18 tips to build your blockchain game in days, not months
Learn how to quickly implement blockchain elements with FSTUDIO
There are a lot of reasons to add blockchain elements into your game. The more pressing issue is, how do you do it without spending months of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars on development? If you’re going to spend that kind of time and money on your game, it should probably go into finding a highly marketable game concept and mechanic.
That’s why our team at Fractal built FSTUDIO — to help game developers like you reap the benefits of the blockchain without any of the complexity. Here are 18 things you can do on the blockchain today with FSTUDIO.
1. Use REST APIs to build on the blockchain
If you’ve already done your research, you know that to build on the blockchain you need to learn a new set of concepts and programming languages — Solidity for Ethereum and Polygon and Rust for Solana.
It’s definitely possible, but not at all necessary. The better approach is to use what you know, like REST APIs and SDKs for Unity, Unreal, and React.
In fact, if you aren’t sure which chain you want to go with — and therefore, aren’t sure which language you need to learn — you can still get started on the blockchain with our REST APIs. Then just choose a blockchain (or multiple) to integrate later.
2. Authenticate users in any game engine on any platform
Just add this code snippet to your game to start the authentication process. If you’re a brand new game without an existing account system, this will save you a huge chunk of time, since you won’t need to build a UI with usernames, passwords, and wallet connector buttons. Think of it like Google Sign In for websites — just instead, it’s Fractal.
There are similar code snippets out there, but most require a browser extension to activate the players’ account or wallet — which isn’t an ideal experience for desktop and mobile games. It’s possible to bypass the browser extension on your own, but you’d need to jump through a lot of hoops or generate a wallet for each game (which defeats the purpose of cross-game wallets).
Fractal, on the other hand, lets you easily authenticate users across platforms, including web, desktop, and mobile.
3. Onboard new players with social sign in
Speaking of wallet browser extensions, it’s not even a great user experience for web games, much less desktop and mobile. You’ll likely see a lot of players drop off if you ask them to go download a browser extension, create a seed phrase, and spend time setting up their wallet.
Instead, you can prompt them to create a Fractal wallet through Google. Just a single tap and they’re all set up and signed in.
This kind of social sign in flow is very familiar to gamers, which makes it a critical tool in onboarding as many as possible to your blockchain-based games.
4. Read your users’ wallets and account states
To create the best game experiences, you want to be able to easily check which NFTs and how much in-game currency users have in their account. There are tons of use cases for this:
- See whether a user owns a special Fractal sword and then change the gun in the game
- See that a user owns a special item in one game which unlocks a special level for them in a second game.
- See whether a user has enough crypto to make an in-game purchase and then prompt them to purchase
This REST API lets you do just that.
5. Generate transactions for users to sign
Signing on-chain transactions without an API is a mess. You need to manage a connection with an RPC node, integrate with wallet providers, construct transactions, and ensure they’re signed, sent and validated properly on the blockchain.
Some transaction instructions are simple like transfer SOL from Wallet A to Wallet B, but others, like minting an NFT or anything custom, are much more complicated — since they require multiple signers and multiple accounts.
If you’re a power user who wants to generate custom transactions for users to sign, this REST API lets you do that. Having a single integration to manage authentication, read a user’s wallet state, sign transactions, mint NFTs, and more means fewer points of failure and easier setup and maintenance.
In the future, we’ll see transaction structures become increasingly complex, as more contracts are created on the blockchain. Then, an API that handles it all will become critical to make sure studios can move fast.
6. Forget about securing funds, wallets, and contracts
Taking care of users’ funds, wallets, your in-game economy, and minting is high stakes — especially when the ins and outs of blockchain technology are still new to you.
You need to be extremely careful storing users’ private keys on your own server, since some of their wallets may contain a lot of money. If something goes wrong, or someone attacks your server, the responsibility is 100% yours.
The same goes for blockchain contracts. If, for example, you’re issuing 1000 tokens and someone finds a mistake in your contract, they may hack your code and mint 10,000,000 — completely ruining the price of your circulating supply. You’ll need to start your economy from scratch and risk upsetting players.
That’s a lot of responsibility — not to mention time and money to make sure your infrastructure is secure.
To help you sleep a bit easier at night, Fractal takes on the responsibility of securing it all. You can trust that our code is safe and thoroughly vetted so there’s no chance of attack.
7. Automatically stay up to date with the latest standards
Each blockchain has different standards and best practices — and they’re constantly evolving. In fact, some chains have mutable contracts, meaning anytime a contract owner makes a breaking change, you’re responsible for keeping your integration up to date. Beyond that, the chains can choose to change their NFT metadata standards, which you’d need to keep up with for anything NFT-related. That’s tedious work better spent building a fun game.
If you’re using our API, we’re making those updates for you. That way, you have a stable and predictable foundation to build your game, while we deal with the underlying complexity and moving pieces.
8. Let your users buy in-game assets with fiat or crypto
This one is more for your players — but by making your players’ lives easier, you’re making your life easier too. Usually, to convert fiat currency into crypto, players would need to create a Binance or Coinbase account, send themselves money, wait a few days, swap it to SOL, then transfer it to their Fractal wallet so they can purchase an NFT.
If your players have a Fractal Account, all they need to do is choose the conversion they want to make on a simple UI (like convert US dollars into SOL) and type in their credit card number. That’s it. The functionality is completely built in for you.
9. Create NFT collections and items in a few clicks
No-code NFTs — yes they exist. You can make NFT collections super easily on our platform interface or through this API.
Just tap ‘Create Item’ then fill out the item name, description, price, and properties. Or, to create items in bulk, you can upload them with a CSV doc or use the API. This way, you can create thousands if not millions of NFTs in one go and automatically add them to the Fractal Marketplace.
