The long awaited testend event has ended! In ZkNoid we worked hard to research the technologies, implement them and ship into the ready to play games. Our efforts was paid off. During the event we saw a lot of real players interested to try ZK games. A lot of feedback and metrics was collected and now it’s the time to summarize the results
Games review
During the event, users were invited to play games on the zkApp platform and report any bugs they found, as well as share their experience with the games. There were four games available for testing: Arkanoid, Randzu, Thimblerig, and Checkers. Additionally, we asked every tester to provide their review and offer suggestions for improving the game experience. The team carefully analyzed the results and finalized the statistics and user opinions.
The survey revealed that Arkanoid was the most popular game, 85% of participants are satisfied with the experience. In each of the three games (Arkanoid, Randzu, and Thimblerig), more than 70% of users enjoyed the gameplay.
Checkers game hasn’t participated in the survey because it was in early development stage and was only an extra task for testers
For each game users left their suggestions for improvement, let’s take a look at them.
Arkanoid
One of the most popular requests is to make game faster and increase the difficulty level. Some ideas how to reach it came from testers: speed up the ball or reduce the paddle in size. Now we use a round ball in the game and a fairly high speed, this was difficult to achieve due to the problem of the round ball.
Why it is so difficult to make ball bigger? The thing is, all actions are being processed on zk circuits. Zk circuit later is used for the production of zk proof, which is quite computationally heavy process. We come try to maintain zk circuit to be as low as possible. This can be achieved by 2 ways:
- With reduction of amount of computation for single tick
- With reduction of amount of ticks
It is was easier to compute physics for point, but was harder to compute ball physics without tunneling effect. Tunnel effect is situation where one object passes through another object with no collision. So we have a two options to improve ball physics:
- Make a more complex collision model
- Make ticks so small, that tunneling is not a problem Both ways resulting in significant increase of circuit size.
As a result, we have to balance between a beautiful user experience and fun of the playing and the performance of proof generation and verification. So for now we are researching the possibilities trying to find a way to improve game physics without increasing the computational load
Also we have been asked to allow to create levels with more cubes, with cubes that do not collapse further or cubes that would moved during the game. The team is thinking about the possibility of introducing a more individual creation of levels and choosing their complexity.
Randzu
This game was created by the developers for the opportunity to play in multiplayer: to invite friends or acquaintances. Accordingly, users became interested because of the ability to communicate. During the testnet, several fundamental questions were asked for the further development of the game. Are the developers planning to add the following functionality:
- The ability to play against a platform rather than a real user
- A chat embedded on the game page so that you can communicate with your opponent
The first question requires us to build an AI algorithm to compete with players. We decided to delay this task to the future time.
The answer on the second one question we developing right now, in the most part of multiplayer games the chat will be implemented soon allowing opponents to talk to each other using text messages and emojies.
Thimblerig
The game was implemented to show the commit-reveal scheme usage in action. Thimblerig — a game of luck. where one user hides a ball and the other searches. Our game is built according to the classic rules, it has 3 thimbles. However, it turned out that users want to test their luck In more tricky conditions, with high stakes and a spark. We were asked for the opportunity to add to this game the ability to play with a large number of thimbles. The team is currently considering this proposal.
User interface evaluations
During the testnet process, we not only wanted to find and fix the bugs in the code, but we also wanted to understand whether we were moving in the right direction and whether the user liked not only the functionality, but also the overall product experience. Is our user interface convinient and simple for newbies or does it need serious rework and changes. In the infographic below you can see testers evaluating of our user interface in 10-point scale.
Of course we also asked to write more detailed feedback and found parts and features that must be changed in near future. Now team work on improving adaptive versions for different screen resolutions and devices. We are also considering adding more varied graphics and simplifying certain features to make the interface more intuitive.
Investments
The financial support of the community shows their faith in the project and helps the project to deliver the next-gen technologies. Here are some financial stats from our testers. All the reported data was cleaned by hand so only that only legitimate testers info is here. Most of the testers are interested in project token buying
The most popular investment expectation lies within 100–499$ interval. We have two testers who are willing to invest more than 5000$! Our audience consists of different types of users. We have feedback from developers, investors, community members who highlighted different types of issues. Willing to invest chart shows the consistency of sums distribution confirming the variety of audience
