Cryptocurrency-driven game(s)

[markm]

I only participate in crowd-funding if I have a reward for it (in this case, a free copy of the completed game), and when I see a project already partway to completion, with "something to show for it".  So, if I were to help crowd-fund your endeavor, I'd want to see you complete it partially in your own spare time, then ask for further funding to focus on it full-time and bring it to completion.  Have some screenshots, a basic demo of it, a really detailed design doc, or something of that nature.

So here's my idea:
Multi-player sim city with satoshi's as the base currency, you have to pay to start your city (i.e., fund it with 0.01 BTC or something to get 1,000,000 credits to start building with).  Cities are placed on a world map.  People can view each others cities.  Cities are constantly in motion - in other words, the gameplay doesn't pause just because you exit the game.

Here's where the money-maker for you comes in, and the challenge/reward for the players comes in:
- A base tax is levied over real-world time.  This is a fixed credit tax.  500 credits/day or something.
- A land tax is levied over real-world time.  This is a variable credit tax, dependent upon how much land you use.  5000 credits/sq mile or something.
- The experienced player must attempt to build a city large enough to sustain itself while paying the taxes.  Anything beyond that is icing on the cake, monies that they can actually withdraw if they like.

It should be difficult to successfully create a large, thriving city, but this is the only way that a person would actually be able to "make money" in the game.  Those monies would come from taxes on cities who don't turn a profit.  The difficulty should automatically adjust according to how much money is brought in from failed cities vs how much money is given out from successful cities.

Hmmm, this actually turned into an intriguing idea as I wrote it.  I kind of like it.

I have wanted to plug in a Lincity or similar free open source simulated city component for a long long time.

Over the decades though I have ended up taking a top down approach to universes instead of the bottom up approach simply because starting at the bottom always leaves too many undefined holes/edges.

Basically instead of starting out with, say, an inn for players to live in an a dungeon from them to adventure in then having to wonder what the rest of the world outside their little area is like, I now start at the large scale and work down.

Thus, I start with a vast panoply of galaxies. (I had a cube 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 parsecs in size, containing billions upon billions of galaxies, back when the Apple IIe was new.)

I get down to cities using Freeciv. Freeciv off the shelf runs one planet, with nations and cities and politics.

That gives me a backdrop in which I don't need every city to have to be controlled in Lincity/Simcity level of detail, there can be a world fully populated with cities even if no players ever choose to delve down into a more detailed view of any particular city.

It would be great to be able to plug in a Lincity type module to let people do that kind of detailed play of their city.

Right at this moment though it is looking like maybe an Open Simulator representation of a city might actually be easier, except maybe for the sheer size of such a representation. (A Freeciv map tile is probably 160,000 or more Open Simulator "regions" in size...)

160,000 "regions" would be quite expensive to host if you did it the simple way of just actually putting that many regions online.

So a Lincity/simcity type representation would if nothing else have an economic advantage in that more players would more likely find paying for such a represenation to be hosted to be within their budget.

But when we start at the planet scale, simply looking to finance the hosting of the Freeciv scale planet representation with enough funds to allow starting into the more detailed - and thus more resource-intensive - scales, a nation/civilisation having only one city seems quite affordable, and also has the virtue of making a large nation with a few hundred cities far more costly than individual players usually find affordable for just their own personal control/use/play. This helps encourage nations to actually "consist of" more than one player, which in turn provides motivation for various clan, association, political party, guild etc etc type groups to organise/grow/develop.

What I have to show so far has begun to be documented at http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu and also at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

(The latter because I want banks and stock exchanges that people build in cities to be able to be detailed out as fully functional so each can itself be an embedded economics/finance game within the larger game, allowing people only interested in speculation etc to have fun doing their thing while still thereby contributing to the depth and detail and variety of the larger game.)

-MarkM-

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[markm]

How about a colony/wild-west type of game where people can have roles/shops (farmer, rancher, miner, blacksmith, shopkeeper, etc.)?
The idea is that each player can produce only a limited subset of goods and needs to trade with other players to get everything they need.

I imagine you start as a "worker" and can help an advanced player produce goods in his business (e.g. farm, mine) in exchange for pay.
As you accumulate money/goods/experience you can eventually run your own business.

The key is you can't do everything yourself because have limited time/manpower/opportunities.

