Exploring the Future of AI Enabled Gaming with ChainCraft

GM, GM. Welcome to what is going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell, the Builder Series edition today. If you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between a platform to showcase their products. Today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Ryan and Eric, the co-founders of ChainCraft. ChainCraft is an innovative platform that revolutionizes game development by integrating blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. If you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Ryan and Eric show us all the fantastic things that make up ChainCraft, as well as some awesome insights into AI gaming and where AI gaming is going to head towards. With that, let's get going, but first, a word from our sponsor.

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GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Ryan and Eric. Ecstatic to have you both on, guys.

Thank you.

Hey, GM.

Yeah, yeah. We're going to be hitting a very fascinating topic today, right on the leading edge of gaming, AI, and blockchain. All the awesomeness in one. But I guess before we begin and get into those details, did you both want to give a brief introduction about yourselves?

Sure, I'll let Eric go ahead.

Yeah, hi everyone. I'm Eric. I'm the technical founder for ChainCraft. I've been in software my entire life now. I don't want to say how many years and date myself, but for a long time. I've been really focused on immersive experiences and peripheral technology around gaming. I'm not a professional game developer; I'm a hobbyist game developer. I think it's one of the things that kind of drew me to ChainCraft, as a gap filler, filling the gaps. Like, I know how to do certain things, but I'm not great at doing other things. How can I fill some gaps and be able to create a game that I couldn't create without trying to put together a team and funding and everything else? So, excited to be here, and yeah.

Yeah, and I'm Ryan, aka Bucho. I have a background in film, tech, and actually the non-profit space and education, kind of all wrapped into one. I've always been a gamer my whole life. I've been fascinated, modded things here and there. But I'm not a developer myself; I've just kind of skimmed the surface of tech when it comes to things like that. But, yeah, I'm excited to be here today. Thanks for having us. I'm excited to kind of chat more about what we're putting together.

My pleasure, and thank you for both of you taking the time out of your days to do so. I guess you guys seem to be kind of, sort of opposites, but you kind of attracted towards each other. I'm just curious, how did you guys end up co-founding ChainCraft together?

Actually, it was, I worked a lot with our third partner, Matt, who's not here. Matt and I worked for a startup together, and then after we left that startup, we did some contract work together. And actually, one of the contracts we were working on was with a blockchain company, and Ryan knew a lot more about blockchain than Matt or I. So we brought Ryan in to kind of do some consulting work. Ryan and Matt have known each other for a while. So, you know, after that contract was over, Matt approached me and said, "Hey, you know, Ryan thinks that there's really a good opportunity to do something cool in the blockchain space. Is that something you're interested in?" I said, "Oh, yeah, absolutely." So I didn't know Ryan that well when we started the company. I mean, I'd worked with him a little bit. But it's been an awesome experience. Ryan is amazing. His knowledge of blockchain and what really works with the community and doesn't work with the community, and his enthusiasm and inspiration, so it's been a really, really good fit for us.

Yeah, thanks Eric. Yeah, we started this probably over a year since the first few meetings and brainstorms. Eric really brings to the table just his knowledge of AI and just where it's at, what we can do with it. So he's like the AI guru on top of everything he's already really good at. And Matt, yeah, Matt was the one who kind of put us together, and it feels like a really good combination of skill sets. Matt's been in the game industry, he's at Austin, and he just knows the game industry and business so well. And, you know, we just started chatting with this idea of, like, AI is coming around. It would be so wonderful if you could build your own games. What would that look like? But could we enhance tools for developers? And it kind of started there of like, all these people are getting laid off, big businesses and game companies are not as risky with the things that they're building. And we thought this was a good time to maybe try to build something that the game dev community could really get into and maybe benefit from at the same time.

Yeah, you guys have built an interesting, or are building an interesting platform combining traditional game development with some of the more bleeding-edge tech now. We're seeing a lot of people doing vibe coding. It seems that this is trickling over to other development verticals as well, gaming being one. I'm sure you guys have entered into it. And we've seen a lot of big-name folks, even people like Elon Musk, saying oh, he thinks that AAA games will eventually be built by AIs, whether it's his Grok model or some other model. Where do you guys kind of see that at this current time? Do you think models are powerful enough to basically supersede traditional game studios building AAA games or not quite yet?

