Monthly Treeverse Update #1
Introducing our first edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read below for some game development insights on what we’ve worked on for the past few months.
An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress—alongside our new Taiwan branch. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!
We’ve rebranded from Mooner Labs to Endless Clouds. Endless Clouds is now the game development studio working on Treeverse, socials have been updated to reflect this. If you are interested in working with us apply via vacancies@endlessclouds.xyz.
Since our first NFT launch in August, we’ve been hiring people in different roles and we’ve currently got a team of 17 people! We’re adding finishing touches to our website which will become the go-to page for everything Treeverse, and where we will introduce everyone working on the game.
Concept Art Update
We initially started with a rough idea of what the game should look like based on what we thought looked aesthetic, but since onboarding our Art Director, we’ve radically improved our approach. Here’s the philosophy driving our new art direction:
For the art direction of Treeverse, we are digging deep into inspiration such as Journey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Valheim and other titles that strive for simplistic design yet are still full of details and stunning visuals. Our team believes this type of style is the direction which can maximize the potential of a mobile device, but at the same time deliver an immersive gaming experience. We are also going to stretch our imagination to create a blend of sci-fi and fantasy to help turn Treeverse into an unfamiliar yet exciting new world for our players to explore and embark on their epic adventure.
Below are some of the concepts we started with and you can see how it has slowly transitioned towards a more stylistic and simple design that still looks stunning.
Below is the most recent iteration of the art style. It is simple yet stylish and elegant. We will still be exploring the art style in various ways but this is the minimum level we are willing to accept for the quality of the visuals in the game.
Character Models
With the improvements in our art style, you can see how the character model has also improved a great deal. We will have much more of these to share as we hone in on our art style, and have more concepts to use.
Animations
Recently we have onboarded an extremely talented animator, below are just some of the first runs through the animations he has worked on.
Warrior
Archery
Woodcutting
Fishing
Development Update
Client Side - On the Unity side of things, our developers have been working on the following:
Dependency Injection (DI)
Zenject is a lightweight highly performant dependency injection framework built specifically to target Unity 3D (however it can be used outside of Unity as well). It can be used to turn your application into a collection of loosely coupled parts with highly segmented responsibilities. Zenject can then glue the parts together in many different configurations to allow you to easily write, re-use, refactor and test your code in a scalable and extremely flexible way. We used dependency injection with Zenject to resolve our dependencies, which will inject all the dependencies needed by the object from context. Meaning that many null references in the platform will not happen.
Top-down engine:
It’s a very fast, tight, mobile-friendly, robust and extendable engine built with quality and game feel at its core to start creating your own 2D or 3D game with a top-down perspective right now with Unity. It’s been designed to act as a foundation for all sorts of top-down games, from dungeon crawlers like Binding of Isaac, to adventure games like old Zelda games, through beat em all like Final Fight or gun heavy games like Hotline Miami, and really any game where the camera is positioned above the action.
We have spent time modifying the library by adding Injection using Zenject in order to have these two powerful tools together. This lets us use many of the built-in features of the top-down engine whilst keeping the codebase clean and extensible.
UniRx
UniRx (Reactive Extensions for Unity) is a reimplementation of the .NET Reactive Extensions. The Official Rx implementation is great but doesn’t work on Unity and has issues with iOS IL2CPP compatibility. This library fixes those issues and adds some specific utilities for Unity.
Character Customization (UI/Logic/Backend)
We have implemented the character customization using MagicaClothes to change as many parts of the character as we want in runtime.
Login
We have implemented Register/Login UI + Logic and connected the web service, now you can simply register/login and save your progress.
Game Core
“We can handle 2,000+ online players in a single world, and large crowds in one location. We also have delayed database updates, which will allow players to join servers anywhere on the globe with the same player account. We planned for the best vertical scaling of the game core server, keeping it isolated from tasks that can be solved by the usual web server. We use an approach for efficient multi-threading work. Thus the cores of the processor are working primarily on the game logic, instead of dozing or handling inefficient multi-tasking. We squeeze the performance in any way possible, like a) using custom-made objects serialization, b) using buffers pool to prevent the OS from doing unnecessary memory allocation and garbage collection, c) prepared SQL statements running on ADO.NET. Our TCP/IP transport layer is entirely custom planned so we have tested with devices situated in London, Sofia, Dubai and Tehran to make sure it can handle connection in-perfection. Our technology is custom-built, so we constantly make stress tests to any newly delivered module with real-life-events behaving test clients and from different locations in the globe.” — Ivan Milanov, Network & Backend Developer.
Services + Pipelines
Identity service to allow users to login via Google Account and custom login
Player service to gather player details
CICD pipeline setup which automates APK building with ease
Taiwan Branch
We’ve opened our first office space in Taiwan. We plan to build an elite art team that will handle all the visuals for the game. Have a look at our WeWork office space!
Treasury and Runway
Our treasury is currently made up of $6.1M in stablecoin and 1,604 ETH. We are looking to ideally build a team of ~50 people who excel in their roles. We will focus on talent density, pay top of the market and only onboard those who meet the high standards we have. Rushing this process will cost us dearly, so we plan to take our time and only hire exceptional candidates.
Open Positions
We are actively looking for people in the positions listed below:
Lead Developer
C# Back end developer x 2
Unity front end developer x 2
Database Engineer
Unity Tools specialist
DevOps
Lead Game Designer
Lead 3D Artist
Technical Artist (Unity)
UI/UX Designer
Lead Environment Artist
Senior Environment Artist
Senior Level Designer
Narrative designer
If you are interested in any of the roles, have the right experience and excel at what you do, contact vacancies@endlessclouds.xyz. For more information on the artist roles, check out some of these roles on our Artstation page.
Philosophy
Endless Clouds is focusing on building a fun game, first and foremost. One that we would love to play ourselves and have our friends and family play alongside us. In order for blockchain games to be sustainable, it's crucial to retain the primary reason why people play; fun, entertainment and stimulation. In Treeverse the tokenomics will be designed as a bonus to gameplay and will not include ponzinomics. If you are here for a pump and dump, understand this is not what we are about.
Our objective is to create the best mobile MMORPG in the world.
Going Forward
Development is key and we have the funds to keep building for years. Updates will start to be more consistent from now on, we have a website in the works where we will share more details on the roadmap, tokenomics and team members.
Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.