When you have an hour-long conversation with a big brain like Dallas Johnson, Chief Engineer of Alien Worlds’ primary contributor Dacoco, you walk away with lots of information to digest. Particularly when the dialogue encompasses so many interesting touchpoints: advances in decentralized gaming, the interconnectability of web3 tech, the evolution of AI, the value of community governance, and so on. Consequently, breaking the resulting article into two parts was a no-brainer.
In Part 1, Dallas discussed how he became involved with Alien Worlds, when he was recruited by Dacoco founders Saro, Michael and Rob to scale up the DAOs. He also disclosed ongoing efforts to decentralize the game by refactoring its smart contracts, offered his opinion on the Stop Killing Games campaign, and explained how third-party developers can use their NFTs in Alien Worlds. If you haven’t done so already, go check it out.
Naturally, the subject of players – Explorers in AW parlance – came up repeatedly during what was a wide-ranging conversation. Like other engineers and devs involved in blockchain-based gaming, Dallas is extremely passionate about nurturing the playing community that dutifully connects their wallets and drives a project forward.
“I think one of the most valuable things any game has is the community,” he states. “And so it’s very important that you look after that community by trying to add more interest and value and keep them engaged. If they’re the sort of people that like to build stuff, being able to provide tools and programs that encourage them to build tools in your space, rather than leave and go somewhere else, is extra useful. Galactic Hubs is a great place for that.”
How G Hubs Empowers Alien Worlds Explorers
G Hubs, a dedicated grants program that grants financial and technical support to community-aligned projects, has strengthened the appeal of Alien Worlds by funding a number of exciting games (Battlefleet Armageddon, Trilium Quest, Milky Way Miner, Battledome) that have integrated into the metaverse, not to mention useful tools (Mission Control) and even an NFT webcomic (Starblind).
G Hubs is a big key driver to really incentivize and help funnel developers into building value into the space,” says Dallas. “Over time we want to start decentralizing certain aspects of G Hubs so that it’s managed by the community, and that’s going to empower the community with a big resource pool that can fund many interesting game development projects that can plug into the ecosystem.
“Although many web3 projects have a foundation or funding mechanism in what they call a DAO to fund projects, often that’s all they are – a voting mechanism to fund projects. We have many other interesting aspects that allow people to come and plug in. If all you’re getting is a pool of funds to build something and nowhere to plug it into, it’s not that interesting. We’re providing the funding mechanism and organizer body through G Hubs, but also several plug-in points that connect to Alien Worlds DAOs and the gaming metaverse. So that whatever they build actually has a place that plugs in and it makes sense.”
Aligning Gameplay with Community Vision
The value of G Hubs is clear: a funding pool entices developers, not to mention the chance to connect to a vast and growing user base. As it is, G Hubs is one of several features that makes Alien Worlds an attractive environment not just for developers but also writers, illustrators, and other creatives. Hence why Geoff McCabe from LightningWorks brought his Starblind project to Alien Worlds, with artwork by Marvel’s DG Franchin.
Some may wonder, though, how to align gameplay with the community’s vision. How can you respect the will of the community and put decentralization front and center while also exercising enough influence to deliver a strong playing experience?
“Aligning the game incentives with the DAO experience comes down to aligning human interests and what’s driving participants along the way,” Dallas explains. “For a while we thought we could set up the DAOs with their pool of funds to play with and they’d just go build things. What we’ve learned is that we need to also align those incentives in many aspects at the same time, and try to get that balanced perfectly. It’s very hard to do."
“You’ve got multiple parties involved, and personalities have organically arisen from communities that have coagulated around the planets. You’ve got your miners who just want to get mining rewards and NFTs and that’s mostly what’s driving them. Then you’ve got DAO participants, some want to really build DAO games or DAO tools because they’re governance nerds; no matter what we do, whether there’s a game or not, they’d be interested in DAO governance and how that can work. Others just want power, they’re not so much about the DAO governance, they want to be in control of a group. The tricky balance is to try and provide games and mechanics and align multiple incentives from different angles, so everyone can push in one direction and pull on the other and create this balance and a constant force that doesn’t lead things to fall over in one direction or another.”