I don't think so. I think we're still a little ways away from that, you know. I think people who talk about AI replacing software developers have never tried to develop software using AI. I use it every day, and some days it works real well and some days it doesn't work real well. But our foundational premise is that the models aren't good enough yet to just go ahead and create everything there is to go do with a game. But part of the problem is people look at AI as the solution to everything, right? So everything has to be done with the LLM, and it's just not true, you know? And so where ChainCraft started, and we've evolved a little bit, but where ChainCraft really started was: Okay, can we have a conversation with AI about a game and get AI to come up with a domain-specific model which represents game and gameplay? And if we can do that, then we can use traditional code generation techniques to take that domain-specific model and generate traditional code. And so that's kind of where ChainCraft started. We're kind of in this intermediate phase right now where we actually have AI-hosted games. So we're generating code using AI, but the AI is kind of gap-filling a little bit. But we very much believe we're going to be moving towards sort of a continuum of what we call AI-driven games. So those are games that are more narrative, or maybe there's a judgment aspect or something like that, all the way down to fully deterministic games where you don't really need an AI to run them. But yeah, to answer your question, I think vibe coding is interesting, but vibe coding really is: okay, you have a prompt, and it generates some stuff, and then you go into something like Cursor, and then you're sitting there iterating in Cursor trying to make it work, right? And what we really want to do is we don't want you to be iterating trying to make it work. What we want is we want you to have a conversation with our agents about the game you want to create. And when you decide on the game you want to create, we want to create that game. We don't want you to have to spend any time fixing syntax, fixing bugs, doing all those things. I have run the continuum of like, okay, I'm driving and I'm just asking AI questions, down to there have been times where I've said, "Okay AI, I don't know anything about this area, just go ahead and run with it," right? Or it's tedious. And what I find is that a lot of times AI will get into this rabbit hole where things just start breaking and aren't working, and it's adding extra code, and it's adding complexity. And I would just shudder to look at what people are vibe coding these days if we actually look at the code and how brittle and fragile it is. So we don't want to do that. Like I said, we want to make it: let's have a conversation about the game you want to create, let's design it, let's figure out the assets from the blockchain, let's figure out what the gameplay logic should be and everything else. And then when we're ready and you push a button, our expectation is you don't ever have to look at a line of code. That's ambitious, but we think that is what an AI-powered game experience should be.

Yeah, and just to add to that, I feel like we've since the beginning sort of taken this like—and this may be frowned upon in the blockchain space—but kind of the tortoise-and-the-hare approach, where you see a lot of like really crazy-looking, complex games that people have quote-unquote vibe-coded. And yeah, they have, but it's like, you look behind the scenes, I'm sure there's a lot of duct tape holding stuff together, or there's things that you're not seeing that are not working. And we're taking this like: let's build the foundation, let's build like layer-by-layer, brick-by-brick, to grow it. But also, we're going to get to a point where the community comes in and they're the ones that are going to help us sort of like put those bricks together. Like for instance, we're starting with the text-based game right now. That's not overly exciting on the outside, but I've had a lot of fun with constraints of just text-based games, what you can do with that. And then it gets me more excited to the future of what it can build into, like adding these layers of complexity, and we feel like it'll just build all the stronger for that. And so that's the route we've been taking, and we feel like it'll just be stronger long term.

Yeah, and that's interesting to me that everybody jumps immediately to wanting to use AI to create first-person shooters, you know? Like really complex games and gameplay. But if you think about it, building a text-based game, you're going to have to address most of the challenges that you have in gameplay, you know, in terms of like, or in game development, like: what's the gameplay going to be like, and what are my states, and how do I interact with players and everything? And really, like when you come down to building, building off of that to, so text-based games and then like maybe card battlers, and then maybe more complex digital board games, and then eventually jumping into 2D games and 3D games and everything. So it's kind of an evolution. But I would say 80% of the foundational pieces you need are present in the simplest version, which is text-based games. So if we can nail that, and one of the things that's allowed us to do is, contrary to a lot of platforms, we've been multiplayer from day one, because we were creating multiplayer, AI-driven multiplayer text-based games. So from day one, we were like: okay, how do we interact with multiple players? How do we manage state? How do we manage action and things like that? So it's just interesting to me the approach people are taking of let's create like the most complicated games. That's the metric for success, right? Is like, oh, if you can create a AAA game using AI, then you've done something. And I just think like, let's start simpler and create simpler games and then work our way up to that.

