The Moloch simulation game

[nolan]

(Sorry for my poor English)

Before telling you about my project, I’ll quickly introduce myself.
I’m Nolan Vanmoortel freelance full-stack developer in Belgium specialized in artificial intelligence.
I’m a big fan of new technologies like blockchain, decentralized finance, and everything that allows disintermediation(WEB 3.0).

I had the chance to be part of the early adopters on many DeFi projects. This chance allowed me to be relatively financially independent.
I now want to contribute to building a better world by designing a project (non-profit) that I hope will give value to UBI.

I want to spend one year on it. To keep this interesting for me, I’ll take the opportunity to play with a lot of techno (Cairo, P2P database, 3D game engine, shader, DAO, etc.)
Here is a summary of my project. To keep you updated on the progress and not pollute this forum, I will create a devblog.

### The Moloch simulation game ###

The Moloch simulation is a massively multiplayer online browser game where each player has the choice to cooperate to progress in the exploration of the world or defect and get an immediate profit.

First, the player can buy a world (NFT), each type of world has resources (Fungible) that can be harvested and dungeons to explore.
A world is split into areas. Each area contains one or more dungeons as well as specific resources.
To access the next part of the world, you must succeed in increasing your influence.
The influence of a zone decreases with time. To raise it, you have to defeat the dungeon keepers continuously.
When the influence drops to 0, the enemies destroy the world and the character of all players in it.
The world owner can invite other players to join his world to progress but with the risk of having malicious players.

The player can buy a recipe to build (with some resources) a cute little robot(NFT) used in-game. Each robot has different characteristics and combat skills, increasing the damage, armor, and the number of resources collected. The robot gains levels when it wins battles. Levels unlock upgrades for your robot, which can give it a bonus or new combat skills.

Fights are turn-based. One or a group of players can initiate a fight. Each turn, the player can perform a certain amount of action, like moving or attacking. Different types of attacks are available depending on the protagonist.
The enemies will destroy all robots (NFT burn) when a fight is lost.
A program under the control of the DAO of the game manages enemies. We will keep this program open source to ensure the same difficulty for all players. The player in case of cheating can seize the decentralized court of Kleros.
The fights are on-chain (StarkNet Validium/Volition).

Harvesting allows you to obtain essential resources to build robots and improve them. Players can freely exchange resources on-chain.
When a player harvests a resource, it disappears, leaving you with a random distribution of resources and seeds to replant (quantity depending on characteristics).
The game will push harvesting information on-chain, the smart contract will control the harvesting requirements(time to grow and to harvest), if we want to avoid bots, we can set up a Mimic system like Dark Soul.

The DAO will have the privilege to sell the world and the robot and robot improvement recipes.
The DAO will do the sale in UBI (UBI = time = free to play), a fixed quantity of each item will be created continuously and will feed an AMM allowing a free market price.
The DAO will also decide to offer incentives or not to the players, like offering UBI to people finishing a dungeon or offering a return to the DAO stakers.
The DAO will have the role of running servers to control the enemies. The artificial intelligence (naive or multi-agent recurrent neural networks?) of each enemy will have to be public to allow players to make sure that there is no fraud.

Thanks for reading!

Does the project sound interesting to you?
Do you think the UBI DAO should be the same as the game DAO?
Do you want to participate in creating the game, or would you rather be an observer?

[clesaege]

@nolan

Does the project sound interesting to you?

Yes, definitely. Turn based means that it can work on a L2 without centralized server.
I think we should make sure that the interactions are sufficiently complex such that bots cannot be used to farm.

@nolan

Do you think the UBI DAO should be the same as the game DAO?

It could start with it. And after some point could potentially spin out.
I think using UBI as a currency would be really helpful as it allows for anyone to play the game for free while having some limited resources and being Sybil resistant.

@nolan

Do you want to participate in creating the game, or would you rather be an observer?

I’m quite busy but would follow it and see if I can give game theory inputs such that the game cannot easily be gamed.

