10 ms·

Exgrasia: RPG-style sandbox game where every tile is a player-made contract

38 points by footest 4y ago

footest 4y ago
Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vifPHd7B4T0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vifPHd7B4T0
hresvelgr 4y ago
I don't think the underlying game is fun or interesting and the blockchain shtick is the only thing it's got going for it which imho is a detractive quality. I think its only merit is that it sated the author's interests.
- detritus 4y ago
  Mm, quite - I can't help but feel that most Blockchain-based-Thing announcements are little more than exercises in domain-specific omphaloskepsis.
  - natpalmer1776 4y ago
    I don't know if it is intentional, but your use of omphaloskepsis seems to be an ironic form of omphaloskepsis in its' own right.
    - detritus 4y ago
      That's very sweet of you, but no, it's just a damn good word.
      - cinntaile 4y ago
        I don't know, we call it navel-gazing in English?
        detritus 4y ago
        Ah yes, English – that famously-consistent and unbaggaged language with just one word, entirely native, per concept. Rot and cobblers for excessive prose!
      - misnome 4y ago
        Thank you for gifting me a new word today!
- Adraghast 4y ago
  "See, look! An application for blockchain! I told you it's not just for speculative assets!"
  - black_puppydog 4y ago
    "And by the way, you can buy this house-tile contract as an NFT!"
- im3w1l 4y ago
  I get what you are saying, but I see it from a more positive perspective. I wouldn't play it, but it's a really cool tech demo and proof of concept. I was amazed that it managed to run as smooth as it did, with every action corresponding to a blockchain transaction. And how easy it was to create new tokens, and contracts for automatically exchanging them. So I did enjoy the video and learned new things. And it made me think that making an interesting on-chain game is actually possible, even if this was not it.
  - hresvelgr 4y ago
    > And it made me think that making an interesting on-chain game is actually possible, even if this was not it. Sure, it's possible. But I would add that any on-chain game would be equally good, if not better by not being on the chain. I dare anyone to show me a game that is only good by existing on the blockchain. I'll wait.
jordemort 4y ago
"Every tile is a contract" sounds a bit like wandering around the dog park barefoot to me.
egypturnash 4y ago
“Every tile is a player-made contract” immediately gives me visions of griefing other players by plopping down a ring of “pay me $lots to step on this tile” around their bases.
- pradn 4y ago
  In high school, we used to play Monopoly with player contracts, usually insurance and no-rent deals. Of course, the friendships that existed outside the game ended up refracting into the contract structure of the game.
  - philipov 4y ago
    Any game that involves diplomacy needs to be played anonymously to prevent that sort of stuff. Not just pre-existing friendships, but people you play with frequently will learn your habits and tells, and will refuse to cooperate with someone they know is good at the game. It was easy to fix in the play-by-email Diplomacy days where you could create a new email address for each new match, but it's a lot harder in today's era of voice-chat-enabled social deduction games.
pavel_lishin 4y ago
> its frontend is highly composable too - just drop in JS code to extend! Eagerly looking forward to new and exciting vulnerabilities this will open players to!
- mdaniel 4y ago
  That's one level, the other was "connect your Metamask wallet to this game, where every tile is an unvetted smart contract"
santoshalper 4y ago
Web3/NFT/Blockchain games remind me of Edutainment Games or Christian rock bands. Failing to achieve your core mission by trying to shoehorn in an orthogonal concept.
- bmm6o 4y ago
  "You're not making blockchain better, you're making games worse", to paraphrase Hank Hill.
surrTurr 4y ago
That does NOT look fun
danielvaughn 4y ago
I have this recurring idea of a game where each player can construct their own islands, and players can travel around the world from island to island. Think Animal Crossing meets Skyrim. I have no clue how a "contract" would contribute to that idea at all, and would in fact pose more risk to vulnerabilities and hacks than would exist from a centralized architecture.
- jperry 4y ago
  Long since dead but I put a lot of time into a browser-based (2D) MMO called Nowhere Else and Beyond back in the day. You could build islands and they'd be placed somewhere in the world for people to sail to, you could create quests set on your island etc. There was even an object inventor for creating equipment.
  - webmaven 4y ago
    That sounds pretty cool. Was it a fork of an existing codebase such as BrowserQuest?
