Original text: Lessons from the Dojo: A striking conversation with Cartridge
Translation and proofreading: Starknet Chinese Community
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Quick Facts
Cartridge, the developer of Dojo, a toolchain for provable games and autonomous worlds, recently raised $7.5 million in funding
Dojo's interoperability allows games developed on it to share assets and logic
Dojo aims to simplify complex blockchain work for game developers, allowing them to focus on their creative vision
Cartridge, the leading provider of blockchain gaming infrastructure for provable games and autonomous worlds, recently announced a $7.5 million Series A funding round and we are excited to see what they have in store for the future.
It’s been a while since we last interviewed the Dojo team and the hard work behind them. Dojo is an open source toolchain that enables developers to build provably on-chain games on Starknet. So, we were very excited to learn about their successful fundraising. After hearing the news, we decided to find out more about Cartridge and ask them to share their vision for the future.
But first, if you are not familiar with Dojo , let us first give you a brief introduction to what Dojo provides for Starknet developers and gamers. Dojo is an open source toolchain that provides developers with the ability to develop games on Starknet. A framework for game and autonomous world proofing. It is compatible with leading game engines such as Unity, Unreal and Godot, and recently completed its milestone release v1.0.0, providing a solid foundation for developers to build the next generation of interactive entertainment experiences.
The traditional gaming industry places too much power in the hands of a few people (whether it is a company or a large platform), leaving players at the mercy of these powerful people, while on-chain games give players the ability to shape their own gaming experience. Decentralization means that as long as there is an active and thriving community, the game will continue to exist. No remote authority can shut down the game on a whim or for purely economic motives. In addition, on-chain games also support composability. This means participants are free to explore creative ways to share and remix game logic and assets to create entirely new worlds.
The vast possibilities for rich, community-owned gaming experiences are not limited by the scalability constraints of blockchain networks. Provable games ensure the integrity of behind-the-scenes computations using proofs of validity, making computations immune to manipulation. Constraints of distributed work of network nodes.
This is where Dojo comes in. Dojo aims to help blockchain developers realize such autonomous gaming experiences on Starknet. It provides developers with the necessary infrastructure and tools to reduce the burden of developing games on the blockchain. And simplified these complex tasks so that they can focus on their creative vision.
Starknet on-chain games powered by Dojo include Dope Wars, Loot Survivor, and Paved.
Well, that’s it for our introduction, let’s hear the insights of the Cartridge team.
Starknet: Congratulations on your recent announcement of a $7.5 million funding round! Before we discuss your plans, can you first explain how on-chain gaming differs from traditional gaming?
Cartridge: Fully on-chain games are different from traditional games, and even from early blockchain games. Fully on-chain games put both the game state and logic on the blockchain. The degree of decentralization of the first wave of blockchain games In fact, it is not high. They usually choose to run games on centralized servers and only transfer part of the game content to the blockchain. Fully on-chain games are not simply incorporating NFTs or homogenous tokens into the game, but The blockchain itself serves as the computational source.
Starknet: Why did you decide to develop on Starknet?
Cartridge: Starknet significantly increases the amount of computation that can be performed or verified on the blockchain through ZK-STARKs, making it an ideal platform for on-chain game development. In addition, other technologies such as account abstraction also provide a good user experience.
Starknet: To what extent does Dojo promote developer creativity?
Cartridge: Dojo allows developers to focus on what matters most, which is their game mechanics, backstory, and client implementation. Dojo takes care of all the auxiliary work typically associated with blockchain development, such as indexing, deployment, etc.
Starknet: Dojo interoperability means that Dojo-based games can interact with each other. Are there any interesting examples?
Cartridge: The Realms ecosystem has been a staunch supporter of Dojo from the beginning, and several games in its ecosystem have adopted this approach, with games like Loot Survivor, Blobert Arena, Paved, and Eternum all using $LORDS tokens. , Realms NFT, and Blobert NFT. These gaming experiences were developed through Dojo.
Starknet: We've seen a game like Loot Survivor, built with Dojo, gain real traction and some positive community feedback. What advice would you give to other game developers who want to leverage the Dojo stack to best effect?
Cartridge: Dojo recently published a blog post detailing the concept behind provable games, which is something the Loot Survivor team has been very supportive of. We encourage game developers to learn more about this concept and take advantage of Cairo and Dojo’s provable As a means to achieve greater scale and higher trust when designing on-chain games.
Starknet: How has Dojo changed over the past year? What new features are you working on?
Cartridge: There are so many changes that it is difficult to list them all.
One of our focuses is improving the developer experience by simplifying access control through namespaces and making the storage model more expressive (supporting arrays, nested models, enumerations, etc.).
Another huge new feature of the toolchain is Sozo Manifests, which provides a declarative interface for defining the desired state of the on-chain world, a feature inspired by Kustomize.
We have also added native Controller support to unify on-chain interactions for development, testing, and mainnet.
Our co-founder and CEO Tarrence wrote a detailed thread after EthCC/StarkCC in Brussels, going into more depth about the Dojo stack.
Starknet: So, what are your plans after getting the new funds? Are there any new developments in the Dojo community that everyone can look forward to?
Cartridge: We hope to continue to lead the way in driving more provable on-chain games by further improving the Dojo stack, supporting on-chain game developers, attracting new teams, and helping developers realize their creative visions.
Starknet: Are there any game projects currently being developed using Dojo that are worth your attention?
Cartridge: So many! You mentioned Loot Survivor, which we're big fans of internally. Other games worth keeping an eye on include Paved , Dope Wars , and Force Prime Heroes , which are all games you can play right now. In addition, there are several games coming soon that are worth paying attention to. Stay tuned!
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