IntoTheVerse
Olá, this is Elio Jordan Lopes, a CompSci undergrad student at VIT University, Vellore & Co-Founder of Into The Verse, an early stage gaming startup building a Metaverse on Celo. In this blog, I would like to share my experience at the Celo Camp web3 Accelerator Batch 4, powered by Upright.
The Inception and Our Journey to the Celo Camp
Into The Verse started out as a hackathon project at the Chainlink Virtual Spring Hackathon 2021, previously known as the ‘Dungeon Crawler’. We grew up playing role-playing games with meaningful characters, stories, and objects. So we wanted to build a game on the Blockchain ourselves, as we were inspired by games like Axie Infinity, Decentraland, The SandBox Game who are building amazing solutions through metaverse experiences connecting players through gamified DeFi. We are still really early in the Play2Earn economy of metaverses and these are going to change the face of Decentralised Finance forever.
Our Co-Founders, Ramesh, Sagar and myself Elio started out building a simple dungeon based RPG game, that could mint token as reward on-chain, for every chest (loot) collected. At the end of the game, the players get a NFT as a level-pass. The player has to encounter several demons, monsters, guarding the treasure throughout the dungeon gameplay.
Our primary goal is to instil a sense of success and ownership in our players. The clean pixel aesthetic of the game harkens back to games from the early 1990s, yet the gameplay is modern and simplified.
The Celo India Fellowship, by Celo Org powered by DevFolio, provided 10 student developers from India, a chance to explore the Celo ecosystem and I am really grateful to be one of them. Here we were introduced to Celo’s mission to create a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity for everyone. It is during these span of 8 weeks, that I learnt a lot about the Celo ecosystem and the several Impact, and DeFi projects building on Celo. Our mentors, who are founders of million-dollar crypto startups and alumni of the Celo Camp Web3 Accelerator encouraged us to apply to the Camp, and time really rewards faith, our team is really grateful for being part of this amazing journey.
Our mission is to bring DeFi and Impact to the Celo Community through a Metaverse and gamified experience.
What we built during the Camp?
It really amazes me, how we were just an idea on paper, at the start of the camp, and the big efforts that the team has put in during the camp to build our MVP, and moreover, present it at the Demo Day. We were a team of three Co-Founders, and we are really thankful to our early believers, a talented group of students from my university, friends from the Celo Fellowship, designers and developers from India, Nepal and Malaysia.
Into The Verse Marketplace
We started out building the NFT Marketplace for game, which would act as a starting point for players to buy and trade characters and cosmetics for the game. We wrote the smart contracts and used Celo’s Contract-Kit and Ethers to build the minting, buying functionality.
Dungeon Hunt Game
We also started out building the Dungeon NFT game on Celo Alfajores Testnet which would produce rewards on Chain and also award NFTs to the players on every level pass. These level pass NFTs would be used act as a POAP for the coming levels as progress of the game should be stored on-chain. All characters are essentially NFTs and the game would be a multi-character NFT quest, where users would be able to buy and equip multiple characters and cosmetics and strengthen the characters to compete better.
In our long vision, the game would evolve to have 3 modes:
- Weekly Loots & Challenges
- 1v1 Stake and Earn Battles
- RPG Story mode
Users need to collect chests as loot, kill the guarding demons and monsters and get to the Celo token to obtain the level-pass NFT. On the way the player, has to unlock token gates to reach the end of the level. The keys are hidden inside the map and the user needs to find these.
Rewards are minted on chain. Our game is built on Phaser, a lightweight engine for Javascript games. Celo’s ContractKit and Forno api make it really easy to integrate your dApp with Celo. The transaction incurs CELO token as gas fees, rewards are given in cVRS game token.
Into The Verse Metaverse
Into The Verse seeks to connect players inside a pixel Metaverse. The metaverse would serve as the starting point for entry to Into The Verse. What is a metaverse ?
The metaverse serves as a token gated access to our platform. Users sign up with a wallet, create a unique name (seeking future potential collab with NomSpace).
