UC Berkeley student designs innovative blockchain game

UC Berkeley junior Modeo Cheng designed a new blockchain game called Treaty, focused on player interactions and a fully on-chain design. After campus alumni Yijia Chen and Kevin Zhang co-founded Curio Research in January 2022, Cheng joined the game studio in June as chief game designer.

After matching through the Chinese Student Association’s mentoring program on the first day of school, Chen Cheng joined Curio Research a few months after it was founded.

“The Berkeley education taught me how to break down systems very well,” Chen said. “Without that, it’s very difficult to start a career in games, especially starting a company in games because it can seem very intimidating. There (are) a lot of moving pieces, from distribution to the game design to be produced and the actual game building.”

According to Chen, treaty players have a capital building and units they can use to fight or gather resources. The goal is to expand the player’s empire by upgrading their capital and producing more units.

While most blockchain games use non-fungible tokens, meaning players own and trade their own assets, Treaty differs in that it is completely on-chain, meaning all the technology is built on the blockchain.

“At our company, we think from first principles,” Cheng said in an email. “Many game organizations these days are fixated on copying successful games and adding minor features, but we don’t think this approach will work for us. Our game requires complex social relationships that existing games don’t have, so innovation is key.”

Based on early games in the chain and extensive research conducted by Curio Research, Cheng envisioned Treaty and designed the entire game from scratch. Since then, Curio has hired another game designer and a developer located in China.

Instead of building on existing games, Cheng and his partners wanted to create a new kind of game where players wouldn’t just focus on organizing large armies or managing economies. Instead, the game features their interactions with other players.

Because the treaty is completely on-chain and focuses on building social relationships, Chen said it gives players “more autonomy and mobility.” The Treaties attempts to place negotiations with opponents, treaties and social interactions at the center of the game.

“A lot of times when these games launch a token, it’s just like they’re no longer designing for the game and the players, they’re just trying to pump the price which defeats the purpose,” Chen explained.

The company has already received $2.9 million from investors such as Bain Capital Crypto and TCG Crypto.

With these investments, Curio Research is working to launch the official version of the treaty. Treaty held its first public demonstration at the end of January, where over 300 players tested the game for ten days.

“Games can bring people together in ways that are impossible in the real world, creating bonds that last a lifetime,” Cheng explained in an email. “We are a group of creatives focused on building games that create rich and expansive social interactions through the composition of crypto and the power of smart contracts.”