Alpha & Beta testing NFT games + chatting with Loopify about Treeverse - Issue #3
This the third in a series of posts that had been originally published on Revue.co With Revue shutting down, the Bored Ape Games on Chain blog/newsletter is moving here and will be mirrored at thechaingamer.eth on Mirror.
This article was originally published on Jan 5, 2022
Welcome to my newsletter, Bored Ape Games on Chain.
I’m going to be focusing on the intersection of blockchain and gaming. I believe we’re going to see tremendous growth in this area over the coming years and I hope to document some of that here and share it with you, the community.
In this issue, we’ll cover Loopify’s projects: NFTrees, Treeverse & Interleave, and how they all fit together.
Additionally, I’ve had a chance to try out a few blockchain games! Thetan Arena, Paladin Pandas and Legends of Venari. The first one launched in November, but the other two just recently released early versions of their games.
Playable NFT Games
Happy New Year!
Over the last few weeks, I’ve actually been engrossed in games that’ve incorporated NFTs and I can assure you, this is just the beginning!
2022 is going to be the year of NFT Games!
Thetan Arena
Thetan Arena is a NFT MOBA for PC & Mobile that uses KardiaChain. It’s seen tremendous growth in a very short time! The website now shows over 12 million players, although this might actually be the number of downloads, and not the unique players. Either way, that’s still an impressive number.
Thetan Arena, a MOBA incorporating NFTs
There have been a number of issues with the game since its’ launch.
The tokens aren’t doing too well. There’s been concern around the fact that $THC and $THG don’t offer all that much utility right now. Personally, I don’t think that should be an issue long term, but short term the impact on price is obvious.
$THC almost hit $1 & $THG was at $21
The killer issue for me was the bots. There were a large number of bots in the game that led to many YouTube videos and posts from an annoyed player base. Lots of mobile games have bots to make match making easier etc. but it hits different in a MOBA. A MOBA is primarily a competitive game and with the bot issue being as bad as it was, you could pretty much tell who would win a match by looking at which team had fewer bots.
Apart from the fact that the bots were awful, another tell was the obvious naming convention used for them. You also couldn’t invite them to play or add them as friends.
In the screenshot below, you can see that I had 3 bots on my team, the enemy team had 2.
You get a bot, you get a bot, you get a bot, YOU ALL GET A BOT!
This issue has been largely addressed, I think, due to a few changes the team made, primarily around limiting game modes that could be played at one time to 2 from 6.
The biggest concern however, in my opinion, has been the complete lack of communication on game issues. I haven’t seen a single tweet, discord, or telegram comment from the team even mentioning bots. It feels like the team sees the outrage, tries to solve the problem behind closed doors, all while not saying a word to its community. As an active player, that doesn’t feel good.
Amidst all these problems, I have honestly still been enjoying the game which shows that it has potential. It’s fun and is quick to play: a match takes about 4 minutes or so. I think the team can really make this something special if they play their cards, staring with improving their communication. I could see Thetan Arena become a pretty fun mobile e-sports game over the long term!
Paladin Pandas
This is one that I’m probably emotionally the most attached to. That’s primarily because of the story behind it. During a late-night NFT twitter session, I stumbled on to the OHDAT twitter page. From there, I went to the website, obvious next step, and I found dancing T-Rex Battle Mechs with different background music tracks & different dance moves 🤣.
So of course, I aped in, minting 9. The mint was expensive, 0.09 ETH each, if I recall correctly. The discord community was small but engaging. I don’t remember how many people many were there, but definitely not many, maybe less than 100?
The team had a fun/crazy treasure hunt going on where you collected clues and responded to a bot via discord. Winners won a special edition T-Rex Mech and got fancy discord server titles!
The sale failed. A little over 700 Battle Mechs were minted, the team was super communicative, conducting votes in real-time on the discord. One of the votes was on whether or not to continue the Battle Mech sale and the community voted to end the sale.
The team executed on that, and immediately began planning for their second mint. They were going to reward genesis minters by airdropping them the new NFTs, while they worked on building the community in parallel so the second sale would be a success.
And it was.
The server has almost 40K people now. The Paladin Pandas Collection sold out and has done over 2K ETH in secondary since. Paladins Pandas had hit about 0.25 ETH so almost 5x returns for folks who minted. They’re currently at 0.097 ETH, but that’s not the main point.
Paladin Pandas Collection Page on OpenSea
The main point is they were/are working on a game! One that just had a beta release. I tried it out and really enjoyed it. It’s currently more around squad building and placement with combat being mostly idle, but I think there’s a lot of potential there, especially with their newly unveiled Roadmap 2.0.