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    oh nice, that's exactly what I was imagining. A crafting system that allows you to create one-off unique items.
- bradhe 4y ago
  > I have this recurring idea of a game where each player can construct their own islands, and players can travel around the world from island to island. That is called No Man’s Sky.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    Similar idea, yes! But I'm imagining a single planet where each players island is specified by a set of GPS coordinates. You'd only be able to travel by boat, so initially only islands close to one another would feasibly be able to interact.
cinntaile 4y ago
It's unfortunate that most comments are predictable anti-blockchain comments again. Can't we just enjoy this guy's creative exploration?
- Stevvo 4y ago
  HN is allergic to Blockchain; people don't even read the articles they just jump straight into their opinions. The only exception is Vitalik; sometimes that guy is just too smart to ignore.
- arinlen 4y ago
  > It's unfortunate that most comments are predictable anti-blockchain comments again. Can't we just enjoy this guy's creative exploration? If the game's whole shtick is blockchain, is it really unreasonable to comment on the blockchain aspect of the game?
gnulinux 4y ago
What advantage does being on blockchain give here? It just looks like a simple game. It seems like you could implement everything in the game without using any blockchain et al.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  The ability to siphon money from players...
qayxc 4y ago
So the "game" is controlled via WASD and every single move is a real transaction on the (Ethereum-?)blockchain - brilliant! So after connecting your wallet, no matter the ominous per-tile player-created contracts, every keypress drains your wallet. Oh, and of course in the author's example they can "fish" at a certain tile and every "fish" is an NFT - but of course it is! A "permissionless collaborative surface" that is nothing but a barren wasteland of nothingness fuelled by a desperation to find a reason d'être. What you've created there is a sandbox, maybe, but not a game. There's nothing to do there, no goals, no sights, and connecting wallets, deploying smart contracts, and literally paying for every step you take doesn't sound like fun either.
spicyusername 4y ago
Love the spirit of engineering here. "Let's see what we can stitch together with these exploratory technologies" Hate that it has to be with blockchain technologies. "Let's see if we can siphon off easy money from more suckers with another piece of crypto vaporware"
- PretzelPirate 4y ago
  Since this runs in Kovan, it doesn’t cost any money to play.
nibnalin 4y ago
Hey folks, Creator here, thank you for sharing this here - it seems there’s a decent bit of misunderstandings in the comments (particularly around the security model/monetary cost) so I’ll clarify some things: - Your main wallet is never exposed to the game tiles, only a burner proxy wallet created for in-game interactions. This limits any attack surface area significantly. - Frontend plug-ins are decently sandboxed and cannot learn things like “what’s your private key?” or make transactions on your behalf unless you explicitly approve it. - This runs on a testnet L2 (Optimism Kovan) so it’s free to play - this is just meant to be a proof of concept exploration. Anyway, transaction costs are on the order of 1/100th of a cent on such L2s, so it’s really not prohibitively expensive to play the game even if it was with real money! I’m a bit disappointed that most of the comments here pose rather shallow understanding of what’s interesting about exgrasia/blockchain as a data layer for games - I’d think nothing would excite fellow programmers more than the ability to build their own systems and mod it into a “world” without any limits/permissions on it :(
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  > I’d think nothing would excite fellow programmers more than the ability to build their own systems and mod it into a “world” without any limits/permissions on it : You don't need a blockchain with global consensus to do that.
  - nibnalin 4y ago
    That’s a fair criticism - I like to think a blockchain is akin to a shared computer we all have access to (via programs/contracts) which makes it really convenient to use blockchains in such ways. Besides, the perpetual machine properties of a blockchain allow code to exist independent of an individual creator/entity - exgrasia cannot go the way of club penguin for instance.
    - pavel_lishin 4y ago
      > the perpetual machine properties of a blockchain allow code to exist independent of an individual creator/entity - exgrasia cannot go the way of club penguin for instance Which is framed as a net positive here, but is it? What happens when my little fishing tile is surrounded by $RACIAL_SLUR-ville? What happens when the landscape becomes a sea of swastikas?

