As some of you know, Human Guild is doubling down more on gaming side (while still pursuing two other strategies via our community). In light of this, I wanted to post quick gaming update in case it’s useful context for folks working on gaming within NEAR ecosystem.
2 teams are working on Unity SDK for NEAR - we’ve used to have a version a while back, but it’s very out of date. You can see more detail here: [PROPOSAL] Light Unity Client-Library
We also have a team working on Godot SDK for NEAR. Details on forum will be shortly.
Vorto Gaming is on its way to what i call becoming “Animoca of Europe” and expanding their NEAR based marketplace to other games, first one announced very recently: Vorto Gaming Partners with Gold Town Games
If you’re interested in gaming, please join our Discord (you can find invite link here: https://humanguild.io/) & introduce yourself! We have regular hangouts on Fridays in CryptoVoxels, and we’d love to be a resource for you, if you’re building out something either in gaming or in virtual world space!
If you have questions / feedback / suggestions - feel free to respond here as well!
i think it would be awesome to have dedicated gaming guild - i know there is Createbase mainly centered around Mintbase and NFT use cases, there is NxM guild for music, and I certainly think that we need to have a guild for gaming.
I’ve been following blockchain gaming space closely since 2019 (in fact, published bunch of learnings in this long unwieldy blog post: https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-state-of-the-blockchain-gaming-industry-3d3445dc2ec), and I think main takeaway for me is that we need to focus on indie gaming / bottoms up side of this market, and it’s great that OPGames are focusing on this market too.
We certainly need more people involved on this front, mainly actually educating web2 game developers about what web3 can bring to the table, and what kinds of use cases make sense. If anything, this should be main purpose of this potential guild.
Monetizing UGC (user generated content) → similar to Roblox & Minecraft in web2 space, and web3 space has example in http://sandbox.game/
– our first 2 virtual worlds will be Marble Place and NEAR Lands
Permanent ownership of land / items / characters (i.e. NFT-like stuff), keep whole game running forever even potentially
– this obviously adds new monetization streams that were not available for game developers prior
Turn based multiplayer with high stakes
– could be poker, but could be even chess
Provably unique experiences (e.g. dungeon crawler where you get one shot to go through given dungeon and your adventure is recorded as NFT)
another great way to monetize something that wasn’t as easy to monetize prior
Would love to see people discussing what’s possible, helping us educate indie gaming space (we’d certainly spend a lot of time there from HG perspective at least for a quarter, and the see results and assess the situation)
Another great idea is to continue doing game jams. We’ve done one recently (solid results because follow through was there, as in talented participants of game jam who were web3 curious ended up working now on both games and gaming SDKs on NEAR), and we’re planning multiple upcoming game jams (next one in August).
In terms of a gaming guild, I think that would be an awesome idea! We had NEAR Gaming - NEAR Forum running for the hackathon and @lenara did a great job managing that, but at the time there was no one to take on the mantle of leading the rest of the community management efforts.
Would love if this thread got enough people excited about NFT gaming in NEAR that we saw that guild (and DAO) become active again.
There’s already a pathway for the guild to request funding within the creatives category: [Guide] The Creatives DAO Funding what’s really needed now is someone to organize the community!
I would like to tell the situation from the developer’s side. After creating a game, any developers face a problem in promotion. Users are not easy to find, retain and attract to a game that is not heard. And also attracted users bring some kind of return in about 1-6 months (it all depends on the topic and strategy of monetization and the availability of a marketing budget). Therefore, if you create a guild, then there should be objective leaders in it who will look not only at projects but also promote them and lead them to a result, and this can be both self-sufficiency and simply the finality of a project that does not pursue the goal of bringing profit to developers and is entertaining or educational character.
If someone is interested in my opinion as a person who is engaged in a project in a gaming theme, then I can write in more detail about one of the most difficult topics in attracting users and investments from probably existing ones.
And don’t forget to play our game) https://galaxyonline.io
Great ideas @sashahudzilin , we would love to be involved in growing a gaming guild, and in helping to bring more game developers into blockchain!
I believe there’s a huge opportunity right now for us web 3 builders to reach out to game developers, and to work with them in addressing their challenges (such as on promotion as mentioned by @galaxyonline ).
