MagicBlock Engine: Future Exploration of Solana Full-Chain Games

Author: WPeaster, Translation: MetaCat

Is this a preview of the future of Solana’s gaming scene?

A Beginner’s Guide to Solana’s Full-Chain Game Engine?

Full-chain game engines make it easier to build games with no external dependencies other than the underlying blockchain.

For me, this is one of the most exciting areas of development in crypto today, which is why my curiosity was piqued when I recently came across MagicBlock Engine. MagicBlock is a game engine that innovates an Ephemeral Rollups architecture to power flexible and high-performance full-chain games on Solana. I think MagicBlock can be an interesting glimpse into the future of Solana’s gaming scene, so let’s go over all the basics.

What is MagicBlock?

MagicBlock is a gaming framework built on Solana that aims to facilitate the development of full-chain games and applications. Recently, MagicBlock Engine demonstrated its capabilities at the a16zcrypto Demo Day event. The demo showcased a live, fully on-chain game fully deployed on Solana, where two clients could play the game simultaneously without any lag, thanks to MagicBlock’s ability to delegate accounts to fast Solana validators.

What are Ephemeral Rollups?

MagicBlock has expanded Solana’s capabilities by introducing Ephemeral Rollups (ER), which are designed to efficiently facilitate state transitions without fragmenting game state. ER runs as a specialized Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)-based runtime that can be customized to support features like gas-free transactions, transaction scheduling, and faster block times. The process here begins with a developer delegating a specific account from an existing Solana smart contract to the MagicBlock Engine. This delegation temporarily transfers state to a secondary layer, the ER, which can process transactions at a higher throughput. During this phase, the delegated account is locked but still readable on Solana. This means that other transactions (such as token minting) can access the locked state and interact with it in real time. Crucially, even though the game state is temporarily transferred to the ER, the assets that interact with it (such as tokens and NFTs) remain on Solana's base layer. This design ensures that all underlying programs and assets continue to reside directly on the mainnet, preserving their composability with the broader Solana application ecosystem. Finally, the state transitions processed by the ER are submitted by the validator and subsequently verified and settled on the mainnet. After the ER ends, control of the delegated account will be restored to the original program without any state fragmentation.

Other Key Features of MagicBlock

BOLT: A framework that simplifies on-chain game development using the Entity Component System (ECS) pattern. It allows developers to quickly create modular, reusable, and extensible game components and logic

SOAR  : SOAR stands for Solana On-Chain Achievements and Rankings. The reputation system allows developers to easily define achievements, track and display user rankings, and deploy rewards based on on-chain activity.

Session keys: MagicBlock recently added support for session keys in the Solana Unity SDK, making it easier for its game developers to eliminate repeated wallet popups during frequent in-game interactions in a secure manner.

Why MagicBlock?

There are various promising on-chain game engines in the Ethereum gaming space, such as MUD developed by Lattice, Keystone developed by Curio, and Dojo developed by Cartridge.

However, a common design pattern in this early scene is to deploy games on their own rollup, which can introduce various composability and fragmentation challenges that are still being solved. MagicBlock's angle is to circumvent these fragmentation issues by keeping assets on the Solana  mainnet, thereby maintaining the potential for atomic composability while still achieving scalability through ER. This way, you get high throughput, a customizable runtime, and the ability for games and applications to interact seamlessly without the need for interoperability solutions.

What to watch for in the future with MagicBlock?

1. MagicBlock is new and still emerging. Which on-chain games will be the first to officially use the engine?

2. The recent MagicBlock demo achieved 50 milliseconds of latency, which is comparable to modern gaming standards. Can we expect further optimizations to make this latency even lower, allowing for a better real-time gaming experience?

3. Earlier this year, Parallel announced that its AI game Colony would be based on Solana. Perhaps the Parallel team will adopt the MagicBlock Engine for its infrastructure needs?

4. Because MagicBlock maintains assets on the Solana mainnet, developers have the potential for atomic composability. What use cases will emerge for this feature?

5.On-chain games benefit greatly from user-generated content (UGC) and user-generated logic (UGL). Will the SOAR system be used to incentivize this type of creation?

6. MagicBlock doesn’t have to be used only for building games. What non-game applications might adopt this framework in the future?

Written at the end

While MagicBlock is still in its early stages, its potential to catalyze Solana’s full-chain on-chain gaming scene seems great, as its Ephemeral Rollups architecture can help it bypass key challenges faced by other game engines while still ensuring high performance.