ChainSafe Gaming SDK Spotlight: Tranquility City

Authored by Colin Adams

Emerging NFT use cases and play-to-earn (P2E) models are driving the rapid growth of blockchain gaming. We see evidence of this every day in our Discord, where devs gather to share ideas and ask questions about the ChainSafe Gaming SDK, web3.unity.

In response, we've created a gaming blog series to showcase a few of the most exciting projects using our tools.

A Walking Tour of Tranquility City

Can you give us a short introduction to your game?

Tranquility City is a social game on the Harmony blockchain with a play-to-earn (P2E) component. Players can own real estate, decorate their places, and earn LUMEN governance tokens by staking plants in their apartments.

How are you using the ChainSafe Gaming SDK in Tranquility City?

We're using the ChainSafe Gaming SDK, web3.unity, to integrate the web3 login. This allows players to log in without asking for their data while keeping personal information secure.

Additionally, we use the web3.unity library to integrate NFTs. This enables people to mint and view their NFTs in-game (calling functions to see what NFTs people have in their wallets). We will also use it to integrate other dApps and call functions from other projects' contracts.

Do you have any metrics of success or milestones you've hit for the game so far?

We've recently hit 500 unique registered users in our game (500 unique addresses registered in the database). We have also released our governance token, LUMEN, and managed to push consistent updates to the game.

What blockchain features are you hoping to build for Tranquility City or your other games?

We will have NFT integration in-game. This will allow players to teleport to their apartment, walk around, and add decorations. These actions will all be done through NFTs. The main goal is to allow players to use their real estate as their personal quarters in-game.

Are there any challenges you're currently facing with implementing blockchain features for your game?

Building a game in the browser using WebGL (Unity) is quite tricky sometimes. Many workarounds are needed for normal game features, such as fetching data from another server. The ChainSafe SDK does not limit us since we can call any function we want from any contract. In this regard, the game works as intended.

Are there any calls to action for your community?

Anyone interested can join our Discord or follow us on Twitter. We post consistent updates and have events for the community.

We will also mint character NFTs soon so that players can use them as in-game avatars. Also, if people want to participate in the P2E mechanics of Tranquility City, they will need to acquire some real estate. Get some on the marketplace if you want to earn LUMEN!

Anything else about your company or game that you'd like us to share?

We're very passionate about what we are doing, and we're building a serious project with actual gameplay and utility. We've dabbled in DeFi, have game development experience, and want to deliver something extraordinary to the community.

What are some blockers to the adoption of web3 gaming, and how do we overcome them?

Most blockchain games are built in the browser, making game development extremely difficult and limited in scope since we can't cram a full game in a browser build.

Windows Builds are something we should aim for but having non-custodial wallet interactions on Windows (like Metamask) is difficult to pull off. The method Sandbox chose seems lazy and not fully integrated.

Namely, clicking on the Sandbox marketplace reveals that the link is a hyperlink that takes you to the marketplace in your browser, where then your Metamask can connect.

What are some keys to success for aspiring web3 gaming teams?

1. Community building. A community or lack thereof will make or break a game.

2. Tokenomics and P2E features. A game with an infinitely mintable token is NOT desired. On top of that, a game without any P2E features will just get ignored since there are much better Web2 projects out there.

3. Finding a good team. By that, I mean good community moderators, internal artists, etc. It can be hard to find trustworthy people in a space where most are pseudonymous.

What are some other interesting developments in the web3 gaming space that you're paying attention to?

NFTs are by far the most interesting component of web3 gaming. What we have seen so far is just technology in its infancy—NFTs can be so much more than profile pictures.

They can be real estate in a metaverse like we're building right now in Tranquility City. They can be a legendary sword drop from the final boss in a MMORPG that is TRULY unique, and not everyone can get it like you would be able to in World of Warcraft.

How was your experience building with the ChainSafe Gaming SDK?

It was a very pleasant experience, and we've gotten A LOT of support from the ChainSafe community. The docs were very clean and informative, so that helped tremendously.

What was the most challenging part of creating a blockchain game, and how did the ChainSafe Gaming SDK help?

Interacting with the blockchain isn't a "plug and play" thing yet. Therefore, having something like the ChainSafe Gaming SDK to facilitate this connection between our Unity WebGL build and the EVM-based Harmony blockchain saved us much energy and time.

Building our own web3 solution to communicate with the blockchain would have taken us quite a bit of time and effort that would be better spent somewhere else in the development process. ChainSafe came in clutch.

How did you find the technical support when developing your game?

We found the support to be very fast and thorough. Sometimes the backend of the SDK would go down, and we always asked the devs what was going on, and they responded fast any time there was some maintenance. That allowed us to reassure the community that everything was fine and it was just routine maintenance.

Thank you to the Tranquility City team for taking the time to answer these questions.

The team also was generous enough to join us for a recent Blockchain Gaming Devs community call. For a demo of their gameplay and more in-depth thoughts on web3 gaming:

The information provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an endorsement of any companies, products or tokens discussed and should not be interpreted as investment, financial, or trading advice.

About ChainSafe

ChainSafe is a leading blockchain research and development firm specializing in infrastructure solutions for the decentralized web. Alongside client implementations for Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin, and Mina, we're building a portfolio of web3 products - Files, Storage, the Gaming SDK, and ChainBridge. As part of our mission to build innovative products for users and better tooling for developers, ChainSafe embodies an open source and community-oriented ethos. To learn more, click here.

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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Tim Ho and Alex Voto for their help putting this article together.