Watch me 'waste' my whole day as I do physical therapy, blog, and work. My game is almost to the point of being a technically working project but I haven't coded in two months. To be fair sitting in this chair programming really puts strain on my injury, but I suppose that doesn't make the situation any less annoying. Plus I have a cold right now so that's also super fun.

Pentaskill

The last time I worked on the project, I had just changed a big part of the logistics after hitting a brick wall of how things were supposed to operate on a macro scale. Essentially, it makes more sense for players to specify their opponent in advance. Instead of having lobbies and empty player slots it made a lot more sense to ping Steem if you're looking for a game and allow anyone else to click that ping; starting a game between both players.

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This seemingly small change simplifies a lot of the problems I was having with data structures and input/output to the blockchain.

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The game works... sort of.

• I took some shortcuts and currently I can test the game against 1 other player (myself), but if multiple people try to play at the same time there are bugs.
• My frontend sends money from the loser to the winner automatically and instantly. Even makes a Cha-ching sound... kinda cool I guess. After all, the only thing unique about this project is that it's unregulated peer-to-peer gambling. Money transfer with no middle-man is the crux.
• My frontend is garbage but the project is more about the backend and getting other devs to help build a network of possible frontend looks. Skins will be bought and sold on the blockchain and can even be made artificially scarce by the creator via burning the total supply (starts at infinite).
• In my opinion the most interesting development of the game was how easy it was to SHA256 hash the actions performed in game so they are safe to post to the blockchain. After that reverse engineering the hash back into the action is easy when your opponent posts it to the chain after the fact.
  • This has a lot of interesting implications. I can leverage the coding I've done here to create a lottery on the side.
  • I may have inadvertently created one of Steem's first (extremely primitive) privacy technologies (if you don't count the memo key that no one uses yet).

Conclusion

True peer-to-peer gambling will bring a lot of value to any blockchain that incorporates it. This is especially true on Steem, because there are very few blockchains out there that can offer these kinds of services without charging transaction fees.

This is one of the reasons I'm so bullish on Steem. Currently, we view Resource Credits as these pointless tokens worth nothing, but when the blocks actually start getting filled to the brim with custom JSON operations we'll be singing a different tune.

Yeah, I'm trying to jump back into it, but it's like a have a mental block.