Solutions for high speed response of blockchain games

Lianchaguan media interviewed Sean Chen, the founder of the BlaCat blockchain gaming platform to find out about the collaboration with NEO’s Chinese developer community NEL and investment team NGC. BlaCat is a new platform that supports high-speed blockchain game operation.

The BlaCat team is divided into two parts, one is responsible for the development and operations side while the other is responsible for the development of ZoroChain. The team currently has more than a dozen people in charge of marketing, promotion and operation in China. It has members in the United States and Canada and will be deployed in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia in the future. The ZoroChain developers currently consist of 10 people researching and developing in Shanghai and Silicon Valley. It is scheduled to launch early next year and will support the BlaCat platform. Before the official launch of ZoroChain the games in BlaCat will temporarily operate on the NEO public blockchain.

This interview tries to mainly understand the technical principles of ZoroChain and the actual results that can be achieved when it is launched. We also asked a few questions about the system and operating standards of the BlaCat platform. We hope that this information will be useful to all blockchain game developers.

How fast is ZoroChain’s response speed?

ZoroChain is not the traditional side chain technology and is essentially different from Ethereum’s Loom. As the side chain of Ethereum, Loom only provides developers with a SDK. Each application needs to be setup a separate server, which can only interact with the main application and the main chain. Whereas ZoroChain is more similar to a public chain. Nodes are connected to each other by forming a P2P network and each node can decide which application chain to operate according to the policy.

For example, suppose the ZoroChain main network has 1000 nodes. At a certain moment there are 5 nodes, namely 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the A application chain. In the B application chain there are also 5 nodes, namely 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. ZoroChain is an iterative development based on NEO code and runs independently. It optimizes and adjusts game requirements so as to simplify the consensus process and improve the transaction speed.

In theory, the transaction response time can be less than 300 milliseconds. To the user it will not affect the game experience within that second. It can be used in many types of games such as card, RPG, and simulation. However, ZoroChain’s technology doesn’t support fighting games which requires several actions within a second and the frame rates of these type of games are above 60FPS with a response time as high as ten milliseconds.

What is the decentralized trading system of the BlaCat platform?

BlaCat provides a set of criteria for asset interfacing and transactions. Various virtual assets published on the BlaCat platform may be directly issued to the asset transaction system. The asset transaction system is an important hub for BlaCat value transactions.

The BlaCat platform takes NEO Gas as the circulation token and meanwhile provides BlaCat Point (BCP), wherein the Gas is mainly circulated for the platform and the BCP is an equity token of the BlaCat platform and also the gas of ZoroChain.

After setting up the gas fee prize pool how can the user pay for the gas fee?

Compared to Ethereum based blockchain games which require payment for each interaction the BlaCat platform can flexibly control the user’s gas fee payment methods. In blockchain games, many gameplay operations such as battling and other actions are charged fees and are not directly related to the actual transactions. If these operations require the player to pay a gas fee the game costs will increase and the game experience will be greatly reduced for the player.

To make the game experience more fluid and enjoyable all the ingame gas fees will be paid by the BlaCat platform initially then the platform will after charge those incurred fees back to the users but will also cancel the unreasonable gas fees from the gameplay operations. For game users they do not consider in detail how developers charge gas fees and plus the cost of each operation will be transparent and can be tracked on the blockchain by the users.

What is BlaCat’s open account and community system?

BlaCat created an open account system to help users socialize and encrypt chat information to the blockchain. They can also purchase game services in the platform and enjoy these value-added services in the game. This account is similar to having an Apple ID but which exists on a decentralized server. All the user information is stored on the public blockchain. Game access needs be authorized by the user directly. The user’s in-game transactions, activity, behavior and other information can be authorized also and the user’s private information is completely encrypted and stored on the blockchain.

Each game can be promoted in and by the community, also players can offer reviews for the games. Games with high ratings will gain more promotional opportunities. In order to avoid trolling reviews, BlaCat has established a corresponding reporting mechanism.

There is a game tkey opinion leader (KOL) mechanism in the community as well. We don’t believe it is contrary to the decentralized spirit of the blockchain. It is due to the nature of the game product itself. The KOL’s are not decided by the administrators but jointly identified by the players.

Why does BlaCat choose to work with NEO?

We investigated and compared several public chains. Our first consideration was the originator of smart contracts, Ethereum. They have a large community of users but we are unfamiliar with its project scale, code, consensus mechanism plus its TPS are not ideal. The EOS chain did not yet launch at the time we were looking and there were many uncertainties. Now looking at NEO, it is a public-chain with its own unique consensus algorithm, smart contract virtual machine technology, clean and small code and stably operated for more than one year. There are many applications based on NEO technology including our ZoroChain, which can help better meet our technical requirements.

We have cooperated greatly with NEO. The NEO.GAME competition is held by us and supported by NEO. Based on this platform we assist NEO developers in training, promoting and enriching NEO ecological applications. One other point is that NGC (NEO Global Capital) is our cornerstone investor.

How does BlaCat attract users? When will the demographic dividend era of the blockchain game come?

Blockchain gamers are still very sparse and the whole industry is still in its infancy. Cryptocurrency holders and conventional gamers are both targets of the BlaCat platform. We think that the first seed users of the platform will be the crypto holders because they already have money in hand and can quickly convert it to the platform token through the wallet inside BlaCat.

For the conventional gamers, they will be attracted by the quality of the games. A game that is not entertaining cannot keep its users. Using promotion only will destroy the industry. High-quality games can retain users!

I believe that blockchain games are very different from conventional games. The game’s economic model and operating modes have all changed. The profits from the game should be developed with the characteristics of the blockchain in mind which requires developers to change their thinking.

BlaCat advocates that developers find breakthroughs in the games itself. My team used to be a conventional game development company with monthly revenues of more than 30 million RMB. Looking at the history of the gaming industry I believe that the demographic dividend era needs one or several explosive products to stimulate it and this will come earlier than what most people expect. As soon as a game with over 10 million RMB revenues per month appears, more players and developers will flood into this market.