Age of Rust — Dev Update #8

We’re very proud to announce that Age of Rust has been selected to join the Early Adopters Program from Enjin! This new and exciting development will do what we have envisioned for our games by providing a platform on the Ethereum network and giving players friendly tools to manage ownership of items.

How we got here is a bit of a story and with all good stories, it starts on a rainy day back in March at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I dashed in from a downpour and made my way to the exhibit hall space. I knew there were several cryptogames and platforms at GDC this year, while a couple of them were cryptogames, most were platforms. I try to pay attention to everything crypto and heard about this swank little demo of a game in the south hall. I went to check it out and saw this little explorer fellow dash from room to room and when he got to a gem, a token showed up in a mobile crypto wallet. Right then and there, everything changed with gaming forever, but if you didn’t understand what crypto was, you just missed the greatest event at the show.

Enjin’eering the future

So, every now and again, something really exciting happens in technology and if you’re lucky, you grab onto it and it fundamentally changes everything around you. You can’t say that often in the world of gaming, you could point to Atari for home gaming, Wolfenstein for a “3D” first person shooter, and Nvidia for a GPU with programmable shading. I believe that the next era of gaming has arrived and it’s the decentralized tokenization of player owned game items from Enjin. The little demo game I saw at GDC (EnjinQuest) was put together to showcase the simple but elegant concept of blockchain gaming for a mass market. What Enjin understands is that the game and the player are what’s important in the crypto space. If you spend half your day on just managing and troubleshooting your crypto, you can’t enjoy the game. That’s what makes Enjin different from the other platforms out there, they understand what the game developer wants to do and what the player needs.

Moving forward with Age of Rust using Enjin… If you’re casually following the blockchain gaming universe, you’re probably aware of a few titles and the tokens that they use with the game. While that’s fine and good, there’s a lot of focus on the technology which can distract from the game and the story. We didn’t want players to get overly engrossed in the details of blockchains and how smart contracts work. As we move Age of Rust into a more immersive gaming experience using the Unity engine, we needed a solution that would bridge the gap between Unity and the tokens on the Ethereum network and that’s where Enjin fits in for us.

A rusty and bright future ahead…

So here’s what’s in store for Age of Rust players as we transition over to Enjin on the Ethereum network:

• We’ll be able to use Rustbits as intended in the game, our rusty-gold that players will be able to use in-game as originally intended.
• Let’s say you own the ultra-rare Rustchain card “Origin”, you’ll be able to rent it out to one another and earn crypto for it.
• Rare game items in Age of Rust will also have some Enjin coins inside them, so if you “melt” them down, you’ll unlock those coins as the item is destroyed. Some of these items may have consequences in the game, melt the item from the universe and the path is lost forever.

• We’re collaborating with another blockchain sci-fi game, Neon District, a cyperpunk RPG. By having our tokens on Ethereum using Enjin, it will allow players to benefit by playing both games with token recognition on the Ethereum blockchain.

From a developer point of view, we’re able to focus on building the Age of Rust universe and not have to focus on a lot of the back end blockchain tech to bring a game like this out there. It gives us the capability to continue to tell the story and take the player on an adventure. We don’t have to focus on writing wrappers for service providers to tie C# to Ethereum and then parse out responses to our own smart contracts. Instead, we can simply use the open ERC-1155 contract from Enjin to do these things and directly from within Unity. Our time is then better focused on harnessing the fun of the game and not the tech that runs some of the show behind the scenes.

Utilizing Enjin is really going to be a game changer for Age of Rust, not only in terms of exposing the game to more players around the globe, but giving more functionality to token holders and players alike. We’re excited to be part of this new space and working with Enjin to provide the new token capabilities through its ERC-1155 smart-contract is a big for us.

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