23 ms·

Learn to Code Ethereum DApps by Building Your Own Game

402 points by alanfalcon 9y ago

alanfalcon 9y ago
I'm little afraid of all the CryptoKitties clonies that this will cause to come into existence, but it's pretty easy to spot the low effort cash grab ponzies and to see that CryptoKitties itself has a ton of thought and effort (and talent/money) behind it [I'm obsessed, feel free to ask me all your CK questions, like "why did you use all your Ether buying pictures of cats instead of a used car?]. Anyway, this is incredible.
- Giroflex 9y ago
  Well, why did you use all your Ether buying pictures of cats instead of a used car?
  - alanfalcon 9y ago
    Addictive personalities can be good and can be evil. I have one and I’m usually okay at recognizing that and when it’s kicking in and not losing self control, but I’ve never had an opportunity to easily spend my cryptocurrency before and so I completely let myself fool myself about what I was doing when CK launched. I fell into a cycle of buying and breeding kitties at market rates, not wanting to sell them, finding “great deals” on the marketplace, buying and breeding those... Of course the “great deals” were really a crashing market after an unsustainable bubble right at launch. I was destroyed by incorrect mental pricing models and easy access to a source of funds. And what’s more, those funds were internet magical funny money that I’d gotten for free anyway, so it was really hard for me to see spending $40 worth of Ether as losing out on the opportunity to buy $40 worth of real world goods. And when the thought crossed my mind, I hand waved it away with the thought that I could always sell the kitties and get my ETH back, with no critical thinking attached. All of which begs the question, why am I a fan of the game? There’s the fact that I feel now like I’ve invested a couple grand in the game ... but that’s my irrational brain again. Some slightly more rational reasons include that working with the community to crack the genome and build tools to help make smart breeding and buying/selling choices has been a ton of fun and very educational. Also just deep diving into the game mechanics in a way I couldn’t have truly appreciated from the outside looking in has been a revelation: many people complain that this is not much of a “game,” and of course they’re right, but there’s still a ton of careful consideration that went into developing each aspect of what exists, including how new genes are gated through release of new kitties and a breeding algorithm with special mutations that require particular gene pairs to breed. And then there are fancies, which a cat becomes when it meets certain minimum requirements such as being Cloudwhite, with a Scarlet pattern, and having a beard along with a hidden “wild” trait: all of which, when combined on the same kitty, produces a (relatively) valuable Santaclaws kitty. Also, I really don’t need a new crappy old car. I’ve already got one of those. And man those kitties really are adorable sometimes.
- geraldbauer 9y ago
  Big fan of CryptoKitties too. Adding my notes to the Awesome CryptoKitties (and CryptoCopycats) [1] page @ Open Blockchains. PS: Launching CryptoCopycats soon - lets you play for free (without gas or ether) an (open source) CryptoKitties unchained version, that runs off the blockchain :-) still using a hyper ledger and a peer-to-peer network (but built from scratch) though. [1] https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-cryptokitties https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-cryptokitties
  - julius 9y ago
    What is a "hyper ledger"? (google tells me it is a linux foundation project...)
    - nsomaru 9y ago
      Corporates who missed the blockchain boat building their own boats.
    - geraldbauer 9y ago
      hyperledger (note: no space) is a linux "enterprise" umbrella blockchain initiative. don't really know. hyper ledger is a (generic) term for a ledger for the internet blockchain era :-). Copycats uses the ledger-lite (open source) library [1] - the tagline reads: hyper ledger book for the distributed blockchain internet era; add your transactions one block at a time; transfer crypto(currencie)s or collectibles (e.g. kitties or cats) and balance the accounts (that is, who owns what etc.) [1] https://github.com/openblockchains/ledger.lite.rb https://github.com/openblockchains/ledger.lite.rb
  - wccrawford 9y ago
    s/Crypo/Crypto/g on your .md
xerophyte12932 9y ago
I have almost no idea about the Ethereum system, but don't you have to pay to have your code executed on the global ethereum machine? Does that mean I have to pay to test run my code? or maybe after I deploy it?
