# THIS CURSED MACHINE: Onchain Game Post-Mortem by ARB | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 20:03
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-vNIQeYXxmVw
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNIQeYXxmVw

## Description

“Live in the pod, fulfil orders, get bugs.”

THIS CURSED MACHINE is a fully onchain sci-fi body horror fulfilment center simulator by Moving Castles, a game studio for the tactical research and development of autonomous worlds.

We will speak about learnings of launching an autonomous world onchain (Redstone) and how we embraced the emergent chaos by making the bot attacks, exploits and player corporations part of the narrative of the world itself.

Speaker(s): ARB
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Best Practices, Gaming, Autonomous World, worldbuilding

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] hello hello everyone nice to be here I'm ARB also uh known as Arthur rowing bear um I will be talking about uh this christm machine I work at a company called moving castles we're game studio for the research and development of autonomous worlds um I have a quick definition of autonomous worlds if single player worlds emerge out of personal Computing and multiplayer worlds emerge out of client server Computing then the definition of our organization is that autonomous worlds are the new games and worlds that are made possible by P2P Computing uh I also want to say that uh I'm fighting a fever and uh if I'm not making sense you can blame the bugs fighting against my immune system right now okay so uh we started building this autonomous world called this curse machine uh a while ago it looked like this in the beginning and um I will show you the first minutes of game play um now [Music] can make a bit darker yeah I skipped over this part because it's boring bugs bugs bugs bugs [Music] okay I'm not going to show all of this you're getting a kind of feel of what's going on uh you're a stump trapped in a pod and you need to produce different materials um it's a fully onch onchain sci-fi body horror fulfillment center simulator Which is less important than you live in the pond you fulfill your orders and you get bugs at some point you unlock a multiplayer Market uh you compete with other stumps to solve orders and uh you can build new things on top extend the world so why um why did we do all of this um but first I think there's a message from our sponsors of Industry our machine so Grand transforms complex matter across the land caffeine MSG and plasma powder in hand our curs machine makes everything PL from RTE to wor in our expert comment okay dear TCM how did you do this in why so the first thing we did was the game is quite simple it's a token in push it through a circuit token out game we created a vast uh material map and so if you take bugs for example you input bugs you input them into the rat cage you put the rats from the rat cage to the burner you get dead rats and there's a lot of them okay compos ibility tokens second thing is narrative composability which is even more important I would say um so what's great about building within a cursed corporate environment is that a Excel sheet is lore consistent this has advantages over other worlds it makes it really easy for people to contribute to it and it kind of blurs the the barrier between user generated content and what we do it also makes our job really easy the next is laring so everything we did was in character which means that oh yeah diaper is an order uh just so you're not confused uh we did everything in characters so the telegram chats the Twitter everything was done um in character as we are also employees at the same company we're just the middle managers and we are blaming other you know the corporate overlords Etc the third thing that that was important was to embrace fourth thing to embrace failure um every issue is a narrative opportunity very simply simple one is you know we're building an onchain game which means we're dealing with this vast broken machine so the game is about being trapped in a vast dysfunctional broken machine um but also this applies to more things as you will see um so what happened a lot of things happened we launched um and players started building different things this is a kind of overview of the different organizations different stump initiatives that emerged um someone found out that you know the orders for stumps uh to create different materials uh the smart contracts were open so they created a site called stump Marler where you can um buy materials from the stumps uh different companies started emerging uh that sold and cornered parts of the market um we had a first issue evil hackers started stealing the bugs we had wanted to give to the good stumps who were joining the game very bad evil hackers so we gave a grant to two new insurance companies which were player Le which gave a predatory loans to new bugs uh new new stumps um so they could now play the game of course this would bite them in the ass later there's a second company um we also at some point the medical records of the stumps got leaked uh oh yeah uh Frolic built an answering machine I don't know if the sound works thank you for calling the S unemployment hotline your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes please hold while we connect you with bgs order fulfillment center so this was built by a player and it reads the smart contract um and reads you the current orders you can actually call it now there are six jobs available job order number 86461 we need 79 okay we're not going to do this okay then we had another hack someone stole all the bugs so we went out with an official statement we started telling the stumps that they need to get ready for the war against the hackers and we didn't we beat the hackers actually it was me dming the hacker and asking him to return all the funds which he did also we had a corporate partnership with tsmc and this is a video can you turn up the [Music] [Applause] [Music] music I took my [Music] bullsh every when I'm bur [Music] me you me we that my me BL my money my money my money my money [Music] long [Applause] clean okay so that worked kind of um we really happy with the outcome um we we saw a lot of things emerge um and we think that happened because of the different methods we used and I think that there is a lot of unexplored potential for leaning into issues especially in the game Space um as people come from the protocol space they're kind of cling to