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Competing For NFTs And Tokens In A Simulated Economy With Alien Worlds
More exciting things are happening in Web3 gaming with Alien Worlds once again taking the lead. In this sponsored episode of Edge of NFT, Evan Dean and Matthew Grigajtis discuss the latest developments at Alien Worlds, a decentralized gaming metaverse which allows players to compete for NFTs and tokens in a simulated economy. Evan, from Galactic Hubs, emphasizes the importance of detailed plans from developers and a focus on how NFTs can enhance player experiences. Matthew, a developer for Trillium Quest, explains how their game integrates with the WAX blockchain, allowing players to trade and use NFTs seamlessly. The unique aspect of Trillium Quest is its integration with the Alien Worlds metaverse, offering a multiplayer version and plans for VR development. They also highlight the upcoming tokenized lore initiative, where community contributions will influence the game’s narrative through AI-driven large lore models. Tune in to learn more!
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Competing For NFTsAnd Tokens In A Simulated Economy With Alien Worlds
Stay tuned for this episode to learn how a game that began in 2020 has turned into a vibrant metaverse with 6 planets and an interplanetary DAO-based ecosystem continuing to push the boundaries of Web3 AI and gaming.
Next, we’ll look at a brief debate over RuneScape or The Witcher 3 as the greatest game ever created.
Which factors contributed to the growth in the gaming market for Web3, and how might it be influencing user engagement in comparison to other sectors?
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This sponsored episode features** Evan Dean**, who helps lead the Galactic Hubs Grant Program in Alien Worlds. He has a well-decorated background in marketing with expertise in managing ecosystem partnerships for blockchain networks and fan engagement startups. Meanwhile, we also have** Matthew Grigajtis**.
Matt is a seasoned full-stack software engineer who graduated from Southern New Hampshire University. He has been programming Maestro since 1998, with a notable distinct in medical development during his time at Health First Medical Group, but don’t let that fool you. Matt also excels in developing cutting-edge business systems for manufacturing, finance, and more. With his diverse skillset alongside his knowledge of various industries, including blockchain, AI, and scrum mastery, he’s a jack of all trades, so to speak, at Arch Games.
Alien Worlds is a decentralized gaming metaverse on Ethereum, WAX, and BNB smart chain, which allows players to compete for NFTs and tokens in an assimilated economy. Posting impressive on-chain metrics with nearly 200,000 daily users and at least 769,000 monthly transactions in a trading volume of 42 million, it’s the metaverse to be on. Founded by McKenna, Michael Yates, and Rob Allen, the games’ six planetary DAOs stand central to decisions. TLM serves as the end-game currency and NFT-spanned land tools, minions, weapons, and avatars and with the introduction of the interoperability bridge players, even earn TLM in Minecraft.
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Gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.
Thank you for having us.
What’s up? How’s everyone doing?
Doing well. Thanks for having us, Josh. It’s been a great opportunity for us. We are really excited to talk about Alien Worlds, Galactic Hubs, and Trilium Quest.
We’re excited, too. I’m Matthew, a fellow New Englander. I’m from Boston, so New England’s near and dear to my heart, but I’m also happy with the warmer weather over here in LA.
I’m not from New England. I’m a Buffalo, New York native.
I don’t know. That’s a fringe one. Some of you like the Patriots, and some of you don’t.
Bills all the way. Buffalo Bills is my team. I remember the four Super Bowl losses in a row back in the early ‘90s.
You’ll get yours eventually, maybe. We have Ju-Ju Smith-Schuster from the New England Patriots coming on the show soon.
That’s nice.
That’s impressive.
I’ll be sure not to mention your fan allegiances because he is a big gamer. I don’t want him to discriminate against your game.
No doubt, but Josh Allen is number one. You have to recognize that.
He has been crushing it from my fantasy football. I heard that.
I haven’t been playing fantasy football since 2023. I feel like life has been a fantasy football game in 2023. What a wild year. It’s also been a wild run for Alien Worlds. You guys are as OG as it comes. Sarah was one of the earliest guests on the show. I feel like anyone into Web3 and gaming which isn’t aware of Alien Worlds has been sleeping at the controller. For those that do fall in that category, Evan, we should give our audience a little bit of background on Alien Worlds and how it’s evolved over its existence. We talked about it a little bit. It started back in the day.
- Alien Worlds started off as a mining game but has since evolved into this massive social metaverse. This 2023, we’ve seen the introduction of six planetary DAOs. From there, we’ve seen 2,000 community proposals that have led to a variety of games, apps, and content all being developed with the games’ NFTs and fungible tokens at their core.
