Parasol Brings Trading Card Gaming Experience to Sui

For decades, trading card games, collectible monsters, and gacha games—think Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic: The Gathering—captivated legions of loyal fans around the world. But they’ve largely stayed in the realm of Web2 games, arcade games, and even physical trading cards. That’s finally changing.

With the release of a new open-source game called Capybara Fusion, the upcoming Code of Joker: Evolutions, and more large-scale, collectible-based games coming soon, Parasol is showing developers—and the world—that Sui makes it possible to marry Web3 technology with the massive scale of these games.

Rebuilding Code of Joker for the mobile era

Parasol, which was recently acquired by Mysten Labs, is an end-to-end platform built on Sui that makes it easier for developers to integrate blockchain infrastructure into their games.

When the company was founded in early 2022, it knew Web3 gaming could be much better.

“We noticed that Web3 gaming often falls short on mechanics and creativity because many projects are overly focused on pushing NFTs,” said Kai Chen, former CEO of Parasol who now leads the gaming group within Mysten. “This splits players into two groups: those with deep pockets who don't care about gameplay, and passionate gamers uninterested in NFTs.”

Parasol wanted to find a way to build blockchain infrastructure that could create the same feeling of delight that players get from collecting physical cards—and do that on a massive scale. So it decided to focus on games with great art, deep legacies, and large, devoted fan bases, and then bring those games onto the blockchain to create engaging gaming experiences with unmatched performance, giving players verifiable rarity, provable randomness, and true ownership over every collectible.

Early on, the company saw big potential with the beloved digital trading card game Code of Joker, which was originally released as an arcade game by Sega Corporation in 2013. This level of popularity and need for interoperability made it just the kind of challenge Parasol was looking for.

At launch, Parasol’s platform—and Sui’s underlying infrastructure—will enable players to prove digital ownership, trade, and showcase their collections. 

Code of Joker: Evolutions will be free to play, with monetization coming in the form of trading cards. The game will be available on iOS and Android this Fall.

A starting point for building games on Sui

At the same time, the company wants to empower other game developers to build their own creations.

“We want game developers and creatives to be able to focus on doing what they do best, which is creating great games,” said Chen. “We focus on the complexities of integrating blockchain into their game.”

Through the Parasol platform, developers can create collections and templates for NFTs, essentially providing them with a no-code tool for creating assets (like card packs or unique trading cards) and controlling their supply and distributing them.

In order to inspire developers and show off what can be done with the Parasol platform, the team built a new game called Capybara Fusion, which is available now as a web-based game. The game is centered around recruiting and collecting capybaras, and cooperating with other players to help repair the capybara world. When a player starts out in the world, things like windmills and windows are broken, and players solve merge puzzle games to build objects—like a wrench or a pile of lumber—that can be used to repair them.

“The awesome thing about this game is that it is fully cooperative,” said Chen. “Everybody who plays the game is contributing to the same goal of repairing the same world, and users can trade items to help fulfill quests.”

Behind the scenes, every action is chronicled on the blockchain. And there are other mechanics around trading, such as collecting the capybaras and imbuing them with verifiable traits.

Capybara Fusion is open source, so game developers can clone the repository and start building their own games on Sui.

Using Sui for speed and scale

For Chen, there is one killer feature that made Sui stand far above the competition: speed. 

“The speed of processing transactions on Sui creates a very polished experience for players. Gamers these days are very critical and expect a high production value,” he said, citing data that if a loot box takes more than 3 or 4 seconds to open, it’s common for gamers to drop out of the app. “With a lot of these animations that are dependent on receiving items from the game or from other players, we take performance for granted in Web2 games. But they’re only made possible in Web3 with the speed and latency of Sui.”

The second thing that drew the Parasol team to Sui is that its object model provides clarity to the code base. 

“Sui provides a very sensible way of reasoning with the objects that are in your game,” said Chen. “The PTBs (programmable transaction blocks) allowed us to optimize on gas fees and make the costs very low for developers and players, while increasing the throughput of transactions and overall performance of the game."

In addition, Parasol is using zkLogin to create a smooth onboarding experience for Web2 users, so they don’t have to register a wallet or use private keys.

“No prior knowledge of Web3 is required to play these games,” said Chen. “We want players to come for the love of the game and the characters.”

Eventually though, some specific Web3 features will be enabled for advanced users who are more deeply invested in the game, such as the ability to trade their assets in an open marketplace. In that way, Chen says these games can help Web2 users discover the value of Web3 while remaining approachable to everyone.

Expanding the deck

With a strong platform already in place, Parasol is just getting started. Since loyalty to trading card games and collectible monsters is amplified in Asia, according to Chen, Parasol’s early focus is on working with existing IP from major studios in Japan. But with a goal of creating games on a global scale, players can expect more announcements from the company in the near future.