ALPHA Galore in the Weekly WRLD! 4/13/2023

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:34] Testing, testing one, two. At least I got one. Laugh out of that. 

EROD:

[01:53] Testing, testing. Can you hear me?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:57] Yes, sir. Welcome.

EROD:

[01:59] Let’s go.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[02:04] Where’s Ark’s testing?

EROD:

[02:07] Everyone needs a mic test.

ARK:

[02:09] Hello?

EROD:

[02:11] You’re good, Ark. Crystal clear. We’ve got to put up with Twitter’s delays in getting speakers brought up and we’re going to get started. This is going to be an exciting space.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[02:29] We’re pulling Dan up as a speaker, right? I see he’s right below as a listener.

EROD:

[02:33] Of course. Of course.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[02:34] Okay, cool.

EROD:

[02:39] And Ninjas too.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[02:44] Sweet.

EROD:

[03:01] We need some copyright free music for like the first couple minutes.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:08] Like some NFT world’s elevator music.

EROD:

[03:11] Yeah.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:13] Yeah.

EROD:

[03:15] Little housey maybe. I don’t know what you think about that

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:18] Hip beat, yeah. Or soft piano, kinda.

EROD:

[03:22] Soft piano.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:23] Well, it’s kind of Minecraft style, right? Like the vibe.

EROD:

[03:25] Oh, that’s true. 

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:27] Placing blocks, vibe. You know what I mean?

EROD:

[03:29] Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you’re right.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:30] Not the word Minecraft related in any way, but. Just kidding.

EROD:

[03:36] Some house piano, elevator music. I’m with it.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:47] Sounds of baguettes baking,

EROD:

[03:50] Ding.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[03:55] Up and timer.

EROD:

[03:57] Dan, welcome. How are you?

DANN:

[04:01] Yo good. Can y’all hear me? I’ve been having some Bluetooth issues. Y’all Hear me okay?

EROD:

[04:06] Yeah, we can hear you. Yep, you’re good.

DANN:

[04:08] Let’s go. Okay, cool.

EROD:

[04:10] And last but not least, we got Ninjas.

NINJAS:

[04:17] Hello guys, how you doing?

EROD:

[04:20] Welcome, welcome. This is an exciting space, the future of question mark. We made it a point in the slack. No one is going to slip up, up here, okey? No one is slipping up. The name is not getting dropped today, said that in the Discord, the name is not getting dropped. However, we are not talking about the future of NFT Worlds because we are rebranding to a more player friendly, facing overall ethos that is not just a name, but it is the way that we carry ourselves as a team, as a company, and we are moving into some very exciting times. With that being said, of course, JFK is a sponsor, so you know, let’s take a moment. Let’s listen in.

AUDIO:

[05:15] 40 seconds away. Why some say the moon. I choose this as our goal. The target for the Apollo 11 astronauts, the moon. Why climb the highest mountain? So for launch. 5, 35 years ago. 20 seconds and counting. [inaudible]. Texas. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to moon [inaudible]. 10, nine, ignition sequence starts, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

EROD:

[05:51] And it’s the weekly world. What are you going to say, Tim?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[05:57] [inaudible] I love it.

EROD:

[05:58] So, yesterday I tried synthesizing JFK’s voice using what I, you know, I did a lot of research. I thought it was the top, but I was really underwhelmed. I think what makes JFK JFK is the fifties, sixties podcast, like gain and audio settings. Like, it’s just so, it’s such a unique combination of like, of sounds and I looked it up and you’ve got to have like, yeah, you can recreate it, but the synthesizing technology removes all that.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[06:32] I mean, not to go off topic, I mean, we kind of are derailing this space right away, but if you actually buy an old microphone like JFK used, it doesn’t give you that effect. It actually had to do with the like audio equipment that it was recording onto. The microphones themselves are actually still used today. And if you put them through modern interfaces, they sound good.

EROD:

[06:52] But it’s the— Yeah, this is what people came to learn about. They came to learn about microphone equipment. But anyway, trying to get, you know, something more custom. That’s the point. I would, I think we should lead off the space and we— It is true we do this not because it’s easy or not because it’s— Whatever JFK says, you heard it, right? We just heard it. So, that’s what he says. We do these things not because they’re easy, because they’re hard. There we go. So, Ark, I want to throw it to you at the beginning, and just get your kind of, if you could summarize overall the vision, where we are, where we came from, where we’re going, in your opinion, and just kind of kick us off with a little overview of NFT Worlds.