- Kiro 9y ago
  You can use the test net.
- edf13 9y ago
  You can run your code on a test network: http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/network/test-networks.html http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/network/test-networks.html
- julius 9y ago
  You can run it in a JavascriptVM. This an online IDE to play around with Ethereums Solidity language: https://remix.ethereum.org https://remix.ethereum.org
- t3chn0SchO0lbus 9y ago
  I think there is a way to have users pay for transactions instead of the contracts or contract owners.
arkad 9y ago
I had birthday yesterday. , Statistically by the life expectancy in my country, I'm now closer to death than to the date of birth. And yet, what makes me feel old is the idea of writing games on top of ethereum.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  I think the only thing that makes you "old" is you thinking to yourself you feel old. If you take a look at who's actually working on all the cryptocurrency projects, a lot of the hardcore developers are probably older than you because they came from the "cypherpunks" era, almost around the dot-com times. I'm not talking about the scammers building ERC20 tokens. I'm talking about legit cryptographers who are building stuff.
- hmate9 9y ago
  Hahahaha this has to be the greatest comment ever
  - shobith 9y ago
    Really?
runeks 9y ago
In all seriousness, who would want to build a game on top of a platform that’s currently limited to ~15 state changes per second? And where each of these state changes cost money? I get the interesting aspect of creating a game with a limited supply of some virtual good, but how much energy does it make sense to put into a game of this nature when the underlying platform prevents your game from becoming successful (because it can’t handle that kind of load)? I suspect there’s a genuine use case for limiting the supply of virtual goods in games, but I doubt the solution involves all games performing state updates using on-chain transactions in a single, shared blockchain.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  Any turnbased game?
- disko 9y ago
  Better to do this on NEO instead. Their tech is better than ETH in every way; it can handle up to 10.000 transactions per second (whereas ETH can handle ~15) and it supports almost all mainstream coding languages. What's more, transactions are free.
  - tstyle 9y ago
    Is there a downside or trade off? I’m a little skeptical that NEO is strictly better in all aspects.
    - Cybourgeoisie 9y ago
      Cryptokitties is possible because of ERC 721, which allows for unique tokens to represent individual assets (having an indivisible kitty with its own dna). As far as I'm aware, NEO doesn't yet provide the ability to create individualized tokens that can be stored on the blockchain in a similar way.
      - zeroxfe 9y ago
        ERC 721 just an API standard for non-fungible assets. There's nothing special on inherent to Ethereum that makes Cryptokitties possible. You can totally build something Cryptokitties with NEO -- the only difference is that because there isn't a standard, there isn't a third-party marketplace for these assets. (i.e., there's nothing inherent about NEO that prevents something like Cryptokitties from being built.)
indescions_2018 9y ago
With the usual caveats about putting real money into risky speculative assets. Blockchain technology could very well prove to be the missing link in providing a way to cryptographically "sign" a digital art work. And publicly verify its uniqueness and provenance. If you wish to experience the hype first hand. There's a show, perhaps the first of its kind, happening in NYC this weekend. With the founders of CryptoKitties, RarePepes, DADA, Cryptopunks, Decentraland in attendance. Rare Digital Art Festival, Rise New York, 43 West 23rd St, NYC, Sat Jan 13, 9am https://raredigitalartfestival.splashthat.com/ https://raredigitalartfestival.splashthat.com/
- tomasien 9y ago
  Wow thanks for sharing the event! It's going to be something else, I can't believe how excited folks are for rare digital art. The movement does feel like something special not just in the blockchain world but in the tech world in particular.
thisisit 9y ago
I wonder if there are any tutorials for building ERC-20 or 71 tokens? And also is there a tutorial on how to download the whole ethreum blockchain and parse it to a databse for analysis purposes?
- viach 9y ago
  Here is the tutorial: https://www.ethereum.org/token https://www.ethereum.org/token There is the BitcoinTalk forum for announcing your new super token https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0 Voila!
decorator 9y ago