2000s. That’s incredible.
That’s super impressive.
That’s a testament to how community-driven we are as a metaverse. It’s been really great and fascinating to see this transform into what is a community-led sci-fi world where the game’s lore and IP are the key threads linking those projects together.
Matthew, when did you catch on to Alien Worlds, and what caught your attention?
I was aware of it back in 2021. I really liked the prospect that there’s a wide-open canvas to paint on, so to speak.
I like that a lot. One of the things that Evan mentioned was the 2000 proposals, but that creates competition. With creating that competition, there are a lot of really cool ways that players can compete for digital assets and tokens within Alien Worlds. Can you break that down a little bit more for us?
Absolutely. Competition is a huge part of the planetary DAOs. You have these six planetary DAOs all competing against each other for the valuable resource, Trilium, which is the fungible token. As a player, you can compete with NFTs that have assigned attributes to be able to mine the currency for yourself. You can then have the staking of the Trilium to your aligned planet.
If I’m a player, I earn Trilium and align it with the planet by staking it to the planet. By doing so, I’m increasing the chances of that planet or team generating more Trilium for the planet’s treasury. You can think of these massive treasuries that are used to create and build applications, games, you name it. You’ve seen it. You’re right. Competition is a big part of that.
How has that played out? I remember some of the Alien Worlds team telling me about this shift that was going to happen a few years ago, if I recall. Even Art Basel, we were talking about it IRL. How’s that competitive fervor shaken out? Have there been any surprises along the way that caught you off guard in terms of how the dynamics of competition have evolved?
The answer is yes. We’re pioneering what DAOs can be, what they ought to be, and sometimes, what they shouldn’t be. There aren’t any rules to how you play the game. By playing the game, I mean being a custodian. As a custodian, I’m representing the interests of my community. Like in the real world, a politician doesn’t always do what you think he or she should do. There are going to be surprises. There’s going to be a lot of politicking. That’s a part of the ecosystem. A lot of the real-world stuff that we see is happening in the metaverse but in a different way because we have the technology.
Have there been any backstabbing moments that caught the community off guard?
Yeah. I am not a part of the custodianship, but I can say that there have been stories of close-knit groups that all of a sudden, a week later, they’re no longer at the helm of the community and some anonymous group has taken over. It takes a while to find out who those people are. Do they get doxxed? We don’t know. It depends on how much information is out there.
What’s really cool about all of this is that you don’t have these rigid systems in place. It’s very flexible. What comes with that as an output is anything could take place. There is backstabbing and politicking. It’s all happened. We hope to see more of that happen because that really creates culture and what a community will stand for and what it won’t stand for. It’s an interesting dynamic.
For those of you reading, I’m drinking an energy drink. I felt like it was the spirit of the show. JOCKO GO is my real energy-zero crash drink. They’re not a sponsor of the show. They should be because I drink it all the time. This gets me fired up. I want to go play. What do you think, Richard?
A good energy drink can get you going. I know when I do my road trips, I do that. Speaking of energy, one of the energies that have been coming at a high pace over at Alien Worlds is Trilium Quest. Matt, I know you’ve been working on that and have been changing the narrative from player to player based on how their experience is going. Can you provide a glimpse into how that is changing the future of gaming as you’re allowing for true ownership to become possible?
True ownership in Trilium Quest? What do you mean by that? Can you specify that a little bit?
From the sense of the NFTs that are being provided and how people are able to take that and, I believe, go cross-game with it.
Trilium Quest is a standard rogue-like dungeon crawler. If you remember Final Fantasy on the Super Nintendo, It is heavily inspired by the earlier Final Fantasy games of the early ‘90s. It’s heavily inspired by that. Our philosophy on this one is that we’re going to make every single item in the game, every single enemy, and every single consumable in NFT that can be moved on and off-chain from the game itself and then do whatever you want with it once you get it on the chain.
If you want to sell it on Atomic Hub, that’s fine. If you want to make your own game with them, whatever. That’s where that comes in. We also allow the importation of certain alien world NFTs into the game-to-function as if they were Trilium Quest NFTs as well. If you have certain NFTs, you can import them. There’s a direct translation of what they are in-game, and you can use those in-game as well.
You guys have a fun trailer for the game that you are nice enough to share with us. Matthew, maybe you can walk us through some of this.
Sure thing. We have some video of some combat with some creatures walking around some of the dungeons. It shows some of the crafting mechanics, some of the casting or tech abilities, some of the NPCs, and some more combat. Join us on Discord and Telegram. It’s very impressive whoever put this together. It’s a nice video.