When each "role" is filled in a town, then a new town is founded. Towns can also trade with each other, and that is another kind of business.

The actual mechanics of this is part of what the CoffeeMUD platform provides. You can think of CoffeeMUD as an API server, anyone who wants graphics, music or whatever on top of the actual game-mechanics can add them just like various GUI front ends have been built for hiding bitcoind from people who prefer a GUI.

From an economy-game and fund-raising perspective the mechanics are the important part, especially if you take a larger view in which individuals labouring in the fields and mines or crafting floors and walls and doors or hammering away at metals to make armour and so on are basically lower classes, labourers, doing grunt work wondering how one ever actually works up from that to being lord of a nation or empire.

CoffeeMUD also has useful government stuff, like clans guilds fellowships gangs and such, whereby people can organise and assign various privileges based on position in the group, and some players have found it thus much more useful than (for example) the Crossfire RPG platform as a place to meet and organise.

The challenge at this scale is how much can you as an employer afford to pay these "mere worker" players? Where will the wherewithal with which to pay them come from? This is the challenge the Galactic Milieu players forming their groups on/in the CrossCiv and CoffeeMUD platforms are currently dealing with...

-MarkM-

[markm]

The idea of using games as a way of distributing cryptocurrency to end-users has been brought up many times already, but most of the time the plan was  to harness the computing power of the computers players use to connect to the games; most such plans seem to have faded away as far as I am aware.

I have been watching various experiments though in which the players are not doing the network number-crunching themselves, they are simply using the currencies. Some of the currencies have been so low in value (and in difficulty) that handing them out to players has been very affordable, and even profitable.

Some interesting things have been observed; for example currencies clearly associated with specific factions, and not open to "just anyone" to mint, have skyrocketed in value compared to currencies anyone/everyone is able to mint themselves.

( See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html )

As mentioned in the previous post, the CoffeeMUD platform has been added to the repertoire of games being used in these experiments; for some time it was accessible only via i2p as mudgaard.i2p but recently it has been made reachable (far less securely) at http://mudgaard.knotwork.com:27744

So far it looks like two types of currencies work well with games: one is very very low value coins, so cheap that they are pretty much useless for anything other than serving as game-currencies; another is currencies minted by specific factions of players so that it is clear to players exactly which faction's currency it is so they know who they should be expecting to "back" it and, from the relative strength of that faction, how strong it might be expected to be or become compared to currencies issued by other factions.

-MarkM-

[markm]

The kind of complexity you are probably imagining seems kind of unlikely, but I have thought of trying something relatively simple such as one of those map-less types of games in which anyone can attack anyone without any actual geography getting in the way by making you have to go through some people in order to reach other people.

In such a game each player's "forces" could be represented by coins at addresses, with the coins acting as the powerfulness of the forces represented by the address and possibly with the address itself being able to differentiate "types" of unit so different "types" could have different attack and defense factors against other "types".

Players could specify their "forces" by signing something with the signatures of the addresses, and manifest them by sending coins to the addresses.

But, there isn't any mechanism for removing other people's coins from other people's addresses, so if you think of the coins in an address as akin to hit points and try to deal damage in the form of reduced number of coins being at an address after the attack, the problem of how to actually cause that to happen makes it clear this would not be an overlay on a currency chain, it would be a game chain, whose clients/servers/daemons would be enforcing some rules by which players can cause other players to change the balances at addresses...

-MarkM-

[markm]

People have suggested in the past that "atomic transactions" can be implemented once the send coins to script functionality is active/working.

This apparently can work between chains too.

So possibly one could do things like lets use bitcoins as actual combat effectiveness, i0coins as what is needed to build infantry (metal, maybe, or something like that, in effect), and ixcoins as what is needed to build naval units (wood, maybe, or something like that, in effect).

Then set up atomic transactions in which I send my navy, represented by a number of ixcoins, to battle your army, represented by a number of i0coins; or maybe we imagine this same sending of coins as representing me sending a bunch of wood to try to seize some of your metal, since the effect of you winning would be you get my wood (ixcoins) and the effect of me winning would be I get your metal (i0coins).

Maybe the transaction can be set up in such a way that depending on which of us sends more bitcoins, representing the force we are backing our move with, somewhere, possibly also modified by the numbers of wood and metal we send (I say possibly since this could also be done integer, one woodcoin versus one metalcoin at a time, or whatever).

