“It is difficult to hold the world’s interest for more than half an hour at a time…” – Salvador Dali

The 7th highlighted update we’re talking about for Saito Summer is asynchronicity in the game engine and new and improved in game clocks; each satisfy an opposite need.

Asynchronous Gaming

Asynchronous Gaming is a general term to describe the ability to support secure P2P game play even if some peers are offline. For the user, the benefits are simple: you no longer need to remain online for the duration of a game, and you can now play multiple P2P games at once.

This is a feature users expect, regardless of the architecture underneath, but it represented unique challenges given Saito’s advanced game engine. Nevertheless, today’s version of the game engine now accommodates a far more general set of experiences, makes less assumptions, and removes unnecessary restriction.

Async invites (for supported games) allow your opponents to begin making moves before you even come online. Players are no longer required to keep a game open to play it, letting them use other apps like Red Square, play other games, or whatever they like between moves. We invite you to play async and share any feedback.

Decentralized Clocks

Again, if Saito were a Web 2 system, it would be easy to take for granted the nuance involved in a coherent, P2P clock system. Still, this is yet another feature gamers, especially competitive gamers, expect.

Clocks have existed in Saito Games for a long time, but this update shores them up with a new system capable of keeping each players’ clocks in sync with the others and UI improvements to display this information. The new system also patches certain exploits which allowed players misrepresent their remaining time.

Without the support of a central server, you can now play tightly-timed turn-based games similarly to in-person competition or premium sites like Chess.com. This brings the feature-set of a purely public and P2P Arcade (the only blockchain project working on this tech) up to the standard of private, centralized, closed-source services. Saito is Web 3 without compromises.

“I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.” – Magnus Carlsen

With this update very long games, taking place over the course of days or weeks, or very tightly-timed competitive experiences gain support from within the Saito Game Engine. Developers and users alike should find much utility out of these improvements.

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With that said, it’s one thing to make some edits to someone else’s code and quite another thing to build an Arcade game from scratch. This is why about a week ago, when I had more important tasks to be working on, I decided to see how quickly I could throw together a new solitaire game.

Don’t get me wrong. Solitrio is a masterpiece (and my first patient), but I’ve enjoyed Spider Solitaire for more than half my life and felt it would be a worthy addition to the Saito Arcade. If you aren’t familiar with Spider Solitaire, it is one of those games along with Klondike (a.k.a classic Solitaire), Minesweeper, and Freecell that used to be bundled on every copy of Windows 95/98/ME. You use two decks worth of cards that you need to arrange and can adjust the difficulty by playing with one, two, or four suits. It starts off easy enough, but you have to deal out additional cards as the game progresses, which may end up blocking you. When you complete a set of Ace through King in a single suit, the whole stack gets cleared off the board, freeing up space to continue re-arranging cards.

As an exercise in creating a new game, the approach was simple enough since I could basically just copy-and-paste the source code for Solitrio and change out the game logic in a couple of hours. I was honestly surprised by how straightforward the process was. If this was year one Saito, that playable demo might have been good enough for a quick launch. (Un)fortunately, our standards are rising faster than the sea levels, so I spent another day and a half of tweaking the code and CSS to get the game looking somewhat decent. Do we really need fancy animations? Yes — this Doctor wrote a prescription for flash.

Between this and Richard’s earlier experiment, it may seem like child’s play to create a new game for the Saito Arcade. My takeaway is that the threshold to making a functional game is pretty low, but that the threshold for making a good game is pretty high. Given this, if you’re totally new to game design I wouldn’t encourage jumping straight into the deep end and try to build a module from scratch. If that’s what you want to do, it’s better to give us a ping and let us help. If you’re looking for a place to start I’d really recommend anyone in the community to follow the same path I did, i.e. iterate on the current games, polish their UIs, and make them better. We are an open source project. Anyone can fork the repository, play around with the interface or mechanics of their favorite game, and submit a pull request. The only danger is you may get caught in the spider’s web and end up working, living, and dreaming of web3.

The post Introducing Spider Solitaire appeared first on Saito.

Saito is an open network that runs cryptocurrency applications in browsers without plugins, private APIs, and non-open infrastructure.

The collaboration will focus on making the two networks interoperable, so that Saito developers and users can add eGold and Elrond ESDT tokens as the currency fueling their applications and games including the popular Saito Arcade.

“Elrond’s high throughput makes it the ideal backend for blockchain-enabled applications operating at an internet-scale. Saito addresses the user-facing performance in an elegant manner, presenting an attractive option for Elrond developers looking for end-to-end scalability for their web products.” said Beniamin Mincu, Elrond Network CEO.

“There is a great match between our two networks in terms of speed, scalability, and efficiency. Perhaps more importantly, the Elrond community is extremely active and we think that kind of audience will be a strong incentive for our users to integrate eGold and other Elrond assets into their apps.” said Richard Parris, Co-founder at Saito.

About Saito

Saito is an open network layer that delivers web3 to users. Applications on Saito can run without closed plugins, private APIs and non-open infrastructure. Saito runs without an owner while funding the nodes that provide routing and user infrastructure for its own network and other public blockchains. All this is powered by an entirely new blockchain design — Saito consensus.

The post Empowering Builders: Web Games and Apps Powered by eGold and Elrond Tokens on the Saito P2P Decentralized Network appeared first on Saito.