Steem Dominion – Release!

Final logo of Steem Dominion.

As a final (at least for now, maybe I’ll update it in the future) devlog, continuing from devlog #2, I will now present Steem Dominion!

When I began thinking about working on a game for the Steem Monsters game jam, I knew I wanted it to be multiplayer, using the blockchain to communicate between players. Thus, the main idea of the game was born. I could have opted for a game where your skills are constantly improving (like most MMORPGs), but I quickly figured out that such an idea wouldn’t work: there is no easy way to differentiate a player from a bot in blockchain games, so botting is inevitable if you reward play time. Thus, I decided to lightly reward play time, so Steem Dominion is very skill based, and even with the greatest deck, you can still lose against a player who has just joined. That was the main idea behind the game, and the rest is history.

Main screen of Steem Dominion.

Steem Dominion places players on a 10 by 10 board, just like chess, but bigger. Each player begins with 5 monsters each, which they can previously select from their deck of cards, inspired by Steem Monsters. Players can move the pieces around the board, just like chess, except with more constraints and rules. There’s also many systems that interact together: an health/attack points system, so that certain units can withstand multiple hits (unlike chess); a healing system, so healers can regenerate other units; and, of course, because this is based on Steem Monsters, a mining + summoning system that interact together to provide a means of resource collection and resource usage to the player. Additionally, there’s a revival system that allows a specific card to revive dead undead creatures with the resources collected, so that you can revive your fellow soldiers, or even revive your foes, and get them to fight on your side! At the end of each game, as long as the game isn’t a draw, the winner receives a free card to use in their deck, permanently.

You can play Steem Dominion on itch.io or, soon enough, steemgg.com (awaiting approval). I hope you enjoy playing a few games!

Going into more technical details, I think the most positive aspect of my entry is that Steem Dominion manages to do all this without any centralized servers, it’s completely decentralized! All is done on the blockchain! There is only a head server that keeps track of the rewarded cards, but that can be hosted by anyone, as the game is libre and open source (details on obtaining the source code are in the itch.io link above). This is a great feature: the servers are unable to be shut down, as long as someone keeps hosting the Steem blockchain. One downside of this, however, is that lag in the Steem nodes used to receive blockchain blocks propagates to lag in the game which, unfortunately, makes the game have long wait times between players’ turns. That’s an issue to solve for another day.
@steemmonsters can be found at http://steemmonsters.com/, or chat on their Discord: https://discord.gg/CAFJRjY.