Introduction
Living out in a Sandbox
Living out in a sandbox?! Yeah! You get the gist, right? But if you don't, its possible you must be breathing from a no man's islands where there is nobody to joke around with or share some popcorn with even though you dont really care about the joke or the popcorn. Well am kidding but really this is the script most of us are certainly acting out because this days, we barely share meaningful communication with humans like us instead we prefer to share all our passion, competitive nature with machines. Yes we are all living out our lives in a sandbox and the sandbox is social activities; one of which is social gaming.
Sandbox : A curse or blessing?
Even though we have substituted humans with machines conveniently, we must be reminded that it is man's nature to stay competitive and have fun. A long-list that bore humans the most because they are too busy to find another busy fellow to quench and suppress their desire as much as machines do. Obviously you dont need any attention to grab your game pad and have a good time, humans do; even though the busy bodies do meet to compete against each other raising the question : Is virtual world more real than the physical world?? (In rhetorical tone).
However getting into either worlds is not easy as we have all come to know about the physical, while game developers can tell the tale of the other world better. This means that inorder for us to better understand our lives since we live in a virtual sandbox, we need to look at the challenges associated with the sandbox; in other words social game development for game developers.
The Problems Identified
Game development is Capital intensive
The cost of assembling a team to work on a project is on the high side for any independent developer even if his idea is one that can sell in the market. Apart from this, the project can also stall if the developer couldn't gain interested sponsors who can provide the needed capital to see the project from development stage through to hosting and market deployment without making outrageous deals which might likely cornered the profit margin of the developer and consequent growth of the project.
Time Factor
One of the greatest factor that could delay the execution a project is lack of resources. Such is the case of game development if the game developer does not have access to all the tools needed to facilitate the quick completion of the project. Obsolete technology means obsolete tools for a developer and that is the challenge for developers when building on a new technology like the blockchain.
New Technology Issues
Blockchain is still a relatively new technology even though it has almost eclipse a decade. This present a challenge to developers building apps on the platform due to reduced shared knowledge of technology, obsolete tools for development and the inherent scalability issue associated with blockchain. The latter option is the major factor in the delay of blockchain for mainstream adoption.
The Solution to all this underlying issues present itself in the form of Xaya!
Introducing Xaya
Xaya is a platform for game developers to build their decentralised and autonomous virtual worlds thereby removing the need for servers.
Xaya will be the developers hub to access this game development and deployment objects : SDK/API, documentation, sample code” as well as “pre-built libraries and utilities to automatically generate Unity Assets and Unreal Blueprints based on the developer’s requirements
The Xaya platform started right back in 2013 when the team conceived and implemented the idea of the first decentralized gaming app fully based on the blockchain; called the Huntercoin
In the process they gained some popularity along the way as
👉 First decentralised massively multiplayer game
👉 First human mining permissible cryptocurrency
👉 First multi algo currency
So therefore, the wealth of experience gained from the huntercoin and previous work on the first altcoin; namecoin will help the Xaya team to drive a decentralised community of game developers who will change the face of gaming on the blockchain.
Potential Solutions offered through the Xaya Platform to Game Developers
Provably Fair Gameplay
This feature is local to the Xaya platform and it is designed to maintain fairness for users within the Xaya blockchain. This algorithm works such that it reconciles the outcome of a game with the game moves of each player; which they can consequently access to verify if they are not clear on the game outcome.
CHI-denominated Economy
The CHI token will serve different use cases within the Xaya ecosystem ranging from account creation, transactions and accounts trading.
However, developers can create their own token for their autonomous to be used as the in-game currency as a means of incentivizing gamers and for purchase of virtual items via the in-game trading platform.
However, CHI token still serve as the base/reserve currency for all transactions within the Xaya Ecosystem.
Decentralised and Autonomous Game Universe
Although Xaya can offer developers to build on various platform; building in a decentralised fashion attracts many benefits including security, low cost due to serverless game scripting. Amidst these qualities, Xaya combines practical technologies such as game channels, Ephemeral time stamps to arrest blockchain scalability issue and help developers create games that can interact in real-time.
