Interview with the "Dark Forest" game production team: xDai technology is very suitable, and pay attention to Rollup technology

Written by: 0x13, Rhythm BlockBeats

Recently, the popularity of blockchain games has reached a new height again. As games with strong wealth effects attract countless players, many people say that the upsurge of blockchain games has come.

However, in the wave of chain games, there is such a project that does not issue coins, has no wealth effect, and cannot "Play to Earn", but it has attracted the founder of Ethereum, V God, and Matt Huang, the co-founder of Paradigm, the top investment institution, to actively promote it with its unique gameplay design, and it uses the Layer 2 network xDai, which is on the Ethereum network When the Gas fee is tens of dollars, it only needs 0.002Dai for each step of operation, the handling fee is extremely low and every transaction can be completed quickly, and the game experience is excellent.

It is "Dark Forest". Rhythm BlockBeats once appeared in "Dark Forest: V God and Paradigm Joint Creation are playing Three-Body Game｜Project Introduction" introduces the gameplay of this game.

Simply speaking, this is a blockchain game based on the concept of "Three-Body Problem", players need to develop and expand own planet. As for the design and future development of the game, the team has not explained in detail.

Aiming at these problems, Rhythm BlockBeats chatted with Brian, the head of the "Dark Forest" game production team, and said " The game, gameplay and future development of "Dark Forest" were discussed.

Rhythm BlockBeats: I am very glad that you can accept our interview. First of all, please introduce yourself to everyone!

Brain:Our team has three people , until recently we were all students. Last year we all decided to leave school and work on a Dark Forest game. My screen name is bgu33, and I used to study math at MIT. I first learned about blockchain and Ethereum in 2017. When I first came into contact with this technology, I was deeply attracted.

My Chinese level is not very high, so I will answer other questions in English. Thank you BlockBeats for translating for us!

Rhythm BlockBeats: We all know that "Three-Body Problem" is your inspiration for making this game. Can you share with us when you What did you feel when you first read this book? And what is the reason for you to decide to make such a game?

Brain: I am in 2019 The "Three-Body" series of novels I bought in July. I like the "Three-Body Problem" trilogy very much, and I couldn't stop until I finished reading it, so I spent three whole days, turned down all the work, and finished reading these three books in one go! This is definitely one of my favorite books in the series, especially the interpretation of "broadcast coordinates" in the book.

At that time I also happened to attend a lecture in the field of encryption around zero-knowledge proofs (zkSNARKs). I have heard of zkSNARKs before, but I don’t know the latest development of this technology, so I was shocked by the progress of zkSNARKs in 2019 when I was listening to the lecture. During that year, many new protocols were developed, and developers have successfully deployed the first production-grade SNARK language and libraries that can be used in web browsers. This means developers can start building zkSNARK applications on Ethereum.

On the way home from that lecture, it occurred to me that I could use zero-knowledge proofs to build a decentralized, Encrypted "Dark Forest". I was so excited that I stayed up all night writing the first version of the concept for The Dark Forest and writing down some core ideas about how the game's universe would work. I love the mechanics of using digital computing to explore the universe and the idea of broadcasting enemy coordinates.

Rhythm BlockBeats: From being recognized by V God to tweet and recommend earlier, it has now attracted widespread attention. Is the development of the Dark Forest game Does it meet your expectations?

Brain: is building the dark forest For the first version, we had two main goals: first, to show the possibility of using zkSNARK technology on Ethereum, and second, to use Ethereum to build a game that is really interesting for players, not just a Apps for investing or earning money. The interest in this game has definitely exceeded all our expectations! Although we are a small team, we have been working hard to release new versions quickly, add more features, fix bugs, and start operating a growing Community.

Rhythm BlockBeats: Let’s talk about the details next. The previous test version of the game will delete files, so will the files be deleted in the future? If you don't delete files, how do you plan to solve the plight of new players at the beginning? When I first played, I was attacked by a "bad neighbor" and lost all the planets. I couldn't continue the game until my friend gave me a planet. The experience was not very good.

Brain:In order to make "Dark Forest "We still have a lot of work to do to make it a perfect game. The current early version is highly experimental in our opinion, and we start from scratch with each new version so that we can move forward as fast as possible without compatibility issues. But this also means that we cannot guarantee that NFTs (such as prehistoric artifacts) in the current version will still be usable in future versions.

As you mentioned, the new player experience is very different. One thing we're trying to improve with every release is to make sure new players have a good onboarding experience, which also means we may need to rework the rules around new players joining the universe. But this is hard because we use zero-knowledge proofs, no one knows where new players are born, not even the game developers. But we think this should be improved by tweaking our algorithm.

Rhythm BlockBeats: The "prehistoric artifacts" in the game can be extracted, so can we trade them in opensea in the future? Will we be able to trade planets in opensea in the future?

Brain: "Prehistoric artifacts" are ERC721 tokens, we are working on building a bridge from xDai to the Ethereum mainnet so that players can trade them. But planets are not ERC721 tokens, players can conquer these planets through games. Also, at this time we do not guarantee that Dark Forest NFTs from previous rounds will be usable in future rounds.

Rhythm BlockBeats: Dark Forest players are very interesting. Some people are "good neighbors" who will take the initiative to help the newbies around them; some people are "bad neighbors", just like the tragic experience I said before; there are also players in some communities who form alliances. What do you think of the behavior of these players, do you think they broke the rules?

Brain: In the dark forest, "Survival is the first need of civilization", any strategy is allowed. Similarly, in the game, we will not restrict the way the player can play. It's interesting that many players see diplomacy, negotiation, and alliances as part of the game.

Because our game is built on the blockchain, we actually have no way to restrict the behavior of players. Beyond the scope allowed by the smart contract. However, if the gaming experience is not great for beginners, we feel it is our duty to rebalance and update the smart contract rules in future versions to improve the experience for new players while still allowing anyone to play as they wish . We hope to write a perfect and fair set of rules, and then the punishment for violations is not soft.

Rhythm BlockBeats: Why did you choose xDai?

Brain: So far, we Think the xDai network is a great fit for our game!

Compared with Ethereum Layer 1, its transaction fee is cheap and its transaction capacity is very large. But we also pay close attention to the Layer2 and Rollup solutions that are under development. The xDAI team has also been working hard to solve the scaling issues encountered by Dark Forest - for example, the use of Dark Forest would significantly slow down the xDAI network in v0.4, but in v0.5, this problem has been solved, Performance has improved a lot. We believe that although xDAI is not as secure and decentralized as the Ethereum mainnet, it is more "real" than the testnet, so it is a very suitable test environment when the dark forest is in the testing phase. We will continue to keep it updated as the Dark Forest develops.

Rhythm BlockBeats: This question is really often asked by many people, will Dark Forest issue coins? Will old players be given some benefits in the future?

Brain: Currently our team is Coins and airdrops don't have any plans yet. Our focus is to create a blockchain game that is fun enough!

Rhythm BlockBeats: Thank you for your answer, and a little Question, if you have time in the future, would you consider coming to the Chinese WeChat community to communicate with players?

Brain:Yes, we are very Happy to join the WeChat group! Although the Chinese level of our team members is not very high, maybe this can be an opportunity for us to improve!

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