100%. Yeah, people like to boast the North Star and all this and that, but it's just like, the reality is it's not there yet. And like, why would you want to try and build the entire house without actually starting with the foundations? So yeah, it totally makes sense. And you guys touched on it briefly, so ChainCraft is basically a chat-enabled game builder platform, but you also mentioned, Eric, that there are on-chain assets that you can also use to build your game. Do you guys want to talk briefly about the crypto angle—or blockchain angle rather—of ChainCraft?

Yeah, I can start and then Ryan can kind of talk about the blockchain aspect of it. But just briefly, you know, I think a lot of—I certainly am—something that has been a barrier for me to developing games is I suck at creating art, you know? Whether it's pixel art, whether it's 3D models or whatever. And when you're creating a game and you've got a vision for a game, you don't want to go buy just some off-the-shelf art and then wrap your vision around somebody else's asset. So the thing that's really attractive to me about blockchain and digital ownership is like, we can create all these really innovative models for how artists and developers can collaborate, right? And the thing that I'm really excited about is it's called LoRA, or fine-tuning, right? So there are things out there like Civitai is one, I think Leonardo you can do it, where artists can basically provide a sample of a bunch of their artwork and generate a model that's fine-tuned to replicate their style, right? So now, we foresee like you could mint a art generator, right? And then you could basically license that out to game developers, and we're thinking about like a royalty system where like, you know, maybe you don't pay up front for that, but you agree via contract to give that artist some percentage of whatever you make for some amount of time. So we just really see blockchain connecting art assets and game developers; that's a big, big win there. As well as the game and gameplay itself, so you might actually be able to, or you will be able to eventually in ChainCraft, mint a game mechanic that's a unique game mechanic, right? And then somebody can license your game mechanic. Or you could build an entire game and it's like, "Hey, I love your game, I want to use that as a basis for building another game." And if you know anything about board games, this happens all the time, right? Like oh, you've got a foundational set and then you're going to use that to build other games; we call that remixing. So, lots of opportunity to collaborate is really what the blockchain unlocks.

Yeah, and that's a bit more of my space, the blockchain space. And there's few doing this aspect, like there's a lot of AI app builders and even game builders. But what's the end product? What's the incentive other than just building a game? There should be, I think we think, that you can earn from what you've created. So if we can set this up in a way where all your hard work pays off because you've created something innovative and it wants to be remixed or utilized in another, whether you're an artist or somebody with just a unique game mechanic idea that maybe has never been tried out before, we want to be that platform where you can come and do that and then earn potential revenue if people are taking your ideas. And we think that's what, where the blockchain is sort of unique and perfect to be able to do this, attribute ownership to who created that. And this whole idea of like art, mechanics, sound design, all these aspects of games, you can either have an AI tool to help you build it yourself, but maybe you are really interested in this person's look or feel, and you want to just like add that component to yours and give them a little bit of royalties. There's a lot of fine-tuning in this, in this grand vision of what we're building, but it's totally possible and we have yet to sort of seen that part done elsewhere. And so that's a big motivator and thing we're excited about.

Yeah, the other thing that I want to say about blockchains is that it kind of forces us to embody one of our core principles, and that is ownership, right? And agency. So one thing when we started ChainCraft, we said we do not want to be a walled garden, right? We don't want to be a Roblox. We don't want to be a platform where people can build games and as long as that platform exists, they can play those games on that platform. So if we generate code, you're going to own that code. You're going to be able to take that code and go put it up on the Steam Store or whatever. If your game is AI-driven, we're going to be giving you all the prompts and all the functions and everything that we use to generate that game. So like, putting it on blockchain means like we can't just say, "Oh, well you own this property, but you're really just leasing space inside our walled garden." No, it's like you own this. And in order for us to say you own this, we have to practice what we preach and make that asset completely available to you. Now, the caveat is that if you have engaged in contractual relationships with other artists or game developers and things like that, we have to figure out a way to make sure that all that happens, and it's easiest to do that through our platform. But once those have all been sort of satisfied, take your game and do with it what you want. You own it. And I love that about the blockchain, the concept of ownership.

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, I totally agree with you. And just briefly, seems that the chain of choice you guys have picked is Sanko, which is an Arbitrum layer three Orbit chain. Do you guys want to briefly touch on why you went with Sanko?