38 points by footest 4y ago

Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vifPHd7B4T0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vifPHd7B4T0

I don't think the underlying game is fun or interesting and the blockchain shtick is the only thing it's got going for it which imho is a detractive quality. I think its only merit is that it sated the author's interests.

detritus 4y ago
Mm, quite - I can't help but feel that most Blockchain-based-Thing announcements are little more than exercises in domain-specific omphaloskepsis.
- natpalmer1776 4y ago
  I don't know if it is intentional, but your use of omphaloskepsis seems to be an ironic form of omphaloskepsis in its' own right.
  - detritus 4y ago
    That's very sweet of you, but no, it's just a damn good word.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      I don't know, we call it navel-gazing in English?
      - detritus 4y ago
        Ah yes, English – that famously-consistent and unbaggaged language with just one word, entirely native, per concept. Rot and cobblers for excessive prose!
    - misnome 4y ago
      Thank you for gifting me a new word today!
Adraghast 4y ago
"See, look! An application for blockchain! I told you it's not just for speculative assets!"
- black_puppydog 4y ago
  "And by the way, you can buy this house-tile contract as an NFT!"
im3w1l 4y ago
I get what you are saying, but I see it from a more positive perspective. I wouldn't play it, but it's a really cool tech demo and proof of concept. I was amazed that it managed to run as smooth as it did, with every action corresponding to a blockchain transaction. And how easy it was to create new tokens, and contracts for automatically exchanging them. So I did enjoy the video and learned new things. And it made me think that making an interesting on-chain game is actually possible, even if this was not it.
- hresvelgr 4y ago
  > And it made me think that making an interesting on-chain game is actually possible, even if this was not it. Sure, it's possible. But I would add that any on-chain game would be equally good, if not better by not being on the chain. I dare anyone to show me a game that is only good by existing on the blockchain. I'll wait.

jordemort 4y ago

"Every tile is a contract" sounds a bit like wandering around the dog park barefoot to me.

egypturnash 4y ago

“Every tile is a player-made contract” immediately gives me visions of griefing other players by plopping down a ring of “pay me $lots to step on this tile” around their bases.

pradn 4y ago
In high school, we used to play Monopoly with player contracts, usually insurance and no-rent deals. Of course, the friendships that existed outside the game ended up refracting into the contract structure of the game.
- philipov 4y ago
  Any game that involves diplomacy needs to be played anonymously to prevent that sort of stuff. Not just pre-existing friendships, but people you play with frequently will learn your habits and tells, and will refuse to cooperate with someone they know is good at the game. It was easy to fix in the play-by-email Diplomacy days where you could create a new email address for each new match, but it's a lot harder in today's era of voice-chat-enabled social deduction games.

pavel_lishin 4y ago

> its frontend is highly composable too - just drop in JS code to extend! Eagerly looking forward to new and exciting vulnerabilities this will open players to!

mdaniel 4y ago
That's one level, the other was "connect your Metamask wallet to this game, where every tile is an unvetted smart contract"

santoshalper 4y ago

Web3/NFT/Blockchain games remind me of Edutainment Games or Christian rock bands. Failing to achieve your core mission by trying to shoehorn in an orthogonal concept.

bmm6o 4y ago
"You're not making blockchain better, you're making games worse", to paraphrase Hank Hill.

surrTurr 4y ago

That does NOT look fun

danielvaughn 4y ago

I have this recurring idea of a game where each player can construct their own islands, and players can travel around the world from island to island. Think Animal Crossing meets Skyrim. I have no clue how a "contract" would contribute to that idea at all, and would in fact pose more risk to vulnerabilities and hacks than would exist from a centralized architecture.

jperry 4y ago
Long since dead but I put a lot of time into a browser-based (2D) MMO called Nowhere Else and Beyond back in the day. You could build islands and they'd be placed somewhere in the world for people to sail to, you could create quests set on your island etc. There was even an object inventor for creating equipment.
- webmaven 4y ago
  That sounds pretty cool. Was it a fork of an existing codebase such as BrowserQuest?
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  oh nice, that's exactly what I was imagining. A crafting system that allows you to create one-off unique items.
bradhe 4y ago
> I have this recurring idea of a game where each player can construct their own islands, and players can travel around the world from island to island. That is called No Man’s Sky.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Similar idea, yes! But I'm imagining a single planet where each players island is specified by a set of GPS coordinates. You'd only be able to travel by boat, so initially only islands close to one another would feasibly be able to interact.

cinntaile 4y ago

It's unfortunate that most comments are predictable anti-blockchain comments again. Can't we just enjoy this guy's creative exploration?