As for gamers
Xaya is presently concentrating on 75% of all gamers who play on mobile and/or desktop platforms, although their technology is far more reaching than the gaming sector. Source : Whitepaper page 8
Other Options for Developers building on Xaya
- Xaya off-chain Lobby
- Centralised environment
Reliable and Scalable Blockchain
Having deployed game channels via the use of private side chains to solve the issue of scalability; it is important to keep the game interactions and transaction in continous mode unless being disrupted. A game flow could be disrupted by a player in the case of a dispute by triggering the dispute-resolution protocol to establish the truth by combining merkel hash commitment, fraud proofs protocol and amortized mining.
In the case of no dispute, the game is poised to maintain a 24/7 . However, the Xaya scaling solution might also bring a lot of changes to a young industry like virtual reality (VR), as players will have the oppurtunity to transfer their virtual experience into real life experience since virtual items acquired will have real monetary value. Overall, this will encourage a sense of rensponsibility among gamers.
Real-time Virtual Trading
The Xaya Platform is equipped with in-game exchange to allow for trading of in-game denominated cryptocurrency to CHI which can be used to purchase virtual items such as Powerups, healing power and more within the Xaya platform. Gamers can also sell this virtual items in a P2P fashion.
The Xaya blockchain will implement game accounts and tradable in-game items in a similar way to Coloured Coins. This is how ownership is securely tracked on the blockchain in a decentralised manner and atomic trades enabled for CHI or between items Source : Whitepaper page 14
Apart from buying, gamers can also acquire virtual assets by playing games in a process called human mining.
However, Players have full ownership of their virtual assets.
Secure Channel For Social Interaction
Along with enjoying real-time interactions between multiple users of the platform, gamers are protected from identity attacks since the blockchain keeps your information in an anonymous fashion and only the wallet addresses are visible to the public.
Why Gamers Should make use of the Xaya Platform
The following benefits are derivable to gamers by using the Xaya platform to play games
- Full Blockchain gaming experience
- User Controlled accounts
- Provably fair game play
- Gaming without cheats
- Real-time atomic trading of virtual items into real monetary asset
- 24/7 uptime
- Secure channel for making new interactions
- Reward-based platform through human mining where gamers play to earn
Features That makes Xaya Visibly Attractive to talented Game developers
There are not many options for game developers to switch to blockchain-based gaming development easily and quickly as Xaya offers. Therefore, Xaya aims to democratise game development for developers via the following means
- Low cost of hosting games on a serverless blockchain
- Accessto pre-built libraries for game development,testing and deployment
- True item ownership and fair acquisition
- Open sourced community of developer tools and knowledge sharing
- No third party politics
- Supports differents genre including Turn-based games, RTS/MOBA, Collectible card game and MMORPGs
Use Cases
Uniform GX
Playing a game like Dota or StarcraftII which are MOBA and classic RTS games respectively using the Xaya platform means that gamers can get to share the same experience of monetising their in-game items like skins, powerups or virtual game coins. Which gives them a better sense of belonging when it comes to playing different type of game genres as their experience in one could easily make a difference in another.
There might also be room for more cross-play features on Xaya since all games are being hosted on its highly scalable blockchain
Fast Game Development and Deployment Model
Xaya will help game developers to achieve fast game development through their pre-built libraries which means that developers dont need to build every component of the gaming script from scratch instead can make use of plug-ins for certain functionalities.
In the spirit of encouraging more gaming development, Xaya will offer its tools at a fair price to developers who are not enrolled on the Xaya platform thereby opening the Xaya developers hub to more developers.
Conclusion
Xaya is a platform that encourage the brooding of talents to revolutionise the gaming industry because they are adopting a practical and open culture to ensure that developers ideas stand the test of time.
Synopsis
Token Information
Presale : ended with over $2.5million CHI sold.
Main Sale : Ongoing
Minimum Contribution : 1000 CHI which translates to around €130 depending on the current BTC value
Token Supply : 150 000 000 CHI
Roadmap
Team Xaya
**Please if you enjoy reading this article, kindly leave a comment
OR
Ask a question while you can visit the links below for more details**
. Feel free to check them out here