If you have an existing NFT collection on the blockchain, you can still import them via our UI, manage them there, and list them on our marketplace, too.
Trying to do all this without this API could take you days. You’d need to create your own contract and deploy it, which requires preparing all the images in advance, uploading them to an IPFS provider, and making sure they’re in the correct order. It’s a long process that requires a thorough understanding of Solidity or Rust to carry out. And you have games to focus on.
10. Modify NFTs
Needing to modify an NFT happens more often than you’d think. Let’s say you:
- made a mistake and want to rename the NFT you misspelled
- want to change the price or metadata (like XP, game progress, item durability)
- want to update the character image or stats as players progress through the game
But (surprise) modifying NFT after it’s been minted and distributed on a few marketplaces is a hassle. You’d need to figure out where you’re storing the NFT (probably Arweave), reupload the data, and change the metadata on the blockchain to reference the new URL. Then once you do make that change, it might not even be reflected on the marketplaces for some time.
If you mint NFTs via our API, however, you can modify any metadata at any time, and our backend will make sure it updates on our marketplace immediately.
11. Mint NFTs “on demand” when users are ready to buy
It takes a lot of upfront budget to finance a minting event — for the art, the blockchain fees, and the development — only to gamble on whether or not you’d sell out.
The better monetization strategy is to only mint an NFT when someone actually wants to buy it. That way, you can actually make a profit, since you can charge more than the fee. This API lets you do that.
There are tons of use cases for this “mint on demand” feature:
- Mint badges and achievements based on in-game actions, and integrate the NFT more seamlessly into the core game loop
- Add a user’s name to an NFT — which isn’t something you could do ahead of time, since you wouldn’t know who’d purchase it. (We did this, and our players hugely appreciated that their name is now printed on the blockchain forever)
- Mint game characters — sync NFT metadata with off-chain data as the player progresses or implement staking using meaningful idle game mechanics. (The character is not frequently played, player sends him to the “training ground” or “expedition”)
- Mint skins, items, weapons or pets — mint directly from the game when needed, dynamically expanding collection size. No need to upload static assets and metadata in advance instead generate them on-the-fly.
12. Create an in-app purchase store that sells NFTs
To build a primary store that sells NFTs, you’d need to process the payments, manage what’s selling and what isn’t, put it on a website so people can buy it, and then take care of all the behind the scenes blockchain work (which as we’ve established previously is months of work).
Think of Fractal like Shopify — you can use our API to do all this for you. Basically, the API packages the backend of store management so you can easily create items and display them on a web or in-game store.
Plus, if a player goes to your store and buys an NFT, and they’re logged into their Fractal Account, the API will automatically generate a buy/mint transaction for that item and then initiate the signing process.
13. Embed a secondary marketplace in your game
Just like you can build a primary store in your game, you can also embed the Fractal Marketplace to function as a secondary store, too. So players can sell the crops they harvested, for example.
Instead of building a secondary store from scratch (which on top of all the usual store management stuff, you’d also need to keep track of all the ownership changes and maintain a cache), our APIs do it for you. You just build the UI and ask our API to tell you which items are currently listed, and we’ll give them back to you so you can present the items to your players however you want.
In fact, you can even add a simple button to your game UX enabling players to list new items. Our API generates the listing transaction and automatically adds it to the Fractal Marketplace.
14. Connect to Ethereum, Polygon, AND Solana
Choosing a blockchain before you start building limits what you can do with your game. That’s why we made Fractal chain agnostic, so you don’t need to even have a chain to use most of our APIs (until you want to mint an item, of course).
This way, you can set everything else up while you’re deciding which chain — or chains — you want to support. If you chose Polygon first but want to add Solana later, you still have the choice to do that.
If you want to mint on a chain we don’t support, reach out to us and we’ll see how we can help.
15. Distribute your game on a launcher, whether you’re using blockchain or not
It’s true there are quite a few launchers that support blockchain games today, but not many have built in account management. That means, users with a Fractal Account don’t need to take any extra steps to access their wallet to play your game — the moment they install the launcher, they’re ready to go.
To get your game on Fractal Launcher, all you need to do is upload a .zip file of your game build to our platform. It just takes a few minutes and once you’re done, your game is ready to play.
16. Run play tests on our launcher
If your game is in closed alpha or beta, and you’re looking to run play tests, you can choose to distribute access codes to select players through Fractal. This gives them full access to play your game on Fractal Desktop. Just tap ‘Generate Access Codes’ and deliver them to your players.
17. Update your desktop game with incremental patches
Like #8, this is more about easily providing your players with a great experience. Instead of forcing them to download your game all over again each time you push an update, you can let them simply download the updates — minimizing download times from hours to minutes.
This is critical, especially when you’re running events — as the event might be over by the time the game finishes downloading.
Fractal Desktop automatically generates the incremental patches for the players, so you don’t need to worry about your game size impacting the player experience.
18. Run a leaderboard tournament
Our Tournament API is open to the public, whether you run the tournament on Fractal or not. If you don’t run it on Fractal, you can use the API to build a tournament infrastructure in your game.
If you do run it with Fractal, you’ll need to get approval from our team first. The API enables you to post scores to the Fractal leaderboard and then fetch the leaderboard scores back in your game. You’ll be featured on the Fractal site and get access to the Fractal community. Once the tournament goes live, you’ll have a steady stream of players creating accounts in your game, trying it out, and providing feedback.
Stay tuned for more
This list is just the start. We plan to keep adding more use cases and functionalities into FSTUDIO that make it easy for you to integrate blockchain elements into your game, without asking you to learn about the blockchain or teach your players. Stay tuned.
