Hello, I’m Seunggeol Song, a game client programmer at Planetarium. This time, I’d like to share with you my experience in the in-house game jam held at Planetarium.
Here at Planetarium, we use our own blockchain game library, Libplanet, to create games. Because Libplanet is currently being developed with the assumption that it will be primarily used in Unity, we have decided to build an SDK for Unity to enhance usability within the engine. To aid our development process, we held an in-house game Jam of creating small example Unity projects using Libplanet.
Groups of 2 or 3 people were formed and for 2 days before the opening day, we got together to brainstorm potential game projects and eventually came up with 5 dazzling game proposals to apply blockchain technology. I teamed up with Chanhyuck Ko to make a game of Omok (Five in a Row). To make two players battle, we implemented the concept of a session (i.e. the room of the game), using the concept of Action and State in Libplanet.
The Great Looking Omok Game We Created!
First, let me introduce some key states and the actions that change them.
SessionState: This state saves the session’s information. There is a unique key (room title concept) to distinguish a session from a list in AgentState, which is the player information in the session. There is also an address that lets you have access to this state.
AgentState: This state saves account information of a player. Here we have the player’s information (typically wins and losses) and address.
PlayerState: This state saves information about the Go stones used by a player in the game. The coordinates of the stones in the Omok table are stored.
JoinSession: This action joins a session with the key a player enters. If there’s no session with the entered key, this action creates a new session with that key. This will change SessionState.
PlaceAction: This action places a Go stone on the Omok table. This changes the stone information of PlayerState.
ResignAction: This action surrenders the game. It changes both players’ AgentState, recording a loss to the loser and a win to the winner.
For more specific internal implementation or code, visit the GitHub repository!
From the overall experience, I felt that the key to developing blockchain games using Libplanet is ultimately knowing how to deal with these states and actions. Action changes states and we take those states in-game logic to play the game. Before game jam, I didn’t have the chance to develop an action myself because I had only recently joined Planetarium. But after implementing the general concept of the session with Chanhyuck Ko, I was able to understand the meaning of action and state and their general usage. It was a great learning experience in many ways.
Closing
If you’re also interested in learning these concepts, I recommend you to take a look at the Planet Clicker GitHub repository, which is a clicker game that’s easy to use while getting familiar with the action and state structure. And as always, if you have any questions, please visit our Discord chatroom and let’s chat!
