EVM: The Machine

🥉3rd Place in the Ethereum Challenge at Gamedev.js Jam 2026

Step inside the World Computer. Eight chapters. Eight moments of Ethereum history. The machine remembers everything you did.

A first-person 3D narrative game built solo in 48 hours for Gamedev.js Jam 2026 (theme: Machines). You walk through eight diegetic scenes from a decade of Ethereum — a Hong Kong dorm room in 2013, an attic full of butcher-paper equations, the Zug spaceship-house, a 42-day crowdsale, a reentrant hall of mirrors, a corridor that forks, a neon DeFi trading floor, and a humming PoW server room on Merge night. In each one you make a small first-person decision. The machine silently records what kind of person each decision implies, and at the end it shows you a mirror — your archetype.

Optional on-chain: every chamber you complete emits a ChamberCompleted event on Sepolia. Finish all eight and a mintJourney souvenir NFT becomes available. The chain is the souvenir, not a login gate — the game is fully playable offline, no wallet required.

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🎮 Play

• itch.io: Play Here
• Source on GitHub: github.com/k66inthesky/evm-the-machine

Local development:

npm install
npm run dev        # localhost:5175
npm run build      # static output in dist/
npm run preview

No plugins, no installers — runs in any modern browser.

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⛓ On-chain (Sepolia, optional — but designed for low friction)

• Contract: EVMHistorian at 0x961821ADDf66BBf8A696ced1Ff94d1AD532C6DCB — soulbound ERC-721, artwork is the cover image (submission/cover.png) served from this repo's GitHub raw URL.
• Finish all eight chapters, and a mintJourney(completionSeconds) Journey NFT opens up at the finale (and on the chamber-select screen).
• Two wallet paths at the finale, both gated on the same contract:
  • CLAIM WITH GOOGLE — Coinbase Smart Wallet spawns an ERC-4337 smart account from a passkey / Google / email login, no extension and no developer signup or credit card required. This is the path for web2 players.
  • CLAIM WITH METAMASK — classic injected EOA flow for players who already have a wallet. EIP-6963 wallet discovery picks the actual MetaMask provider when Binance / OKX / Coinbase Wallet extensions are also installed.
• The Journey NFT is soulbound: transferFrom and safeTransferFrom revert. The token id, the bearer, the completion time, and a tokenURI (data: URI with embedded JSON + a stable image URL) are all on-chain.

See contracts/README.md for deploy + verify steps.

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🕹 Controls

Action	Key
Move	W A S D
Look	Mouse (pointer-lock on click)
Interact	E
Sprint	Shift (hold)
Choose	1 2 3 4
Quit to menu	Esc or Q (or click QUIT)

Volume and fullscreen toggles live in the top-left of every screen.

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🗺 The eight chapters

Each chapter is a first-person scene, ~60–120 seconds. You walk in, look around, interact with one focal object, and pick from up to four choices. Every choice silently feeds an 8-dimensional archetype tracker. After Chapter 08 the finale screen tells you who the machine thinks you are.

1. THE LIMIT (2013, dorm room) — Bitcoin Talk thread on the CRT: "Bitcoin is limited to payments — or is it?" Type a reply.
2. WHITEPAPER (2013, Toronto attic) — Pick the opening sentence of the Ethereum whitepaper from four candidate paragraphs.
3. SPACESHIP (2014, Zug) — roles.md is open on the kitchen table. Pick which of the five hats you take on.
4. CROWDSALE (2014, server room) — Day 37 of 42. The blog post tomorrow morning will tell 5,000 buyers what ether is. Pick the framing.
5. THE DAO (2016, hall of mirrors) — Seven panels replaying withdraw() re-entering itself. Read it. Tell the podium what it means.
6. FORK (2016, block 1,920,000) — A corridor splits. Hard fork (cyan) or Classic (orange). Or abstain. Or walk out.
7. BLOOM (2020–2021, neon trading floor) — Four glowing plinths: Money Lego, Primitive, Experiment, Mania. Mint to the one you actually believe in.
8. MERGE (15 Sep 2022, 06:42:42 UTC) — The last PoW server room. A red button on a pedestal. Press it, pay respects to the miners, study the call stack, or walk out without pressing.

The 8-dim archetype vector — Visionary / Engineer / Capitalist / Governor / Rebel / Speculator / Builder / Witness — never appears in the UI during play. The finale reveals your top two.

