Ethernal
Ethernal is a multiplayer dungeon game that is entirely generated from the blockchain. You explore the dungeon to discover (generate) new rooms. In these rooms, you’ll find items and monsters. You can collaborate with other players to defeat monsters, or race against them to be the first to discover new room and rare items. Your character will level up to explorer the deeper, more dangerous parts of the dungeon. But remember, if you die you will lose everything that you carry and others can scavenge your remains.
The original idea of creating a classic-MUD-like game on the blockchain came after discovering Ethereum in 2016. The blockchain seems like a great fit for procedurally generating game worlds. Edward A Thomson had written about a similar idea of building a rogue-like game on Parity’s Substrate.
Procedural generation has been used in video games for a long time to automatically create large amount of content within game worlds. The method combines 1) assets created by the designer, 2) algorithms (rules for generating the content), 3) computer-generated randomness, and 4) processing power. The blockchain can be used to define the rules for generation (written in the smart contracts), generate randomness (using block hashes), and provide processing power (via nodes on the blockchain).
But there were a lot of limitation to building a game entirely on chain back in 2016. Fast forward to today, there are various developments within the Ethereum community to allow faster, cheaper transactions (xdai, matic, eth2), better wallet management and on boarding flow (Portis, Authereum, burner wallet). So we are giving this idea a go and starting by going back to the basics: focusing on core gameplays of classic MUDs and taking advantage of crypto and blockchain specific features.