Gm!

Thank you to everyone who subscribed to this newsletter, minted our NFTs, joined our Discord, and followed us on Twitter over the past few days!

I’m so excited to be on this journey with you all as we explore this new frontier of onchain games and autonomous worlds in the hopes of finding both entertainment and glory.

WASD’s content NFTs live on OP mainnet, so I thought it would be fitting for our first piece to focus on an ecosystem with roots in Optimism: MUD.

MUD is emerging as one of the leading onchain gaming engines, and there’s a lot of fun games building with it today.

In this piece, we’ll be diving into the MUD ecosystem and discuss:

• What MUD is and why it’s valuable

• Some of the most promising games building on MUD

• Why I’m very bullish on the MUD ecosystem

If you like this article, be sure to collect our free writing NFT with art designed by the legendary Bushi!

Now let’s get into it!

MUD 101 & The Value Of Game Engines

MUD is a framework for building EVM-compatible applications.

MUD was created by the Lattice team and publicly announced with the launch of MUD V1 in November 2022. The second iteration of the project, MUD V2, is live but currently in alpha.

At the highest level, MUD is a set of code libraries and tools that makes it easier for developers to build dapps, particularly complex ones like games.

MUD helps do this in various ways, such as by making data management simpler and more gas efficient via the Store, an onchain database. Another way it does so is through World, a contract that contains all of the state and smart contract logic for a given dapp.

MUD is also compatible with Entity Component System (ECS), which is commonly used for data modeling in TradGaming development.

That’s a lot of dev jargon, but essentially what you need to know is that MUD makes it easier for devs to create and manage large-scale dapps while remaining secure and gas efficient.

If you want a more technical breakdown of MUD, I’d recommend checking out the MUD docs and this piece by Kasper Chen.

Although MUD can theoretically be used to create anything, its attributes have led it to become a popular choice as an onchain gaming engine.

An onchain gaming engine is similar in concept to its offchain counterpart: It’s a set of standards and tools that makes it easier to create games.

This means that rather than have to create everything from scratch, developers can utilize frameworks like MUD to drastically reduce development time and benefit from its security, gas efficiency, tooling, and interoperability, as games built with MUD are easily composable with one another.

OPCraft: MUD’s First Breakout Dapp

The first major MUD-based application to see significant traction was OPCraft.

Created using MUD in just ~6 weeks by the Lattice team, OPCraft is a fully onchain, voxel, Minecraft-like world launched on its own OP Stack L2.

The game resembled Minecraft’s creative mode, as players could build structures and mine for diamonds. The lucky souls who managed to find some (a group that did not include me) could take ownership over parcels in the game, meaning they had the exclusive right to build on them.

Although OPCraft was only live for two weeks, it was revolutionary (literally). This is because a player who went by SupremeLeaderOP acquired 135,200 diamonds which used that to claim a massive portion of land and declare themselves dictator.

SupremeLeaderOP went even further, modding the game through a smart contract that allowed players to join their “Autonomous People’s Republic of OP Craft” and access its treasury in exchange for giving up the entirety of their inventory.

OPCraft was a clear demonstration of two things:

1. The technical capabilities of MUD

2. The power of onchain games to enrich gaming experiences through attributes like permisionless modding

Games Building with MUD

Now that we have a high-level understanding of MUD, its history, and why it’s valuable, let’s dig into some of the games that are building with it today.

We’ll look at some games that are either fully deployed on testnet, or holding public playtests, and some promising ones that are private but appear to be actively in development.

Sky Strife

Sky Strife is a turn-based, multiplayer, real-time strategy (RTS) game that’s being developed in-house by the Lattice team.

Currently deployed on the Lattice testnet, in Sky Strife players battle in an attempt to destroy each other's settlements while protecting their own.

First and second-place finishers can win resources, an in-game currency that can be used to summon new islands (i.e. create new matches), and in the future craft items to build out your inventory.

Sky Strife is frenetic, fast-paced, and requires quick, on-your-feet thinking. You’ll have a limited amount of time per turn to plot your moves and allocate gold, an in-game currency that you can use to purchase units.

Despite its simple premise, there’s quite a bit of strategy that goes into the game. You’ll have to balance going on the offensive and defensive, and as your army grows, make tradeoffs about which units to utilize each turn.

Sky Strife onboarding is incredibly smooth, as it utilizes a solution I’ve seen across many MUD and onchain games: Burner wallets.

A burner wallet is a temporary wallet that’s automatically generated when you open Sky Strife and is stored locally in your browser. It has the right to sign transactions on your behalf and is auto-funded with testnet ETH to pay for gas.

This is a significant boost to in-game UX and onboarding flow, as it means that you don’t have to sign any transactions, bridge any funds, or connect your wallet to play.

If you were a normie and stumbled across Sky Strife, you would barely be able to tell that it’s an onchain game.

Although it remains in its early development stages and is rough around the edges, Sky Strife is already a ton of fun.

It’s my favorite crypto-related game (onchain or Web 2.5) that I’ve played to date.