Stevvo 4y ago
HN is allergic to Blockchain; people don't even read the articles they just jump straight into their opinions. The only exception is Vitalik; sometimes that guy is just too smart to ignore.
arinlen 4y ago
> It's unfortunate that most comments are predictable anti-blockchain comments again. Can't we just enjoy this guy's creative exploration? If the game's whole shtick is blockchain, is it really unreasonable to comment on the blockchain aspect of the game?

gnulinux 4y ago

What advantage does being on blockchain give here? It just looks like a simple game. It seems like you could implement everything in the game without using any blockchain et al.

Mikeb85 4y ago
The ability to siphon money from players...

qayxc 4y ago

So the "game" is controlled via WASD and every single move is a real transaction on the (Ethereum-?)blockchain - brilliant! So after connecting your wallet, no matter the ominous per-tile player-created contracts, every keypress drains your wallet. Oh, and of course in the author's example they can "fish" at a certain tile and every "fish" is an NFT - but of course it is! A "permissionless collaborative surface" that is nothing but a barren wasteland of nothingness fuelled by a desperation to find a reason d'être. What you've created there is a sandbox, maybe, but not a game. There's nothing to do there, no goals, no sights, and connecting wallets, deploying smart contracts, and literally paying for every step you take doesn't sound like fun either.

spicyusername 4y ago

Love the spirit of engineering here. "Let's see what we can stitch together with these exploratory technologies" Hate that it has to be with blockchain technologies. "Let's see if we can siphon off easy money from more suckers with another piece of crypto vaporware"

PretzelPirate 4y ago
Since this runs in Kovan, it doesn’t cost any money to play.

nibnalin 4y ago

Hey folks, Creator here, thank you for sharing this here - it seems there’s a decent bit of misunderstandings in the comments (particularly around the security model/monetary cost) so I’ll clarify some things: - Your main wallet is never exposed to the game tiles, only a burner proxy wallet created for in-game interactions. This limits any attack surface area significantly. - Frontend plug-ins are decently sandboxed and cannot learn things like “what’s your private key?” or make transactions on your behalf unless you explicitly approve it. - This runs on a testnet L2 (Optimism Kovan) so it’s free to play - this is just meant to be a proof of concept exploration. Anyway, transaction costs are on the order of 1/100th of a cent on such L2s, so it’s really not prohibitively expensive to play the game even if it was with real money! I’m a bit disappointed that most of the comments here pose rather shallow understanding of what’s interesting about exgrasia/blockchain as a data layer for games - I’d think nothing would excite fellow programmers more than the ability to build their own systems and mod it into a “world” without any limits/permissions on it :(

NoraCodes 4y ago
> I’d think nothing would excite fellow programmers more than the ability to build their own systems and mod it into a “world” without any limits/permissions on it : You don't need a blockchain with global consensus to do that.
- nibnalin 4y ago
  That’s a fair criticism - I like to think a blockchain is akin to a shared computer we all have access to (via programs/contracts) which makes it really convenient to use blockchains in such ways. Besides, the perpetual machine properties of a blockchain allow code to exist independent of an individual creator/entity - exgrasia cannot go the way of club penguin for instance.
  - pavel_lishin 4y ago
    > the perpetual machine properties of a blockchain allow code to exist independent of an individual creator/entity - exgrasia cannot go the way of club penguin for instance Which is framed as a net positive here, but is it? What happens when my little fishing tile is surrounded by $RACIAL_SLUR-ville? What happens when the landscape becomes a sea of swastikas?