CoinDesk Report:
Author: WPeaster, Translation: MetaCat
Is this a glimpse into the future of gaming on Solana?
A beginner’s guide to Solana’s full-chain gaming engine?
Building games becomes easier with a full-chain gaming engine, free from external dependencies beyond the underlying blockchain.
For me, this is one of the most exciting developments in the crypto space today, which is why encountering MagicBlock Engine recently piqued my curiosity. MagicBlock is a game engine pioneering an Ephemeral Rollups architecture designed to support flexible and high-performance full-chain gaming on Solana. I believe MagicBlock offers an intriguing look into the future of Solana’s gaming landscape, so let’s dive into the basics.
What is MagicBlock?
MagicBlock is a gaming framework built on Solana aimed at fostering the development of full-chain games and applications. Recently showcased at the a16zcrypto Demo Day, the MagicBlock Engine demonstrated a fully deployed real-time, full-chain game on Solana, enabling two clients to play simultaneously without any latency thanks to its ability to delegate accounts to fast Solana validators.
What are Ephemeral Rollups?
MagicBlock extends Solana’s capabilities by introducing Ephemeral Rollups (ER), designed to efficiently facilitate state transitions without fragmenting game states. Operating as a specialized runtime on Solana’s Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), ER can be customized to support features like gas-free transactions, transaction scheduling, and faster block times. The process starts with developers delegating specific accounts from existing Solana smart contracts to the MagicBlock Engine. This delegation temporarily moves the state to the secondary layer, ER, which can process transactions at higher throughput. During this phase, the delegated account remains locked but readable on Solana, allowing other transactions (such as token minting) to access and interact with the locked state in real-time. Crucially, even as the game state temporarily shifts to ER, assets interacting with it, like tokens and NFTs, remain on Solana’s base layer. This design ensures all underlying programs and assets continue to reside directly on the mainnet, preserving their composability with the broader Solana application ecosystem. Following submission by validators, state transitions processed by ER undergo verification and settlement on the mainnet. After ER concludes, control of the delegated account returns to the original program without any state fragmentation.
Other Key Features of MagicBlock
BOLT: Utilizing an Entity Component System (ECS) pattern to simplify on-chain game development. It enables developers to swiftly create modular, reusable, and scalable game components and logic.
SOAR: Solana On-chain Achievements and Rankings. This reputation system allows developers to easily define achievements based on on-chain activities, track and display user rankings, and deploy rewards.
Session Keys: MagicBlock recently added support for session keys in the Solana Unity SDK, making it easier for game developers to securely eliminate repeated wallet pop-ups during frequent in-game interactions.
Why Choose MagicBlock?
In the Ethereum gaming sector, promising on-chain game engines like Lattice’s MUD, Curio’s Keystone, and Cartridge’s Dojo exist. However, in this early landscape, a common design pattern involves deploying games on their own rollups, which may introduce various composability and fragmentation challenges that are still being resolved. MagicBlock’s approach circumvents these fragmentation issues by keeping assets on the Solana mainnet, preserving the potential for atomic composability, while still achieving scalability through ER. This enables high throughput, customizable runtimes, and seamless interaction between games and applications without the need for interoperability solutions.
What’s Next for MagicBlock?
1. MagicBlock is emerging as a newcomer. Which on-chain games will be the first to officially use this engine?
2. The recent MagicBlock demo achieved a 50-millisecond latency, comparable to modern gaming standards. Can we expect further optimizations to lower this latency for better real-time gaming experiences?
3. Earlier this year, Parallel announced that its AI game Colony will be based on Solana. Could the Parallel team adopt the MagicBlock Engine to meet its infrastructure needs?
4. With MagicBlock maintaining assets on the Solana mainnet, what use cases will this feature enable?
5. On-chain games greatly benefit from User-Generated Content (UGC) and User-Generated Logic (UGL). Will the SOAR system be used to incentivize such creations?
6. MagicBlock isn’t limited to game development. What non-gaming applications might adopt this framework in the future?
Closing Thoughts
While MagicBlock is still in its early stages, its potential to catalyze the full-chain gaming scene on Solana seems significant. Its Ephemeral Rollups architecture helps circumvent key challenges faced by other game engines, while ensuring high performance.
