When a full-chain game (dare we say an autonomous world?) matures, core developers transition from building contracts and client code to creating tools for third-party developers to build plugins and robots. This is a sign that the game mechanics are solidifying, spontaneous behavior has emerged, and now we can truly start enjoying the fun.
Words3, a crazy full-chain version of Scrabble (if Scrabble was built by a futures trader with a special love for VRGDA), has entered the robot toolkit stage.
(Translator's note: VRGDA, Variable Rate Gradual Dutch Auctions. Scrabble is a classic word game where the goal is to score points by forming words. Each player has a set of randomly chosen letter tiles, with the number of letters fixed at the start of the game. Players must place their tiles on the game board grid to form a valid word.)
This game was developed using MUD v1 in November of last year and has since been ported to MUD v2 and undergone various quality improvements in preparation for last week's mainnet release. In a conversation with @0xsmallbrain on a Wednesday, we discussed the next steps in the game's development. Recently, the game held a 4-day competition on Base, with over 120 wallets participating and a prize pool of approximately $22,000, with plans for more competitions in the future.
Words3 board at the end of a recent competition
For those who haven't had a chance to play Words3, here's a brief overview of the rules: You connect your wallet to the client, immediately enter an infinite board, and receive all 26 letters of the alphabet, with the price of each letter determined by demand. The price of letters increases (or decreases) based on an exponential function corresponding to the expected future price, meaning that at any given time, the price of letters may be higher or lower. Like Scrabble, you place letters on squares to form words; unlike Scrabble, anyone can play a word at any time (of course, you're not randomly drawing letters, but purchasing them directly). You earn points for your words, and there are additional 2-5x letter multipliers on specific squares. Whether you can receive a share of the prize pool at the end of the competition depends on the points you earn and the adjusted total profit potential of your words.
In the recent competition, we saw some primitive robots and plugins starting to emerge. @_yonada built a Words3 statistics client that displays the most frequently played letters, the best words played, the distribution of scores between players, and the MUD table configured by Small Brain. @saucepoint (ranking high on the Words3 leaderboard) built a score multiplier calculator using a game dictionary and custom Python scripts, which provided him with the best word suggestions. At one point, saucepoint reflected, "If I knew how to read the MUD contract, I might be able to build the perfect sequence. I could even use the auto-submit feature to manipulate the game." This is where Small Brain's upcoming robot toolkit may come in handy.
Script created by saucepoint for calculating profits in Words3 strategy
To understand the power of the robot toolkit, we first need to understand how Words3 contracts work and how they interact with the Words3 client. The logic of playing words on the Words3 board is handled by the PlaySystem. When you call the "play" function from the client, various inputs are submitted: the letters you play, a client-side Merkle proof (used to check if the word you played is in the English dictionary), the coordinates of the word's start and end, the direction in which you play the letters (left to right), and boundaries (a struct) that check the other letters above and below the word you played to see if they can form other words around it. The boundaries also have a client-side Merkle proof requirement, as they also need to check for valid words.
To call the game's play function, the client must generate a Merkle proof (used to validate the validity of the move on-chain)
For those attempting to create robots or custom clients for Words3, this client-side complexity can be daunting. Because you need to determine the words you want to play and create word proofs and boundary objects for each word from the client itself, making moves is very labor-intensive. To alleviate this complexity, the robot toolkit will allow users to simply provide their words, letter coordinates, and direction, and it will fill in the Merkle proof and boundaries for you. Since MUD automatically synchronizes the state from the client, players can deploy more complex logic using the robot toolkit without needing to understand the lower-level details of MUD (such as MUD configuration). In future rounds, we may see saucepoint (who admits to being a MUD novice) using Small Brain's robot toolkit to launch an auto-submit robot. We may see robots that evaluate the board and harvest high-scoring words by playing the letter "S" on words that can be changed to plural, while spending very little. Or we may see entirely new, more specialized clients emerging.
Once implemented, the robot toolkit will essentially be the minimum package for MUD with the Words3 contract inserted. It will show you how to set up a basic MUD project and handle all the features of the Words3 smart contract. The robot toolkit is essentially a way to eliminate the need to understand how MUD or Words3 handles logic between the client and smart contract. It is a layer on top of MUD that transforms state updates into a format that developers can read more easily.
In a bustling world of Words3 clients (one of Small Brain's dreams is to see someone passionate about the game build a Bloomberg terminal for Words3), the client itself will be able to monetize. This is a possible endgame for the robot toolkit: it becomes not only a way to optimize your own winning strategy but also a way to put your custom client into the hands of many users willing to pay for upgrades (some of whom may choose to further optimize the client to meet their own needs).
In addition to the robot toolkit, Small Brain is also considering other improvements to the gameplay of Words3. This round is the first time players can use score multipliers. Upon reflection, Small Brain believes that distributing multipliers widely across the board may have been a mistake; players were too easily able to accumulate a large number of score multipliers and quickly climb the leaderboard (so perhaps saucepoint needs to find a new winning strategy without multipliers). The pricing of letters using the VRGDA mechanism may also need adjustment: the constant Small Brain used for the target price of letters may be too small, resulting in a sharp increase in letter prices the next day. Small Brain is also considering extending the duration of rounds or having multiple rounds, where each game affects the next game in unexpected ways.
However, the robot toolkit remains a focus for Small Brain. For us, it is an exciting new possibility that MUD can achieve and a new digital physical layer that can be unleashed. In addition to providing software to users for easy deployment of complex on-chain applications, MUD can also provide a track for the robot toolkit, generating new and unexpected forms of on-chain gameplay. For every MUD application, thousands of clients thrive.
This article was originally written by @v3rafy
Original article link: https://world.mirror.xyz/gXc4Y6S-I2XsBYNbDRsTF3OGGHcP2IHCt4mk_qTnYFk
Translated to the Chinese community by @hicaptainz