(Disclaimer: I hold some Enigma). I'm (self)-interested in learning about Enigma[0]. It's an off-chain solution for scalability & privacy with regards to systems of blockchains (blockchain agnostic). It also has the capacity for its own dapps. The Enigma product isn't completed, yet there is a working product on top of the protocol called Catalyst[1] (I've not personally tried Catalyst, yet). Catalyst is a trading app for quants. Enigma is supported by MIT, & has Alex Pentland as an advisor. There's more to Enigma than what I've just outlined. 1) There's the data marketplace component. 2) It could also conceivably become a secure data processing layer for the Internet. I think it can be used with different protocols. I've yet to figure that out. [0] https://www.enigma.co https://www.enigma.co [1] https://enigmampc.github.io/catalyst/ https://enigmampc.github.io/catalyst/
tomasien 9y ago
There's a lot of hate on here for blockchain gaming/rare digital art so I'd like to clarify two points. 1. Blockchain games are best when only the necessary work is done on chain, such as transfer of ownership or enforcement of critical rules at run time. This tutorial may not show that so as to demonstrate the power of the blockchain, but most people in the space are building only the components players want to not be controlled by a central entity into the blockchain. It works fine. 2. The lack of digital scarcity is a real problem for artists. Blockchain art is a real solution. Artists I talk to are extremely excited about the ability to issue limited/special editions of their art on the blockchain that can owned and traded by their biggest fans. It's not about hiding the source art (image, music, etc) from the public, it's about having "signed" and "authentic" editions folks can collect and trade. They've lost that ability in the digital art world and this gives it back to them.
- camillomiller 9y ago
  The work of art in the age of mechanical scarcity? :)
- hudon 9y ago
  Blockchains do not provide digital scarcity. This a myth promulgated by the early days when “there are only 21 million” was a fact. Now, it is trivial to fork, copy or derive tokens to instantly bring millions of new “assets” into existence.
  - aliendoodledog 9y ago
    Just because you can fork, copy, and derive tokens doesn't mean that scarcity doesn't exist in that particular market. I think the point was never about true scarcity, but that as long as the market has consensus over which blockchain is the source of truth, the internal scarcity is achievable without a central authority.
    - hudon 9y ago
      For 10 years of “blockchain”, the market has had more and more blockchains. So in absence of the consensus you’re hoping for, who decides which blockchain is the source of truth?
crack-the-code 9y ago
I can't imagine how immensely powerful it would be to have a game like Diablo leverage block chain for its items. This would eliminate the risk of dupes and ensure a fair system.
- dangero 9y ago
  The risk of dupes meaning that the company that created the game may release duplicate items? A centralized database can eliminate that risk as well.
DougN7 9y ago
IMHO, this reflects all that is bad about blockchains. So many systems around the world having to forever track nonsense like who owns a fake kitty. This is bloat. Throw it in a database that is owned by a virtual-kitty-selling company. Yeah, it's not decentralized. So what? It's a game! IMO the blockchain should be for important (financial/legal/real estate/?) transactions.
- zilian 9y ago
  "I don't like it so it shouldn't exist" ! I think this tutorial is very cool, I introduced programming and dapps to my 15 yo niece with it and she liked it.
  - DougN7 9y ago
    It doesn't matter that I don't like it. Every addition to the blockchain imposes costs in storage, backup and transmission - forever. Nothing gets removed, so it just keeps growing. For property records that's a cost worth bearing (we had to record who owned what anyway). But how long and how much will it cost to forever record that Bob owned Kitty XYZ and then sold it to Allen? Multiply that by 50,000 other apps, and (millions?) of frivolous transactions. Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
    - t3chn0SchO0lbus 9y ago
      It doesn't have to be like that. We could rely on periodic snapshots of the blockchain for future validation. We could even selectively include specific data in the snapshots to be preserved. Maybe some group might need to store the entire history of the blockchain but there is a lot of room for innovation to solve this scaling dilemma.
gcb0 9y ago
anyone found the tutorial (or a similarly recommend one) in text?

