No Prize at Colosseum? The Players Still Showed Up!

The Colosseum hackathon winners are out and unfortunately I didn't win any prizes this time. This was the fifth Colosseum hackathon, I've submitted to a couple before and picked up an honourable mention once at Grizzlython. So in this video I skip the sulking and show what's actually live on Gamerplex, because even if the judges didn't love the submission, the players do!

What is a sovereign game developer?

That's what I call myself. I try to build on fully open source stacks so all the code is owned by me, the whole stack is open source, and it uses open source blockchain protocols. That protocol is Gamerplex, and I've shipped several games on it.

If you've followed solana.blog you'll know I've been covering Solana development and submitting to hackathons for a few years now. It's really good to see the builder community still strong on Solana. I build on other chains too, but this is where Gamerplex lives.

What's live on Gamerplex right now?

Over at gamerplex.com there are eight games live, all using the Gamerplex protocol. A couple of standouts at the time of recording:

Game	Plays
Block Words	60
VRFC Kickboxing	64

All of them are WebGPU based. Block Words was one of the first games I built. The layout is pretty simple: change one letter to make a new word, come back each day and keep your daily streak going. I have no idea what the next word is going to be either, which made for a very bad live example. "Wedge" to "wedgie" did not work and I finished on 45 points 😭

How do on-chain scores work?

There are two ways to save a score:

• Web2, log in with an email and the score goes into a database
• Web3, connect your Solana wallet and the game writes a transaction on chain

The on-chain version creates a Solana transaction and stores the game info in the memo field, like your score and player ID. I can then read the chain through an RPC and build a leaderboard from it, which makes it a verified leaderboard.

That's the whole premise of what I'm building. Your data is stored on chain forever, so even if Gamerplex shuts down you can still get your scores and player data years into the future.

The Block Words leaderboard right now has Liam on top with 248 points, excellent player! I'm sitting on 150. If you think you can do better, have a crack.

So what happens next?

I've been building web games for a few years and I'm always keen to build the next one whenever the idea hits. No hackathon recognition this round, but the games are live and people are playing them. If you want to support the Gamerplex games and the on-chain gaming protocol, the Telegram community link is at the top of the Gamerplex website.

Own the stack, build games the sovereign way, and I'll see you on the leaderboard. Cheers!