Disclaimer: This is a theoretical article that tries to draft a long term vision for the Interlude project. It is purely speculative and propositional, and doesn’t make any claim or value judgment on any existing work, process, methodology in the field of game development. To get more practical info on the Interlude project please read our main article or head to our website.
1. Waiting for the Metaverse
The rise of game engine technologies has democratized the production of video game and 3D content in general. The type of content that took a John Carmack-led team of experienced programmers 20 years ago can now be produced by small teams, and even by solo developers. Furthermore, today’s game engines are not just 3D graphics libraries, but provide complete ecosystems, with asset marketplaces and huge communities of enthusiastic users ready to help each other. All in all, these ecosystems have empowered hundreds of thousands of developers to create some incredibly cool stuff.
Easy-to-use and state-of-the-art graphics technologies. Huge assets banks with thousands of 3d models, plugins, shaders, and the like. Communities of tens of thousands of enthusiastic and passionate developers… It seems all the key ingredients for a user-generated content revolution are here, and we should already be witnessing the age of the Metaverse dawning upon us. And yet nothing of the sort is happening. There have been several attempts at harnessing the power of crowds to build collectively the fantastic virtual worlds of the mythical Metaverse, but one element is always missing… Players! The players are nowhere to be found!
With Unity and the Asset Store you can build a low-fi clone of Doom or Call of Duty as a solo developer, just by working on your week-ends and free time. But that won’t interest players. They already have the original!
The players — at least the majority of them — don’t care about the Metaverse, and they don’t care about small, low-quality games created by users or hobbyists. They play either the big AAA games like Fortnite and LoL, or maybe the successful indie games for the most adventurous; but up until now it has been very hard for user generated, non professional content to reach the mainstream public.
“The threshold to satisfy today’s public expectations is out of reach for non-professionals”
Making a game on your own is really hard. Creating a complete game with several hours of content, a backstory, UI, custom art assets, all with sufficient polish and sufficiently few bugs is a herculean task for a solo dev. The threshold to satisfy today’s public expectations is almost out-of-reach even if you dedicate all our time to your project, let alone if it’s just a hobby on top of a full-time job.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Game engines (and in particular Unity) give us some incredible creative possibilities, and the asset stores have tens of thousands of gorgeous assets. We should be able to use them to create something fun for players, that makes money, without having to sacrifice 7 years of our life. We have to be more demanding!
As a Unity developer I want three simple things:
- I want to work on cool games. I want to work on a 3D game like Elder Scrolls or Doom, like FPS and RPGs. Unfortunately today it’s almost impossible to build a complete 3D game as an hobbyist
- it has to be easy. I don’t want to spend weeks and weeks working in my room 12 hours a day, fixing bugs and play testing again and again to maybe find the right mechanics that maybe will make this a success. I just want the easy part: buying assets on the Asset Store, building cool maps, putting some monsters and characters here and there, imagining cool stories. In particular the last 5% in any project are always the hardest and most nightmarish; let’s just stop at 95%, and not care too much about polishing.
- it has to be successful. I want a lot people to play it, a lot of excitement. With streamers on Twitch playing the game for tens of thousands of viewers, the media talking about it, etc… Also it would be cool if it made some money, so I can build some passive side income while doing that.
This won’t be possible if each hobbyist tries to build their own game, their own low-fi copy of successful games on their side.
They need to unite!
2. Unity is the key
Fundamentally there has to be a reason why a player chooses a game in particular, among the tens of thousands of existing games. It can be anything — a great story, beautiful visuals, the size and breadth of content, or an original mechanics — but there has to be something unique to this game, that will entice the players.
Solo developers and hobbyists have very limited means to achieve this. They can’t create AAA level graphic assets — it takes weeks to design a single character, that’s not realistic for a single dev. They can’t create huge open worlds, and they don’t have million-dollar marketing budgets to kick-start a community and hype their games. Sometimes they stumble upon a new enjoyable mechanic (eg Minecraft) but that is a one-in-a-thousand occurrence. Most of the time the best they can do is a small-scale clone of an existing concept, with low-quality graphics, and maybe a personal touch. Nothing that would make the game stand apart from the tens of thousands of other games.
There is a simple solution: we need to build a meta-game. We need a way to make all these hobbyist-made small games part of a unique, world-scale game loop. To win at the meta-game — a huge game with millions of players, huge prizes and global recognition — you will need to play these small games.
If we succeed we could get a game of a scale never seen before, out of reach for even the biggest studios.