The basic idea here, the mechanics, is that transactions can be built, even using more than one chain supposedly, which either complete or do not complete; either the battle happens or it does not, kind of thing.

Even this though I am not sure can be done practically since maybe the way the various signings of the transaction have to happen will always leave one of us in the position of being able to abort the entire battle if we perceive we are about to be the loser...

-MarkM-

[markm]

On the other hand, just the simple existence of a multitude of currencies, some of which are P2P blockchain based and some of which were once blockchains and hope someday to again be blockchains if they can come up with enough mining power, is already a huge boon to the world of metagaming (weaving together multiple games).

Just the fact that any games are free to interface with any of the P2P currencies permits a whole lot of fun economics and finance play to cross boundaries between games, and in the process opens up a whole field of finance games and speculation games so that players can "invest" and "wager" and "hedge" and so on across multiple games without even having to burden themselves with vulnerable avatars wandering around inside the various games being stalked by thieves and assassins or laid siege to by armies or nuked from orbit or whatever the dangers player-avatars might face in the various games.

This also means that characters inside games investing in infrastructure in the game can merge or slippery-slope all the way through to players investing in the deployment of games the hosting of games the development of games and so on.

As an example, consider the Galaxies Online "galaxies not so very very far away" game, which currently is implemented using XNova Redesigned software. It turned out that software totally lacks combat, so perforce those galaxies, conceived as inner defences that will ultimately hopefully defend the Freeciv-based civilised worlds from hostiles from galaxies far far away, are currently limited to peaceful development/exploitation.

However, if someone were to throw some cryptocurrency at the problem of the broken combat system, or, alternatively, at making a data migration routine that can migrate the data over to the 2moons software's database schema, combat could become possible in those galaxies some day or some month or some year or some decade; players from farther-away galaxies who want to bring war-fleets toward the civilised worlds might throw coins at the problem at any time, which in turn creates motivation for the civilised worlds to try to develop a way to send fleets from their no-combat nearby galaxies out to galaxies farther away to take a "good offense" approach to defense...

-MarkM-

[KhanJohnson]

Funny you bring up MUDs! You might be interested in checking out this Blockchain Based Multi-User Roguelike (Medium)

[Kakmakr]

OP, I went through this thread and your previous thread of 10 pages to see if I could find the GUI interface for this game, but I cannot find it. Will this be a text based game like the old BatMUD game  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BatMUD ) or something with a nice GUI interface and massive worlds that can be explored?   < https://www.bat.org/ >

I kind of get the idea of what you are planning, but I cannot see your ultimate goal for this game. (What platform ...? Xbox / PC / Play Station )

[DaveF]

Don't forget about coindroids.
Kind of hokey, but still fun, robot fighting game.
https://coindroids.github.io/Coindroids-Documentation/#introduction
Not what I would call rapid development but it is being worked on and maintained.
Uses litecoin / defcoin for now but others can and will be added. Or others were at least planned to be added, don't know where that stands.

-Dave

[Stratobitz]

The concept of having cryptocurrency-driven games, or rather, games which utilized specific cryptocurrency tokens was one of many concepts I had in per-development back in 2014.

But it never went farther than having a number of IRC chats with a few other developers, coders, a cryptographer, and some rough loosely written white papers I drafted.

The concept was ArcadeCoin, which I hold the twitter @ArcadeCoin handle to... as well as the Bitcointalk account username ArcadeCoin, which was used by the few of us who worked a bit on the project.

However it's been dormant for a long time.

If I remember correctly it would have been Cryptonight based, but we honestly moved on to other projects simply because of the game development in conjunction with the cryptocurrency integration (specifically related to the blockchain timing/confirmation issues) was simply too much of an undertaking (at that time).

I have always thought it was a solid concept in theory; however I am not a "game" developer, and game developers we found lacked the understanding of blockchain integration... basically we spoke different languages.

I made the decision in December to pick back up where I left off with a different project-  HALO, which will be a blockchain based dynamic cryptocurrency-- I'll leave the details to that until we release / update the ANN thread / Twitter, Handles for that name...

But ArcadeCoin or some variation / concept based on that idea still intrigues me.

Cheers!

Strato
 

[DaveF]

I totally forgot about huntercoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=435170.0
Wow, I mined it and played it back in the day.
Now, I have to go and dig through my old drive images to see if I even still have a copy of it anyplace.

