It’s been a while since we sent out an update. I’m sorry to let you know that we’ve decided to stop work on Ethernal. It was a very hard decision for our team as we all believed in the idea—a fully decentralized dungeon crawler that players would generate and own. And we had a lot planned for the future of the game. We have spent some time exploring different options. But we agreed that this is the right thing for us.

Everyone on our core team—Lumir, Ronan, and I—as well as all of our collaborators have worked very hard and given a lot of energy and time to this project in the past year. I want to thank every one of them and our partners: Matic Network, Blockchain Game Alliance, Open Sea, PixelChain, and XAYA. 

Big thanks to the Ethernal Guardians and Dungeon Masters for helping players in the dungeon and in our Discord server, and making it more fun for all of us. Despite the many internal challenges we faced, our community’s enthusiasm has been what motivated our team for the last few months. I’m truly sad for not being able to fulfill a lot of ideas and plans we had set out. 

History of Ethernal Alpha Mumbai NFTs

As a gift to our players, we sent a History of Ethernal Alpha Mumbai (Top 20) NFT to each of our top players and a History of Ethernal Alpha Mumbai NFT categorized by character classes to all Mumbai players. These NFTs were created with player-generated historical data on the Matic blockchain (Mumbai testnet).

Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes NFTs

We had planned to sell the remaining Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes NFTs during our mainnet launch. Instead, we’ve transferred the remaining Heroes NFTs to Hermippe (@komiya_ma). Please reach out to him if you’d like to purchase one, and we encourage everyone to continue supporting his amazing pixel art. 

Ethernal codebase

We’ve wound down the game’s web app. The smart contracts that we deployed to the Matic Mumbai testnet will remain on the testnet, as well as the items minted in the dungeon. In the coming weeks, we’ll open source the Ethernal codebase for anyone who would be interested to build on the idea. For questions, you can reach us at hello@ethernal.world.

We are still excited about the potential of decentralized gaming. There are many great games to explore: Dungeon Protocol, Dark Forest, and the many games that are part of the Blockchain Game Alliance. 

Thank you all for being part of this journey with us. 

Jia
@ohjia

We’ve made a lot of fixes and updates since moving to the Matic Mumbai testnet. You can also keep track of our progress by joining our Discord community.

New Food Bank feature

A “Food” mechanism has always been designed into the dungeon gameplay. Since our game is built on-chain, every move a player makes requires gas (fee in $MATIC) to be paid. We let players pay once for “Food” which pays for all transactions, instead of paying for gas on every move (with annoying pop-ups). Players are incentivized to move in the most efficient way possible to optimize their “Food” usage.

For our Alpha, we’ve been testing “Daily Food” on Discord with our playtesters: every day at 3 PM (ET) we sent some $MATIC to players that messaged us for “Food”. Our new Food Bank feature allows players to claim free “Food” inside the game. Based on a curve, the amount of “Food” a player can claim depends on the total $MATIC balance in the Food Bank. Food Bank’s balance increases with more activities in the dungeon. I will share more details about this design in a future post.

All updates

💀 Monsters & combat

• Combat with bare hands feature

• Call for help feature

• Drop & spawn rate updates

• Monster stats updates

• Monster display updates

⚔️ Gear

• New class-specific gear

• Gear durability and stats updates

• Uncommon gear update

• Select all items in vault transfers

☄️ Dungeon Keeper

• Change room names

• Paying taxes for foreclosed rooms

🤖 Dungeon Bot

• Notifications for all activities

Economy

• Claim free food from the Food Bank

• Healing cost update

Optimizations

• Map init

• More caching optimization

… and lots of bug fixes

Ethernal x Hermippe Limited Art

The fifth (and final) Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes limited art, ΔYa-shaΔ, went live on OpenSea, with over 4 ETH volume in the last 4 days! 🔥 Sale ends Aug 27th, 10 PM ET. Get it here.

Want to be an Alpha tester?

You can still reserve a key by following us and tweeting “open sesame” to @EthernalWorld. Or message us in #🗝️keys🗝️ on our Discord.

To get more updates and details, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord community.

For the summer (and since my last post) our team has kept cool by staying indoors, continuing to build and test features, and moving closer to getting ready for our Mainnet release.