Roadmap 2.0 for Paladin Pandas
The game itself is fun/easy to get into and play. The beta was quite polished! They even included a couple of mini games during the fifteen battle campaign, which served as nice breaks between battles. I recorded my entire playthrough of the beta, which you can check out below!
Lots more to do, but from what I have seen so far, it looks very convincing. Here’s hoping that 2022 brings lots of cool stuff to the Paladin Pandas ecosystem!
Legends of Venari
In my last newsletter I wrote about Legends of Venari and the conversation I had with their CEO, Jason, and their CMO, Drew.
Since then, the alpha season has launched. NFT games twitter is abuzz with folks tweeting about the different Genesis Venari they’re catching. It has been a super fun experience!
Before the game, I understood what they were trying to do with the whole capturing experience as the Pokémon GO similarities gave me a decent frame of reference but actually playing it was so much better than I’d expected!
Laticus, a very commonly found bug Venari, has already become a meme amongst the community. Many of us, who want to earn our place on the right side of history, rightfully hate this bug. There are others who do not see Laticus for the nuisance that it is. They are foolish. Maybe they will learn. 🤣
Laticus, my nemesis. We meet again.
From what I can tell, growth has been quite organic. Everyone who has played the game has *loved* the collection aspect of it.
The core loop is simple enough.
The City of Tecta
You start out in the Tecta region and have access to three locations, and a Tier 0 Makeshift Rig (this is like your reusable Pokéball).
Prepping for the expedition. You can choose a rig (required) and bait (optional).
You buy bait to set it out in each location. A countdown starts from 15 minutes and slowly Venari start showing up on the grid.
The encounter begins!
During the encounter, you can take actions, three times, from a list of three actions: Feed, Play or Fight.
My collection
There are many different Venari for you to capture. There are 114 different variations since each Venari can come in 6 different elements. Venari also have different rarity tiers. In the screenshot above, the third Venari is a Tier 2 Vespille!
It’s simple. It’s fun. It’s addictive. It is, to use Pokémon terminology, SUPER EFFECTIVE!
A number of Axie Guilds have also partnered with Legends of Venari and their guild members are hard at work trying to capture all the genesis Venari they can!
Here’s a short video playthrough that shows me failing to catch a T2 Vespille, an encounter with Laticus, and browsing around my collection!
I’m quite excited to see what 2022 has in store for the game. I sense great things to come and can’t wait to see what the team delivers!
Treeverse, visiting the Wizard's Den
We’ve covered games that are out so far, but there’s one game that I’ve been really been looking forward to throughout 2021. It’s not an understatement to say Treeverse is probably the game I’m excited for most in 2022.
I reached out to Loopify 🧙♂️ to ask some questions about Treeverse, its sub-projects and Interleave.
How did he enter the NFT space? What made him pursue building, even after his tremendous success in the space?
I’ll let Loop set it up in his own words:
I stumbled upon the NFT space as an artist. I stopped creating art a few months in, the main reason being I became passionate about building projects, that were possibly due to NFT technology.
I never really had a plan, especially from the beginning. Sort of went with the flow. The gaming industry was obvious as someone who looked at the market from an investing and collectors’ perspective. This is when I really thought of the idea of blockchain games, my thesis was validated by Axie, but I started building Treeverse before that. I have STRONG belief in myself and was confident Treeverse was going to do well.
Media was something I thought of a few months after Treeverse, Interleave was inspired by collectible projects giving IP out to users (shout out Bored Apes for being one of the first). But then again, Treeverse was going to be something completely different at the beginning, a mix between a social MMO and NiftyGateway was the first idea.
I missed the Treeverse mint when it happened earlier this year in August. I was trying to remember how I heard about Treeverse and I can’t quite recall. This year has been like several years compressed into one! It was most likely via NFT twitter while looking for gaming projects or one of the discords I’d joined.
It was on the 3rd of August when I aped in and got a couple of Founders’ Plots on Opensea and that’s when my Treeverse journey began.
Missed the mint, but got in on the 3rd of August
The Private Alpha was just a sneak peek at what the team was really looking to build. The messaging was (at least to me) quite clear. This is a long-term project.
From then on it has been a constant, slow and steady stream of information coming from Loop and the team.
