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Comment by Karrot_Kream | Hacker News Reader

Dark Forest [1] is a game that runs completely on-chain (on the Gnosis chain [2], compatible with Ethereum) and uses ZKSnarks. Here's a fun post on it [3]. Found this to be a cool application of blockchains that aren't financial, no affiliation or otherwise. There are financial aspects of the game and you can pay money, but the devs have a faucet that just let you start playing the game. It's also really cheap to play on the official instance (which is closed for play now), but other games have really cheap buy-ins.

[1]: https://zkga.me/

[2]: https://www.gnosischain.com/

[3]: https://omarmezenner.mirror.xyz/gFCfCVwTfUU91SDXeROEaDQe4984...

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Dark Forest is the only game I know of that has all-on-chain game play like the game I've been working on, Orbiter 8. The two games have a lot in common, actually. Both are space games, with planets as assets, 2D views of the game map, all on-chain, written in Solidity, client agnostic, etc. But the two games are still distinctly different in how they play. Also, we are still in alpha and haven't released any battle features. Our last demo only has trade, but it's multichain and we're planning on bridging the ships so they're cross chain. You'll get to take your ship into universes that exist on other networks, ti's gonna be kinda neat:

https://orbiter8.com/play

You might like 0xMonaco:

https://0xmonaco.ctf.paradigm.xyz/

I do like. TY

But...why isn't this game better served by just throwing all the data in $DATABASE? This is what I don't understand about blockchain games, the idea of having to buy a currency to play a game is not new, and the blockchain doesn't seem to add anything at all.

Unlike most blockchain games today, Dark Forest is decentralized and has some unique properties:

- the game is open source and free to fork

- because of zero knowledge proofs, no single entity decides on or knows of the secret data. Assuming the protocol is correctly coded, users cannot cheat or crack the game - not even the developers know the planet locations.

- because it’s built on a fairly permissionless network, any user can build smart contracts, new game clients, and plugins for the game to modify it. Most online games have to issue API keys for server access to achieve modding; in Dark Forest there is no concept of “centralized server.” So even if the game developers stop maintaining the game, the contracts and on-chain game state is unaffected and will continue to operate normally.

In addition to what zeroclip said, the cool thing is that blockchains are running all the time and needs no active input to pay, maintain, upgrade, etc by users of the chain. Operations are paid for through transaction costs on the chain, no need to pay a provider monthly to give you a hosted Postgres and make sure they maintain their SLA. Each transaction pays for the resources it uses on chain. That means that operations that use blockchains as DBs get per-access priced access to an ever-running DB with no maintenance necessary.

I'll be concrete. The game I linked, Dark Forest, has a "lobby" feature which lets you create a new game and invite others to join that game, like a game lobby. I play occasionally with friends in a lobby. $1 can give you enough to play many games at time of this writing. The authors of the game need to pay for nothing to host me while my friends and I play an independent game paying only what we need, mere cents. The only problem is the game uses xDAI a token which is a bit of a pain to get (you need to buy DAI and get it converted.) IMO that's pretty good.

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