402 points by alanfalcon 9y ago

I'm little afraid of all the CryptoKitties clonies that this will cause to come into existence, but it's pretty easy to spot the low effort cash grab ponzies and to see that CryptoKitties itself has a ton of thought and effort (and talent/money) behind it [I'm obsessed, feel free to ask me all your CK questions, like "why did you use all your Ether buying pictures of cats instead of a used car?]. Anyway, this is incredible.

Giroflex 9y ago
Well, why did you use all your Ether buying pictures of cats instead of a used car?
- alanfalcon 9y ago
  Addictive personalities can be good and can be evil. I have one and I’m usually okay at recognizing that and when it’s kicking in and not losing self control, but I’ve never had an opportunity to easily spend my cryptocurrency before and so I completely let myself fool myself about what I was doing when CK launched. I fell into a cycle of buying and breeding kitties at market rates, not wanting to sell them, finding “great deals” on the marketplace, buying and breeding those... Of course the “great deals” were really a crashing market after an unsustainable bubble right at launch. I was destroyed by incorrect mental pricing models and easy access to a source of funds. And what’s more, those funds were internet magical funny money that I’d gotten for free anyway, so it was really hard for me to see spending $40 worth of Ether as losing out on the opportunity to buy $40 worth of real world goods. And when the thought crossed my mind, I hand waved it away with the thought that I could always sell the kitties and get my ETH back, with no critical thinking attached. All of which begs the question, why am I a fan of the game? There’s the fact that I feel now like I’ve invested a couple grand in the game ... but that’s my irrational brain again. Some slightly more rational reasons include that working with the community to crack the genome and build tools to help make smart breeding and buying/selling choices has been a ton of fun and very educational. Also just deep diving into the game mechanics in a way I couldn’t have truly appreciated from the outside looking in has been a revelation: many people complain that this is not much of a “game,” and of course they’re right, but there’s still a ton of careful consideration that went into developing each aspect of what exists, including how new genes are gated through release of new kitties and a breeding algorithm with special mutations that require particular gene pairs to breed. And then there are fancies, which a cat becomes when it meets certain minimum requirements such as being Cloudwhite, with a Scarlet pattern, and having a beard along with a hidden “wild” trait: all of which, when combined on the same kitty, produces a (relatively) valuable Santaclaws kitty. Also, I really don’t need a new crappy old car. I’ve already got one of those. And man those kitties really are adorable sometimes.
geraldbauer 9y ago
Big fan of CryptoKitties too. Adding my notes to the Awesome CryptoKitties (and CryptoCopycats) [1] page @ Open Blockchains. PS: Launching CryptoCopycats soon - lets you play for free (without gas or ether) an (open source) CryptoKitties unchained version, that runs off the blockchain :-) still using a hyper ledger and a peer-to-peer network (but built from scratch) though. [1] https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-cryptokitties https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-cryptokitties
- julius 9y ago
  What is a "hyper ledger"? (google tells me it is a linux foundation project...)
  - nsomaru 9y ago
    Corporates who missed the blockchain boat building their own boats.
  - geraldbauer 9y ago
    hyperledger (note: no space) is a linux "enterprise" umbrella blockchain initiative. don't really know. hyper ledger is a (generic) term for a ledger for the internet blockchain era :-). Copycats uses the ledger-lite (open source) library [1] - the tagline reads: hyper ledger book for the distributed blockchain internet era; add your transactions one block at a time; transfer crypto(currencie)s or collectibles (e.g. kitties or cats) and balance the accounts (that is, who owns what etc.) [1] https://github.com/openblockchains/ledger.lite.rb https://github.com/openblockchains/ledger.lite.rb
- wccrawford 9y ago
  s/Crypo/Crypto/g on your .md

xerophyte12932 9y ago

I have almost no idea about the Ethereum system, but don't you have to pay to have your code executed on the global ethereum machine? Does that mean I have to pay to test run my code? or maybe after I deploy it?