ARK:

[07:46] Yeah, I mean for, I think there’s probably a lot of new people here, but like originally we started off with NFT Worlds is this idea of building like a really deeply interconnected economy and a bunch of other layers using blockchain on top of Minecraft, like a deeply integrated server network, all these different ideas had a lot of traction in the beginning, lot of players across all the different servers, the games, the worlds. Until we got booted by Minecraft [inaudible], which, you know, said, “Hey, no more blockchain or NFT related anything can be built on top of Minecraft”. So, we’ve since taken that is motivation to, you know, with our great team, take a step back and look at what has Minecraft had as far as shortcomings over the last five to seven years since Microsoft acquired them. And the innovation has kind of been sort of stifled and said, how do we modernize what the idea and the ethos of what Minecraft has been and take it into, you know, the century that we’re, or not the century, the decade that we’re now in. Whereas, you know, Minecraft got its popular in the beginning of like the 2010s and has since not seen much modernization from that respect. So, yeah, we’re trying to bring the next evolution of this whole space to everyone.

EROD:

[09:06] And Ted what does that next evolution look like? What’s the problem currently with Minecraft? I mean, is there a problem with Minecraft? And as Ark kind of left off with what does that evolution look like for NFT Worlds and why is it necessary that there’s an evolution?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[09:23] I mean, a pretty much nailed it. We just take, you know, what Web 2 players know and love about Minecraft and expand on it using web 3 technologies. I mean, we can go in the nitty gritty of it, but I think that’s basically what we’re doing.

ARK:

[09:37] Yeah, there’s— I mean there’s a bunch of quality of life, like content creator improvements, developer improvements in all these different areas. We just want to expand the capabilities of what, like, the idea of this type of game is, I think, in the long term. And, you know, just ultimately take what, you know, millions of us love about what Minecraft itself has been from an idea standpoint and just make it way more expressible from like a developer content creator, a player standpoint and bring it into kind of like the modern age.

EROD:

[10:08] And one of the big changes is Rust, from Java to Rust. Can you maybe go into a little bit about that decision to use Rust?

ARK:

[10:20] Yeah, I mean, ultimately it was the decision by the engineering team that has been doing some really, really great work building out the game engine and our lead over there. Like Rust versus Java from like a game client standpoint and like in general is just, it gives us significantly more like flexibility and capability and it’s just a more performant language for the use case. Which just unlocks our ability to do more in the long term on more modest computing hardware and stuff like that. And also, like being able to move into web support and a bunch of different other platforms other than just native desktop.

EROD:

[10:58] Now, you mentioned a little bit about the team. It was the team’s decision to use to use Rust. Temp, Ark, whichever one of you wants to take this, maybe talk about a little bit about the hiring. Who’s actually working on this? Who is that team?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[11:18] Yeah, I mean it’s a team of basically Minecraft modifier and industry veterans that are just really well— They just know the client really well and the ins and outs of the Minecraft protocol. And so, we just kind of hired the best of the best we could. It’s a team of seven or eight right now and yeah, they’ve just been cranking like crushing milestones and it’s really great.

EROD:

[11:47] Ark, do you have anything to add to the team?

ARK:

[11:51] Yeah. I mean, I think we can bring up I think Miles just requested, if you want to bring them up and—

EROD:

Oh, really?

ARK:

Yeah.

EROD:

Awesome.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[11:59] Miles is like DMing us on Slack. Like “I’ll talk, I’ll talk”.

ARK:

[12:04] Let’s hear miles talk, Miles is yeah, the lead on our engineering side.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[12:09] Yep. Miles is the manager for the client development team. So, she’ll be able to say some cool stuff.

EROD:

[12:17] That’s awesome. What a surprise. This is great. If Twitter lets her up. Oh, I hate Twitter. Wah, wah.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[12:30] Wah, wah, wah. That’s how this goes.

EROD:

[12:36] Well, that’s how it goes.

ARK:

[12:37] They’ll probably re request, I’m guessing they got bad internet or whatever.

EROD:

[12:40] Now, I think one of the— As we’re working that out. An under— A hugely understated value add beyond the web 3 integration and components built on top of Minecraft, which we had seen huge adoption of, are these quality of life improvement. And Dan, I want to ask you a little bit about the graphics, or not the graphics of the game, more so the user interface, the actual you know, the systems that players are going to be interfacing with, right? One of the coolest things that we’ve seen are things like the chat system, right? Which has been something you’ve been working hard on and it’s fairly difficult to get right. And how that also ties into not interoperability as a buzzword, but more the ability for players to kind of, you know, have friends and you know, be able to join each other’s experiences very easily. And you know, it all kind of ties together. Dan, how are you thinking about like the design and the interface and the way that players are going to be using this and how does that impact your decisions on that front?

