Exploring games on the whole chain: Lattice development brief

Original Author: Lattice Translation: FunBlocks

What are the stories of Lattice, an important promoter of the full-chain game industry? We translated the introduction of our own development history on the Lattice official website. From the development experience of Lattice, we can better understand the original intentions and ideals of these early promoters.

Translator's Preface: "Although the blockchain industry has had early attempts at full-chain games, it must be admitted that what really makes full-chain games an independent track with a solid theoretical foundation and a clear direction comes from the dark The builders of the forest ecology and organizations such as Lattice, which were established later. After achieving initial success in the dark forest, they established Lattice, MUD, Argus and many other important projects to support the development of the whole chain game ecology.

So what is the relationship between them, and what is the story of Lattice, an important promoter of the whole chain game industry? We translated the introduction of our own development history on the Lattice official website. From the development experience of Lattice, we can better understand the original intentions and ideals of these early promoters. "

01. Seeds (Spring 2021)

In 2020 and 2021, Ethereum and the applications on it began to become more and more complex, but there is still huge room for improvement in developer tools and the types of projects deployed. Although DeFi is developing rapidly and NFT is still in its infancy, few applications can provide interesting experiences, promote the emergence of new user behaviors, or provide the complexity similar to the later autonomous world. Ethereum is becoming the world's financial computer, but does it still have a chance to realize its ideal of becoming the world's computer?

In that period full of controversial DeFi fork projects, liquidity mining and early NFT games, a new experiment emerged. This experiment is Dark Forest, which is completely different from other applications deployed on EVM before. Dark Forest is the first full-chain game - the game logic and all data are written on the chain, and the game state can be deduced from the history of the chain. No servers, no intermediaries, just a purely real system powered by blockchain, open to anyone. Dark Forest is also the first on-chain game to use zkSNARKs to create information asymmetry.

Dark Forest attracted hundreds of players who were initially attracted by the gameplay and gradually started building new clients and plugins for the game. These include an in-game NFT marketplace, plugins that help players move automatically, a "remote SNARKer" that speeds up player map creation, an exchange that allows users to sell their Dark Forest planet locations, and dozens of other community developments Plugins that enhance core functionality. The Dark Forest is becoming a complex network of emerging behaviors.

In 2020, Lattice founder Ludens sent a message to a stranger named Gubsheep, one of the developers behind the Dark Forest game.

Soon, Ludens was heading to Mexico to start working with the Dark Forest team. These ideas and attempts promoted the birth of future Lattice and MUD.

02. Germination (Summer 2021 - Winter 2021)

In the summer of 2021, Ludens wants to make a new game. He teamed up with Alius, and the two started working on zkDungeon, a full-chain game whose gameplay is somewhere between a board game and battle royale. After months of relentless iteration, the team finally had a working demo.

However, there are still some problems here. At the time, Ethereum's development tools could not handle such an ambitious application. Ludens and Alius hope that developers building clients and plugins on top of zkDungeon will have a seamless and intuitive experience - but there is no development framework that makes it easy for the community to contribute. We still need to improve some things.

03. Breaking Ground: The Birth of Lattice and MUD (Spring 2022-Summer 2022)

Ludens and Alius, with the help of other collaborators, realized they needed to build an operating system before continuing to develop the game. They need a framework and protocol to handle more complex game codes and eliminate unfriendly development models in traditional smart contract development methods. After exploring many game development frameworks, the team discovered the ECS (Entity, Component, System) model, which became the basis for MUD v1, the team's game engine.

In the spring of 2022, at the DEFCON conference in Amsterdam, Ludens announced Lattice, a corporate organization. And Alius introduced the MUD and ECS framework in more detail. Soon, Kooshaba joined Lattice, one of the core developers of the Dark Forest team. We were also joined by Biscaryn, who became our CEO. In the summer of 2022, we were officially established.

That summer, the team went all-in on developing the MUD. We held a summit in New York and started to develop the chain, infrastructure and services, which will become the later MUD testnet and MODE. At the same time, we started to develop a game called "MUD War", which developed into the current "MUD War" Sky Strife".

In August 2022, Ludens published "Autonomous Worlds (Part 1)" which will become the cornerstone of any team wanting to build complex, emergent-capable systems on Ethereum.

04. Going Mainstream (Fall 2022 - Winter 2022)

In the fall of 2022, when MUD v1 is entering a relatively stable phase, we invited a dozen teams to London for an event themed around building games and apps using MUDs. We were blown away by the sophistication and innovation they demonstrated. Our initial intuition of "needing a robust operating system to support on-chain applications" was validated.

Internally, the Lattice team is working hard to develop a new game called OPCraft, a voxel-based full-chain game that challenges the performance limits of MUD and Optimism (Optimism is an EVM compatible rollup that deploys OPCraft). In the ten days since OPCraft went live, the game has hosted all kinds of complex activities that have sprung up on the chain—new plugins, custom smart contracts, and even a supreme leader, all appearing when the game goes live.

In October 2022, at Devcon in Bogotá, the team presented MUD v1 to the public for the first time. Immediately afterwards, we held an 80-person Autonomous World workshop to demonstrate the capabilities of MUD v1 in more detail. In November, Frolic, one of the most prolific plugin contributors on OPCraft, joined the Lattice team full-time.

05. Continuous development (2023-present)

In the new year, we welcomed five new members, responsible for engineering, operations and product management. The development of Sky Strife has entered a good stage, we launched a new tutorial for the MUD to make it easier for new developers to enter the MUD ecosystem.

We are focusing more on improving the MUD, and building new features to get MUD v2 to a stable state as quickly as possible. At the core of MUD v2 is modularity: we modularized the data model to bypass the Solidity compiler-driven data store. We modularized the plugin system to provide more flexibility to developers using MUDs. We modularized the sync stack to allow syncing of contract and client state, and to support querying clients and autoindexers using SQL. We provide continuous feedback into the development of MUD v2 through our development work on Sky Strife, and the needs of other developers who build applications using the MUD.

In the spring of 2023, at our event in partnership with ETHGlobal, we received over 100 different projects submitted by over 400 hackers, all built on top of MUD v2. We continue to work on MUD v2 as well as many internal projects related to the EVM infrastructure.

While there are various efforts in different directions, our focus remains the same: building developer-friendly products that are compatible with the Ethereum ecosystem, making it easier for everyone to drive the development of the system on the chain.