodied to both off-chain game and on-chain games. Trying to create a friction-free experience is hard even on the off-chain world since we need to save players data to know who the player is and its not feasible to ask the player to save a code. One of the solutions we came up was the Discord Login Authentication as a form of login to identify a user and save their data. This way we ensure that the off-chain experience is still friction free and with no more than 4 clicks to enter Exothium World and show us what you got :)

Tech updates

In the last weeks the ecosystem brought us some special news regarding account abstraction and Cairo VM. These developments are key to unleash even more innovation in the gaming sector.

Account abstraction

Account abstraction is already acknowledged as one of the most important steps that enables more freedom of choice and control over our funds. Right now we are seeing great strides using Account abstraction to simplify the way we interact with the chain and, of course, this will impact on-chain gaming in a huge way. We want to compute everything on chain in the competitive mode, and so, we need to ensure that the player is signing every in-game action, but that is a big "NO" for the players since every move needs to be validated and signed. With StarkNet and account abstraction there are already concepts using smart wallets that will make possible to the user to specify a game and the maximum value of a transaction and a total limit to enable fast transactions, without ArgentX validation, on every in-game action plus securing that we don't pass a certain cost threshold.

With the near future we will use web-auth on StarkNet and sign the game transaction with our phone without a special wallet like metamask or argentX. This will be awesome to the crypto gaming sector. It will unleash a more fluid experience where every step of the game can be on-chain and be completely unnoticeable.

More info about webauthn on StarkNet: https://twitter.com/tarrenceva/status/1559642730502004736 https://hackmd.io/@DPG-l_PrQWiKr1YYqngaDw/Hkjrm8cJj

Cairo VM

Cairo VM is at the core of our development because is where we execute or code and tests. In Exothium World we will compute the perlin noise to know everything about an hexagonal biome (this computation will be done on cairo). Since we enable enormous worlds we will not compute and save every hexagon in one shot (its not feasible to do that if we can compute the data off-chain). The problem with that approach will be the number of possible worlds being played at same time and the slow computation throughput of the most used Cairo VM coded in python.

In 28 of August the Lambda Team announced that they are close to finish the first steps of a Cairo Rust VM and that is already showing 10x improvements compared with Cairo VM (CPython) and 100x compared with Cairo VM (pypy).

With this VM it will be faster to unit-test and compute cairo for other things without to code it in another language. For Exothium World we will compute the biomes faster and show every hexagon biome in a more fluid way.

More info about Cairo Rust VM: https://twitter.com/ClassLambda/status/1562958354116673537