Something that is important to talk through is I believe people can go play this. It is available, correct?
That is correct. You can go to my personal Itch.io account and download this. We are going to have the official releases on the website as soon as we connect this to the main net. The bridge, which is Trilium-Quest.net, for the NFTs is only active on the Testnet. Soon, it will be on the main net and the files will be directly downloadable on that website. You can go to my own Itch account, which is also linked to the website. If you go to Trilium-Quest.net, you will be able to get a link directly to the downloads. They are available there. You can see it there and start playing away.
That’s very cool. Matthew, I felt a little bit of Zelda in the imagery I saw. I am curious. It felt nostalgic yet innovative. What were some of the inspirations behind Trilium Quest?
Exactly all of that. There is the original Legend of Zelda. I was a huge Final Fantasy fan back in the day. There is the Dragon Warrior, which I believe has been renamed the Dragon Quest since a certain day in the US. I grew up playing those games, so I look back on them very fondly. I even play through some of them occasionally. Every now and then, I play through the original Legend of Zelda from start to finish and even the second quest because it was so much fun. It was a great game, a timeless classic.
There is also Ultima. I can’t believe I forgot to mention Ultima. I loved Ultima back in the early ‘90s. Seven was my favorite. There is a lot of influence from that because Ultima was one of the pioneers of good, classic role-playing games with how the spell-casting system worked and the interaction of the environments. Although, Ultima 8 was a bit of a step back in terms of that. If any of you followed any of those retro classics, have any of you played that one?
I have not, but I played a lot of what you called out. Of the host, I’m the gamer. I enjoy playing a lot of these different games. One of the callouts I do want to say is you were able to build this game through Galactic Hubs. Can you talk through us about how that experience has been and what that meant for being able to bring your vision to life?
It has been a journey, that’s for sure, of getting from here to there. We started this way back in the beginning of 2023. We’ve been working on this for 8 to 10 months, if memory serves me correctly. We were approached by James from Magor.
Magor being the planetary syndicate?
Yes. One of the planetary syndicates. That is why the game takes place on Magor to begin with because they initiated the project. I’m not the finance guy. I’m the technical lead. From what I understand, there were applications for a grant. I don’t know who did that. It was either our guy, Alex, or James himself who went through Galactic Hubs and was able to land us the grant to allow us to develop the game going forward. It was a lot of work involved, that’s for sure. There have been several artists and several developers. We cheated with the music and used AI-generated music in some spots.
I don’t know if that’s cheating.
It is because I originally wanted to get Meg Lee Chin to do the music for it. I don’t know if you know who that is. She was a big industrial person back in the ‘90s who was with an obscure band called Pig Face and did a lot of raw material. I know her personally and wanted her to do it, but she wanted too much money.
It would’ve been cheating if you used her voice without her permission to do the music or used her.
We wouldn’t do that. We wouldn’t use her voice.
It’s not cheating. It’s a little bit of extra assistance from AI. That’s a fascinating conversation we have a lot. We should talk about AI a little bit later.
We love it.
First, Evan, I see you sitting back. You got to play the trailer. You’re listening to what Matthew’s building. You have a dream job with what you’re doing at Galactic Hubs, which is another branch of Alien Worlds, where you get a chance to breathe life into this metaverse. I’m reflecting on your role and I’m like, “Wow.” You must be having a lot of fun.”
You got that right, Josh. I really do enjoy my job and working with teams like Matt’s to be able to bring these things to life and ultimately make the Alien Worlds experience better. One of the things that sets us apart from other grant programs in the industry is that we are more than funding. I was laughing inside when Matt said, “It’s a lot of work to be a part of Galactic Hubs.” That’s true in a lot of ways. It is a lot of work.
The reason why we’ve been effective at bringing or rolling out interesting products is that we offer tailored marketing campaigns. Our marketing department or marketing team is very much seeing grantees or projects like Trilium Quest as clients. You could think of a marketing agency and a typical client. That’s the relationship that they have. In this context, part of being in the Galactic Hubs program is receiving help and support from our marketing team.
Let’s break down the program a little bit more. To give people the context here, how big of these grants are we talking about in Trilium? We can convert it to USDC at the moment. How big are these grants? What are the support services and processes for getting these things going?
The process starts with filling out an application. You tell us how much you’re requesting in Trilium. Based on that, we have two different tiers of grants, generally speaking. We have what is called the development tier grants, which are smaller initiatives but with more flexibility. If you’re coming to us for the first time and looking to create content on a show like this, it is the, “We haven’t worked together but let’s try it out,” type of thing.