We began moving our dungeon to Matic's new Mumbai testnet on July 23rd (all other Matic testnets have been deprecated). While this forced us to wipe our testnetV3 dungeon and start a new dungeon, it allowed us to make some big changes that wouldn't have been possible or were much more challenging through only updating our smart contracts. And we’ve been testing the new Mumbai Alpha with our playtesters.

Dungeon Keeper

Dungeon Keeper is the biggest update that we made in the Mumbai Alpha. Players now own the rooms that they generate, earn rewards based on activities in their rooms, and unlock things to add to their rooms. Our team had previously brainstormed on ways to give players more control and allow them to govern and manage what would be generated in the dungeon. Dungeon Keeper made the most sense to us.

Since the beginning, our goal has been to design a fun game that fully utilizes the advantages of decentralization. To us, that means more ownership, value & control for our players. Now every time a player makes an on-chain move, they are not only generating monsters, chests, or NPC in the dungeon; they are also minting room NFTs for themselves or minting rewards for the owner of the room. As owners of rooms, they directly control what gets added to the dungeon.

We’ve been testing these Dungeon Keeper features for both its gameplay and its economic model. I will share details and updates from the test in a future post.

All major updates

📜 Quest system

• 4 unique quests added to this release.

🗺️ Multifloor dungeon

• Unlock the next floor & move between floors using teleports as portals.

• Minimap - the Cartographer’s little secret :)

☄️ Dungeon keeper & rewards

• Generate & own rooms: this unlocks the Dungeon Keeper feature. Generating rooms cost fragments.

• Rewards: players earn fragments (and coins for special rooms) when other characters take actions in their rooms.

• Adding to rooms: unlock new things to add to rooms & new features by earning fragments.

• Tax: players need to pay tax or risk having their rooms put on sale. They have the option to abandon or deactivate their rooms.

Economy

• Fragments: integrated fragments from testnetV3 dungeon that playtesters earned into the current dungeon.

• Coins: more coin drains.

Technical

• Diamond contracts: contract refactoring and implemented the diamond standard for more flexible upgradability

• More caching refactoring & optimization

• Front end data culling: more optimization

Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes #3 & #4

The fourth Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes limited art, ↜Warrior↝, is on OpenSea! Sale ends Aug 13th, 10 PM ET.

Want to be an Alpha tester?

You can still reserve a key by following us and tweeting “open sesame” to @EthernalWorld. Or message us in #🗝️keys🗝️ on our Discord.

To get more updates and details, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord community.

Hope everyone has been busy exploring and looting. ⚔️ Here are the updates since our last post.

Dev updates

🗺️ Dungeon map: besides generating monsters for themselves, characters are now generating NPCs, chests, and monsters in their area when they move around.

• Alchemist: trade gear for fragments (will be very useful on Floor 2)

• Big bosses (on level 8)

• Chests

• Map UI updates and features

⚔️ Gear & items

• Gear with class & durability

• Special attack gear (level 8 only)

• Uncommon (only level 4+) & rare gear (only level 6+)

• Gear UI updates

🎒 Inventory & trade

• Enable consumable transfers (coins, keys, fragments, elements): drop & pick up, and send to and from the vault

• In-room trade & reactions: send reactions to characters in the same room and buy or sell items & gears for coins

🧙 Characters

• Character page: see other character's stats & items via their unique URL

We also welcomed DungeonBot to our Discord. DungeonBot notifies us when new events are triggered in the dungeon as well as providing general information and FAQs to players. We will be adding more features to DungeonBot and use it to quickly test stuff out without requiring us to build a UI.

Community

Though our playtester community is still small (we are in closed Alpha), we’ve been encouraged by the support and engagement from them. Playtesters have initiated a Guardian clan of elite character that helps out other characters, started translating game texts into different languages, and written great posts of their first experience in the dungeon. As we continue to build out the core gameplay of Ethernal, we are excited to continue learning from our community’s feedback and feature ideas.

Limited art

We released the second character in our Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes series. The next character will be released on Tuesday (7/21)!

Next up

We've been busy getting Floor 2 ready and preparing our smart contracts for moving to the Matic Mumbai testnet. There will be bigger updates and new features coming up. Stayed tuned. 👀

Want to be an Alpha tester?

You can still reserve a key by following us and tweeting “open sesame” to @EthernalWorld. Or message us in #🗝️keys🗝️ on our Discord.

To get more updates and details, follow us on Twitter or join our Discord community.

Our team has been hard at work since releasing Alpha 2.0 on the Matic testnet. Here are some updates for the last two weeks.