DANN:

[13:54] Yeah, as far as design wise, the goal here is to keep things literally as simple as possible, right? Like, you look at a lot of new games that are out these days. The interfaces are just like all over the place. They fill up the entire screen, I don’t know what happened to gaming, but we become so interface heavy. So, the main goal here is to just keep it as simple as possible, you know? As lightweight as possible. And like, I mean, even Minecraft is pretty simple. There’s a lot of ways they could improve, like the chat and stuff, of course. But like go back to like, hey, remember the original Halo designs interface, like the original menu style for that, like we’re thinking to simplify things, right? But a lot of improvement on top of that.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[14:50] I think of the big things as well is like, we’re designing the interfaces so the players and users, you know, they’re intuitive to them. So, when they first log in, it’s not like “where is everything?” they know exactly or roughly where stuff is, and it feels kind of natural to them. And so, it’s like part of the hard part is finding a balance between something that feels, you know, like home, like what they’re used to and something that’s like new and innovative with quality of life improvements without getting in the way of that feeling. So, that’s what I mean, Dan is doing an amazing job at balancing those things right now.

EROD:

[15:27] And one of— Just specifically about, about chat for a minute, and also we saw a sneak peek of things like waypoints, right? and just locations, but the chat system in Minecraft currently is pretty bad. I mean, it’s like all chats are tough, right? But what specifically about the chat system we’ll have here kind of ties into the general and overall theme and ecosystem that we’re, that we’re building. So, if I’m a player, you know, that’s playing NFT Worlds, why is my— You know, how is the chat system and friends system going to improve my experience overall?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[16:11] Well, it’s kind of a necessity almost, because, you know, existing Minecraft servers are, you know, 50 ish players, a hundred ish players for the average. So, you know, the chat system, the chat system they have now works for that. But if you build this giant ecosystem of interconnected servers where you’re talking about thousands maybe on each server, then the chat becomes extremely flooded. So, most of our focus on redesigning the chat is around, like, making it more organized, like making the text smaller, doing systems for managing multiple private messages for multiple people, things like that.

EROD:

[16:45] Right.

ARK:

[16:45] I mean, there’s other things too. Like if you’ve played Minecraft before contextually that it would just be super helpful, like on larger servers and you’re in a group of like, you know, anything more than a few people and the chat’s being flooded, given it’s just a general chat, unless you’re talking one-to-one via dms, it’s kind of hard to contextually know like who’s talking and where they are relative to the gameplay. So, things as simple as like chat bubble that are toggled above the players’ heads as they speak. So, you know, where like people in proximity are like, just these quality of life improvements that like adds so much to these, like the basic ideas of what the gameplay is and can be for different types of game modes, I think are going to add just a lot on top of the chat system improvements outside of the context of proximity as well.

EROD:

[17:31] So, for those that are new to space we have talked about quality of life improvements, you know, general list. I think it’s important to kind of go over them again. and maybe— So, we covered chat. What other quality of life improvements are we bringing?

ARK:

[17:52] Yeah, I mean there’s two categories, I think. There’s the developer side of quality of life improvements and just their ability to make more creative content beyond the limitations of what they had had prior in Minecraft. And also, quality of life improvements, which will be more immediate in the initial launch of the game on the player’s side. You know, on the player’s side we just covered chat there’s things like mini map and waypoints that’ll come into play, friends systems, cosmetics like hand game player to player trading, like using web 3, using World Token, using your NFTs you’re holding your wallet, all these different things through native interfaces that will bring this cohesive experience together on the player’s side,

EROD:

[18:33] Is that enough to win people over? Like, you know, players?

ARK:

[18:39] I mean, I think yeah, it’s a really good question. Like historically we can look at the Minecraft like third party just launcher space in general. Some of the most popular launchers such as lunar client, for example, at any given time have anywhere between like 50 and a hundred thousand players online at any given moment using their launcher. And like the main reason those launchers got popular and really the only thing that they are is they’re still the base Minecraft game client with all of its limitations. They just like automatically load a few mods for you that enable things like maybe slightly faster frame rate within the limitations what is still Java. And they give you some ability to have some cosmetics and a little bit better chat system. But like the extensibility, because of the Java limitations and being still wrapped in, locked into the Minecraft Java client implementation itself is not that large, but just these small quality of life improvements have seen so much traction for players and for us to be one of, like, I don’t actually know of any game client that’s ever fully— A nd we’re not even doing a re-implementation of Minecraft.