It appears I’m not the only stan, as we’ve already seen the first Sky Strife guild develop with the creation of [WE].

Made up of several prominent community members, [WE] has been cleaning up on Sky Strife playtests, and I’ve fallen victim to them multiple times.

Perhaps we need a [WASD] guild to challenge their dominance.

If you want to try it yourself, Sky Strife is holding a playtest tomorrow at 6:00 am PST. They usually hold them on Fridays at 7:30 am PST, though it’s possible this cadence will be changing down the road.

Primodium

Primodium is a resource allocation game that’s live on an OP Stack testnet.

Similar to the Web2 game Factorio, in Primodium players aim to grow their industrial empire by mining resources and building factories while creating the most efficient supply chains possible.

The team behind the game has also developed Crypto Towns (which as its name suggests) is a town-building game.

The entire game takes place on a shared map, which adds an additional layer of strategy and complexity, as you’ll have to take other players' supply-chains into account when plotting your own growth.

In a future update, Primodium will begin supporting onchain combat, where players can fight and launch missiles at one another.

Primodium is a bit hard to pick up, and I had to follow their guide closely to get started. However, it’s engrossing once you get into it.

For a business nerd like myself, figuring out what resources to accumulate, and how to create the most efficient production line possible was a lot of fun.

Primodium is sleek, as its graphics are clean and the game runs smoothly. Like Sky Strife, it also utilizes burner wallets, meaning onboarding is seamless and the UX feels similar to a traditional browser-based game.

I’ll be getting deeper into Primodium more over the next few days and weeks, and I’m very excited to see onchain combat in prod.

Words3

Words3 is a PVP word game developed by Small Brain Games and currently live on the Lattice testnet.

Small Brain is the team behind other titles like Dark Seas and Apes Gambit, and is also currently developing Network States, a strategy game built on MUD V2 that will utilize LLMs to create in-game lore.

Words3 has similarities to other word-building games like Scrabble and Words with Friends, as players compete to form words and get points.

However, the game is financialized, as players must spend ETH to buy letters. This ups the stakes, as you’ll win or lose ETH depending on whether or not you emerge victorious.

I’ve not yet gotten the chance to try out Words3, but I’ve heard great things and it looks like a lot of fun. As a degen, the ability to win ETH by playing the game certainly adds to the appeal and should help it attract interest among crypto natives.

A Words3 playtest (which I’ll be attending) will be held this Saturday, August 5 at 4:00 pm PST. It’s expected to be the last one before they launch on mainnet.

In-Development Projects That I’m Keeping An Eye On

There are plenty of other MUD-based games in-development that are not currently playable. Here’s a TLDR of a few of them that I’m keeping a close eye on:

Autoroad

Autoroad is a multiplayer, Sokoban construction game being developed by the Engine Study team.

It’s hard to find public information about Autoroad outside of their Twitter a thread in the Lattice Discord. However, we know that the game will be built in Unity and I think it looks pretty cool based on some short videos that the team has released.

The homepage of the Engine Study website is also pretty interesting, as it lets you run around while drag and dropping visual representations of your NFTs. I don’t think this relates to Autoroad, but it’s creative and makes me bullish on the team.

Netherscape

Netherscape is an onchain RPG, where players can explore a world and battle one another. An interesting aspect of Netherscape is their use of a marketplace to loan out the rights to control playable characters in the game (PCs).

The game was one of the finalists from the AW Hackathon, and the only one with an active Twitter account. I look forward to trying it out if/when they start holding public playtests.

OPCraft 2

OPCraft 2 is a revival of the original OPCraft.

Another finalist from the AW Hackathon, one of the defining features of OPCraft 2 was the incorporation of redstone into the game.

It’s unclear where OPCraft 2 stands in its development as OPCraft’s page in the MUD Community Notion was last updated in June. Given how fun the first rendition of the game was, I’m hoping and watching closely to see if it makes a comeback.

If you want to discover other projects building on MUD, check out the MUD community notion.

I’d also take a look at the demos from the Autonomous Worlds Residency in fall 2022, and the submissions from the recent Autonomous Worlds Hackathon.

Bullish MUD

Like onchain gaming, the MUD ecosystem is still in its infancy.

It’s raw…but extremely promising.

I’m not a dev, but MUD seems to deliver on its promise to make it easier to create onchain games.

Given its EVM compatibility, first-mover advantage and the strong intellectual capital in its community, MUD seems well-positioned to capture mindshare and maintain its position as a leading engine and ecosystem for onchain games.

Like many technologies, it should benefit from strong network effects, as developers will want to build, and players play, in the ecosystem with the most resources, security, and cross-game composability.

As a player, despite being far from finished products, many MUD games have great onboarding through the use of burner wallets and are already as easy to get started with as their Web2 counterparts.

And most importantly, games like Sky Strife and Primodium are already a lot of fun.

Overall, I’m very bullish on the future of the MUD ecosystem.

If you haven’t already, start playing some games so you can MUD-pilled yourself!

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