Community Update — September
Welcome! The Curio team has been heads down working towards our first game. Here’s what we’re up to …
Iterate, iterate, iterate …
When working on our first demo, we were bogged down by our own development process. We looked towards history and how game engines are structured under the hood, studying concepts like reconciliation and entity component system, then combining them with what crypto does well, like ERC721s and ERC20s, and finally cooking up a prototyping game engine of our own. Using this new system, a feature that used to take a few days with multiple people now takes only a few hours with a single person. Assets are now easily create, burned, and traded.
We’re very excited about the prospect of using this tool to develop games at a rapid pace. It’s the most exciting piece of software we’ve crafted, and one that hasn’t been seen in the on-chain gaming space. Building games with this feels like we’re living in the future.
About the game
Curio has always wished to explore what’s uniquely possible in web3 games, and the game engine is a necessary step for us to get there. While our demo was inspired by Empire 1977 and Civilization, these single-player, history heavy games often involve massive amounts of micromanagement that are both loved by players but potentially compromise on the multiplayer experience, especially given the current constraints of the blockchain. While we remain interested in the broad genre of 4x strategy games, we consulted game makers and leaders in the field and zoomed into sub-genres in the industry to make our game more social and collaborative, such as the slg game genre. The social layer, like creating clans, negotiating trades, is equally important, and can be overlayed using many existing technologies.
We think there’s something extremely interesting in crypto native games allowing players to launch their own [redacted] and [redacted]. Crypto native features can not only enhance existing experiences of strategy games but will bring new ones that players have dreamed about for years on forums and in chatrooms. Since then, we’ve iterated on many core loops and will start inviting the community to play with us very soon.
Recent events
0xMonaco made noise recently, reigniting passion for on-chain games. This category of games, which are games that usually center around one piece of core mechanism often based on game-theory ideas (ex: wolf game with Prisoner’s Dilemma, 0xMonaco with VRGDA), present the alternative for games, which is the opposite of triple-A productions that rely on graphics. In these more light-weight games, developers can be much more lean on team size and rely more heavily on token as a distribution for games, while targeting a smaller audience with higher purchasing power. It was as much of a social experience as it was a programming competition. We’re happy to see more people “get it” and want to bring everyone onboard.
About us
The blockchain affords us both unique properties and constraints for what games can look like. On-chain gaming believer dream of a world where these games are run autonomously and self-balances due to on-chain data’s persistence. Grand yet lofty goals of true composability and interoperability in the long term need step by step execution.
We as practical idealists work through many of these problems, whether that means thinking about appropriate developer tools that can be built now, or researching into different execution engines and bridges. We like to focus on shipping to real users rather than theorizing the utopia, and we very much so believe in putting users first even when working in such a nascent field.
While the team is deep in prototyping mode, we will soon onboard a group of core community members that will get early access into what we’re building and help give feedback. Join our discord here for everything related to that.
Join us!
If you’re excited about these themes like we do, please reach out! We’re looking for engineers, game designers, artists, and community managers to join us on the journey.
Join our discord here and sign up to our newsletter to get the most up-to-date information about Curio!