[19:46] This is an entirely new engine that just has networking protocol backwards compatibility, but the extent at which we’ll be able to go above and beyond any quality of life improvements that these launchers would’ve, should have attracted, you know, millions and millions of total players collectively. Like I think that will be such a large draw for these players who are, you know, already playing Minecraft, looking for quality of life improvements and because of our backwards compatibility without being tied to the Minecraft IP, like I think that will bring quite a few players. And then as the new server side of NFT Worlds with all the new content creative stuff for the creators coming to play and bring so many more, you know, deeper and more extensible and expressive game modes that these players can play that aren’t Minecraft anymore, that aren’t Minecraft servers, that are our own network protocols, all NFT Worlds. I think that alone— Yeah, it just compounds as we go and it should be quite attractive to players in my opinion.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[20:46] It’s also worth noting that we’re building the engine in a way to where a lot of the additional features on top of the typical features that Minecraft has are modular. So, we can add features down the road, and a lot of this stuff is still kind of being conceptualized by us. We’re not a hundred percent sure what’s going to make it into what version and when, but there’s going to be a lot of support for adding new things as time goes on really easily.

EROD:

[21:13] What out-of-the-box tools will be provided? Ark, you brought up modernizing the network protocol, right? Allowing developers to create more easily, allowing them to port over, there’s backward compatibility, out of the box temp maybe, what are some of the tools? I know they’re modular and iterative, but out of the box, what are some of the most important ones would you say?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[21:35] I mean, I can’t say a hundred percent what we’re going to include in like the first versions, but I think it’s almost mandatory to have like the redesign chat system, you know, reworked user interface, a server list. So, you know, the NFT Worlds can become servers easily and be shown to players. But beyond that it’s kind of like, you know, we have yet to decide that. So, I can’t like give official decisions.

ARK:

[22:04] Yeah, I mean, I think on the— Like going more on the developer side too, and the longer term, like the definites on the developer side are simple things that are just such a pain at Minecraft, like using custom models, making custom enemies and mobs, and even things that just move in the game. Like if you’ve ever tried to develop or program a car that like you can drive into Minecraft, if you have any experience doing something like that, you know how much of a nightmare and how many like hacky workarounds you have to do, and it doesn’t really work well because of the limitations. Making yeah, just like content that should inherently be, you know, relatively easy to make in what is ultimately a sandbox game. But a game like Minecraft was never really built initially with the intention of third-party developers coming in and being creatives on top of it. It was built like a default survival game mode and people just kind of made hacky workarounds because of the player demand on top, and it was never improved on beyond there. So, we’re making all these things that developers have been wanting to be able to do easily and more flexibly and like more extensively possible from a creative standpoint in the new NFT World’s engine. So, I think that’ll bring a lot of new content and cool stuff.

EROD:

[23:18] Yeah. And building on the content and mobs models piece, Ninjas, maybe you could take it away, just kind of an overview of some of the stuff you’ve been working on in that department.

NINJAS:

[23:32] Yeah, so as of right now, the biggest thing that the avatars team is working on is creating pretty much every single mob or model that you have seen in the old Minecraft game, remade and remade in a higher quality and better way. So, it’s not necessarily just, “Oh, it’s the exact same thing, but better”. But we have looked at a lot of models that we’ve completely changed or we worked in terms of their appearance and their models so that it kind of sets a good standard so that when people are making content in our new game that they have a good standard to set, if that makes sense. And it is just the beginning because then we also have the whole angle of the NFT world items, and those items will be, you know, usable in the game as well. Those will be custom models whether they’re wearables or you know, there are some mounts that we’ve kind of showcased already. And those, all those models are also kind of setting a standard.

EROD:

[24:26] What about modularity with the models, Ninjas? That is from a like user-generated content perspective, you know, the standards that people will be working with to upload and import their own models, and Ark and Temp can also can also speak to this as well.

NINJAS:

[24:44] Yeah. So, in terms of the vision, the goal is to make it much easier than in the traditional game for people to be able to import their own models, right? So in the current version of the game, if you wanted to, let’s say add your own mob, you’d actually have to take an existing item or mob and make it transparent and then push your custom model on, and then you’d have to kind of make your own behaviors that it used, the current behaviors that exist in the game, and adapt them in unique ways to make it work, right? However, in our new or new game, we expect to be able to implement and have truly custom mobs that are implementable in the game. So, whether you change the behaviors based on existing ones or you implement your own behaviors, you should be able to have all of those different options.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[25:31] Yeah. And as far as injecting custom and community created content into the ecosystem, at first it will probably be, you know, some hands-on from our team, like actually manually reviewing content and approving it and you know, maybe helping communities get that content into the marketplace or into the game. But eventually we want to create systems that are kind, that’s kind of doing it dynamically. So, as long as the content that’s created conforms to like a certain standard, whether that’s in-game items or skins, that they’ll be able to use like a tool to kind of demo the items, make sure they look right on the models, and then finally like inject them into the ecosystem. That way, you know, we don’t have to expand our team to, you know, in real time to be able to support the amount of content coming in. And you know, since our content model is community created, we need a way to allow a lot of content to move through and move into the ecosystem. We want it to be kind of like an open market for content creators.

