Cartridge, the leading provider of blockchain gaming infrastructure for provable games and autonomous worlds, has recently announced a cool $7.5M Series A funding round and we couldn’t be more excited to see what they have in store.
It’s been a while since we last caught up with the team and hard-working minds behind Dojo, the open-source toolchain that allows developers to build provable onchain games on Starknet. So, thrilled to learn about their successful funding round, we decided to check what exciting stuff Cartridge has been up to and let them share their vision for the future.
But first, in case you’re not so familiar, let us briefly explain what Dojo does for Starknet developers and gamers. Dojo is an open-source toolchain providing developers with a framework for building provable games and autonomous worlds on Starknet. It is compatible with leading game engines, such as Unity, Unreal, and Godot, and it recently hit its v1.0.0 milestone, providing developers with a solid foundation upon which the next generation of interactive entertainment experiences can be built.
While the traditional gaming industry puts too much power in the hands of a few, be it corporations or mega-platforms, and leaves gamers at the mercy of the powers that be, onchain gaming gives gamers the power to shape their own gaming experience. Decentralization in gaming means that as long as there’s an active and thriving community, games will persist. No remote body can shut down a game on a whim or solely out of financial motives. Furthermore, onchain gaming allows for composability, which means participants are free to explore creative ways to share and mix game logic and assets, thus creating entire new worlds.
The vast possibilities for an enriching and community-owned gaming experience, don’t have to be diminished by the limitations of blockchain network scalability. Provable gaming offers a way to trust the integrity of the computation behind the scenes by using validity proofs, so computation isn’t held back by the distributed work of network nodes.
Now this is where Dojo comes into play. Dojo aims to help blockchain developers achieve such an autonomous gaming experience on Starknet. It allows them to focus on their creative vision, by providing them with the necessary infrastructure and tools which take off the load and complex work associated with building on blockchain.
Some Dojo-powered games on Starknet include Dope Wars, Loot Survivor, and Paved.
Ok, that’s enough from us, let’s hear what the folks at Cartridge have to say.
Starknet: Congratulations on your recently announced $7.5M funding round! Before we get to your plans for that, can you first tell us a little bit about how onchain gaming differs from traditional gaming?
Cartridge: Fully onchain gaming differs from traditional gaming – and even earlier forms of blockchain-enabled gaming – by putting both game state and logic on a blockchain. The first wave of blockchain games were actually not very decentralized, often choosing to run their games on centralized servers and moving only select parts of the game to the blockchain. Rather than simply incorporating NFTs or fungible tokens into gameplay, fully onchain games use the blockchain itself as a source of compute.
Starknet: Why did you decide to build on Starknet in the first place?
Cartridge: Starknet provides the ideal target for onchain game development by exponentially increasing the amount of computation that can be executed or verified on the blockchain through ZK-STARKs. In addition to other technologies like Account Abstraction which provide a great user experience.
Starknet: To what extent does Dojo foster developer creativity?
Cartridge: Dojo enables developers to focus on the things that matter most, their game mechanics, lore and client implementations. It takes care of all of the auxiliary work that is typically associated with blockchain development, like indexing, deployment, etc.
Starknet: Interoperability with Dojo means that Dojo-powered games can interact with each other. Any interesting examples of this?
Cartridge: Several games are taking this approach within the Realms ecosystem, which has been a huge supporter of Dojo from the beginning. Games like Loot Survivor, Blobert Arena, Paved, and Eternum make use of shared assets like the $LORDS token, Realms NFTs, and Blobert NFTs. These experiences are all built with Dojo.
Loot Survivor: The fully onchain arcade dungeon crawler built with Dojo, on Starknet.
Starknet: We’ve seen Loot Survivor, a game built using Dojo, gain some real traction and get positive feedback from the community. How would you recommend other game devs use Dojo’s tech stack for maximum effect?
Cartridge: Dojo recently published a blog post detailing the ideas behind provable games, which is something the Loot Survivor team has been a huge proponent of. We’d encourage game developers to dig into this concept deeply and to leverage the provability of Cairo and Dojo as a means to enable greater scale and trust in designing onchain games.
Starknet: What has changed with Dojo in the last year? What new features are you working on?
Cartridge: So much has changed, it would be difficult to list them all.
One of our focus areas has been on improving developer experience by simplifying access control through namespaces and improving expressiveness of the storage model (support for arrays, nested models, enums, etc).
Another huge new addition to the toolchain has been Sozo Manifests, providing a declarative interface for defining the desired state of the onchain world, heavily inspired by Kustomize.
We’ve also added native Controller support to unify onchain interactions across dev, test, and mainnet.
Our co-founder and CEO, Tarrence, wrote a detailed thread on the Dojo stack coming off of EthCC/StarkCC in Brussels that goes into a lot more detail.
Starknet: So, with the new funds, what are your plans going forward and what can we expect next from the Dojo community?
Cartridge: We expect to continue leading the push for more provable onchain games by further contributing to the Dojo stack, supporting onchain game developers, onboarding new teams, and generally helping builders bring their creative visions to life.
Starknet: Any exciting gaming projects harnessing Dojo happening now that we should know of?
Cartridge: So many! You mentioned Loot Survivor already, which we’re huge fans of internally. Other games to add to that list include Paved, Dope Wars, and Force Prime Heroes – all experiences that players can check out today. There are several more games rapidly approaching launch to keep an eye on, too. Stay tuned!
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>> Check out some of the innovative and fun ways game devs have been harnessing the Dojo toolchain >>