Absolutely. I've been a Sanko fan for a while. I love the team. I love the community. It's silly, fun. And, I guess I'll start with Arbitrum too. I feel like I learned about Arbitrum because of Sanko, and feels like many years ago—feels like many years ago, my crypto time versus IRL time feels totally warped—but I want to build on Sanko and Arbitrum because Arbitrum I've just seen over the years be very consistent, growing steadily, not jumping to hype. And I really like that. And I also kind of like that Sanko does that too. Like they have really good builders with head on their shoulders, aren't always like deterred by price action, this or that, they're just like building, shipping, and doing their best, you know? Like, and you can see that they put a lot of soul into their work. And I feel like the community that is part of that, like in the Telegram and on Twitter, you can tell that they're passionate about it. And a lot of people have been filtered out that maybe are the bad actors or quick flippers, and that's hard to find. And so I really like that we are launching on Sanko, and we really want to grow and be part of that because I believe in that team and the vision. And it's hard to find. So, that's really why we are launching with Sanko. And then the technical side, like just the speed, just the ability for connecting to the devs, and Arbitrum in general are within reach. I really like the ecosystem.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean sounds like a lot of checkboxes are getting ticked there, so why not? Amazing. And I guess coming back to the ChainCraft platform itself, is there a particular type of game developer it's targeted towards? Like, perhaps an indie game studio, indie developer, bigger studio? Who would you say is your main target audience for ChainCraft?

I mean, I think, you know, in my mind, our ideal client profile would be a hobbyist, you know, maybe someone who's not even like a game developer, you know, like maybe someone who is more of a game designer, right? But somebody who has a vision for something that they want to create and they just kind of struggle with like, getting it off the ground and getting it launched and figuring out how to connect all the people. So they could be really any skill set. They could be a developer. They could be an artist. They could be a game designer, you know? I play a lot of board games, and I am just blown away by the creativity and the innovation that exists in the board game space. People just come up with these, you know, I mean there's, at the end of the day, I think BoardGameGeek even did it, you can catalog and there's like some finite number of game mechanics, but the different ways those have been applied to create truly compelling experiences, interesting experiences. So that's kind of what I'm hoping to see, right? Is that we'll get this army of creators just creating really quality content way beyond what we've even been able to envision. That's not to say that if you're an indie game developer, you know, you're not going to be able to create a game on ChainCraft. We certainly want to support the game development community. But we kind of figure the game development community probably has a lot of the pieces that we're trying to bring to the puzzle already. So I think we're targeting more people who would like to be indie game developers but just don't have, you know, gap filler, really that's kind of what I said at the beginning, right? Is like, ChainCraft is a gap filler. You have a vision, you have an idea for an outcome, which is this amazing high-quality game. You've got all sorts of gaps between where you are and where you need to get to, and ChainCraft is going to fill those gaps and help you get there.

Amazing answer. Great. And in terms of the types of games ChainCraft will produce, is it targeting a particular platform? Like, mobile games, web-based games, console games, or just like general games in general?

I think to start, mostly mobile-friendly. Like, our web app that is in development right now is basically tailored to just mobile, like so that you can do something simply. It's accessible to a lot of people. That's the route we're going first and foremost.

Yeah, we're fully embracing games as a social construct, you know? And that's not to say that like, you couldn't create great single-player content. But in my mind, what makes great single-player content great single-player content is amazing stories and narratives, right? And we're just a little ways away from AI being able to generate amazing stories and narratives. But, so, you know, I would say socially, games that are fun to play with other people on various platforms. You know, one of the things is that we're open-source, and one of the reasons that we're open-source is because, you know, we have finite resources, right? So we might say, "Hey, we're going to launch ChainCraft, and you can play on a web app or something." But somebody might come along and say, "Well, I really want to play that on some other platform, I don't know, I might want to play that on Unity, right?" or something like that, or build a Unity version of that game. And so because we're open-source and we'll have a spec for how to create a game playing interface, our community can kind of create interfaces to let people play on whatever platforms they want, and we hope that they do that.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, why I was kind of asking this is, I used to be a gamer, I don't game as much anymore just because I don't have as much time, but I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on where you guys think consoles are going to head. Like we've seen like a lot of cloud gaming initiatives kind of come up, whether it's like Xbox Cloud Gaming or whatever. Do you guys, being gamers, do you guys think the traditional console is still going to stick around, or are we going to be like fully handheld?

I will say it's funny, I'm in a similar boat, like I don't play as many games as I used to. Matt might even be, if he was here, have more info or more to say to that question. But I do think there's something about consoles that will probably have staying power, and that's ease of use, just plug and play. I want to play a game. It's like, like if you, most of my game playing is on Steam, but I have to like set it up. If I haven't played it in forever, it takes time, and you know, like, so, so I think consoles will always have their place. I could be wrong, but I do think that convenience is always going to be a thing.