Kiro 9y ago
You can use the test net.
edf13 9y ago
You can run your code on a test network: http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/network/test-networks.html http://ethdocs.org/en/latest/network/test-networks.html
julius 9y ago
You can run it in a JavascriptVM. This an online IDE to play around with Ethereums Solidity language: https://remix.ethereum.org https://remix.ethereum.org
t3chn0SchO0lbus 9y ago
I think there is a way to have users pay for transactions instead of the contracts or contract owners.

arkad 9y ago

I had birthday yesterday. , Statistically by the life expectancy in my country, I'm now closer to death than to the date of birth. And yet, what makes me feel old is the idea of writing games on top of ethereum.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I think the only thing that makes you "old" is you thinking to yourself you feel old. If you take a look at who's actually working on all the cryptocurrency projects, a lot of the hardcore developers are probably older than you because they came from the "cypherpunks" era, almost around the dot-com times. I'm not talking about the scammers building ERC20 tokens. I'm talking about legit cryptographers who are building stuff.
hmate9 9y ago
Hahahaha this has to be the greatest comment ever
- shobith 9y ago
  Really?

runeks 9y ago

In all seriousness, who would want to build a game on top of a platform that’s currently limited to ~15 state changes per second? And where each of these state changes cost money? I get the interesting aspect of creating a game with a limited supply of some virtual good, but how much energy does it make sense to put into a game of this nature when the underlying platform prevents your game from becoming successful (because it can’t handle that kind of load)? I suspect there’s a genuine use case for limiting the supply of virtual goods in games, but I doubt the solution involves all games performing state updates using on-chain transactions in a single, shared blockchain.

ThomPete 9y ago
Any turnbased game?
disko 9y ago
Better to do this on NEO instead. Their tech is better than ETH in every way; it can handle up to 10.000 transactions per second (whereas ETH can handle ~15) and it supports almost all mainstream coding languages. What's more, transactions are free.
- tstyle 9y ago
  Is there a downside or trade off? I’m a little skeptical that NEO is strictly better in all aspects.
  - Cybourgeoisie 9y ago
    Cryptokitties is possible because of ERC 721, which allows for unique tokens to represent individual assets (having an indivisible kitty with its own dna). As far as I'm aware, NEO doesn't yet provide the ability to create individualized tokens that can be stored on the blockchain in a similar way.
    - zeroxfe 9y ago
      ERC 721 just an API standard for non-fungible assets. There's nothing special on inherent to Ethereum that makes Cryptokitties possible. You can totally build something Cryptokitties with NEO -- the only difference is that because there isn't a standard, there isn't a third-party marketplace for these assets. (i.e., there's nothing inherent about NEO that prevents something like Cryptokitties from being built.)

indescions_2018 9y ago

With the usual caveats about putting real money into risky speculative assets. Blockchain technology could very well prove to be the missing link in providing a way to cryptographically "sign" a digital art work. And publicly verify its uniqueness and provenance. If you wish to experience the hype first hand. There's a show, perhaps the first of its kind, happening in NYC this weekend. With the founders of CryptoKitties, RarePepes, DADA, Cryptopunks, Decentraland in attendance. Rare Digital Art Festival, Rise New York, 43 West 23rd St, NYC, Sat Jan 13, 9am https://raredigitalartfestival.splashthat.com/ https://raredigitalartfestival.splashthat.com/

tomasien 9y ago
Wow thanks for sharing the event! It's going to be something else, I can't believe how excited folks are for rare digital art. The movement does feel like something special not just in the blockchain world but in the tech world in particular.

thisisit 9y ago

I wonder if there are any tutorials for building ERC-20 or 71 tokens? And also is there a tutorial on how to download the whole ethreum blockchain and parse it to a databse for analysis purposes?

viach 9y ago
Here is the tutorial: https://www.ethereum.org/token https://www.ethereum.org/token There is the BitcoinTalk forum for announcing your new super token https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0 Voila!

