Gm everyone!

I wanted to begin WASD’s content journey by mapping out the onchain gaming landscape.

We started this last week with MUD, one of the leading EVM-based engines and ecosystems.

If you haven’t already, you can read that piece here.

Today, we’re going to continue our metaphorical cartography by diving deep into another leading ecosystem: Starknet.

Don’t let the anime graphics and 👉👈 emojis on Twitter fool you: Starknet is fast becoming a major onchain gaming hub.

Today, we’ll explore the Starknet ecosystem and cover:

• Key onchain gaming infrastructure like Dojo and Cartridge

• A breakdown of the top Starknet games

• My bull case for Starknet gaming

If you like this piece and all things Starknet, be sure to collect it. It’s free!

Now, let’s get to it!

Starknet 101

Before we dive into its games and supporting infrastructure, let’s get a bit of context on Starknet as an L2.

Starknet is a zero-knowledge (zk) rollup. It’s differentiated from other ZKRs like zkSync Era and Polygon zkEVM due to its use of STARK, rather than SNARK proofs, and because it's not EVM-compatible.

Instead, smart-contracts on Starknet are written in Cairo, a Rust-based programming language.

For a detailed technical overview on Starknet, click here.

This lack of EVM compatibility can certainly cause some headaches at times. You can’t use the traditional slate of browser wallets, and there’s no block explorer that comes close to matching the quality of Etherscan.

However, Starknet’s unique attributes also provide it with some affordances that make it well suited for hosting onchain games.

For instance, Starknet has native support for account abstraction which provides a built-in UX boost for games by enabling wallet-less onboarding and removing the need to sign transactions while playing.

Starknet also recently implemented its Quantum Leap upgrade in July 2023, which increased throughput by 10x and drastically reduced confirmation times from minutes to just a few seconds.

Quantum Leap was critical for Starknet, as it put what was once a painful user-experience on par with that of other L2s.

Dojo: Starknet’s Game Engine

As I mentioned earlier, Starknet has numerous pieces of infrastructure that are supporting its onchain gaming ambitions.

A major piece of this pie is Dojo, an onchain game engine native to Starknet.

An engine is a development framework consisting of contracts, tools, and code libraries that make it easier to build onchain games.

Dojo was created in February 2023 and is community run, maintained by a coalition of prominent Starknet teams like Cartridge, Realms, Briq, and Toplogy (more on these later).

Dojo is centered around the Entity Component System (ECS), a data modeling approach commonly used in Web2 gaming development.

Like MUD, a primary component of its architecture is the World contract. World is a “master contract” for an onchain game, as it contains all of its logic and components in order to help streamline its development and management.

Dojo also supports several pieces of infrastructure to improve performance like Torri, an indexing layer that makes querying game data faster, and Katana, a high-speed local Starknet node.

In the future, Dojo plans to further leverage Starknet’s capabilities by incorporating features like optimistic updates, which will improve UX by reducing the amount of time you need to wait for transactions to confirm, and storage proofs that can be used for cross-chain communication.

Cartridge: The Steam of Starknet

Another major piece of Starknet’s onchain gaming infrastructure is Cartridge.

Cartridge is the “Steam of Starknet,” as it’s a game launcher where you can find and start playing different games.

This addresses a major paint point for developers and gamers, as it improves distribution, while making it really easy for players to access their favorite games and discover new ones.

Cartridge currently supports Influence, Roll Your Own, Loot Survivor, Briq and Frens Lands, and recently overhauled their UI so the site is now simple, smooth and easy to navigate.

The team is also active in providing other support features across the ecosystem and is building games of their own (more on this below).

Games Building on Starknet

Now that we have an understanding of Starknet as an L2 and core pieces of infrastructure like Dojo and Cartridge, let’s look at some of the most exciting games that are building on it.

Realms

Realms is an ecosystem of games based on IP from the NFT project Loot.

Governed and developed by Bibliotheca DAO, there are two primary games within the Realms ecosystem: Loot Survivor and Realms: Eternum.

Loot Survivor

Loot Survivor is roguelike survival game live on StarkNet Goerli.

In Loot Survivor, players battle monsters as they make their way through a post-apocalyptic world. The game is strategy-based, as when you encounter a monster you’ll have to decide whether to fight or flee, while allocating XP to upgrade various attributes in the hopes of prolonging your survival.

Overall, Loot Survivor is pretty fun, especially if you like strategy games. It has a great aesthetic, with neon green text against a black background that gives it both a retro and sleek feel.

The game’s onboarding and UX is also quite smooth due to the use of Arcade Accounts.

Similar to burner wallets, Arcade Accounts are wallets that are generated and stored in your browser. Arcade Accounts can be controlled by an external wallet known as a Master Account, and support features like withdrawal permissions and limits which help safeguard user funds.

On mainnet, Loot Survivor will incorporate Play-2-Die, a mechanism where players will purchase their character (known as an Adventurer) with LORDS, an ERC-20 token used as money within the Realms ecosystem. When a player dies, these LORDS tokens will then be released back into the game world.

Although games where you have to purchase an NFT to play risk restricting their user-base to whales, Play-2-Die seems like an interesting mechanism and I’m keen to see how its utilized.

Realms: Eternum

Realms: Eternum, is an upcoming MMO strategy game where players will have to build and develop their Realm while defending it from attacks by others.

Each Realm in Eternum is represented by an NFT, which is also used for governance in Bibliotheca DAO and can be staked to earn LORDS. There are 8000 Realms, though more players will be able to participate in the game through an expansion via the Adventurers NFT collection.