this idea of security and and I think it doesn't matter if if you're actually creating a thing which is supposed to be fun the you know the most fun about crypto is all the hacks all the drama all the onchain shenanigans and uh why not Embrace that um and make it into The Narrative of the game itself and I think that that is really how you get a decentralized narrative where the actions of the players and the different participants uh shape you know what the world is um we're going to we're working on a next game this is an artist rendering I'm not going to tell you more than that um if you want to follow uh what we're up to you can scan this QR code I'm going to give you a little bit of time since not many people are doing it it must be because you don't have a lot of time so I'm going to give you more time okay are are you all done great and then the last thing is we we/ rmos one person from moving castles oh yeah I want to credit uh gvn uh and rosmos my two co-founders and then also Agnes Cameron and Manos niof who worked on TCM and this one was made by bunker and rmos and uh you can it's shulan do engineering and you can uh upload your frogs uh and synthesize new materials it's available now and it integrates with zup pass okay the URL is shulan not engineering wait I don't know how I go back wait wait okay here you have to read it quickly at the top here shalan okay wait okay one more time you see it okay I'll do what okay I'm I I have a lot of time left so I'm kind of uh but I think that uh maybe it's time for questions do we get questions there are questions good cuz we have a lot of time left how do I do this all right a big Applause for ARB who despite being sick came here and present uh all of this and um like don't be shy please bring more questions because the first one is not really a question it's just like thank you and then the second one would be what's your favorite material from the map I think the first question is really important and I like it a lot I must say thank you whoever asked that uh I agree I am persevering persevering uh my favorite material from the map um I don't know um um there's a lot of good ones I will think about a little bit does anyone in the audience have any favorite materials adrenochrome is pretty good neural link is good yeah yeah the mold stuff is also pretty good there's a whole like I like the whole uh oil um what's it called material map unlock that was great petrochemicals um Electronics was good yeah why Redstone yes of course I didn't mention that we work together with the beautiful lattice company uh and this was built on mud and we used their chain called Redstone as well which worked really well I mean we like working in mud um and Redstone worked well for um you know it came with the thing and it was good I'm not super opinionated about chains I think it it worked really well and we like working with the lattice team uh who's the best player um I think that this is an interesting question we had a leaderboard um but um I think the best players were the one that started creating their own stuff I think Frolic built an in the API which was cool that's uh that was a great player achievement um and I think that yeah the players who extended the game and extended Logics were the best players um are there other projects okay here's a lot of stuff here how did you build it mud um so the one on the top are the ones with the most up votes so what percentage in character are you still in right now it's a very good question I don't know uh I I think the fever the fever is is pushing me more into character yeah [Music] um here obviously blockchain constraint options for game Loops as well as developer resources independent of these two is there Central mechanic game Loop even interesting from a narrative perspective um I think that like it's really hard to build uh game Loops or games on chain um I think you can you can do a lot of like classical games when you start doing uh obus or ZK stuff uh otherwise it really limits the game Space I think that TCM worked for the time we ran it um but it also was basically a capture with a faucet at the end and then we we we did a bunch of Wheeling and dealing around that to extend the game Life of that I'm currently I find like um like games that have optimal strategies but that change based on player Behavior really interesting and I also like like social Oracle games uh like the beautiful dress to impress game on Roblox which is a game where you um you know you dress up and you perform a fashion show and then people rate you for it that's a great game um the next would be are there any other projects that are along the same lines of a merchant blockchain narrative I don't know are there does anyone no do you know any gvn are there any more all of them trying yeah they're we're all trying um I think that yeah I think that maybe games are too afraid to lean into the failures I think that that maybe is like a unique thing about our game and I think if more people were able to do that um we could have more emergent narratives I think that's basically the somewhat chaotic uh um kind of core message of my talk uh is that you know um the people feel like they have agency over worlds if they can break them uh if you don't allow that you really you're just creating like a little sandbox that people can play in but you don't allow them to change or break the sandbox and really the most interesting narratives are the one that subvert the expectations of the game makers and then become part of the narrative all right then the one that actually interests me a lot is like how did you build it the whole thing yeah it was built uh using mud um by a great team um us at moving castles and together with with the support of the mud team um and I think it it was it looks good because we leaned into the kind of limitations of the medium um yeah thank you so much so what was the funniest hack then that happened H um yeah I think the faucet faucet hack the uh I mean yeah there was all kinds it was like a lot of people like trying to break the game and then me kind of begging and DMS for them to return the funds that happened a bunch of times the good thing is we we just were the central bank for the token anyway so when someone like hacked or tried to speculate on it something we just increased inflation so it was worthless so it like we did a bunch of stuff like this and uh that was fun uh we basically the the the trickest is to just demotivate uh so much that they give back the the the tokens