[pscott]

@nolan

First, the player can buy a world (NFT), each type of world has resources (Fungible) that can be harvested and dungeons to explore.

How many worlds are you thinking about exactly? Is the an upper limit, or will it be determined “by the market” (e.g worlds price go up as a function of already existing worlds?)

@nolan

The world owner can invite other players to join his world to progress but with the risk of having malicious players.

I think I’ve misesd exactly what “malicious” players can do. Worst thing they can do is “not play”, making the influence go down? Or can they sabotage fights?

@nolan

A program under the control of the DAO of the game manages enemies. We will keep this program open source to ensure the same difficulty for all players.

If the AI is open-source, and fights are turn-based, do you fear it will get easy to basically play a simulation in the background, and see which action has the highest probability of making you win?

@nolan

Harvesting allows you to obtain essential resources to build robots and improve them. Players can freely exchange resources on-chain.

Can player exchange ressources inter-world, or is it limited only to a single world?

@nolan

The DAO will do the sale in UBI (UBI = time = free to play), a fixed quantity of each item will be created continuously and will feed an AMM allowing a free market price.

When you say “item”, what you referring to? Worlds? Other stuff in mind?

Really excited about this! Thanks Nolan!

[nolan]

Thank you for your questions

@pscott

How many worlds are you thinking about exactly? Is the an upper limit, or will it be determined “by the market” (e.g worlds price go up as a function of already existing worlds?)

There will be several types of worlds with different zones, resources, and dungeons for each.
The DAO will mint each type of world(NFT) at regular intervals.
The quantity minted can be adjusted, for example, depending on the number of players.

These worlds will feed an AMM to allow the price to vary according to the demand, so if the players strongly appreciate a world (interesting resources for resale?) will increase in price and vice versa, for example, by making a reverse auction with continues liquidity.

Creating new types of worlds will take a lot of time (3D environment, 3d enemies, balancing with the rest of the game, etc.), so I imagine we will have only a few types of world at launch.

@pscott

I think I’ve misesd exactly what “malicious” players can do. Worst thing they can do is “not play”, making the influence go down? Or can they sabotage fights?

They can harvest all the resources of the world and sell them.
Thus blocking the progress of the rest of the group.

This mechanism is the most exciting part of the game. To progress, you will have to cooperate with many humans.
But the more you progress in the game, the more the resources will be rare and valuable.
Players will be interested in collecting as many resources as possible to make an immediate profit, but this will cause the world’s destruction if no one continues to use their resources to upgrade their robot and defeat the dungeon keepers.

It will be necessary to coordinate so that each player limits their harvesting time to participate in the common effort and keep their regions or conquer new ones.

@pscott

If the AI is open-source, and fights are turn-based, do you fear it will get easy to basically play a simulation in the background, and see which action has the highest probability of making you win?

We can decentralize the code of the AI but keep secret the trained model that we will train regularly thanks to the dataset collected on the players.

In case of suspicion of cheating by the DAO, it will always be possible to give access to the trained model to the Kleros court to verify the neutrality towards all players.

@pscott

Can player exchange ressources inter-world, or is it limited only to a single world?

The game will be directly on-chain. The resources can be simple ERC-20 and therefore can be exchanged between players regardless of the world.

@pscott

When you say “item”, what you referring to? Worlds? Other stuff in mind?

The DAO will be in charge of selling the worlds to allow the player to play and the recipes to create new robots or improve his robot.
The recipes can be single-use to guarantee a source of income to the DAO and circulate the UBI.

[nolan]

I recently created a blog to share my adventure of creating an on-chain game.

https://www.nolan.ninja

[Jkusne]

This looks reaaaaally interesting. I would love to participate in a way. I’m an economist so I can help with the economics of the game and help with some data analytics once we have deployed.

[nolan]

I’m glad you like the idea!
I will try to create the game as open as possible so that everyone who wants to participate has the opportunity.
The help of an economist will surely be essential to the success of the game!

I’ll come back to you when I start to implement the economic logic.