I definitely think, yeah, I mean, for me, I'm a console gamer. I've never really gotten into PC gaming because when I do have time to play games, which I'm working on ChainCraft most of my free time right now, but when I do have time to play games, you know, like I just want to be able to fire up Horizon or something and play. But I think that we're headed to a world where you're going to be able to play the same content on any device, you know, on phones, on AR, you know, I just got a pair of XREAL Air 2 Pro glasses, you know, I have a Meta Quest. And so I think we're headed to this place where the lines are going to get blurred and, you know, bandwidth, hopefully high-speed bandwidth, satellite bandwidth is going to be going up and so enough bandwidth is going to be available. Compute prices are going to go down enough where cloud gaming is really going to be a thing, and that's what I would be excited about is, you know, just being able to sit down and play a game on my console, and then like I'm in line at the DMV or something and I can pull it up on my phone and keep playing on my phone or make progress. I can't speak to the industry, but for me, yeah, consoles are still really important, but I really am excited about cloud gaming and just being able to play the same game across all your devices.

Likewise. I think the industry is probably going to be headed towards there. It's just like, a lot of the compute now is being taken up by AI, so they've got to share. They've got to share. Awesome. And as we're closing in on time here, I just want to get a couple more questions in. Is there anything you can share around the roadmap for ChainCraft?

Yeah, I think I'd like to share, so this also is a shout-out to Arbitrum and Questbook, we got a grant with them to develop our web app. We are developing our web app, so that's something that is immediately what we're working on and little-by-little, we're going to be opening that up to, through invites for people to come test out and playtest and give us feedback as we grow that. And we're kind of aiming for a way for you to build a game and then duel somebody and wager with token duels, is something. So that's kind of going to be our base like main MVP that we're aiming for, and we're excited about that. There's a lot more to ChainCraft than that, but we feel like that is a fun, easy place to start where you can just come in, design a game, and then challenge somebody to play it and maybe, you know, a little bit of ETH, a little bit of DMT on Sanko, that's kind of what we're aiming for. That's a little bit of alpha, I guess, for y'all.

Yeah, I've been working a lot on our engine, and you know, so we have a basic capability for AI-driven games, like we can, you know, you can describe a game—you can do it on our Discord right now—you can describe a game and then you could play the game, and you know, the AI will simulate the game, but there are certain things that you really need more deterministic and reliable things, and so when you're depending on a model, it can be hard sometimes to get deterministic and reliable, especially if we're going to start, as Ryan talked about, doing token duels and things like that. So what I'm working on on our engine side is incorporating some principles of Codec, if you've ever heard of that, it's one of the principles that Manas is based on. And so instead of the AI basically just kind of generating like "well, here is the game state," the AI generates code that uses a whole bunch of libraries of functions and things like that, and so the game state is very deterministic. The AI just says, "Oh, okay, here's the player action, here's the code, execute that code." So we're in the early stages of testing that right now, but seems to be pretty promising, so I think that's going to be exciting and it's going to open the doors to creating more complex games and getting good results from them.

Yeah, that sounds awesome, and congratulations on securing the grant, and yeah, really looking forward to seeing the platform get further built out. I guess, my last question is like, if people want to start playing with ChainCraft today and follow progress, how can they do that?

I would say follow Twitter and join our Discord. It's a little slow right now, but we definitely encourage you to be there for when we are going to start like being more vocal about inviting people and opening that up more and more. So, yeah, the Discord and Twitter are probably the best places to keep tabs on us.

Yeah, I mean, you could also check out our repository, you know, because it is open source, so if you want to look at what we're doing there. And, you know, I would say like, a lot of the people that are working with us right now have just been captivated by the idea, you know, and have been excited to work on it. So we're definitely going to be wanting people to help us kick the tires on this thing. So get on Discord, get active, reach out, tell us how much you want to participate, and we'll find a way to get you in there.

Amazing. Amazing. You heard it here, folks. The link to their Discord will be in the description of this video below. So definitely join and play around with ChainCraft. I mean, you're on the leading edge here of blockchain, AI, game development, so definitely want to get in on that. And with that, just want to thank you both, Eric and Ryan, for coming on the show today. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to do so. And yeah, we're looking forward to seeing that web app get developed here.