"Achieving this sort of balance isn’t something web2 developers need to think about: the sole focus is on delivering quality gameplay, preferably centered around a likable protagonist and a compelling narrative. Web3 games, though, demand all of the above in addition to aligned incentives since they attract players, builders, governance nerds (Johnson’s words!) and token stakers. In the case of Alien Worlds, mining is a central focus – though not all Explorers actually bother to mine. “I think another crucial benefit of web3 gaming is interconnectability,” Dallas says. “You really can’t do that with any technology that’s not web3 gaming, to the same degree. And certainly, there’s nothing stopping web2-based game engines from providing APIs that allow plug-and-play type scenarios to be possible. But in all of those cases, you’re relying on a central publisher, a single point of failure, to provide the API integration point. By providing all of this on a blockchain, it’s disintermediated across all the block producers, everyone. We don’t have to ask for permission, they don’t have to ask for permission – they can interconnect and use these things in whatever interesting and creative way they come up with.”
AI Advancement and Spatial Metaverses
AI has been the hottest tech trend of the last 18 months, so it’s no surprise to learn that Nvidia, Ubisoft, and Microsoft are already thinking of ways to integrate AI into their games. Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular hold much promise, as they can generate responsive and intelligent behaviors in non-playable characters (NPCs): no need for a script. Generative AI tools, meanwhile, could make spawning entire digital worlds a breeze. So what does Dallas make of it all? And how will AI weave its way into Alien Worlds?
“I think we’re still at the very early stages of AI everywhere. There are very expensive AI models being run by industry leaders like Google and OpenAI and it’s very experimental. We can leverage off that by taking advantage of the updates coming out every week. We’re already using tools like Midjourney and other image generators to help create some of the lore compatible artwork and we’re looking at tools that can automate that and make it even more efficient and available for the community. We’re also looking at how we can use these to generate text-based lore through the LLM, and behind the scenes we’re using it to help with our code generation to get more code-per-developer.”
Perhaps the most exciting AI use-cases within Alien Worlds is the Large Lore Model: an LLM-powered repository housing all of the game’s approved sci-fi mythology, from races and vehicles to characters and planetary history. Dallas explains: “When we bring LLMs into the lore setting, we’ve got a whole community of people, many of whom have been here since the beginning and so know a lot of the lore and history. But for people who are new to go back and read through everything that’s happened in Discord and Medium, there’s a lot of content to digest. By using a lore model we can, in effect, fast forward that for everyone.
Someone can come straight in, start bashing away at the Large Lore Model and adding value and relevant information and additions to the lore of Alien Worlds from day one. And the lore model will help it make sense and be relevant. It doesn’t mean we’re just delegating all control to an LLM to say, ‘From now on everything’s going to be run by an AI.’ It’s allowing humans to come in, get a seed of something from the LLM, they can look at that and go, ‘That’s a good idea’ or they can reject it and come up with a different human variation that adds on to that. And once again, that can be fed back into the LLM.
Beyond LLMs, of which there are already several candidates competing to be the de-facto vessel for lore, Dallas foresees AI-generated games growing in prominence. “Some of the mechanisms we’re looking to build and add in now that will extend to DAOs, and to the NFTs and structures like that, will include incentives to allow funding for game developers to build mini games, mini tools, and mini plugins to add on to games,” he explains.
“At this stage, because the AI is still quite early, a lot of those mini games are just mini games – but they’re a lot of fun and they’re quick, cheap and easy to make. And that’s well within the budget for indie developers who might want to get involved in our community. Over time, those tools will get bigger, better and cheaper. What game developers are able to build today will only improve. And the NFTs and incentives the DAOs are able to pay to encourage devs to get involved is only going to get better and better for the players over time.”
The hype around AI, propelled by the success of tools like ChatGPT, has fed into the metaverse narrative with apps that streamline 3D content creation already helping to build out more immersive virtual worlds. Might such a world be navigable using a future version of Apple’s spatial computer, the Vision Pro?
“People are really excited about the Vision Pro, but it’s very expensive to even get one, it’s prohibitive for most people to even consider,” says Dallas. “So that is one barrier to entry. To create an immersive gaming experience inside a metaverse is going to be expensive at this stage. What I expect we’ll see over the coming small number of years, especially with this evolution of AI, is that it’s going to come down in price dramatically."
“As we have more accessible consumer devices, more accessible developer tools to be able to develop compelling user experiences, it’s inevitable that a metaverse like Alien Worlds is going to evolve more into a three-dimensional spatial environment which we can immerse ourselves in more. But there’s still going to be that human element in there. It still needs to be engaging. Just making it look pretty is not enough. You need to have the people involved providing drivers, incentives, and engaging experiences to keep them in there.”