Welcome to Death-Machine, a fully on-chain game that is simple to learn yet hard to master! We designed Death-Machine to replicate the most interesting mechanics in crypto, such as the hunt for MEV and block validation, at a level of abstraction that is easy to understand and accessible to everyone.
Death-Machine is heavily based on the awesome game Mumu. We use a ton of their code and patterns - and owe them a huge debt of gratitude for expanding what is possible on-chain!
The goal of the game is to collect stars on a 15x15 grid. Players control three spaceships and strive to design the optimal sequences before submitting their moves on-chain. Death-Machine consists of 49 turns, and each turn corresponds to a player move.
Rounds last 20 minutes. At the end of the 20 minutes, the player who has submitted the best sequence of moves wins.
Winners validate the block and are rewarded with the captured stars. The stars can be any arbitrary smart-contract such as ERC-20 or ERC-721.
The block difficulty is dynamically adjusted based on the previous block scores.
Enemy skulls are distributed randomly on the grid. Every turn, these skulls move randomly within a set radius. We use the Xoroshiro128+ algorithm and a secret seed to generate the enemy moves.
Death-Machine leverages zero-knowledge technology to manage scalability and access. We use the Sismo Protocol to manage player access in a privacy-preserving way, while our smart contracts are written in Cairo and deployed on Starknet.
For our beta testing, only players who generate a zk-proof attesting that they follow @zkhack on Twitter can play!
By far the biggest source of complexity was fully integrating the software development flow across the frontend, backend, and smart-contracts. Small changes in one often had outsized impacts on the other two, especially with smart-contract inputs and outputs.
Death-Machine v1 will heavily focus on building a more tightly integrated and responsive development and testing environment.