“Quantity has a quality of its own”. If we manage to do that, to integrate the games of tens of thousands of hobbyists into a single game loop, we can get a game of a scale never seen before. A scale that would be out-of-reach of even the biggest studios. Then that could certainly interest players and — provided we share the revenue in a fair way — every developer could be rewarded in proportion to what they bring to the game.
Now we start to see how the concepts of decentralization and crypto might help us.
We’re talking of having tens, even hundreds of thousands of developers collaborating on a single project, on one unique cultural creation. There’s no way we can do this in a traditional, centralized way with a game director managing these thousands of contributors. We need to decentralize the design of this meta-game: to create a set of rules that will govern both the game creation and the sharing of profits, and allow thousands of developers to collaborate without a manager or a company to tell them what to do.
In other words, we need a protocol.
3. Introducing game protocols
There would certainly be a way to describe this more formally, but for the time being we can satisfy ourselves with a practical definition:
we call game protocol a set of rules, or standards, that allow uncoordinated game designers (with no central direction) to create a game together — a meta-game.
Developers would “implement the protocol”, i.e. create their own small game by following these rules. The protocol is what would give unity to all these uncoordinated, developer-made small games, and allow them to form a unified game-play experience — a meta-game. And the (meta-)game state would be stored on the blockchain, with its transition rules written once and for all as a smart contract and accepted by everyone, players and developers.
What would that look like in practice? We will have a lot of trial and errors to answer this, but with a bit of imagination we can already propose some examples. What about a decentralized quest system, where players would need to find items in some games to finish quests in others? Where you would need to find a magic artifact in a fantasy world to save a planet in a sci-fi game? We could also have a Combat Protocol, with NFT weapons that could be used across the hundreds of games that would implement it… The possibilities are truly endless.
Now the big question is….
Could this make a successful game?
It’s too early to tell. All we know is that a lot of efforts, ideas, trial and errors will be needed. But someone has to try… and that someone is us!
4. Interlude
At Interlude our mission is to conceptualize, design, implement and bring to market these game protocols. At the moment we are a normal company, with a simple business goal: create a cryptocurrency that will be used as a native currency for all these games.
Apart from relying on a cryptocurrency, there are two reasons why crypto and decentralization is a perfect fit for this project:
- with crypto we can properly and fairly incentivize all stakeholders in the project. In particular, by distributing time-locked tokens, the game developers that will join the project (by connecting their games) will become shareholders in the project on the same level as normal team members or investors
- putting the protocols’ specification on the blockchain in an immutable way can accelerate adoption and bring it to a much higher level, since there’s no way we can change the rules of the game once the project is successful (as is the case with centralized platforms)
In the future we hope other game designers will join us and start inventing new, possibly inter-operating game protocols, so that the Interlude network will take a life on its own, completely open and decentralized — like an internet of games.
5. A proof of concept: the Scavenger Hunt Protocol
Our first protocol can be seen as an MVP, a “Minimum Viable Protocol” for this game design paradigm: the Scavenger Hunt Protocol.
As its name indicates this is a simple scavenger hunt game, that takes place across potentially thousands of small games, 3D worlds and even websites. In essence it’s the most simple “game protocol” we can build: there is just one element — one mission to fulfill— in each game node. By fulfilling the mission a player gets a key, that proves they have completed the mission. Finding a key allows the player to determine the next key to find, through a simple mathematical function.
This scavenger hunt network is permission-less, in the sense that any developer can independently choose to connect his game (or website) to it.
And it is decentralized: it relies on a simple 300 lines smart contract, with immutable logic and hard-coded parameters— there is no owner or admin able to change the rules.
Whenever a player finds a key, a few units of the Interlude’s currency— the Shell — are mined and shared between the player that found the key and the developer that hid it. Since this reward is denominated in native token, the prizes for players and the income for developers increase directly in tandem with the token price. Thus we hope to observe a virtuous circle, where an increase in the token price will make the game more spectacular for players and more profitable for developers, which will drive mind-share and further contribute to the token price’s appreciation.
Hence we get our first meta-game: a scavenger hunt across the Metaverse, Ready Player One-style!
Here’s our roadmap for the next weeks:
04/01 — project reveal
05/ 09— opening of our Continuous Token Offering
05/15 — playable demo reveal
06/01 — whitepaper + algorithm reveal
06/31 — First Scavenger Hunt
In the next months we will focus on the Scavenger Hunt Protocol. If we can make this work, we’ll take this as a validation for the “game-protocol” design paradigm and start working on bigger, more complex and more exciting things.
If you want to help us, get in touch! And follow us to stay updated:
