We want to create a scalable standard for uploading and reading tilemaps on the blockchain. Starting with uploading a games color palette as mapped single pixels and scaling up from there to 16x16 sprites. These 16x16 sprites would then be mapped/assigned a value to represent themselves in the game world using as little storage as possible. They will need to be layerable and have room for a few other key values like whether a game asset can pass through the tile, if the tile will move the asset up or down layers, if the tile transports the asset to a different part of the game world, etc.
An On-chain tilemap standard would;
- Bring in indie game devs and allow them to more easily create games on Cardano.
- Open up a new tilemap nft market.
- Bring token-gated/on-chain gaming to the next level with tile based games.
- After Cardano scaling solutions are implemented, game assets could move through these worlds with micro-transactions to change their position. A future proposal could implement hydra heads as game servers, letting users easily interact with each other on chain in real time.
The biggest challenge is to get the tile maps on chain without the use of ipfs. We will mitigate this by starting at the single pixel level and scaling up from there. This will also keep the standard flexible for projects using sprites smaller than our target 16x16 pixel size.