Alpha 2.0 stats

• ~200 Alpha keys were sent out to testers: 176 new characters were created, with 87 characters remaining active after 7 days. 28 characters finished level 8 & level 9 (the highest levels on floor 1).

• 35,506 rooms and 15,577 monsters have been generated in the dungeon.

• 3,670 total daily moves were made by playtesters.

• 10 players on average requested food each day: we restricted the amount of test $MATIC players would get for food refill per day (food is required to make every move in the dungeon), which limited daily playtime for each player.

• Most visited rooms in the dungeon:

  

Dev updates

🗺️ Dungeon map

• [NEW] Healing in the Temple

• [NEW] Send items to and from the vault in the Carrier room

🎒 Inventory

• [NEW] Vault

Other updates

• More player info in the UI

• Visual bug fixes

• More optimizations on the front end and caching

Rare art NFTs

We added the winning pixel art from our Skulls & Crest contest to the dungeon this week. Players who find these rare art in the dungeon also receives the NFTs on the Ethereum mainnet. There were four rare art already discovered in the last 2 days. Two more remains in the dungeon right now!

Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes limited art sale

We collaborated with pixel artist Hermippe (Komiyama Takashi) again on a new limited art collection: Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes. Based on the Ethernal hero classes, we are releasing a total of 5 artworks. The first of the collection ✧Mage✧ is now live on OpenSea, until Tuesday, June 30 at 12 PM ET. Read our interview with Hermippe.

Want to be an Alpha tester?

You can still reserve a key by following us and tweeting “open sesame” to @EthernalWorld. Or message us in #🗝️keys🗝️ on our Discord.

Pixel Artist Interview

Hermippe (Komiyama Takashi) is a Japanese pixel artist, illustrator, and VJ, who works across a variety of mediums, including music videos, embroidery, merchandizes, ZINE, and more.

Ethernal: Hi Hermippe, please introduce yourself and tell us about your work.

Hermippe: I’m an illustrator and pixel artist. The topic of my work is often about the housing complex in Tama New Town where I grew up, insects that I observe, or sci-fi stories. I also make music videos, embroidery, record jackets, ZINE, and collaborate on commercial products and VJ.  

I started to draw when I was very young, but I don't remember how it got started. Instead of playing with toys, I was always drawing on stock-forms at home. I began to study drawing seriously when I was 16. Then I attended an art college. I used to draw miniature drawings with a ballpoint pen and started pixel drawing about 7 years ago.

イラストレーター（ドット絵）。昔飛び出した故郷・多摩ニュータウンで見た気がする集合住宅を描いたり、SFのお話の挿絵を描いたり、虫をよく見て描いたりして暮らしています。ミュージックビデオ／商品コラボ／VJ／刺繍／レコードジャケット／ZINEなど制作。

物心がつく前から描いているので、きっかけは憶えていません。遊び道具の代わりに、家にたくさんあったストックフォームにずっと絵を描き続けていました。絵の勉強を本格的に始めたのは16才の頃でした。その後、美術大学で学び現在に至ります。ドット絵は7年ほど前から描いていましたが、それまではボールペンによる細密画を描いていました。

E: What is your process for creating your artworks?

H: I usually don’t make a draft unless requested. I’ll decide on the composition once I imagine the overall atmosphere of my work. Then I’ll think about the proper balance of colors and techniques. Finally, I’ll set up a specific color palette, perspective, and resolution, etc.

普段は「ラフを提出しろ」と言われない限り、下書きはしないで作り始めます。最初に全体の雰囲気を考えて構図を決めます。それに合わせて色のバランスや技法について検討します。それらを踏まえて具体的なカラーパレットや立体感の程度、解像度などを設定します。

E: What are your inspirations?

H: I’m inspired by the ideas of “surrealism in everyday life” and “estrangement”. Regarding “surrealism in everyday life”, although I often choose landscapes and natural objects as motifs, I focus on the housing complexes or insects around them. This unusual combination of normal motifs and unexpected elements strengthen the feeling of “surrealism”. On the other hand, my hometown, Tama New Town, is my inspiration for “estrangement”. Tama New Town is a residential area bulldozed from a natural hilly area (the stage of Studio Ghibli's Pom Poko). This kind of “New Town” can be seen everywhere in Japan. Their distinct “well-organized design” as well as having “everyone being outsiders” make me feel unnatural and sad, which informs the original feeling for my works.