EROD:

[26:33] Now, in addition to your player acquisition, there’s also the conversation of this content— You know, getting content creators on board, getting them creating and contributing to the ecosystem. So, there’s two prongs to the kind of user acquisition side, right? Of marketplace ecosystem, however you want to frame it. Temp, maybe you can dive in a little bit on how we’re thinking about that player acquisition. In your words, where are the players, right? How are we getting them?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[27:11] Oh, sorry. So, we’re moving on from content, we’re talking about player acquisition?

EROD:

[27:15] Well, I mean, content and player acquisition, I guess, you know, kind of tie hand in hand, right? Because content brings, you know, brings the players and, you know, how are we getting people on board to create the content? How’s that trickling over into attracting player base?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[27:28] Sure. Yeah.

EROD:

[27:29] But if you want to go a different direction, we could do that too. If you have a different—

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[27:32] No, I get what you were saying now, I just was, I just needed a little clarification. I think the biggest tie between player acquisition and content is content is a way for servers to monetize. You know, that content, if they use NFT Worlds, they have a quicker path to like a revenue model without doing like a work around like donation system. So, when we do like business development and we try to convince servers to move into the NFT world’s ecosystem, one of the like selling points will be, you know, you can, you know, you can monetize your server by rolling out these collections that relate to your project, right? So, if you’re a server that’s, you know, like, I don’t know, forest themed, right? Like you can roll out, you know, forest theme items, like you got forest armor and you know, forest weapons, that type of thing.

[28:20] So it matches your brand and you know, players want to play your server and they want to buy your items because they like your gameplay. So, it’s like a reason to move over from being a lonely server in the middle of this sea of custom servers non interconnected, to being part of like this larger ecosystem, larger marketplace where you have a lot more potential customers and there’s already tools and a model for you to, you know, monetize your server. So, that’s kind of like one of the angles we would take on, you know, biz deving servers into the ecosystem. So, I guess that’s where it kind of ties in.

ARK:

[28:56] I think to add that too, like from a server operator standpoint on the Minecraft side right now, like the ways that you’re technically allowed from like your perspective to monetize are very, very, very limiting. Like there’s only specific ways such as like cosmetics primarily that like are some of the biggest revenue generators, whether it be like item or like just status type things in game. But beyond that, like the ability for creators to have more access to avenues of monetization that add to the player experience I think ultimately will be one of the big drivers from a biz dev perspective that pulls in a lot of these servers and content creators over from, you know, the existing Minecraft side

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[29:40] Let me add one more thing and then we can, I think Miles is ready to speak. But what I wanted to add is from the player perspective, if you’re going to spend actual money to purchase something in game, especially something cosmetic, right? Has no functionality other than making you, you know, setting you aside on an appearance standpoint, if you are playing in a large ecosystem with hundreds of thousands of players, and that item is going to work through all those servers and that entire ecosystem, that is a ton more alluring than just purchasing an item that can be used on a singular server. So, anytime that you are a content creator creating a cosmetic item, you know that that item has a much larger potential buyer audience. So, it’s, you know, you can list them cheaper, there’s a lot more money in it. It’s just better to be part of an ecosystem when you have like a product to sell, you have more customers.

EROD:

[30:38] And for those that have tuned into the spaces week after week, first of all, I know who you are, we know who you are, so thank you. But also, we talked about this, you know, user generated content, moving between servers, the value that adds to items from just a pure economic standpoint with [inaudible] of economics design, which is a really interesting conversation. That’s why when I’m seeing these pieces connect, it’s like, “Wow, this is great”. And it’s not possible without conversations like that, conversations like these and conversations we’re going to have with Miles. Miles, welcome. It’s so awesome to have you up here. What a surprise.

JAN MILSE:

[31:18] Hello. I hope that this is working properly this time. But thank you so much for having me.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[31:22] Sound good to me.

EROD:

[31:24] Yeah, you sound great. Maybe Miles, you want to start with just a brief overview background of who you are, your role, some of the things that you’re working on, and maybe some of the priorities that you’re focused?