By the way, when Loop mentioned “building Treeverse before that” when talking about the success Axie saw earlier in the year, part of what he is talking about is NFTrees, the first NFT collection in the Treeverse universe, which so far contains, NFTrees, Founders’ Private Plots and Timeless.
NFTrees were announced end Jan. The launch happened in Feb and instantly sold out. It was a collection of 420 trees.
The NFTrees post on Loop-News
This was the genesis collection. Work on Treeverse had already begun. Hiring for the game began as soon as the collection sold out.
NFTrees Roadmap
The next big update was on June 26th and I encourage you all to read it in its entirety here.
Treeverse private alpha title screen
It was in this same post, where we not only get a look at the title and gameplay screens from the alpha, but Loop also mentioned the following:
In addition to this, I’d like to announce another massive project that I am working on that will be partnered with Treeverse.
This is a unique project featuring Apes and NFTs from some of your favourite artists along with DeFi mechanisms to gamify the experience. Stay tuned.
Interleave was in the works!
Treeverse private alpha game screen
Fast forward a little, the Founders’s Private Plot mint happens in August, and all 10K plots sell out within hours, with the discord continuously growing.
The alpha video went up within a few days to give the community a look at what the private alpha would look like.
Since August, a few key updates have been:
The announcement and release of Timeless. An avatar collection that can be used in the Treeverse world. You could only mint them if you held NFTrees or FPPs
Treeverse closed a seed round that was co-led by IDEO Ventures & Animoca Brands
The Interleave genesis token dropped.
According to Loopify, interleave is the media company that will be the “Arcane” to the Treeverse’s “League of Legends”.
There’s so much going on! So how does this all fit together and what are Loop’s plans for the coming year?
My vision is that Interleave will become top quality in terms of production, whether that be outsourcing or getting top quality in-house. I’m also 1000% confident Treeverse will be a massive game in the future, one of the biggest, if not the biggest blockchain games. Me creating Treeverse and Interleave is the only thing in the NFT space currently comparable to LoL and Arcane. No one is even trying things out, it’s the same old, same old. I’m confident that we will start off as the LoL and Arcane (yes, I know that it’s a production and not the production studios’ name) of Web3, and then become bigger.
We have some ideas for Interleave and Treeverse connecting, purely because I am the founder, so I am thinking of ways that connect both projects. However, they are still separate projects. You can imagine the lore of Treeverse split across different mediums: quests in-game, 3D animated films, Mangas and Animes, (ft. Timeless!? 😉) rather than in 1 specific way.
2022 is going to be an even bigger year for NFTs. So, it will be even bigger for Treeverse. We have plans to make a superior team of 50+ people and hopefully release our playable version with our tokens Q4 2022. No idea when we can get an alpha for the game before that but expect it when we think we are ready to launch.
There is a lot of work that lies ahead of Loopify and team if they’re to accomplish these incredibly ambitious goals. I’m quite optimistic though. I’m getting Guild of Guardian vibes from the game and the way they’re progressing! We are definitely still early, and there’s *never* a guarantee when it comes to product development, and game development is just SO much harder.
Treeverse will become one of the biggest games ever, having everyone talk about it. I’m pretty confident this happens. 5-10 years down the line is a long way away, in this time, Endless Clouds will become like Riot Games. We will build more games, while making everything sustainable. Sustainability is key. I can’t share much about what we have planned now, because we are focused on the present, and the future will be built on the boundaries we set now, so it’s key we do it right. Oh, also, Interleave will be like Marvel ;)
Loop’s vision is quite something! It really resonates with me. Building worlds and telling stories through a number of mediums.
I’m confident 2022 is going to be a hell of a year for crypto gaming. I think Treeverse will be a big part of that and I’m here for it!
Official Resources:
NFTrees | Full Overview - by Loopify - The Loop News
Join the The Treeverse Discord Server!
Treeverse (🌱) (@TheTreeverse) | Twitter
Interleave (@interleaveCC) | Twitter
Endless Clouds (@EndlessCloudsHQ) / Twitter
DISCLAIMER
Here are my holdings for the NFT Games projects that were covered in this letter.
Thetan Arena: I bought 1200 and some $THC, which I used to buy 1 Thetan Arena NFT Hero. I’ve been using in-game earning to unlock more NFTs.
Paladin Pandas: I minted their genesis collection and because of that I got airdropped 10 Paladin Panda NFTs.
Legends of Venari: The team gifted me an alpha pass. I also bought 4 gilded passes on OpenSea.
Treeverse: I currently hold 4 Founders’ Plots, 2 Timeless and 22 Interleave Genesis tokens.