Interview with the Realms Metaverse Game-By the Chinese StarkNet Community (English Version)
Enjoy this interview of the Realms Game which is building an OnChain Game on StarkNet.
This Interview was carried out by the StarkNet Chinese Community
Let’s give them a follow here and have a look at their linktr.ee.
On Realms
Could you please give us an introduction of BibliothecaDAO, Loot Realms and ‘Realms: Eternum’?
The project is commonly known as ‘Realms’, but there are some things to know:
Bibliotheca DAO is a decentralized game studio using bleeding edge technology to build on-chain games.
Loot Realms is the collection of 8,000 procedurally generated NFTs. They serve two functions:
1. They are ‘deeds’ to a Realm which allow the holder to play the ‘Realms: Eternum’ game. Holding a Loot Realm NFT makes you a Realm Lord.
2. Loot Realms NFTs are also governance tokens that allow the holder to participate in Bibliotheca DAO governance.
‘Realms: Eternum’ is the flagship On Chain game to be developed by Bibliotheca DAO. It is a game of complex economic and military strategy taking place on an atlas. Players are the Realm Lords who hold Loot Realms NFTs. It’s in Pre-Alpha testing on Starknet.
Why does Realms choose to build on StarkNet?
As a DAO we wish to develop a game on the most decentralized and secure smart contract network, which is Ethereum.
The goal is to build complex games in which players have a lot of agency, and to keep game logic and game state on-chain. So we need a layer 2 scaling solution to make computation-rich gameplay viable.
We created a prototype of ‘Realms: Eternum’ on Arbitrum in Q4 2021. However we hit hard limits with computation On Chain which meant we could not create the complex game that the DAO wants to make. EVM chains are great for simple computation, but we want more On Chain computation space.
Our research led us to StarkWare and, therefore, StarkNet as well. The StarkWare team wrote the book on zero knowledge, and we believe Cairo as a programming language will maximize the potential of roll ups. We believe that Cairo and StarkNet have the best tech, and so we are aiming at where we believe the market will be when our game(s) are ready for mainnet.
What’s Dojo? Anything special about it? Will it make game development easy?
We are closely partnering with DoJo (https://github.com/dojoengine), which is an upcoming onchain gaming engine written in Cairo 1.0 and Rust.
On-Chain games are inherently hard to build, DoJo aims to solve this by abstracting most of the complexity away so developers can focus on games and not infrastructure.
Many of the best developers from across the StarkNet ecosystem are working on DoJo, we are proud to be working with them. We will add it to the SDK that developers can use when developing games that tie into the Realms On-Chain gaming universe.
What is ‘Play 2 Die’?
In parallel to building ‘Realms: Eternum’, we have a separate initiative called ‘Realms: Adventurers’.
Adventurers are On-Chain characters. Players can mint an Adventurer for a small cost ($10 of $Lords). That On-Chain character can be taken into mini-games in which the Adventurer's life is forfeit if they die in that game. We call this ‘Play 2 Die’.
‘Play 2 Die’ is a novel approach to building a thriving creator ecosystem. Why? Because if an Adventurer dies in a game you created, you, the creator, receive a cut of the $Lords tokens used to mint that Adventurer. And if your mini-game isn’t fun or rewarding to play, players won’t play it! This push and pull will create a thriving two sided marketplace for players and creators.
One keynote about Adventurers is that it is built on top of the original Loot bag NFTs. Bibliotheca DAO is creating primitives that give the items in the Loot bags, such as Katanas and Divine Robes, an On-Chain life.
Through the ‘Play 2 Die’ mechanic, we create a permissionless incentive system for builders to keep expanding upon the Realms On-Chain gaming universe. Games in planning include rogue-like games, survivor games, card games, etc, etc. Imagine a decentralized Realms On-Chain gaming app store and you are thinking in the right direction..
Tokenomics and other
The $LORDS token sale was raised in January. What's the next step on how to use these funds to build the game?
The sale was hugely oversubscribed (over 6x) and sold out in the community round. We are proud to be community funded from inception through to today.