Imagine you live in a virtual city. You have a unique identity and an NFT avatar inside the city and also own a part of the city. You can meet new players live, visit banks and swap tokens, visit shops, purchase items and use them inside the metaverse. You can add liquidity to pools in our banks, start mining in liquidity pools, earn staking rewards inside banks and live the Play2Earn economy. You can also explore various causes for Impact and donate to good causes as a sign of giving back to the community, and a lot more!
Our metaverse is coming up with a lot of new features like real estate, staking pools for real rewards and is constantly evolving. For the Camp, we have built an initial iteration of the pixel metaverse, and it would help us onboard masses to Celo and DeFi on Celo using a gamified User Experience. We want to evolve as a mobile first metaverse in the longer run, where Web3 interactions would be facilitated by the Valora mobile wallet. We have also built a smart contract that helps users donate to Impact Market Celo address everytime players visit the donation camp building on the metaverse.
We plan to launch on Ubeswap and Symmetric decentralized Exchanges in future and we spent our time working on the Ubeswap Interfaces and Routers to create native swap Counters to enable users to visit and swap assets inside the bank. cUSD would be swapped to cVRS token to help users purchase assets on the marketplace sold in exchange for cVRS tokens.
Our metaverse would serve as a channel to various ecosystem, DeFi, Impact and NFT projects on Celo and would evolve into a gargantuan product in our vision, providing users the best web3 experience.
Making Impact
Ever had the joyful feeling of reaching out as a helping hand to people of the world, Impact Market helps you do just that. On the metaverse we would be collaborating with Impact project building on Celo to make real impact and help alleviate poverty and donate to the green economy. Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much!
User Story
Wen Celo Mainnet ??
Although Into The Verse is not live on Celo Mainnet yet, but we are still in the early days, getting the opportunity to Demo at the Celo Camp Demo Day was really rewarding for the team. I would like to congratulate all the teams for the pioneering work, they’ve put during the Camp. We have received a lot of valuable support from the Celo community. We really appreciate all the help and support from the mentors at Upright, cLabs and Celo. Everyone is really excited for the day that we launch and our players get to try out the product.
We have a strong intuition that Into The Verse, will be a powerful project in the Celo ecosystem, growing hand-in-hand while supporting other ecosystem projects. We are super excited for the process! We are here to make an Impact and bring prosperity to the metaverse on Celo.
Highlights
Memorable moments:
The most memorable moments at the Camp would be the Camp mingle sessions and the Prosper sessions, where everyone would spend some time re-connecting with ourselves, splitting into breakout rooms and having powerful, productive conversations and exchange of ideas.
Moreover, I will cherish the conversations with the people working on Celo, mentors, speakers, community advocates, who helped create a difference in our lives and continue to support us after the Camp.
Right from the first meeting with Alon Shavit, Co-Founder Upright, getting to know about the Camp, pitching my startup at the pre-camp demo, and building alongside these amazing people during the camp, making true friends that will last a lifetime and help me throughout my Web3 journey, I am really grateful.
Celo Camp has really helped me develop as a team player and understand the world of startups, from conducting user research and finding the Product Market Fit, to shipping and deploying solutions effectively, networking, developing Go-to-Market Strategies, approaching investors and most importantly refining the fine-art of The Product Pitch. It has my best achievement since my time as a college student and has opened a gateway of opportunities, moving forward as a young entrepreneur and alumnus of the Celo Camp Batch 4.
Most importantly I can’t thank our team enough — Ramesh Sachan, Sagar Behara, Mitesh Pandey, Stanley Seow, Piyush Petkar, Naquiah Q, Shovin K, Gokul and Rishabh Keshan, who’ve been sailing aboard a ship, united with a vision.
Following our presentation at the Demo Day, we are thrilled to receive positive feedback, seeing so many projects and investors reaching out, and this brings so much motivation moving forward. We aim to continue building on the product, build our team and utilise the resources provided during the camp to the best advantage.
So please stay up to date with the latest developments on Into The Verse:
Follow us on Twitter
Visit our website, and stay tuned for early signups, NFT Presale and much more!