「非日常」と「寂しさ」です。「非日常」について、普段は風景や自然物をモチーフに選ぶことが多いですが、身近にある集合住宅や、その辺にいる虫に注目して描いています。誰でもよく知っているモチーフが意外なものと組み合わさることによって、日常とは異なる部分が強調されるように感じます。「寂しさ」について、自分が生まれた「多摩ニュータウン」は、自然溢れる丘陵地を切り開いて作られた住宅地です（スタジオ・ジブリの「平成たぬき合戦ぽんぽこ」の舞台です）。日本に点在する「ニュータウン」と呼ばれる形式の住宅地特有の「整然とした街並み」「全員よそ者」といった部分に違和感や物悲しさを感じていたことが原体験としてあります。

E: Who are your favorite artists?

H: Manabe Hiroshi and Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita.

真鍋博／メスキータ

E: Why do you choose to make pixel art?

H: I enjoy the restrictions and rules. In Japan, there is a 17-letter form of poetry called the “Haiku” which is similar to pixel art. It’s fascinating because you have to express the scene that you are describing within the limitations.

制限やルールを楽しむためです。日本には「俳句」という、17文字で情景を表す詩の形式があります。限られた要素で情景を表す点に面白みを感じています。

E: There are a lot of game-inspired visuals in your work. What are your favorite games?

H: Bugtronica (iOS app) / Sword&Sworcery (iOS app)

Bugtronica(iOS app)／スキタイのムスメ(iOS app)

E: What do you think about cryptocurrency and crypto art?

H: The pixel art and GIF animations that I use as production tools are expressions unique to digital. It is a difficult medium to add and access value. But I became more interested because the concept of value changed due to blockchain technology.

Someone had defined public blockchain as “digital resource” because of its natural phenomenon-like nature, which is difficult to control by the will of a particular person or organization alone. I think there are similarities in the “game-like characteristics” and “storytelling” that I have in mind when creating my work. The similarity is that although each (a blockchain or artwork) is made by someone, it doesn’t turn out as expected, but there is value in it.

制作手段としているドット絵やGIFアニメーションは、デジタル特有の表現です。作品としての付加価値をつけることが大変な媒体ですが、ブロックチェーン技術によって、その概念が変化したことがきっかけで興味を持ちました。

パブリックブロックチェーンが、特定の人物や組織の意思だけではコントロールしにくい自然現象のような性質をもっていることから「デジタルな資源」と定義した人がいました。創作する上で意識している「ゲームのような特徴」や「物語性」においても、それと共通する部分があると思います。それぞれ人が作ったものではあるけれど、思い通りにならない、でもそこに価値がある、、、という点が共通した魅力であると思います。https://crypto.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/event/1135831.html

E: As a VJ, you also work a lot with music. Who are your favorite musicians?

H: Arthur Hnatek, 鎮座DOPENESS, New Zion Trio, and SUPERSTARS

~ Questions from the Ethernal community ~

EC: What is your fascination with doing all of your artwork on an iPhone about? Why have you chosen the iPhone as your medium? What are the pros and cons? Don't your thumbs hurt after a while ... what about your eyes, do they get stressed out?

H: I chose the iPhone because I can draw on it at any time. Being able to draw in bed, on the bus, during trips, or pockets of time between meetings really attracts me. Also, because of its small screen, I can see my entire work very well which means it’s easy to decide on my work’s shape. I only use my right index finger to draw, and I'm used to it so it's not a big deal. However, my left little finger feels painful sometimes because I hold the phone for too long.

iPhoneを選んだのは「いつでも描ける」からです。布団の中や電車、旅行や打ち合わせ中など空いた時間にずーっと描いていられるのが魅力です。また、画面が小さいので全体を見ることが出来るため、形をとるのが楽です。右手の人差し指だけで描いていますが、慣れたのでもう辛くありません。iPhoneを持つ左手の小指が少し痛い時があります。

EC: Do you plan on minting more artworks on Ethereum?

H: Of course. I am excited and hope to have more opportunities to collaborate.

もちろん興味はありますが、良い出会い次第です。

Ethernal x Hermippe Heroes

Based on the Ethernal hero classes, we are releasing a total of 5 new artworks: a new limited artwork every 14 days. Each artwork will have a maximum of 20 art tokens.

