🏟 Dark Forest Arena 🏟

Today we embark on our next journey in the Dark Forest universe, and we want you to join us.

We are excited to announce open playtesting for our new project:

Dark Forest Arena.

Dark Forest Arena is the first MOBA-style fully on-chain game. It emphasizes action-packed gameplay in short, intense game rounds.

Arena is possible for two reasons: first, the work done by the core Dark Forest team to make their game open-source and easily modifiable. Second, it is deployed on Gnosis Chain’s brand new Optimistic Rollup, which boasts extremely cheap transactions and fast transaction confirmation times.

Arena will allow us to compose different Dark Forest universes into new primitives. We are laying the foundation for on-chain leagues, matchmaking, ELO, and tournaments.

Before official competitions, however, we need to make Arena matches competitive and test Gnosis Optimism. That’s where you come in! If you participate in playtesting, you will help lay the groundwork for the game’s future. Additionally, you will be rewarded with beautiful POAPs and NFTs 😊.

Read on for details about Arena features, free gameplay, how to play, and how to get rewarded for contributing.

What is Dark Forest Arena?

An Arena is a Dark Forest lobby with a specific objective:

Capture and claim the 🎯 target planet to win the match.

Victory is found here for those skilled enough to conquer

All players have an equal chance to capture the 🎯 target because we have created 🍼 spawn planets at pre-determined points on the map.

These mechanics have already unlocked three new game modes:

Battle for the Center (4p) — Take on your friends for a dog-fight to control the center planet!

Race Across the Map (2p) — Jockey for position in a head-to-head sprint for the target!

Time Trial (1p) — Optimize your strategy for getting across the map as fast as possible!

The preset game modes you can choose

These games modes are fully customizable and the presets are just suggestions. You can create your own game mode with custom 🍼 spawn and 🎯 target planets. Each round also has a start and end time, which enables time trials and additional bragging rights.

Keep reading for specific details about the new game mechanics and configuration features.

Gnosis Optimism: A Better User Experience

Dark Forest veterans are used to the tedious task of bridging DAI to xDAI and paying high gas prices during the round. Fear not, fellow voyagers.

Dark Forest Arena is lightning fast. Due to the design of Optimistic rollups, transactions are confirmed almost instantly. In our testing, we found transaction confirmation is 2–3x faster than Gnosis mainnet. We will continue boosting speed further by working with the Gnosis team.

Dark Forest Arena is 100% free. It is deployed to the Gnosis Optimism chain, where the gas prices are currently 1 wei. Although this will likely increase, the base gas price is current 1 million times cheaper than on the Gnosis Chain 🤯. We have built a faucet that will automatically fund your wallet when you create or join an Arena, and will refresh your balance if it gets too low. DM us if you have any faucet problems.

Playtesting

Quest 1

You are invited to participate in our first-ever quest. The quest is a month long journey that is broken up into two mini-quests in the first and second half of May.

For each mini-quest, there are 3 ways to earn a POAP for contributing to the Arena game development.

1. Fill out the feedback form after playing an Arena Match.
2. Upload a map configuration and explanation of what you liked / didn’t like about it in our Discord channel #🌎-map-configs. Add an address to receive your POAP.
3. Share a piece of artwork that is related to Arena in the #🎨-arena-art channel. Our favorites might end up on the Arena homepage…
   Add an address to receive your POAP.

Rules and Rewards for Quest 1

If you do each these mini-quests each week (resulting in 2 POAPs), you will get a special NFT at the end of May.

Additionally, the dfdao team may award special NFTs at our discretion for submissions that are especially beautiful and/or helpful.

Game Nights

At the end of the day, we’re here to play Dark Forest.

That’s why DFDAO will be hosting regular community play sessions in our Discord server. Keep an eye on announcements channel and turn your notifications on!

These Game Nights correspond to our development timeline. Before each Game Night, we will release a new version of Arena based on your feedback (and some secret new features we’re building 🤫).

How to Play

1. Go to https://arena.dfdao.xyz
2. Click Create Arena
3. Press n to create a new burner wallet that will get dripped $0.05 of Optimism xDai.
4. Choose a game mode from our pre-existing configuration or create your own.
5. (optional) customize game mode to your liking.
6. Click Create World to make your own Arena
7. Click Add All to add your 🍼 Spawn and 🎯 Target planets to the map.
8. Click copy link for a shareable link you can send to a friend(s)
9. Click Enter Universe to begin playing.

Thank you 🤝

Dark Forest: Arena would not be possible without support from these 3 groups:

• The Dark Forest Core team for answering our questions, giving helpful feedback, and creating the lobby system that is the basis for Arena.
• The Gnosis Chain team for funding our development work on Arena.
• The 3,494 grant funders who contributed to our grant on Gitcoin.

Additionally, we’d like shoutout to the Moongate Guild as well for helping us with graphics and play testing. We are excited to continue to collaborate with them!

Appendix

If you are still reading this post, you are a true dfdao stan.

Here are bunch of little details about Dark Forest: Arena. Please reach out to us if you have any questions or concerns.

Gameplay

• Players create their 🍼 spawn planets (can be any level, type, or location).
• Players create their 🎯 target planet(s) (can be any level, type, or location) and set the energy percentage required to claim victory (defaulted to 50%).
• Players modify their universe with new settings: Spaceships, planet level frequency, planet settings (defense, speed, range, etc…) , and locations of spawn + target planets.
• Admin controls are left in for now, but will be removed for official competitions.
• Hashing speed increased by 44x by reducing Mimc difficulty.

Faucet Details

• We have deployed the Dark Forest Arena Faucet. Any address can receive a drip of $0.05 xDai once every 24 hours.
• Please don’t abuse this faucet, it is a community resource that enables Arena Mode to be played for free.
• If you have any trouble with the faucet, please DM us on Twitter or in our Discord

Disclaimers

• This is experimental software and certainly has bugs. We are building and testing in public to make a better experience for everyone; please inform us if anything breaks.
• We are also on an entirely new blockchain, so we expect to deal with gas problems and transaction errors as well.

Troubleshooting

• Don’t refresh the page during lobby creation or progress will be lost. Other errors should be logged on the screen, but please inform the developers in our Discord