JAN MILSE:

[31:38] Sure. So, my name is my Miles—

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[31:44] Uh, we can’t hear you.

[inaudible]

EROD:

Oh, no.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[31:51] We got, “My name is Miles” and then lost her. All right, I think Miles is back. We lost you for a second. Testing, one, too.

JAN MILSE:

[32:09] All right. Take two.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[32:11] Welcome back.

EROD:

[32:12] Welcome, welcome. We got you now.

JAN MILSE:

[32:14] Okay, wonderful, wonderful. So, my name is Miles. I will have been programming for about 10 years next month. I do a lot of stuff sort of on this project, I put together and oversee the team who is creating the new game engine. And yeah, I’m just, I’m very excited to work on this project. I’m very passionate about it, so.

EROD:

[32:36] Yeah, we’re super excited to have you. So, you’ve been— You’ve been programming for 10 years. Can you maybe walk us through some of the relevant parts of your past? and maybe just some like contextual background so people can get to know you a little bit.

JAN MILSE:

[32:53] Sure. So, I started programming when I was eight. And so and I will be turning— I’ll be 18. So, I started programming when I was eight. I sort of got into it through YouTube and stuff. I ended up meeting somebody at a local university, and I ended up learning how to program from a teachings assistant, and it all just kind of spiraled from there. Over the years, I’ve covered many technologies. Obviously, I’ve been modding Minecraft for about the same length of time. And I’m all too familiar with many of the problems a lot of the community has with it. In addition, I do functional programming, high insurance programming, fancy cool math stuff that I find really interesting. But yeah, I’ve kind of done it all over the years, but yeah.

EROD:

[33:41] And I asked this question to Ark, I want to ask it to you again too. Rust is a, as a programming language and kind of modernized network protocol, you know, simplified implementations of— From my understanding, of everything, you know, people are creating and just an overall better framework. Am I right on that, or maybe I’m wrong? You know, what was kind of the decision making process behind that from your perspective?

JAN MILSE:

[34:10] You’re absolutely correct. So, obviously currently the sort of current Minecraft implementation that everybody uses at the moment is written in Java, and there’s nothing wrong with Java, people use it in production, but it’s definitely a dying language. But Rust offers a lot of undeniable huge benefits. It simply can’t be matched by other languages. It is incredibly fast while still having a lot of modern language features. It has a lot of tools that allow us as the programmers to make sure that we’re doing our jobs right, which means that you’re going to have virtually no bugs, no crashes, no memory leaks. It’s significantly more efficient, so it’s going to be able to run much better on much worse hardware. It’s much more maintainable, meaning that it’s going to— It’s going to, on the tail end, be a lot easier for us to update and add wonderful new features to.

[34:55] It also allows us to work sort of on a lower level, which means that we get to do a lot of lower level optimization. We get to work more directly with the network stack, and we get to engage with a lot of the nitty gritty that really makes a good game that Minecraft was never able to because of its implementation in Java. And it also means that the rest ecosystem will allow us to create a much better modern system that will allow people to not just modern rust, but also modern, many other languages, whatever they feel works best for them, it opens up a whole new world for development, creativity, speed, efficiency, it can run in many platforms, including the web. It’s an everything language that works perfectly in all situations.

EROD:

[35:40] So, my job is to ask the questions as kind of the voice of the community, right? And so, I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but you are 18, right? And, you know, why do you think you are, you’re the right fit for leading this team? Which of course we know you are, but you know, like I said, that is my job. I’m asking the questions the community has, right? You know, why do you think— What makes— And what are you passionate about? Like, why are you passionate about this? is another part of that question.

JAN MILSE:

[36:21] Look, so I am a 18, but I also first of all have a lot of experience. And because of that, I’ve— Not only do I have a lot of experience programming, but I’ve also just, I grew up on Minecraft. I’ve been playing Minecraft my entire life, and I’ve been modding Minecraft my entire life. And I have had the same frustrations the community has had, I’ve had myself for years and years and years and years, and I just wanted to see some change. And I, first of all, I would just like to say that this is a wonderful opportunity to disrupt this long overdue for disruption Field. Minecraft is such a wonderful game, but I think it’s really due for something new. And I am really excited to be on the cutting edge of that new technology that we’re able to work on.

