Create a game that accepts Bitcoin for currency

[Xenland]

I cannot do anything tech side, maybe use that stupid RPG maker, but if anyone takes this on, I'd enjoy throwing ideas toward a Bitcoin based story where the main enemies are trolls.   Incorporate all the exchanges being attacked.  I don't want to spoil the storyline too much here, but the 'hero' though saving the exchanges may not need them in the end, that twist would be for all the heavy btc politics groups lol.  There is a love story with a girl who exchanges cam images online for btc.  And death story too.  Alt coins will be in the game, but in name only.  Lot of material to work with here, I would play a Bitcoin game if it had Bill Cosby in it

Wow..... I couldn't have said it any better. 


Basically what we need for a Bitcoin game that reflects everything we've seen in the past year from creation of the Bitcoin all the way to all the haxks on to where we are now with teh trolls.

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[RodeoX]

I like the idea of building tournament ladders using bitcoin. That could be implemented in any game. Like the starcraft example from page 1.

[markm]

Creating games nowadays is mostly a matter of how much money you are willing to spend on development, and actually running the games is mostly about sustainability, again meaning money. To make it graphical can be very expensive. Thus if graphics can be made a user-end problem, a problem the users themselves are expected to solve like in Second Life, that would go a long way for development and operating budgets.

Second Life isn't even very pretty, it might be worthwhile to use Plane Shift's open source engine instead of the open worlds system that is directly compatible with Second Life. It too is basically only an open engine, almost all the graphical stuff used in the actual Plane Shift game they do not give away for others to use.

Leaving the eye-candy to clients or users lets you focus on the actual game, and also hopefully might let the eye candy end of things develop as users prove the demand for it by actually financing it. For a lot of stuff a 3d graphical world is not even a very useful interface anyway. For example running a planetary scale campaign might be easier using something like Freeciv than by using a 3d avatar in some kind of 3d command-bunker trying to issue orders to your 3d avatar generals or something like that. Those who actually run the campaign could use Freeciv to conveniently run it and only bother wasting time and computer-power on a3d avatar system if they for some reason have to deal with political masters who insist on meeting with the military leaders in such ways instead of sending them orders by email or even -gasp- actually using Freeciv themselves to actually take control themselves instead of delegating such details to subordinates.

Basically if you are too lazy to actually control forces yourself using a village scale or planetary scale or multigalactic scale command interface then fine, try to convince those who are not so lazy to listen to you on a character to character scale, but how then will you convince them to follow your plans or implement your ideas?

Do you plan to be more deadly than they in individual combat, maybe, and convince them by threatening to assassinate them or disable them or something like that? If so, why would they even choose to make themselves vulnerable by actually showing up at the avatar to avatar individual character level meeting? Maybe if they consider such a meeting worthy of any notice at all they would be better off sending professional played or non-played assassin characters to deal with you on that scale?

So far it is looking as if more bitcoiners are interested in trade economy and investment activities (aka games; pastimes) that eliminate melee and missile-weapons and even marching armies around; so maybe even if they can somehow be attracted onto a game-board where such possibilities exist their primary concern would be how to make the eliminating of such threats cost-effective enough to make such milieus worth such risks?

Given that observed bias of bitcoiners it seems more important to get the whole "how their coins can interact in such systems profitably" side of things in place before worrying about trying  to make such systems look pretty for people who have more interest in eye-candy than in bitcoins.

Except maybe for artists. If your main product is art rather than coins, yeah, trying to sell art makes sense. But this venue seems more interested in selling coins... What, if any, game-commodities are they willing to spend significant numbers of them on?

-MarkM-

[byronbb]

Think of a game like minecraft. Imagine if the act of playing minecraft a hashing process was also underway effectively "mining a crypto currency" as you played. Obviously you would be part of a large pool and every so often you are awarded a small bit of crypto currency. This allows you to cashout to buy real stuff or perhaps ingame items or gambling.
Then we finally have this Far Side comic closer to reality.