Similar to our first limited art NFT release, 「the entrance」, each token comes with high-resolution JPEG and animated GIF files, original sketch, and mobile wallpapers. Collect all five tokens to receive special high-resolution JPEG and animated GIF files with all the heroes in portrait and landscape views.

✧Mage✧, the first of the collection is on sale on OpenSea, until Tuesday, June 30 at 12 PM ET.

For this Alpha 2.0 release, we made lots of updates based on tester feedback and fixed critical issues discovered in Alpha 1.0. We rewrote our smart contracts infrastructure so that it would allow us to make continuous updates as we test new features. We created a new map generation algorithm and updated our player interface for web and mobile. And we moved over to the Matic testnet!

Now not only are the dungeon rooms procedurally generated from the blockchain by the players, but new items will also be generated in existing rooms as players take actions in the dungeon. This means the more active players there are, the more items, gears, monsters, and NPCs will be created.

All Alpha 2.0 updates

🗺️ Dungeon map

• New map generation algorithm

• New navigation and moving multiple rooms

• New fog of war for movement

• Updated drops to improve game balance

🧙 Characters

• New classes! Play as an explorer, warrior, mage or barbarian

• Death, rebirth, and inheritance: choose to create a new generation character with inherited attributes or create a brand new character if your character dies in combat

🎒 Inventory

• Items are tradable and transferrable

• Limit number of items that your bag can carry

• Drop and pick up items in rooms

• Gears and items with durability and rarity

• Scavenge items from dead characters

⚔️ Combat

• Improved monster difficulty and gear balance

• Charge your card for a turn

• More multiplayer actions

• New monsters and mini-bosses

Refactoring and optimization

• Smart contracts: contracts are now upgradeable, allow items to be transferable and tradable and allow us to add more floors to the dungeon

• Web app refactoring and UI updates for web and mobile

• Graphics rendering: improved performance and allow us to add more interactivity to the dungeon map

• Caching updates

Infrastructure

• Deployed to the Matic testnet

• New deployment process using Buidler

Next up

While we still have more optimization and fixes to make, we are now ready to try out new game features and quickly test with our players. Among the many features in our plan, we will be adding a daily food system, additional multiplayer features, more content & gameplay, and items of different rarity levels to test out the NFT economy within the dungeon—the first to be added will be the winners from our recent Skulls and Crest Pixel Art Contest.

Want to be an Alpha tester?

You can still reserve a key by following us and tweeting “open sesame” to @EthernalWorld. Or message us in #🗝️keys🗝️ on our Discord.

Welcome to our first newsletter! For this first post, we want to share that we’ve partnered with Matic for our upcoming Alpha 2.0 release!

We’ve been quiet for the last two months — kept our heads down, hard at work refactoring the Ethernal code base, designing and updating game features, and implementing them. As part of our refactoring, we have been working with Matic through their Developer Support Program to move our smart contracts to the Matic network.

Since we started working on Ethernal, our goal has been to explore and utilize the best tools and protocols in the ecosystem to create a fun game that can bring more users and players to the brave new world of Web3 and true ownership. Building a multiplayer dungeon that’s fully on-chain is challenging, both technically and design-wise. We wanted to make sure that the player experience would be intuitive and smooth, which requires us to have our game logic on a network that can provide better UX, i.e. faster and cheaper transactions.

Besides UX capabilities, we were looking for the following while exploring our options:

• Decentralization: This is, of course, important for us since we are building a fully on-chain game.

• EVM compatibility: We want to be able to easily get our solidity smart contracts to work on this chain.

• Bridge to Ethereum: Our game items would be NFTs on Ethereum, so players can have access to the burgeoning NFT/collectibles market and easily buy and sell their items on marketplaces such as OpenSea.

• Mainnet ready: We need a chain that would allow us to launch this summer.

• Support and community: It’s important that we not only build a fun blockchain game with great UX, but also have access to player communities and grow our player base.

After exploring various options, Matic seemed like the best solution for our future releases. There are some trade-offs, but we are confident that we would be able to work together to find solutions for any issues. So far it’s been great to work with Matic, and we are looking forward to our upcoming releases!

What’s next

We will be sending out new keys to our testers in the next two weeks once our Alpha 2.0 is ready. We’ll keep everyone updated!

If you want to be an Alpha 2.0 tester, follow us on Twitter and tweet "open sesame" to @EthernalWorld.

To learn more about Ethernal, check out our game introduction and our Alpha 1.0 update posts.

Connect with us on Discord.