The indie HTML5 game developer market is particularly promising, and if we can bring together a gaming guild that will make it as easy as possible for them to build successful games on the blockchain then it will be a win-win for all involved!
Sharing some links here that might be useful also:
W3G Games Group Discussions - The participants of the W3G Games Group have great insight on what web game developers need, and are a great group of people to possibly collaborate with
Lars Doucet, veteran game developer and brilliant game industry analyst, also sees the web and creator-driven economies as the future of games. There is a lot of hesitancy though from game developers on blockchain, and we need to be able to prove that we can build something better than the currently extractive app store model
I wonder if something could be put together to incentivize/inform artists that might want to make logo’s, sprites, skins, tile sets, music, NFT’s or even voice acting performances for indie game projects? Maybe that could be a partial focus of a Gaming Guild or a Human Guild Art DAO as well?
Incredible things will come of this work on the SDK’s, thats a huge step in the right direction. Might need a targeted promotional push to get the right eyes on it though (another good use for a gaming guild?).
Also, we where talking about maybe having some guest speakers at the Fri hangouts every once in a while. If anyone would like to share some knowledge on related topics/projects let us know in the discord servers “meeting humans” channel, please and thank you
That’s a great idea @orztirrstudio , Unity has something similar in the Unity Asset Store, but someone should make a decentralized version that has better incentives for creators and curators. Perhaps even governed by a DAO?
Thanks so much for the update @sashahudzilin, and going for gamedev as a topic!
Happy to see there’s work on the game engine plugins, as this will surely help reach more developers, and new games, which will lead as an example for others. There’s definitely room for more plugins and intro tutorials as many “traditional” HTML5 gamedevs are still confused by all this.
We already had the online Gamedev.js Jam 2021 in April with the Decentralized category, and are planning to have the very same in the upcoming js13kGames 2021 competition. Plus building a tutorial on a demo game to show how the tech can be implemented - we’re super thankful for the opportunity and I hope the devs participating this year will join the NEAR community with many cool new games!
That would be perfect project for a DAO, really. A NEAR community driven asset market to go along with the SDK revamps would be very useful. It gives crypto artist a new way to earn aside from their NFT sales for instance. Of course, making art for games has some unique requirements that change depending on the project so a learning component would be a good idea as well so people can transition into the new field. Maybe an indie crypto gaming workshop series?
On one hand, you can be working on existing platforms (e.g. mobile) where there is a huge competition and expensive user acquisition, but at the end of the day it’s a “devil you know”.
On other hand, you can jump into web3 gaming space and potentially also face high user acquisition cost - since you would be going after same market of gamers (e.g. players who love space games in case of GalaxyOnline). Gladly, now you can build onboarding and UI as easy as it was in web2 space. This helps a lot, since you won’t be losing 199 of 200 gamers who are trying to play your game up front (that’s the case with ETH games where onboarding option is Metamask).
I know Galaxy Online suggests being able to run their own validator and using staking rewards on user acquisition, and it’s something we should definitely do once we have changes to infra that allow for cheaper floor to become validator (cc @Bowen )
I think the community is quite fragmented: there’s HTML5 GameDevs forums, not quite active as it used to be but still the biggest, specific forums of given tools, from Phaser, through Construct (construct .net/en/forum/) or Defold (forum.defold .com), to Unity or Unreal since they have web exports too. There’s a bunch of Facebook groups but again, not as active. I guess a few Reddit subs is still an option, though I haven’t used any recently. Our Gamedev.js Weekly (gamedevjsweekly .com) newsletter could be a good way to reach some as well.
Then there are also online game jams - from more broad, big and well known like Global Game Jam (globalgamejam .org) or Ludum Dare (ldjam .com) where HTML5 game developers participate next to other technologies, through a huge list (indiegamejams .com) of jams (itch .io/jams) to potentially look into (or organize your own), to tech-specicific like our Gamedev.js Jam 2021 (gamedevjs .com/jam/2021/) that run in April or the upcoming js13kGames 2021 (js13kgames .com) in August.
You could also consider meetups or conferences, although you can imagine the pandemic is not helping at all.
There’s no one place to rule them all, but rather many smaller spots, but if you’re commited enough then you should be able to reach a fair amount.
Ps. Sorry for the weird formatting of the urls, I was restricted to use only 2 links in a post.