[markm]

Minecraft code is available, the main reason I do not yet have it online is a lack of paying customers choosing to finance the hosting and bandwidth for it. So far it seems my player base does not consider a minecraft interface to be worthwhile / cost-effective as a means of interacting with the game universe/multiverse. But if you can find enough people who do prefer a minecraft type representation to actually cover the hosting and bandwidth such a representation entails it can be set up.

So far my players have been preferring to start with more-abstract representations that entail lower hosting and bandwidth costs, the better to allow a larger proportion of "free players" to "paying players". Any player who is willing to actually pay to have portions of worlds they are interacting with illustrated in glorious artwork is welcome to do so, but so far the players I have been working with seem to prefer cost-effective interfaces over art-intensive interfaces for working with their virtual assets.

Thus the approach I have been taking is to first get working inventories of assets, the ability to trade them, go to war over them, and so on before worrying about whether artists will ever end up being able to make a decent wage creating illustrations of them.

IF you were looking to pick up some virtual real-estate that will double in value in 30 days time, how much overhead would you be willing to incur to have artists illustrate the stuff? Once you've sold it at double what you paid for it will you still care what it might actually look like to someone using some specific client on some specific machine using some specific video card? Would it even look the same using their client and hardware as it would using yours? Heck, maybe they might even prefer a different look than you prefer? They might choose a different style of architecture in their client, making all buildings appear differently to them than they do to you. Are buildings that players do not get to choose their own preferred visual representation of worth more or less than those that each players' client can show in the player's preferred style?

If you really like to see stuff represented in minecraft style, that can happen, but there will be costs associated with doing so. How many bitcoins so far are out there demanding that specific representation be added to the list of representations players can choose to use? I am all for increasing the number of clients and types of clients players can use to interact with various aspects of the virtual multiverse but lets try to make sure we can pay the hosting and bandwidth costs...

-MarkM-

[MaxSan]

Take a read below and make amendants or w/e where possible. Going to pass it along to some real cleaver guys who run a private server and see what they think on fesability. Ive no idea how familiar they are with bitcoins so there is some extra stuff in there that you guys will already know all about.

if some cleaver guy can work out the math behind what im going on about that would be good. Would take me quite a while I think hehe.

I onyl picked dark age of camelot cause im familiar with it. I assume if done with one game can be done with many in relatively the same method.

Game - Dark Age of Camelot. Private Shard. Based from Dawn of Light source.

It has been discussed about implementing bitcoin mining into a game. Those who are not familiar with bitcoins should look at www.weusecoins.com  http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com and www.bitcointalk.org for information. An alternative system to this may be used which is based on CPU power instead to try implement a proof of concept. Bitcoin or alternative will be refered to as xcoin.

Rules
1.   Effect on the game should be minimum.
2.   Money cannot have an imbalance to gameplay.
3.   Server owners must not hold responsibility for large amounts of funds.
4.   The game play experience must still be fair for all.

Logic
Every client (player) will run the algorithm to produce xcoin, even if they are not doing anything of value in-game. The server will act as a pool to connect to the main xcoin network and getwork for each of the clients.
While an area is populated with a specific population of in-game characters a set percentage figure is given to the NPC mobs as possible drops.
Depending on which xcoin is used some players my greatly add to the pool of available funds. These people should be reward with a personal or group bonus based on a small % increase on the “basic rate”

Example figures, defining the basic rate;
Server Population = 150, Realm Population = 50, Zone population = 15

Droppable money will represent a maximum of 10% of the total possible coin production of the server. This figure will be lowered to account for value of items and level of zone.
Using the same figures if the area was for level 10 characters only 2% of the value would be given in comparison to a level 50 to keep an in game balance for value.

Accounts
Xcoin is notorious for having people try to hack and scam people for amounts coins in some way. Decoupling this from ingame logic would be essential for trust and avoid being targeted.
As the client is mining the funds are being held in a different location this information is updated by polling to the server when blocks are found which up updates in-game accounts. This is essential as using live data would give 10 minute delays on transactions. This way they represent an alias of the funds held by the system.
If a user chooses to “retire” he may withdraw the money from the system. If he chooses to play again he may add the money back to his account, but no more than he had before, this will stop imbalance.

