The Internet Computer GameKit

What and what?!

So from the title you probably have 2 questions. What is the Internet Computer and what is a GameKit?

The Internet Computer

The Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) is a decentralised world computer blockchain that runs high performance smart contracts, is very secure, cost-effective and environmentally friendly.

Why should you care about decentralisation though? Well are you happy dancing to the whims of Google, Microsoft. Amazon, Apple, and Facebook(Meta). Didn’t think so. Decentralisation offers a compelling alternative to these centralised cloud providers but most blockchain solutions struggle to offer the power, memory and storage provided by these centralised solutions.

ICP is unique in offering a full-stack, powerful, decentralised solution that, as a developer, feels remarkably complete and easy to use. Their reverse gas model means the experience is free for the end-user, simplifying the onboarding massively. Smart contracts run on canisters, if you are familiar with containers you will feel right at home. Canisters can handle your back-end via smart contracts and even serve your front-end via static web assets. Fantastic!

Your main language choices for the smart contracts are Motoko and Rust (also TypeScript and Python are in beta). I would recommend trying out Motoko though, it’s easy to pick up, has a lovely, clean syntax and is well supported by the tooling. Some of the new Chain Fusion stuff is Rust only, hopefully this is just due to it being early days for Chain Fusion. What is Chain Fusion? Well exciting that’s what it is. It enables ICP to sign and submit transactions to other blockchains securely, holding the private key in a secure, decentralised manner. Clever stuff!

The IC GameKit

The IC GameKit is my attempt to write a decentralised version of the AWS GameKit. When you create a game, even a single player game, you often want to support things like cloud game saves, achievements, player profiles etc. These would normally require some centralised cloud service like AWS or Unity Gaming Services, not ideal… Thanks to the support of an ICP Grant, I’ve put together a compelling alternative. The IC GameKit comes with an example clicker game that shows how you can use it to award player achievements, rewards etc based on how clicky you are ;-) . So what are the advantages of using this IC GameKit?

• You have full control - Deploy your own canisters, it’s easy!

• Cheap! It’s free and cheap to maintain

• Game engine agnostic (not tied to Unity)

• Good intro to smart contracts and Motoko

• Has both a Unity and React game example

• Opens the door to more Web3 functionality

So what are you waiting for? Dive in and help the internet break free from big three!

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