Artem Vasilenko on building games on Solana with zero-code engine

0:01i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have artem vasilenko the ceo of solcery artem welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time to come on carson thanks a lot and thanks for having me you're very welcome i am looking forward to diving into the world of blockchain games it is blowing

0:24up uh the games hub that your team is working on on solana is a really important part of growing defy into games having all of the different industries that aren't really familiar with the benefits of blockchain integrate them all into one and i think so many gamers are rushing in to cryptocurrency especially in 2021 so far and um i'm loving to hear your thoughts

0:51on that but first let's kick it off with a little bit about solcery what your team's working on and the solutions that you're driving into the space all right yeah sure um so in solicitory we are building an on-chain xero called game engine where people will be able to create small to medium to large gaming experiences without knowing how to code on blockchain specifically without

1:15knowing any rust without knowing how transactions or accounts work on solana so we provide that infrastructure layer for them by default they just need to come and create their games uh in a visual uh scripting tool node editor that that's been made um yeah so they can create game experience for their nft communities around their nft collections uh integrate them in

1:40games make game messes from them and yeah just enjoy the interoperability of blockchain gaming of all the products on the platform definitely yeah great intro artem and i'd love to dive a little bit deeper on uh you know the advantages of this zero code game engine uh and moving it into the blockchain you know is this has this been a barrier to entry for

2:05games coming in to try to build uh you know with solana or with cryptocurrencies um or really what's preventing the gaming space from driving this technology straight into the heart of games really quickly yeah i believe so i believe the the there is a barrier uh because people who have not ever quoted in rust uh a bit afraid of starting on solana specifically

2:31big projects uh where everything is interconnected and you can't make many mistakes with the with blockchain coding and we ourselves experienced that uh we decided to participate in the first hackathon uh the second hackathon on solana started to make a game and it realized it's quite a barrier to learn rust and implement your game mechanics at the same time so we decided to use this

2:56pain for many inspiring game developers who just want to to create something on blockchain due to all the advantages that blockchain gives for for gaming in the future and yeah that's why we're building a game engine first and games uh second definitely and i i look like there was already some uh on the platform already can you talk about you know you you were in the

3:21hackathon which was earlier this year uh how has your team been working since then and where is the platform at right now uh so yeah we started with a simple game then realized what infrastructure it needs to be able to create the same game but an abstract tooling for for that started making an editor iterated several times and we've already made two games using

3:48only our visual scripting tool uh we actually onboarded several game designers who do that for us and they they do it quite quickly we made a pvp game first just to be able to realize that we can do that on our platform and to show everyone and now we've made a single player game that allows you to onboard any nfts on solana to become playable game assets uh actually so you

4:16you can take a dj nape or uh metabase or salon monkey business nft uh ubering into sorcery and it becomes a card with a unique ability uh that is available for you to select from very cool yeah the next iteration would be a public uh game editor available for for everyone when we're ready when we fix everything when we polish the user experience and we're

4:44gonna develop our own games uh in parallel just to showcase what the editor is capable of definitely well that sounds really exciting and uh with developing your own games and for the games on the editor i was reading that the games are like fully on chain or it's really integrated into the blockchain can you talk about what that means yeah we decided to take that approach uh

5:07from the start because we want to cover all the advantages that blockchain gives for games and most of all it's permissionless nature it's trustless uh it can be esports ready out of the box if all the game logic is uh transparent on chain and you can see all the transactions that happens how the game state proceeded from point a to point b to the finality uh to be able to

5:32know who won even if some something lags or a client breaks down uh so yeah we we're taking that approach because having transactions all unchained for our games allows us to actually interact with all the nfts uh inside sorcery not only showing them as customizable items as customizations or your player portraits but actually integrating them fully and

5:57yeah utilizing all interoperability of layer one uh cylinder blockchain that sounds great and i would love to talk a little bit more about solana you know you mentioned you're in the hackathon um you're integrating fully on chain there's a lot of people that are still just getting into d5 that you know they hold cryptocurrencies and they trade them but they haven't even really dove

6:20into defy on ethereum yet and now we're introducing the solana ecosystem maybe you can talk about why you chose to build a platform on solana and what are the advantages of having all the games directly on chain on solana absolutely yeah uh we thought of creating something similar on ethereum well actually on binance smart chain at first because it it has a higher

6:42throughput than ethereum but once we tried solano we never came back because it has the highest throughput of all blockchains it's all layer one no charging no roll-ups uh yeah you you actually can operate with any protocol from from your from yours not having to onboard them uh on a side chain or roll up like polygon or others and yes salina is great

7:07the development community is awesome we have been talking to a lot of devs and they are helping us out the ecosystem is just getting born specifically in gaming there are a lot of projects uh that starts their development right now uh i can't wait to see what it turns into in a year or even half year with the speed the salon is developing right now and growing and to your point uh