Gameplay
A user must be able to drastically reduce the amount that his system is mining if required. It is a game after all and it needs to be playable. It’s not possible to turn if off but larger contributors will be rewarded as stated above.

[Elwar]

Just had an idea for a Bitcoin game....

Similar concept. All items/upgrades/etc. in game are purchased and sold using Bitcoins. The Bitcoin client will be built into the game to ease the transfer of coins.

The game will also include mining code into it to mine coins.

It is basically a battle type of game where everyone is out for themselves, or they form groups or whatever they want.

When the combined power of all of the miners discovers a block and gets 50 BTC it pops up in the game (or many coins separated are sent out). The coins fall closest to those who contributed the most GPU power.

When the 50 BTC comes in, it is a free for all. Whoever can get to it first wins. You can fight others, coordinate with others, go lone wolf, etc.

When you get the BTC, the server transfers the BTC to you. From there maybe you need to get back to your home base or whichever.

It would be like pool mining but a game where playing a video game could actually make you money.

[molecular]

Just had an idea for a Bitcoin game....

Similar concept. All items/upgrades/etc. in game are purchased and sold using Bitcoins. The Bitcoin client will be built into the game to ease the transfer of coins.

The game will also include mining code into it to mine coins.

It is basically a battle type of game where everyone is out for themselves, or they form groups or whatever they want.

When the combined power of all of the miners discovers a block and gets 50 BTC it pops up in the game (or many coins separated are sent out). The coins fall closest to those who contributed the most GPU power.

When the 50 BTC comes in, it is a free for all. Whoever can get to it first wins. You can fight others, coordinate with others, go lone wolf, etc.

When you get the BTC, the server transfers the BTC to you. From there maybe you need to get back to your home base or whichever.

It would be like pool mining but a game where playing a video game could actually make you money.

How about raining the 50 BTC down randomly in small patches. Send your harvesters out, or something along these lines...

EDIT: about an engine: I played spring a while ago with a friend. pretty good engine, it seems to me: http://springrts.com/

[Elwar]

How about raining the 50 BTC down randomly in small patches. Send your harvesters out, or something along these lines...

EDIT: about an engine: I played spring a while ago with a friend. pretty good engine, it seems to me: http://springrts.com/

Ya, I guess they do not even need to be considered BTC in the game. Maybe something that you can sell for BTC or whichever.

That spring engine looks quite nice. Open source and everything.

[molecular]

How about raining the 50 BTC down randomly in small patches. Send your harvesters out, or something along these lines...

EDIT: about an engine: I played spring a while ago with a friend. pretty good engine, it seems to me: http://springrts.com/

Ya, I guess they do not even need to be considered BTC in the game. Maybe something that you can sell for BTC or whichever.

may the SPICE be with you!

That spring engine looks quite nice. Open source and everything.

I agree.

[markm]

The Crossfire RPG engine supports a bunch of types of money already, bitcoins can be added simply by offering them for sale in the game.

Each bitcoin can be represented by two tokens, one redeemable for the other. The redeemable one you can trade between characters like any other in game item characters can pick up and carry. It does not tell the address and private key of the actual bitcoin, that way you can tell that no-one has yet claimed that coin thus the token still has value.

The token that tells the actual address and private key of the coin is stored in a vault that can only be opened by the redeemable token, which vanishes when thus redeemed.

Thus when someone wants to actually "cash in" a bitcoin token they take it to the vault and use it to get the actual address and private key of an actual bitcoin. Meanwhile they have a token they can easily trade to other players or that other players can capture by killing them to get the things they carry.

There is a potential "cut" for the game if people do use player versus player in this way, because when you kill someone some of their gear might get destroyed, depending on how you kill them and the material the gear is made of. A paper token for example would burn easily so killing the character carrying one with fire is quite likely to destroy the token.

Also bots can be deployed in the game, running on servers that have bitcoind also running, to provide access to bitcoind functions from inside the game. That can be done with any game that allows bots to be used.

