Nearbound

Link to Github Repo: https://github.com/pulkitgarg784/HawkHacks

Our team members’ Devpost Accounts

• https://devpost.com/pulkitgarg784

• https://devpost.com/thirandiesemage

• https://devpost.com/lisapingchan

What It Does

Nearbound is a gaming platform running on the NEAR blockchain. The platform allows people to design their own levels, publish them on-chain, and experience each other’s levels. It is skill-based, rewarding both game design and gameplay skills. Players can win money by completing others' levels or by designing levels that other players try to complete. One of the biggest benefits of having everything on-chain is that all levels and transactions are always secure and cannot be abused. Nearbound was built with modularity and extensibility in mind, enabling developers to easily and rapidly add custom behaviors with minimal to no changes to the base code, without having to worry about deploying to the chain.

How We Built It

We build Nearbound using C# for our game logic, Unity for our user interface, and NEAR blockchain to deploy smart contracts to manage level data. We also used Git for version control, which helped us manage code changes efficiently and collaborate effectively.

Challenges We Ran Into/What We Learned

Most of our team members had limited experience with game development, and many of us had never used Unity before. Additionally, none of us were familiar with blockchain technology, making it our biggest learning curve. One significant challenge we faced was creating and integrating our own smart contracts with our Unity application. We also spent considerable time creating a serialization system that can convert Unity levels to on chain data and convert it back to interactive levels dynamically. This allows us to store multiple levels on the chain. Despite these struggles, our team gained valuable knowledge in both game development and blockchain.

Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of

Despite our initial lack of experience with Unity and blockchain, we managed to successfully build a functional and secure gaming platform. This project was a significant learning experience, and all of our team members improved their game development and blockchain skills. 

What’s Next

In the future, we plan to enhance our players’ customization capabilities by implementing a feature that allows players to use their NEAR tokens to purchase more collectibles that they can place in the levels they design.