Solcery's CEO on a zero-code engine for fully on-chain Solana games

Ashton Addison: What is Solcery building?▶ 00:51

Artem Vasilenko: We are building an on-chain zero-code game engine. People can create small, medium and large gaming experiences without knowing how to code on blockchain. They don't need to know any Rust, or how transactions or accounts work on Solana. We provide that infrastructure layer, and they just come and create their games in a visual scripting tool, a node editor. They can build game experiences for their NFT communities around their NFT collections, and enjoy the interoperability of blockchain gaming across all the products on the platform.

Ashton: Has coding been a barrier to bringing games onto blockchain?▶ 01:40

Artem: I believe there is a barrier. People who have never coded in Rust are a bit afraid of starting on Solana, especially on big projects where everything is interconnected and you can't make many mistakes with blockchain coding. We experienced that ourselves. We took part in the second Solana hackathon, started making a game, and realized it's quite a barrier to learn Rust and implement your game mechanics at the same time. So we decided to use this pain for the many aspiring game developers who just want to create something on blockchain, given the advantages it offers for gaming. That's why we're building a game engine first and games second.

Ashton: Where is the platform now?▶ 03:21

Artem: We started with a simple game, then realized what infrastructure we needed to create the same game with abstract tooling. We started making an editor and iterated several times. We've made two games using only our visual scripting tool, and we've onboarded several game designers who do that for us, quite quickly. We made a PvP game first, to prove we could do it on our platform. Now we've made a single-player game that lets you onboard any NFT on Solana as a playable game asset. The next iteration will be a public game editor available to everyone, once we've fixed everything and polished the user experience. We'll develop our own games in parallel to showcase what the editor can do.

Ashton: Your games are fully on-chain. What does that mean in practice?▶ 04:44

Artem: We took that approach from the start because we want all the advantages blockchain gives games, most of all its permissionless, trustless nature. A game can be esports-ready out of the box if all the game logic is transparent on-chain. You can see every transaction and how the game state progressed from point A to point B to finality, so you know who won even if something lags or a client breaks down. Having all transactions on-chain also lets us interact with NFTs inside Solcery not only as customization items or player portraits, but fully integrated, using the interoperability of a layer one.

Ashton: Why did you build on Solana?▶ 05:57

Artem: We first thought about building on Binance Smart Chain, because it has higher throughput than Ethereum, but once we tried Solana we never came back. It has the highest throughput of all blockchains, and it's all layer one, with no rollups. You can operate with any protocol without having to onboard it onto a sidechain or rollup like Polygon. The developer community is awesome, and the ecosystem is just being born. In gaming specifically, a lot of projects are starting development right now. I also don't think it's much harder to onboard people into Solana than into Ethereum, because Phantom is a great wallet and has all the UX you need.

Ashton: Are we still at the early-adopter stage for blockchain gaming, and where is it heading?▶ 07:57

Artem: We're still at the adopters phase. I think gaming on Solana is going to turn into something we can't imagine right now, because of the interoperability between protocols. You'll have an NFT that works as a tool in DeFi, where you use it as collateral. Then you onboard it into Solcery and play it as a card in one game, and as a playable character in another, with different abilities. You can trade it on marketplaces. I think we'll see finance, gaming and art blended in the same place.

Ashton: How do NFTs fit into Solcery's games?▶ 09:38

Artem: Our goal is to provide the place where you can bring any NFT on Solana, no matter what collection it's from or who minted it. We want you to be able to use your NFT in any game, and any developer on our platform to be able to support a specific collection with unique abilities. Someone could build a brawler where apes throw bananas at each other, or a game for all NFTs where certain collections become legendary cards. We're planning to release a Solcery Forge protocol, which would let you take your NFT and forge it in Solcery. We'll create a kind of wrapper, and then it can become an asset that any developer can support.

Ashton: What is the team focused on right now?▶ 11:01

Artem: We're expanding as fast as possible. We've hired several Unity developers, and we're looking for a Rust developer to fill some gaps in our protocols. Very soon we'll need people to come and try Solcery and give us honest feedback, so we can polish the experience. Our goal is ambitious: a game engine that is fully on-chain. So we're doing it in steps. The first is to be able to create any card game. Then we'll move to board games in general, with figurines, the board itself, maps and playable tokens. After that we'll move to something even bigger, but time will show.

Ashton: Large games are a huge burden for blockchains. Do you see problems for Solana?▶ 12:21

Artem: I don't think throughput will be a problem, or that we'll face bottlenecks in transactions. If anything, it will probably be something like security systems, but I don't know what the biggest problem would be. We're taking a bottom-up approach with Solcery. We're not competing with huge titles like Star Atlas, because they plan everything out first, release their vision and then work with the community to develop it further. We want to create little experiences and see how they connect to each other.