Realms are already quite expensive at 0.36 ETH, but given the caliber of the team I’m nonetheless excited to see the finished product.

Briq

Briq is an NFT building protocol.

In Briq players can create designs in a voxel-like world.

Briq’s are similar to onchain legos, as each design can be minted as an NFT that can be disassembled or reassembled into something else. Like legos, Briq sets can also come with instruction manuals that will walk you through how to recreate a design yourself.

There have been a variety of different projects built using Briq, including games, art, and PFP collections. A prominent one is Ducks Everywhere, a collection of 271 different ducks that many Starknet community members are rocking as their PFP.

One of Briq’s best features is its onboarding. You can start designing in Briq just by opening their website, and don’t need to sign transactions or connect a wallet until you want to mint your design.

Another nice perk is that it’s easy to use for artists and non-artists: Even I was able to make something in it!

I think Briq has a lot of potential as a primitive for creating interoperable and unique art, merchandise, and experiences. I’m very excited to continue playing around with it despite my lack of design skills.

Roll Your Own

Roll Your Own is a crime-themed strategy game.

An adaptation of the game Drug Wars, in Roll Your Own players channel their inner Heisenberg by buying and selling drugs in the hopes of becoming a kingpin and rising to the top of the in-game leaderboard.

Roll Your Own is a collaboration between Cartridge (whose team developed the game) and Dope DAO, the organization behind Dope Wars. The two are working together to build “Dope World,” an ecosystem of different games that utilizes Dope Wars assets.

Although it’s in its early stages, Roll Your Own is a lot of fun. I enjoy the PVP aspect of the game, as you trade against other players which influences the prices of the different drugs. I also am a huge fan of crime-related IP (GTA and Breaking Bad are my favorite game series and show).

Onboarding into Roll Your Own is also quite easy, as the game utilizes burner wallets, meaning you don’t have to connect your own or sign transactions.

While there is room for improvement when it comes to communication and documentation in the Dope Wars ecosystem, I think it has a lot of potential to create rich lore and fun games given its genre and caliber of the Cartridge team.

Influence

Influence is a strategy MMO developed by Unstoppable Games.

In Influence, players compete with one another to colonize asteroids, accumulate resources, build their crew and earn SWAY, an ERC-20 token that serves as an in-game currency.

A limited version of Influence is currently live on testnet, where you can create your crew and begin scoping out the different asteroids that you want to conquer.

The games is not the easiest to pick-up on. It’s complicated and I had to read the docs to get a good understanding of the gameplay.

However, I do think Influence has a lot of potential.

It’s already developed extensive lore about its game world, and its sandbox-style, emergent gameplay could lead to exciting experiences and interesting stories.

I’ll be closely monitoring Influence’s progress as it gears up for its mainnet launch, and am excited to try the full version when its live.

PixeLAW

PixeLAW is an in-development autonomous world being built in Dojo.

Like Briq, PixeLAW intends to be a primitive, where developers can control the attributes of programmable pixels on a grid to create different games, art and experiences that are composable with one another.

PixeLAW won the first place price for best use of Starknet at the recent ETHGlobal Hackathon in Paris, where it was used to create paint, snake, and rock-paper-scissors games.

Although its still in its early stages of development, PixeLAW has the potential to become a unique design primitive. I’m looking forward to seeing it in prod.

Some Other Games I’m Watching Closely:

There are a plenty of other interesting games in development on Starknet that, for brevities sake, I didn’t get the chance to cover in full.

A few that have stood out to me are:

• Shoshin, a PVP fighting game being developed by Topology.

• CafeCosmos, a restaurant simulator game with a novel P2E mechanism.

• Tsubasa, a soccer game building on a Starknet L3.

Bullish Starknet Gaming

Starknet’s onchain gaming ecosystem embodies many of the attributes of its host L2.

It’s rough around the edges, but fun, creative and exciting.

There are a number of promising games and design primitives being built, and it has a passionate community of talented protocol and game developers.

Like MUD, Dojo has the potential to build up a strong network effect as a first-mover game engine, with developers wanting to leverage its supporting infrastructure and composability.

Starknet gaming should also benefit from strong distribution channels like Cartridge and the native functionality of the L2 itself, as account abstraction and (in the future) storage proofs should greatly improve onboarding and in-game UX.

With that said, I think Starknet gaming has more obstacles to overcome relative to other ecosystems due to its lack of EVM-compatibility.

There are far fewer Cairo than Solidity developers, and as a user, I still don’t like having to download a new wallet or use a clunky block explorer.

The best thing Starknet could to do sidestep these concerns is produce a lot of fun games.

That’s of course far easier said than done, but Starknet is already flashing signs of doing so with Briq, Roll Your Own, Loot Survivor and plenty of others promising projects in the development pipeline.

All in all, I think Starknet is in a great position to become a leading onchain gaming ecosystem along with MUD.

But don’t trust me.

Hop in the Dojo and head on over to Starknet to see for yourself.

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Thanks for reading!

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If you want to meet other onchain gaming and autonomous world enthusiasts, players, and degens, hop in the WASD Republic Discord.

Interested in another Starknet fix?

If so, we’re hosting the first ever WASD Twitter Space on Monday, August 14 at 10:00 pm UTC with Loaf and Eetherway from the Realms and Influence teams.

You can save the date for the space by clicking the link here: https://twitter.com/WASD_0x/status/1689392344720977920?s=20

Hope you all have a great weekend!

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Disclosure: I hold LORDS tokens.