7:33to a point about onboarding people into d5 i don't think uh that it's much harder to get people on board into solana than into ethereum actually because phantom is a great wallet it has all the ux you need from a wallet they are releasing a mobile version soon i believe uh software has very mobile version uh of a wallet and and yeah maybe we can just keep this

7:57type of ethereum and get users straight to the salon without without them interacting with these yeah definitely would definitely save a little bit of transaction costs uh exactly sometimes i know um you know your team is going to be working on more games which is super exciting but to build an engine that allows others to start building into the gaming industry uh you were just talking

8:23about how excited you are to see you know where gaming on solana is even by next year you know because the growth is just explosive can you talk about where you see blockchain gaming and nfts inside of games and gamification of d5 as a whole uh right now you know is it still like in the early early adopters phase or are we hitting early majority yet

8:47uh it is at the adopters phase yet uh i think gaming salon is going to turn into something that we can't imagine right now because of all the interoperability between protocols you will be able to have your nft as a tool in defy that you land as collateral and then you onboard it into sorcery and you play it as a card in one game as a playable character

9:10in another one uh it has different abilities you can trade it on marketplaces uh you you can do whatever and and i think we'll see a blending of finance gaming and art in the same place just due to the commercials nature and things being able to operate all the time definitely very cool and i think the same with nfts inside of games i really like what you mentioned there about the

9:38solana monkeys and the other nfts being able to just put them into your game and all of a sudden they have value inside of inside of the platform as well that's super cool is the team at solstery also coming out with your own nfts or a marketplace or what's the extent into which nfts are involved in all these blockchain games uh so yeah uh we our goal at soul sorry is to provide the

10:05place where you can bring any nft on solana uh no matter what collection it is made for uh no matter who committed it and when we want you to be able to use your nft uh in any game and for any developer on our platform to be able to support your specific nft collection if you want with some unique abilities so someone can create specifically a game for dj and apes and make a

10:31brawler where apes throw bananas at each other or you can make a game for all nfgs but uh makes certain collections uh be legendary cards i mean whatever the imagination allows and we are planning to release a sorcery forge protocol which would allow you to actually do that to make uh take your nft forge it in sorcery uh so we will create some kind of a wrapper and then it can

11:01become an asset that any developer can support ah rapping okay now now it's starting to make sense uh very cool and uh with all this development are you looking for more developers or team members or to you know to start building more games on the platform or what's really the primary focus right now for your team uh right now yeah we are expanding ourselves as fast as possible uh we

11:30hired several unity developers we are looking for rust developer who can fill some some gaps in our protocols but yeah very soon we will need people to just come and try social out give us their honest feedback so we can tweak things uh polish the experience at certain features because our goal is so ambitious to create a game engine that is fully unchained we are doing it in steps in

11:58iterations so the first step is to be able to create any card game possible then we'll move to board games in general where you can have figurines the board itself some maps some some tokens uh i mean playable tokens not the ones that we used to um and then we will move to something something even bigger but yet time time will show yeah no that makes total sense and i

12:21know the difference between having games fully on chain and just having a game in that's built but also integrates nfts but you know the game itself isn't really on chain games especially ones with good graphics and and large worlds are huge and they're like a huge burden for blockchains traditionally when we were looking at ethereum and i was like how

12:44are we going to store this much data how are we going to store this quality on the blockchain um is that moving forward as you continue to build up these large games do you see any problems with the solana ecosystem and being able to handle you know huge games that everyone is interacting with at the same time i don't think we'll have any problem with the throughputs and we will

13:08face any bottlenecks in transactions happening but yeah mostly it's going to be problems with maybe security systems or yeah i i don't know what the biggest problem would be i guess but we are taking a bottom to bottom up approach uh with sorcery so comparing ourselves to huge titles like star atlas or rory we're not actually competing with them in any sense because they they have it

13:36all planned out at first they release their vision and then they interact with community to develop it further and we want to be able to create little experiences and then see how they can connect between each other very cool and uh for the viewers that are looking to follow along with the games as you release and learn more about you know what's coming up on the platform what's

14:01the best way for everyone to stay involved and to learn more the best way would be to follow us at twitter solsterygames and we have all the links in the description the main one would be sorcery.xyz it's our website we showcase some videos of creating a game some videos of how the game is played some videos of onboarding nft so you can learn more other

14:26and yeah welcome to into our discord uh we also looking for honest opinions some suggestions uh your ideas etc sounds great adam i will leave all those links in the description box below as well thank you so much for taking the time to come on to talk about solcery what your team's working on i'm looking forward to playing some of the games uh and looking forward to 2022 i know that

14:49your team has a lot in store and i'm sure we will do another video then so until then let's follow up in the near future thank you thank you thanks