[37:03] But yeah, it’s not just me. I am incredibly lucky to have over the years met an amazing team of probably some of the best Minecraft developers in the world, people who have been playing the game just as long, if not longer than I have, people with knowledge that I don’t have. And we’ve worked together in a way that I think has created something incredible in the speed that I was never able to imagine at the beginning. It’s not just me. I’m very lucky to be on a team of all stars, and I’m just really excited to see how this throws us forward in a way that I don’t think has been seen before. And I’m just glad to be a part of that.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[37:42] We’re happy to have you. Thank you.

EROD:

[37:46] I would say that was a 4/10 answer.

[inaudible]

EROD:

[37:52] I give it a 4/10—I’m joking. That was a really good— I put you on the spot there, miles. That was awesome. Tim, did you have something to ask or, or add to for Miles? I’ll just mute for a second.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[38:05] Oh, no, no, I was just saying it was a great answer. Yeah.

EROD:

[38:09] Yes, indeed.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[38:10] Indeed. I think everyone’s kind of curious about this team that we’ve kind of had working in the background, working in the shadows. So, it’s nice to have miles up here and kind of like, you know, just hear their voice. There is a team, everyone, they’ve been working really hard. We do have a game client coming, who knew? It’s so funny, we still see on Twitter like, “Oh, NFT Worlds is a rug. Like, they’re not even building anything”. Like where are these people getting these ideas? It’s amazing the amount of stuff that we’re like putting out and developing. We’re just so excited to finally show everyone and kind of kill the doubters,

EROD:

[38:45] To be honest. But I mean, I can’t blame them, right? I mean, with everything that goes on in the space, and that’s the reason, you know, for the rebrand and for, you know, separating from the NFT and kind of web 3 positioning, right? Is because of that connotation. Like, just because Miles hasn’t been on a Twitter space before, or shone her face around the discord, right? I mean, that doesn’t mean that she’s not awesome at everything, that they’re, you know, that her and the team are working on and building you know, a really incredible game client. But that’s just because of like— No one would second guess that in a web 2 or more traditional company. So, it’s just a, it’s a weird dynamic, but yeah.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[39:38] Yeah, that’s true. You’re right. People are kind of conditioned by the space, but I think we’ve always like, tried to stay transparent with the community and build a reputation for being reliable and always building. So, I think this is just one more, you know, one more time we’re proving that, I guess it’ll always be like that. So, buckle up. We got cool stuff coming. we’re super hyped.

EROD:

[40:02] How much is Miles charging us again to get up here? What’s her acting fee?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[40:11] Thousand dollars a minute.

EROD:

[40:12] Oh, man, we got to wrap up. We got to wrap up soon then. I’m curious of your thoughts as well, Miles, while we have you up here it, you know, on u user generated content, you touched on this a little, but— And web 3, right? Because coming from this traditional Minecraft background, what were your thoughts going, you know, around web 3? How, you know, initially, I’m not even sure that, you know, we’ve talked about this, so I’m very curious to hear kind of how you think this plays into all of it, and what are your, you know— What do you think about it overall? I mean, web 3, NFTs, you know?

JAN MILSE:

[40:58] So, I’ve been obviously in the programming community of the Minecraft community for nearly a decade now. And because of that, I’ve seen many technologies come and go and that makes you kind of jaded. But something different happened, I think, when Web 3 started rising because there’s something so unique about the incredible tangible opportunities that provides that I just think genuinely hasn’t been seen before. And also knowing people who use Minecraft as an avenue for creativity and self-expression and being able to use these amazing tools to not only share it with their own communities, but also to share it with the world, I think is an incredible unmatched opportunity and innovation that I guess I just wish we had sooner. And I guess I’m just very excited to see how much more amazing work we’re going to be able to see from the community that we’re going to build around this. Because that’s what it’s really about, right? I mean, I have a lot of wonderful developers and we’re going to make something really cool, but it takes everybody who plays it to make it really what it will be. And I am beyond excited to see the amazing thing that this turns into.

EROD:

[42:09] Ark attempt, do you have anything to add? I do have another question, but I want to make sure that you guys, you have anything to add or any questions?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[42:20] I mean, you know, we kind of say it every single space, right? Like we have a goal of using Web 3 and blockchain technologies in like a different way than everyone else has. So, I think if there’s any community that’s going to be difficult to tap into, it’s going to be the Minecraft community, because they’re very anti NFT. That’s partially why we’re doing our rebranding. But if we do tap into that, which we really think we will through, you know, just giving them this amazing product, then you know, we’ll be able to kind of start that reeducation process where, you know, we can show that NFTs and blockchain can be used in a non evil way, right? , which is at least is how they think of it. And that’s always been our mission, right? Like we use the technology because we love the tech, not because we’re trying to make some silly cash grab or something. So, we just need to prove that to our web 2 gaming audience.