We’ll allocate up to 500,000 Trilium. You can work that out. That is around $7,000. From there, we can build on top of that relationship with that deliverable being delivered that we’re happy with. We can build that up to what’s called the pioneer tier grants, which is the higher level of engagement we have or the relationship we have with grantees. Trilium Quest is part of our pioneer tier.
We have a grant. Thank you very much. This is for full disclosure. I’m thinking out loud here. Eventually, we can do the episode from a replica of a flying saucer with a studio audience in downtown LA with some dope DJ. That would be going for the big one.
The sky is the limit. That’s where I was going to say pioneer doesn’t have a cap from scope to deliverables to budget, but you have to understand that getting to the pioneer tier is a case-by-case scenario. We really do ask for and want to see a level of commitment that would make us feel like, “These guys are serious. They’re going to take this all the way.” That’s what we found with Trilium Quest. We saw the game. This was not whipped up from the moment we met. This had already been in a development phase. It already had a testing environment so we could look at it. Ultimately, we chose Trilium Quest to get a pioneer tier grant.
Matt, I wanted to pass the mic to you for a second. What do you think sets you apart to receive it? As you are working with the team to build this out, how has that working experience been?
To my knowledge, we’re the only studio so far to do something like this to have a game that ties into WAX NFTs. I really wanted to build something like this before we encountered Magor and Alien Worlds because I learned about the WAX network and how it was the least obnoxious in terms of fees. Other networks like the Ethereum or Binance network will spam your users with transaction fees or gas fees. You look at a game like Splinterlands, which is one of the most popular games in the Ethereum network. The Ethereum network spams you with these gas fees. It’s crazy.
I remember in the past, there have been games. It might have been World of Warcraft for a while. It is where you could go into the game, find a rare item, and then sell it on some market. I thought WAX was really perfect for something like that. If you had a game where you could find a rare item and you wanted to sell it to somebody else, trade it, or do something else with it, WAX is the best environment to do something like that. It’s because you only have to put a bit of money into your CPU stake because it refreshes every 24 hours. That’s nice compared to something like Ethereum, where it’s like, “If you want to send over this NFT, you have to pay $8.” That’s a bit much. That WAX platform is much better for that.
It was really easy to integrate, for the most part, with caveats. It can get a little bit tricky when you’re talking about the WAX Cloud wallet because, for the most part, it’s web-only. It can be difficult to access that from the game engine because you don’t have access to your keys in the Cloud network. Most people don’t even know what those are. It’s a balancing act to have the bridge on a website that can integrate with these things. It’s not so much directly in-game, which was very difficult. To my knowledge, we’re the only ones on the WAX network to do something like this and have a game that interacts with the chain in such a way that I envisioned years ago. That’s all that.
Was that for me or was that for Evan?
That was for Evan.
I had plenty.
Either that or Pokémon cards.
Matt, what about you?
Did you have a go-to?
Junk at a yard sale, for sure.
The Meta Quest Three.
How do you like it?
I’m very impressed with it.
How about you, Evan?
Matt, what is the most recent thing you sold?
How about you, Evan?
Do you remember the brand?
Yes. It’s a Swiss brand, Certina.
Matt, what about you?
Exactly.
You’ve reached Nirvana. Congratulations.
Amen. I ditto that.
How about you, Evan?
I feel you on that one. How about you, Evan?
What about you, Matt?
Were you doing some dev work?
I don’t miss those days.
Richard, do we have a bonus question?
Besides Alien Worlds.
The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, for sure.
How about you, Evan?
Matt, do you want to go first or should I?
I’m not really sure, so you can handle that.
You can read about Trilium Quest and play it by going to Trilium-Quest.net. That website will have all the information for Trilium Quest, like where to download it. There’s the bestiary, the page with all the enemies. You could get all hyped up. You can see what’s there and what’s available. I’m not very active on social media. That’s due to my tunnel vision. I’m so focused on work. I forget to talk to other people a lot. I do have a Twitter. It’s @FloridaDataNerd, if I remember correctly, but I hardly ever tweet. It’s only when I’m complaining about Sean McDermott.
I hope so.
We’ll see. We’re trying to dethrone Miami.
Important Links
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Discord – Trilium Quest
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Twitter – Alien Worlds Official
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@FloridaDataNerd - Twitter
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Spotify – Edge of NFT Podcast
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iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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@EdgeOfNFT – Twitter
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Instagram – Edge of NFT
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Facebook – Edge of NFT
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