Shipment 20/52 in my year of #ShippingFaster The first entry into the BGL, Shootout! On-chain gaming is hard [citation needed]! You can think of Solana like a game server with a ping time of 400ms in the best case and 24s in the worst case. twitter.com/breadheads_nft…

If you want fully on-chain logic the easiest approach is turn-based games that are forgiving of lag. The Wild West themed @breadheads_nft game is a mix of off-chain platforming and on-chain mini-games where the core action happens. So the obvious choice here is a shootout.

Enter BGL-Shootout: I wanted a turn-based game that was simple but fast-paced enough to capture some of the action of a real shootout. After thinking it through, I settled on a riff of the ever-popular rock-paper-scissors. github.com/blockiosaurus/…

The normal actions are replaced with the the actions below, and the outcome of the match is tracked in a PDA. A match is created between an NPC NFT and a Player NFT and the CPU's action choice is dependent on the same pseudo-random code that Candy Machine uses.

I tried to be clever with the PDA design, here. The authority and player NFT are both seeds, enabling a maximum of 1 game at a time per player character. The authority itself handles all game actions on a backend so the user doesn't have to click approve a million times.

Delegating all actions to a game crank is a critically underadvertised learning from the @DinosolsNFT battle. People like to use on-chain games, but not at the expense of UX, so having a crank that takes the need to do so away from the user helps improve this UX problem.