Hi,
my main question is:
What is the plan for gaming on Cosmos?
I will try to split this thread into 3 parts. In the first part I will try to analyze the history and what I have learned about gaming in Cosmos in the past. In the second part I will try to analyze the current state of gaming on Cosmos and in the third part I try to understand what the future plans are and what I see from here.
So basically I’m quite long now with Cosmos and building a game with Cosmos for a couple of years now (CrowdControl). I’m an ICO investor into Cosmos, so it’s not totally new and in the past I was quite happy to have picked Cosmos SDK, since some awesome features that helped us came on the way. Most noably authz, which is great for improving our UX.
We have also participated in the Hackatom VI, which had a gaming category, we even won in one of the categories, so we got some feeling that gaming is something that Cosmos wants to expand into. Also the Hackatom left us with some question marks, like how a Olympus DAO copycat obvious ponzi could win the grand prix, but back at the time, we just thought, well maybe we don’t understand something about that, but well, later Olympus obviously collapsed and made it clear it is a ponzi and nothing more. But that might be a story for another day. Long story short: Gaming was never a really big thing on Cosmos, but it was clear it is something that the Cosmos AEZ wants to expand into (well back then AEZ was not a term, but the Cosmos Community wanted to expand into that realm).
So the current state is a bit pale and thin, there is not much going on, the Hackatom VI is 2 years ago, there was only a game of NFTs, in which we participated and build a a game again, which did not draw any attention at all. So gaming seemd to be quite dead. Also in addition to that, there is nothing being developed that helps gaming developer experience, we don’t see any new tools and using vue autogenerated code, is not really getting better, but having more and more roadblocks. We post Github issues and find bugs in that, which are only slowly tackled by ignite or cosmos-sdk. This left us wondering a bit, as we do not really understand how we can be the first ones, to find those bugs, basically everybody who is upgrading to Cosmos-SDK 0.47 and using the autogenerated vue website interface, should be roadblocked by the bugs we report? Is nobody really using the autogenerated website with Cosmos interfacing, are the projects building that interface by themselves or ist just not much going on with new developments?
So basically we have arrived at a point, where we are integrating the blockchain interface (custom transactions from our modules) into our Unity gameclient and we are wondering why there is no dev tooling available. There is no C# code at all. There is no Unity plugin. It’s like if you decide to build a game with Cosmos SDK and then use Unity, you are basically left alone. You have to code everything yourself. For Javascript, so Websites there is CosmJS and we use that. You can autogenerate your interface from your transaction messages, great. It has bugs and some updates have regressions, but at least it is usable and your not left standing in the rain. This is different if you go with Unity, which is the most used gaming platform. However, maybe you prefer Unreal, but there it is the same. No tools available. Which leaves me wondering, what has happened in the last 2 years? Why is there no tooling? What is the plan to attract game devs into Cosmos Ecosystem?
So this brings me to the last part, what is the plan for the future and how did we react. After we realized there is nothing, we started building that stuff ourselves. We now have build CosmCS (GitHub - DecentralCardGame/cosmcs: A C# client library for cosmos-sdk blockchains), which makes it possible to use Cosmos with C# codebases (.NET, game dev in Unity etc.). We are now also building an ignite version manager, because of showstopper bugs, we have to switch between versions so often, it is just useful, but it should be a tool available already. Well, then at some point, someone told us, err guys, if you building that stuff, you should apply for a grant. This is a no-brainer. It is obviously needed and useful, just ask for a small grant and then you can build out your stuff so it is useful for others and make it Unity plugin, that opens game dev for those who are not experts on Cosmos-SDK, but still want to build a game with Cosmos transactions. Ok, so then we applied for a small grant, for building a Unity plugin and C# integration, basically to generalize the stuff we are building and make it available to everyone building games on Cosmos. However the grant was rejected, which raises the question in me:
What is the plan with gaming on Cosmos?
It’s ok if such a grant is rejected, but only if someone else is building that stuff. But somehow to me it seems like this kind of integration has been forgotten for the last 2-3 years and should have been done already. And I don’t see anything being developed like that in Cosmos. So this basically leaves me with only one other option to understand all of this:
Cosmos AEZ has just silently given up on gaming and is no longer trying to get game devs on board and that is why there are no resources at all being moved into improving game dev experience. It would be really nice if someone, who is officially working for Cosmos can clarify that and either confirm that gaming has been given up at some point or explain to me what I am not understanding that might be crucial here to see the bigger picture.