Secret Network SDK for the Unity Game Engine – empowering the Web3 Gaming
Description
Project Summary
UniSecret is a Secret SDK built on top of SecretNET designed specifically to work with the Unity game engine. It allows developers to effortlessly connect their game to the blockchain and shape the future of Web3 gaming on a much larger scale than ever seen before. No longer are we restricted to simplistic HTML games.
The SDK provides the following:
- Wallet management
- Tools to query the on-chain data
- Transaction submission with a prompt dialog for the player to accept/deny transaction
The Problem
At the current moment, most DApps are built on the web. Not many blockchains provide SDKs in languages other than JavaScript/TypeScript. While a lott can be made in JavaScript these days, this makes it almost impossible to leverage the power of native apps, games, IoT devices, and other areas that still remain largely unexplored.
Similarly, developers who on daily basis work with languages other than Node.JS very rarely have access to tooling that allows them to embed blockchain functionality into their code.
Secret Network, more than other chains, has the potential to be used across many different platforms, devices, and use cases. Particularly one aspect worth highlighting here is gaming. I personally feel like the potential of Secret Network for gaming is infinite due to the following reasons
- Fast and reliable on-chain randomness;
- Private contract state allowing devs to create experiences that can’t be easily “cracked” or spoiled by just reading the contract state;
- Access to the vast ecosystem of features on top of that through IBS
My response
I have taken the existing tooling (Codemonkey’s SecretNET project) and decided to extend it to run with the Unity game engine in addition to it already running on MAUI native desktop apps. This is how the first Secret gaming SDK was born.
The Process
There was a lot of considerations to be taken into account, as well as a lot of missing pieces in available tooling. Some of them minor, other much more troublesome than originally anticipated.
As an example, it turned out that games built for the web using WebGL did not natively support .NET’s GRPC-web client. This took a lot of trial and error, but over time and with the help of some complex JsInterops it was possible to re-route the gRPC-web calls through JS http requests that function well in the browser. Adding support for this unfortunately bumped the minimum Unity version supported from 2021.1 to 2022.1, but the problem of interacting with Secret through web-based games got solved, thus bringing the Secret Network to an even wider crowd.
There was also a lot of work required to adjust SecretNET to work with Unity, which uses an older version of .NET runtime than the originally targetted .NET 6. This meant a decent part of the code had to be rewritten, and additionally game engine-specific hooks and events had to be added to support the flow of APIs and commands. It was a great opportunity to learn the inner workings of a Secret client library and in the end turned out to be well worth the effort.
The process of building the Unity integration part also came with its architectural challenges. Taking multithreading and garbage collection into account was a complex task, but now most features are fully compatible with Unity with only ocassional crashes.
The Scope
Unfortunately, due to lack of time, not everything originally planned was included in the final product. It’s still very much a proof of concept that will require clever engineering to bring it to a production-ready state. It is, however, a working framework and I am extremely proud of that. We are now one step closer to building high quality blockchain gaming experiences and that alone is a huge point for Secret.
Roadmap & Future Plans
UniSecret is at a very early stage of development, and is maintained by a sincle core contributor. Current focus for the next 6 months of development (as of June 2024) includes goals in many different areas:
- Project Homepage + Docs;
- Social media presence – start to build a community
- Optimize performance & Improve user experience – focus on ease of use by other devs
- Improve the end-user-facing UI (in-game wallet integration, popups, tx info, etc)
- Enable UniSecret to work with browser games seamlessly (WebGL)
- Build the first small-scale game on top of the UniSecret framework
Funding Received So Far:
- Hack Secret II Winning Prize