decorator 9y ago

(Disclaimer: I hold some Enigma). I'm (self)-interested in learning about Enigma[0]. It's an off-chain solution for scalability & privacy with regards to systems of blockchains (blockchain agnostic). It also has the capacity for its own dapps. The Enigma product isn't completed, yet there is a working product on top of the protocol called Catalyst[1] (I've not personally tried Catalyst, yet). Catalyst is a trading app for quants. Enigma is supported by MIT, & has Alex Pentland as an advisor. There's more to Enigma than what I've just outlined. 1) There's the data marketplace component. 2) It could also conceivably become a secure data processing layer for the Internet. I think it can be used with different protocols. I've yet to figure that out. [0] https://www.enigma.co https://www.enigma.co [1] https://enigmampc.github.io/catalyst/ https://enigmampc.github.io/catalyst/

tomasien 9y ago

There's a lot of hate on here for blockchain gaming/rare digital art so I'd like to clarify two points. 1. Blockchain games are best when only the necessary work is done on chain, such as transfer of ownership or enforcement of critical rules at run time. This tutorial may not show that so as to demonstrate the power of the blockchain, but most people in the space are building only the components players want to not be controlled by a central entity into the blockchain. It works fine. 2. The lack of digital scarcity is a real problem for artists. Blockchain art is a real solution. Artists I talk to are extremely excited about the ability to issue limited/special editions of their art on the blockchain that can owned and traded by their biggest fans. It's not about hiding the source art (image, music, etc) from the public, it's about having "signed" and "authentic" editions folks can collect and trade. They've lost that ability in the digital art world and this gives it back to them.

camillomiller 9y ago
The work of art in the age of mechanical scarcity? :)
hudon 9y ago
Blockchains do not provide digital scarcity. This a myth promulgated by the early days when “there are only 21 million” was a fact. Now, it is trivial to fork, copy or derive tokens to instantly bring millions of new “assets” into existence.
- aliendoodledog 9y ago
  Just because you can fork, copy, and derive tokens doesn't mean that scarcity doesn't exist in that particular market. I think the point was never about true scarcity, but that as long as the market has consensus over which blockchain is the source of truth, the internal scarcity is achievable without a central authority.
  - hudon 9y ago
    For 10 years of “blockchain”, the market has had more and more blockchains. So in absence of the consensus you’re hoping for, who decides which blockchain is the source of truth?

crack-the-code 9y ago

I can't imagine how immensely powerful it would be to have a game like Diablo leverage block chain for its items. This would eliminate the risk of dupes and ensure a fair system.

dangero 9y ago
The risk of dupes meaning that the company that created the game may release duplicate items? A centralized database can eliminate that risk as well.

DougN7 9y ago

IMHO, this reflects all that is bad about blockchains. So many systems around the world having to forever track nonsense like who owns a fake kitty. This is bloat. Throw it in a database that is owned by a virtual-kitty-selling company. Yeah, it's not decentralized. So what? It's a game! IMO the blockchain should be for important (financial/legal/real estate/?) transactions.

zilian 9y ago
"I don't like it so it shouldn't exist" ! I think this tutorial is very cool, I introduced programming and dapps to my 15 yo niece with it and she liked it.
- DougN7 9y ago
  It doesn't matter that I don't like it. Every addition to the blockchain imposes costs in storage, backup and transmission - forever. Nothing gets removed, so it just keeps growing. For property records that's a cost worth bearing (we had to record who owned what anyway). But how long and how much will it cost to forever record that Bob owned Kitty XYZ and then sold it to Allen? Multiply that by 50,000 other apps, and (millions?) of frivolous transactions. Just because we can doesn't mean we should.
  - t3chn0SchO0lbus 9y ago
    It doesn't have to be like that. We could rely on periodic snapshots of the blockchain for future validation. We could even selectively include specific data in the snapshots to be preserved. Maybe some group might need to store the entire history of the blockchain but there is a lot of room for innovation to solve this scaling dilemma.

gcb0 9y ago

anyone found the tutorial (or a similarly recommend one) in text?