It came about after a governance proposal (BIP7) was voted on by the DAO. The raise was to fund the next phase of development of ‘Realms: Eternum’ and ‘Realms: Adventurers’.
Currently DAO members are crafting proposals to add liquidity to the $LORDS token, to bring on board specialized talent (e.g. a 3JS engineer to upgrade the Realms Atlas) and to create a fund to allow Bibliotheca DAO to fund other game developers to help them building in the Realms On-Chain gaming universe.
If you own a Loot Realm NFT, join the discussions!
Is Realms going to have a dual or more token economy model? If yes, why could there be two or more tokens in an on-chain game.
$LORDS is the primary token in the economy, but there are other resource tokens. When a Loot Realm NFT is settled (i.e. staked to allow playing of the ‘Realms: Eternum’ game) it can produce resources. There are 22 resources, each is an ERC1155 token. Players will need to trade resources in the game’s AMM to construct buildings and summon armies. Each resource is paired with the $LORDS ERC20 token.
There is a resource cost to produce new resources from a Realm. Players must decide which resources are economically viable to produce. In this way the economy will not be flooded with farmed resources from inactive players.
One final observation: the DAO will receive Ethereum from fees for NFT market transactions. In this way the DAO has a stable, liquid asset it can sell onto the market to top up the DAO’s treasury, reducing the need to sell $LORDS tokens from the DAO treasury to fund BIP initiatives.
Which stage are we in with respect to the development of on-chain gaming?
We are at the dawn of on-chain gaming. Which is incredibly exciting as we are building games today that will live eternally (for as long as ethereum is producing blocks!). Our goal is to develop a game that future generations will be playing for a long time after we are gone.
Why haven’t we had games on-chain before? Many blockchain users see the value of putting things On-Chain. With finance and art, for example, we have seen huge interest in moving as much On-Chain as possible. The reasons are varied: transparency, interoperability, true ownership, timelessness.
The desire has been there to create On-Chain games but the scaling solutions have not. On layer 1 it wasn’t possible to create games as the computation required was simply too expensive for players. After the merge, layer 2 scaling options like rollups can solve this.
Now, like finance and art, we are seeing developers solving difficult challenges and embracing the quirks and constraints of blockchains to create fully on-chain games. So we are early for On-Chain games, but the pace is increasing.
What do you think about On-Chain Gaming? What‘s the most important and relevant thing about it?
The most important thing with any game is making it fun, and the same applies to OnChain games. If the games are fun and people really want to play them, this will encourage new players to take the plunge into web3.
What’s the future plan for The Realms: Eternum?
The game will never be ‘finished’, as developers can keep expanding the game. We hope ‘Realms: Eternum’ will be an ever expanding, eternal, community owned metagame. We hope to hand our Loot Realms onto our children and grandchildren one day so that they may keep playing the game we started!
On Team
How many contributors or members are contributing to the building and development? How are you working together?
There are about a dozen full time and part-time developers, communications and community contributors. There are hundreds of people in the DAO that contribute in small ways every day . An example of these activities is training “the text to image” custom model that the DAO is developing.
On DAO
We know game development is very complex. How to build a game through a community?
We are one of the earliest On Chain gaming projects, starting in August 2021. We don’t have all the answers but we do have the right attitude. We strive every day to be more transparent, more inclusive to contributors, more decentralized. We are proud to have such a passionate, talented and motivated community contributing each and every day to the mission of building the best OnChain games.
Who can join to build and contribute to the game? And how?
Anyone! If you wish to contribute to Realms: Eternum or to build a mini-game using Adventurers, please join the Realms x Bibliotheca DAO discord. Tag Loaf or Secretive.
Do you have any suggestions for developers?
Learn Cairo. We are very bullish on Cairo!
Cairo seems intimidating at first, but we believe it is the perfect language to maximize the potential of ZK technologies. It will not be used only on StarkNet but across non EVM networks. If you wish to learn, drop into our discord and ask for advice.
If you got curious about the Realms Game, check their linktr.ee out!