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🧱 Tech stack

Layer	Choice	Why
Engine	Three.js	Procedural geometry + canvas-textured diegetic UI is its native idiom
Bundler	Vite	Static dist/ drops straight into itch.io / Wavedash
Language	TypeScript	Judges can navigate the 8-chamber architecture with type hints
Wallet / RPC	viem	10× smaller than ethers+wagmi, clean vanilla integration
Contracts	Foundry	Single Solidity file, single forge create to ship
Audio	Tone.js	Code-synthesized synthwave loops — no audio assets to manage

Everything in-game is procedurally generated. No imported 3D models, no texture files, no pre-recorded audio. Every cube, every line of equation on a whiteboard, every snare hit is made from code at runtime.

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🏆 How each jam criterion is addressed

Overall scoring

• Innovation — eight first-person scenes that turn protocol history into places you walk through. Every diegetic surface (CRT, laptop, whiteboard, marquee, mirror, plinth, miner face) is a procedurally drawn canvas, not a sprite.
• Theme (Machines) — Ethereum is the World Computer. The game is a first-person tour of its memory. The theme isn't decoration — it's the entire premise.
• Gameplay — eight chapters, each a single tight decision in a distinct space. No filler. The hidden archetype tracker turns the whole arc into a personality reveal.
• Graphics — procedural geometry + canvas textures + selective bloom + fog. Mipmaps + anisotropy on every diegetic screen so text reads at distance. 60fps on a mid-range laptop.
• Audio — eight chamber-specific BGM moods composed live in Tone.js plus SFX on every meaningful interaction. Volume + mute in the top-left.

Challenges

• Open Source (GitHub) — every file begins with a header comment explaining its purpose. The folder structure reads top-down: src/main.ts → src/core/game.ts → src/chambers/NN-*.ts. A stranger can understand the architecture in ten minutes.
• Ethereum (OP Guild) — the on-chain integration is meaningful, not a login wall. Every chamber emits ChamberCompleted(player, index, at). Completing all eight unlocks mintJourney(completionSeconds). Players who never connect a wallet still play the full game; players who do get a permanent on-chain record. See EVMHistorian.sol.
• Wavedash — the production build deploys unchanged; no platform-specific code.

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🎓 Reading the code

Architecture, top-down:

src/
  main.ts                # boots Game
  core/
    game.ts              # state machine: title → select → chamber → finale
    renderer.ts          # WebGL renderer + selective bloom
    fps-controller.ts    # WASD + mouse-look + AABB collision
    input.ts             # key/mouse tracking with per-frame edges + pointer-lock edge
    hud.ts               # DOM overlay for titles, prompts, briefings
    palette.ts           # locked color constants
    progress.ts          # localStorage: chapters completed
    settings.ts          # floating volume + fullscreen
  screens/               # title, chamber-select, finale (archetype mirror), credits
  chambers/
    chamber.ts           # base class — mount / build / update / win / dispose,
                         # plus installBriefing() helper for the four-key
                         # interaction pattern
    01-limit.ts          # 2013 dorm — CRT + phone + bed
    02-whitepaper.ts     # 2013 attic — laptop + two equation whiteboards
    03-spaceship.ts      # 2014 Zug — kitchen table + roles.md
    04-crowdsale.ts      # 2014 server room — LED marquee + draft.txt
    05-thedao.ts         # 2016 — seven mirrors animating reentrancy
    06-fork.ts           # 2016 — corridor fork + miner-vote sign
    07-bloom.ts          # 2020–21 — four plinths, neon DeFi
    08-merge.ts          # 2022 — pedestal + PoW miner blinkenlights
  systems/
    archetype.ts         # 8-dim hidden tracker (V/E/C/G/R/S/B/W)
  audio/
    audio.ts             # facade used by the rest of the game
    synth.ts             # Tone.js composition per chamber
  chain/
    chain.ts             # viem wrapper: connect, markChamber, mintJourney
    abi.ts               # hand-written ABI, matches EVMHistorian.sol
contracts/
  src/EVMHistorian.sol   # on-chain scoreboard + Journey mint
  foundry.toml           # forge config
  README.md              # deploy steps

Each chamber is self-contained. Reading src/chambers/05-thedao.ts alone tells you the entire DAO experience.

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📝 Credits

• Design · code · audio: k66
• Built with: Three.js, Vite, viem, Tone.js, Foundry
• For: Gamedev.js Jam 2026 · Theme: Machines
• Challenges entered: Open Source · Ethereum · Wavedash

📄 License

MIT. Fork it, remix it, put it in a chamber of your own.