A couple of months ago, at one of the crypto meetups in Lisbon, I met the creator of an interesting crypto card game. Like, you know, played with real cards. She asked a few people if they want to play and I instantly accepted. After playing one game, I was hooked.

We kept in touch for a few weeks and even tried to apply for a grant once, but some logistic hurdle blocked us.

So, when the Cosmos ecosystem announced their 6th hackathon (aptly named HackAtom VI), I asked her if she wants to team up, and build a prototype for the contest. She accepted, we planned a few steps and we started to work.

The category at which we entered was gaming, on the Pylons ecosystem. Pylons is a Cosmos SDK based blockchain aiming at the NFT niche. They have a striped down "smart contract" engine which can be used to build basic games. It works by creating a "cookbook"", which acts as a container for your "recipes". These "recipes" are basic operations, consisting in an input, some processing, and some output. There is a certain amount of meta data you can add to the inputs, allowing you to create relatively complex objects, or "cards". The recipes can be chained together, and some complex game mechanics can be built on top of that.

I didn't have the time to dig deeper into this, but I would love to do it in the future. We got to a point where we did build a prototype, but the actual blockchain implementation is missing, we just deployed a cookbook and a few basic recipes. There is some JS scaffolding, but nothing is playable yet. During the hackathon the chain was halted because they found a bug, and I personally struggled with the toolchain, or how to actually broadcast and sign transactions on the chain. There's no React Native support for the CosmJS package, only a basic vue implementation for Starport. On top of that, you need to add the Pylons specific protos, and ok, I think you got an idea.

Today is the last day of the hackathon and you can see our project here:

GetCryptoGame at HackAtom VI

If you could have a look at it, we would be very grateful. We don't know yet when the community voting starts, but I will write a heads up when I will.

What If...

As the hackathon is coming to an end - there are 7 more hours left at the time of writing - and I got a better idea about the work involved, it dawned upon me that I could write a blockchain-agnostic version of it. Like having the game playable independent of any blockchain. Choosing a specific blockchain would be just a parameter. So you could have thee option to play the exact same game on the Hive blockchain, or on the Pylons blockchain, from the same interface. It will be the same game, but it will be played with the account that you have on that blockchain, with people having accounts on that blockchain too. Programming-wise, Hive would be a much easier endeavor for me, since I'm a witness for more than 5 years (wrote hive.supply as an example for using PHP-Hive), even if I'd have to learn a bit of the layer 2 smart contracts.

Last, but not least, Eva, the inventor of the game, agreed to introduce among the cards a Hive one, for the web3 event (you'll get an idea about cards and events if you visit the link above). Many thanks, Eva :)