Come on over to the "CrossCiv" instance of Crossfire RPG, it is accessible using the web-deployed Crossfire client found at http://invidious.meflin.net/crossfire/jxclient.jnlp

You will want the science fiction milieu rather than the fantasy milieu, since bitcoins are more a sci-fi type of currency than a fantasy-world type of currency. So don't choose a fantasy character (elves orcs etc, dragons, magic-users, priests etc) if you are looking to reach the science fiction milieu rather than the fantasy milieu.

I have two other games also in testing, both fully web-based, which will also interact, initially mostly by means of blockchain currencies all the games support but eventually also trading resources etc: a Villages game and a Galaxies game. Both are based on aquiring resources, and they already have one resource in common, known as metal in the galaxies game and iron in the villages game. So already they have more in common than just the use of blockchain based currencies.

Because stuff should not appear from nothing when new players join, eventually players will have to first accumulate enough "stuff" for found a village in the smaller scale game before they can start into the Villages game, and similarly accumulate enough stuff at that or the smaller scale before they can launch into the galaxies, but currently they are in early adopter stage where it is assumed they obtained backing (loans) to obtain their startup stuff.

-MarkM-

[Xenland]

How about raining the 50 BTC down randomly in small patches. Send your harvesters out, or something along these lines...

EDIT: about an engine: I played spring a while ago with a friend. pretty good engine, it seems to me: http://springrts.com/

Ya, I guess they do not even need to be considered BTC in the game. Maybe something that you can sell for BTC or whichever.

may the SPICE be with you!

That spring engine looks quite nice. Open source and everything.

I agree.

Ohh SPICE will SWIM be there too?

[markm]

Is there genuinely any real interest in this or is it just empty B.S. ?

Ryzom has released all its source code plus its art assets, so there is now an engine available that does include art assets.

But is anyone actually interested? In particular does anyone actually want to *play* games that involve bitcoins or other blockchain based currencies?

-MarkM-

[DeaDTerra]

DeaD.Gaming are currently hosting the second CryptoCrush Starcraft 2 tournament, it's the second tournament were the prize pool is in Bitcoins, check it out at http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=288969 . It will be played on the 3rd it will be streamed on our stream channel www.twitch.tv/deadgaming

[BitcoinPorn]

Kudos to the Crypto X Change for hitting up the Starcraft tourney and having those requirements to enter, very well done marketing, and good for the players of Starcraft, it's a huge audience that isn't exactly ignored, but not marketed to enough imo.

Is there genuinely any real interest in this or is it just empty B.S. ?

I am willing to assist on the side with graphics, possible writing, and other notes, but I am not a person who codes, and the creative freedoms in video games really are limited by the person who would be writing the game.  I was looking at the villages and galaxies pages, were there current screenshots of Galaxies, also the Villages screen page is down.

[Unthinkingbit]

I have been working toward this end with several open source game systems. Unfortunately web-based ones seem to have a tendency to not actually be in workable condition, but hopefully as Devcoin picks up  bounties can be used to help fix that.

As long as there is a plan to get revenue, we could offer Devcoin bounties for development.  Unfortunately because Devcoin is not well known yet the value is low, so the bounties may be not be worth someone's time to fix the game system.  However, they should at least be enough to fund documentation, artwork, world description, etc..

For making revenues, the mining idea is great:

I was thinking about this just as I hit this thread..

The game basically uses the some spare cycles to generate BTC. This is then added as "drops" from creatures as they accumulate (mite only satoshi's at first but will grow..)

Part of the spare cycle money should go to the developers and the server operator.  I suggest that because many players wouldn't have web accessible GPUs that the miner be a CPU coin like Litecoin, with a web based miner:
http://www.litecoinpool.org/embed

That part of the litecoins would then be split among the developers and server operator, with the option of being converted into another coin.

Another source of revenue would be to put the documentation on the devtome wiki, and make adsense directly and also through cross link pages.  Money from that would be split among the developers.

Overall, as long as people are interested in the game and willing to work to develop it, we can do this.

[Mushroomized]

Top secret bitcoin/litecoin/whatevercoin minigame MMO project

[markm]

The Galaxies and Villages games both need complete new grahpcis, open source. The more I glimpse of the commercial games they were intended to be similar to, the more of the graphics look to me to be stolen from commercial games. So I cannot trust any of the current set. A total complete full new set is needed for each.