There was another one too, it was a clone of huntercoin, I don't remember the name but it was out there too.

-Dave

[zeuner]

I only participate in crowd-funding if I have a reward for it (in this case, a free copy of the completed game), and when I see a project already partway to completion, with "something to show for it".  So, if I were to help crowd-fund your endeavor, I'd want to see you complete it partially in your own spare time, then ask for further funding to focus on it full-time and bring it to completion.  Have some screenshots, a basic demo of it, a really detailed design doc, or something of that nature.

So here's my idea:
Multi-player sim city with satoshi's as the base currency, you have to pay to start your city (i.e., fund it with 0.01 BTC or something to get 1,000,000 credits to start building with).  Cities are placed on a world map.  People can view each others cities.  Cities are constantly in motion - in other words, the gameplay doesn't pause just because you exit the game.

Here's where the money-maker for you comes in, and the challenge/reward for the players comes in:
- A base tax is levied over real-world time.  This is a fixed credit tax.  500 credits/day or something.
- A land tax is levied over real-world time.  This is a variable credit tax, dependent upon how much land you use.  5000 credits/sq mile or something.
- The experienced player must attempt to build a city large enough to sustain itself while paying the taxes.  Anything beyond that is icing on the cake, monies that they can actually withdraw if they like.

It should be difficult to successfully create a large, thriving city, but this is the only way that a person would actually be able to "make money" in the game.  Those monies would come from taxes on cities who don't turn a profit.  The difficulty should automatically adjust according to how much money is brought in from failed cities vs how much money is given out from successful cities.

Hmmm, this actually turned into an intriguing idea as I wrote it.  I kind of like it.

I have wanted to plug in a Lincity or similar free open source simulated city component for a long long time.

Over the decades though I have ended up taking a top down approach to universes instead of the bottom up approach simply because starting at the bottom always leaves too many undefined holes/edges.

Basically instead of starting out with, say, an inn for players to live in an a dungeon from them to adventure in then having to wonder what the rest of the world outside their little area is like, I now start at the large scale and work down.

Thus, I start with a vast panoply of galaxies. (I had a cube 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 x 1.0E11 parsecs in size, containing billions upon billions of galaxies, back when the Apple IIe was new.)

I get down to cities using Freeciv. Freeciv off the shelf runs one planet, with nations and cities and politics.

That gives me a backdrop in which I don't need every city to have to be controlled in Lincity/Simcity level of detail, there can be a world fully populated with cities even if no players ever choose to delve down into a more detailed view of any particular city.

It would be great to be able to plug in a Lincity type module to let people do that kind of detailed play of their city.

Right at this moment though it is looking like maybe an Open Simulator representation of a city might actually be easier, except maybe for the sheer size of such a representation. (A Freeciv map tile is probably 160,000 or more Open Simulator "regions" in size...)

160,000 "regions" would be quite expensive to host if you did it the simple way of just actually putting that many regions online.

So a Lincity/simcity type representation would if nothing else have an economic advantage in that more players would more likely find paying for such a represenation to be hosted to be within their budget.

But when we start at the planet scale, simply looking to finance the hosting of the Freeciv scale planet representation with enough funds to allow starting into the more detailed - and thus more resource-intensive - scales, a nation/civilisation having only one city seems quite affordable, and also has the virtue of making a large nation with a few hundred cities far more costly than individual players usually find affordable for just their own personal control/use/play. This helps encourage nations to actually "consist of" more than one player, which in turn provides motivation for various clan, association, political party, guild etc etc type groups to organise/grow/develop.

What I have to show so far has begun to be documented at http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Galactic_Milieu and also at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

(The latter because I want banks and stock exchanges that people build in cities to be able to be detailed out as fully functional so each can itself be an embedded economics/finance game within the larger game, allowing people only interested in speculation etc to have fun doing their thing while still thereby contributing to the depth and detail and variety of the larger game.)

-MarkM-

People also build cities in https://www.minetest.net/, and use currency there (https://gitlab.com/VanessaE/currency). For integration with a blockchain, it would be required to secure the server logic against duplication of currency items, and a mechanism to spawn them based on deposited blockchain balances.

The possibilities seem rather exciting because it would solve the existing issue of moving resources from server to server.