Author: FaultProofBen

Gm, and welcome to The WASD Weekly!

The momentum in the onchain gaming space is only accelerating as we approach the holiday season.

This week was filled with another slate of new launches, playtests, and announcements from titles like Dark Frontier, Project Awakening, Doomsday, Merlin’s Gambit, and Aether Sands.

I think this is an incredibly bullish sign.

While I expect things to slow as we get closer to the actual holidays, I think this is a preview of what 2024 will look for onchain gaming.

Aside from trying to keep tabs on all the news, I also spent much of my week helping coordinate World Sky League, an onchain esports league in Sky Strife launched by WASD, ggQuest, and [WE].

Our first matches are in the books, and we’re rolling towards our playoffs that’ll be streamed on Twitch and X on December 14.

The league been quite the undertaking, but a ton of fun. I’ll share my experience helping manage it on Monday in Onchain Lore VIII.

Now, without further ado, here’s:

• A primer on the week’s news

• My picks for three games to play over the weekend

• A list of upcoming playtests, opportunities, and events

• A recap of WASD content & mints

• An overview and my thoughts on Dark Frontier (THE GAME SPOTLIGHT IS SO BACK)

And of course…

…The S-tier meme of the week!!!

🗞️ The TLDR:

The hottest news from the last week in onchain gaming and autonomous worlds.

• Dark Frontier launches on a World Engine Devnet

• CCP Games’ Project Awakening begins its playtest

• Doomsday announces its Season 4 will kickoff this Saturday

• Realms migrates its protocol owned $LORDS liquidity to Starknet 

• Aether Sands gears up for their first playtest

• Coinbase launches Base Hunt at Art Basel

• Merlin’s Gambit begins beta testing on Arbitrum

🎮 Plays of the Week:

Three onchain games to try out for yourself this weekend.

• Sky Strife

• Dark Frontier

• Block Heroes

⚔️ PTO: Playtests, Tournaments, & Opportunities:

Upcoming events from around the onchain gaming ecosystem.

• Watch: The World Sky League playoffs on December 14

• Playtest: Gaul on December 14

• Playtest: Tonk Attack (Date TBD)

📺 This Week in WASD:

Catch up on WASD content and mints from the past week.

• Read & collect: The State of the Onchain Gaming Venture Market

🤝 Words From Frens:

The best non-WASD Content from friends in the community.

• Read: What We’re Learning from Extending Downstream with Composable Gameplay and Secrets - Baz

• Read: Thread on the Realms Ecosystem - Composable Hub

• Watch: Autonomous Worlds Starter Kit (Unity & MUD) - Neilson 

🕹️ Game Spotlight: Dark Frontier

Overview:

Dark Frontier is an MMORTS.

An independent reboot of the OG onchain game Dark Forest, in Dark Frontier players compete against one another in a shared galaxy to capture planets and reach the top of the in-game leaderboard.

To do so, players will search for new planets using the “explorer” and capture them using energy, a resource within the game that players can transfer between planets.

Each planet has a different amount of energy and attributes like defense, range (how far it can send energy), and fill time (how long it takes to refill its energy).

Under the hood, Dark Frontier is built by Argus Labs using World Engine.

World Engine is a framework for creating sharded, EVM-compatible L2s optimized for hosting high-throughput onchain games. The network also utilizes Celestia as its data availability layer to further boost scalability.

This round of Dark Frontier launched on December 5 and is set to run until December 19.

At its conclusion, Argus will distribute $7500 in prizes to the “top scoring players” over this period.

The WASD Take:

I never played the original Dark Forest, so Dark Frontier was my first experience with its game mechanics.

I played the game for a few hours shortly after it launched and had a lot of fun with it, as the gameplay is engaging and easy to get started with.

However, I underestimated the time commitment needed to play, as I spent a couple of days between playing in which time all of my planets had been captured (RIP).

Despite this, I could definitely see why the OG Dark Forest became so popular.

When playing Dark Frontier, I was also curious to assess the in-prod performance of World Engine.

So far, I like what I’ve seen.

The game runs smoothly, and the use of “Persona,” an account abstraction system that enables signature-free gameplay, also provides a nice boost to UX.

However, I do think the rollout of “Game Keys,” a code that gives you access to the game, could have been improved.

I received mine 6 hours after launch, putting me at a theoretical disadvantage to other players, and I know of many who received their keys even later.

Overall, I think Dark Frontier is a nice demonstration of what World Engine is capable of.

I’m very excited to see what else is built with it, whether the Argus team continues to run rounds, and how the broader ecosystem developers from here!

🤣 The S-Tier Meme of the Week:

A recreation of a classic in Sky Strife.

Thanks for reading!

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Have a great weekend, and see you all on Monday!