The Villages game started off from code that said anyone can use it for anything, but then people working on it kept adding all kinds of outrageous claims to the whole thing every time they made some small change, even one that broke it all, anywhere in the thing. Basically the whole "ragezone" forum population seems to be about pirating games and trying to make money on their pirated versions, despite the site's claim it is about free stuff and its its rules against directly asking for money there. Most of the people clamouring for games there actually *want* then to use stolen graphics it seems.

Both the games use a system known as "skins", which seems to be intended to allow players who have a commercial "skin" (collection of graphics) at home to configure their account to look on their local disk drive for graphics. If they want to use stolen graphics that is how they should do it, but the developers seem to tend to just put stolen graphics right on the site, not onlyt as default "skin" but even as alternative "skins" for people to download.

We need "skins" that use truly open source graphics.

Also, I am not all that keen to try to directly "clone" an existing commercial game. So the efforts of those cloner people aren't really on the mainline of where I want to go. For example I had added to the Villages markets the ability to trade in the so called "gold" and also a few types of blockchain based currencies. That all got walked over in an early round of pulling "fixes" from others back before they started trying to add "all rights reserved" crap all over the thing any time they contributed a "fix".

Villages turns out to be a major "gold" hog, you really do seem to pretty much *need* to always have gold to spend. Trying to play it with "gold" seems like it would be pretty crippling. One guy who seems to be trying still has only one village wihile other players have 6 or 7 villages. Though he also doesn't put much time in either I think. I expected it to be one of those "put in time or put in money" type games where the proverbial kid living in his mom's basement keeps up with the folk who have real life jobs by being able to put in a lot more time than they can. But I think no matter how much time you put in you will still really need to at least be able to get 20 gold a week to keep all four types of resource at +25%. The bigger you get, the more actual resources 25% amounts to, so as time goes on gold should in theory be "worth" more and more resources per gold.

The "oases" and "heroes" don't work, nor the "treasury and relics" stuff. That all is maybe sidetrack stuff anyway, needless complication. Right now it seems to be a nice peaceful agricultural world. But there seems to be a problem with transportation: production is so high that the puny merchants system provided seems unlikely to be able to actually move all the resources produced to a starport or wherever to ship them out to the rest of the planet / solar system / galaxy / milieu. I think at very least an "autoship" system is needed that will have your merchants automatically shipping your produced resources for you. Right now most players' storage is full most of the time, it is inconvenient to manage to keep getting back to it often enough to spend the stuff fast enough to make space for more stuff.

The Galaxies one is much better in that regard, it does not take long to get enough storage set up that you need only log in to it once a day, and after a few months you can easily miss a day or few here and there. That is more the kind of laid back pace my players seem to prefer, sicne most of them are just using these systems as background bean-counters limiting the supply of resources much as mining speed limits the supply of *coins.

Income is still a bit of a puzzle, the Villages game assumes "gold" will be bought from the admins or hosters but that direct a model tends to end up with most players not bothering to buy any. As economies are the main way so for of linking many games into one larger milieu, most of the players expect to be converting assets they already accumulated in other parts/aspects of the Milieu into each particular world's local influence / favours / currency / "gold" when deciding to operate in/on a particular "world". In the long term, many of those assets did cost "real money" to create somewhere along the way in some sense, but it does mean each new game added tends to "sell" most of it's own local specialty item speciality resource or "local currency" to characters/entities that already built up a warchest / operating capital fund through various other games already.

If the Open Transactions server actually attracts traders possibly we will find that trading on such markets will provide ways of working on "the funding problem".

-MarkM-

[marcus_of_augustus]

... anybody here read the latest by Neal Stephenson .... REAMDE

MMORPG game currency and economy is a central theme ... crypto, gold, etc. Lots of ideas in there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde

[Ryland R. Taylor-Almanza]

Top secret bitcoin/litecoin/whatevercoin minigame MMO project

This is actually being worked on.  It uses html5, and it's making progress. Slowly but surely.