EROD:

[43:07] Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. Good.

ARK:

[43:12] I think, yeah, I think I ultimately agree too, it’s like at the end of the day, like blockchain and the ideas around how blockchain works and the new things that can be built with just the way that like trustless ownership and all these other ideas flow into it. Like, I think there’s a lot of really interesting creative things that can be done. And I’m excited to see all of that as well in the context of, you know, what we’re building.

EROD:

[43:36] Now, Miles, with user acquisition. How, from the technical perspective, are you factoring in our kind of strategy on the player acquisition, content creator acquisition side of things?

JAN MILSE:

[43:59] So, when I kind of think about this type of thing, I’d like to think about some of the things that people flocking to recently. Some of the many like PVP clients and aesthetic clients that have been invented recently. And what I see is I see people craving innovation, right? Minecraft 1.09, I think is, I think it’s seven or eight years old now. Like the main versions of this game that people are playing on haven’t seen updates in five years, six years, right? And it’s so apparent from the entire community that they just want something new. They want to still have that core game, but they still want to engage with new technologies and new features and new ideas. And I think that Minecraft is in that manner, kind of a restrictive medium. Because as wonderful of a game as it is, it also comes with a lot of baggage from that time and its age. And what I think we’re going to be able to do in a way that has never really been done before is fully, is fully remove that baggage and outrun it in a way that’s going to open up opportunities that have never been thought of before in the community.

JAN MILSE:

[45:06] And I think that when new players to see how much more freedom they’re going to have around their ability to be creative, around their ability to interact with their friends, to be social, to play new mini games, to play the same game, the same thing that they’ve been playing since probably they were very young but with that new modern twist, I think it’s going to be a no-brainer for many of them. And I think that we’re going to see that, especially as the community learns about more of the wonderful features that we have planned, I think that it’ll be super apparent why people are going to switch over. Because as wonderful as Minecraft is, there’s just some stuff it doesn’t have that we’re going to.

EROD:

[45:47] And you also mentioned before, the social expressivity of players and the doors that kind of that opens up, right? Are you taking inspiration from anywhere? Temp, don’t clown on me. You know, where I’m trying— I’m asking a leading question. No, I’m just— I’m not, I’m not. It was Roblox. I was just asking, you always think I should just marry Roblox, because I really do love Roblox a lot. So, I was just making fun of that, and I talk about it quite a bit. But Miles are— Don’t answer with, you know, Roblox is not the answer, don’t answer with Roblox. But you know, are you pulling inspiration from anywhere for how players have expressed themselves in other games and other environments that you think are important? That Minecraft as you mentioned, is, you know, limits.

JAN MILSE:

[46:42] There’s a lot of places. I think, for instance, one of the trends we’ve sort of seen more recently in the Minecraft community is things like sort of the cosmetic trend where people are just looking for more ways to express themselves. Like with Lunar client for instance, it’s sort of very deeply integrated social features and it’s deeply integrated, you know, like attempt to increase the level of expressivity that players have. But I think when we’re sort of thinking about this, right? As somebody who’s implemented similar things to what Lunar client has, lunar client will forever be restricted by the outdated technology of the Minecraft version that they work on. Minecraft 1.8 to 1.9 uses I think an [inaudible] version that’s well over 10 years old. It doesn’t run well in modern computers, it’s super restrictive, it can’t run at full resolution. And because of that, anything that we add to Minecraft right now, we’re working against the grain, right?

[47:38] But the platform that we’re building will not only enable these things, but it will encourage it, it will make it an integral part of the thing that we’re creating, right? And that integration is what’s going to allow for a whole new world of social expression because you’re no longer going to have to fight for every inch of extra things that you have. Instead, we’re going to not just be a lunar client, not just be a bad line client, we’re going to be something completely different. Something that from the ground up, from the first line of code has had in its mind a much grander vision of what it means to play Minecraft and be social in this game. And I think that we’re going to see, especially as the things that we show get more mature, especially as sort of our internal version gets more mature, that we are going to be able to enable connection in Minecraft in a way that just was never seen before, in a way that doesn’t wait for Minecraft to catch up, in a way that ceases the moment and that will truly allow another dimension to the game that was ever seen before.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Amazing. I love it.

EROD:

Yeah. Really well said. 

TEMPTRANQUIL:

I mean, it’s true.

NINJAS:

Yeah. I knew all this and I’m getting more hype despite knowing it just by hearing her voice.

EROD:

[48:49] Yeah, me too. I’m like, “What? Miles crazy, you’re crazy”. Yes, very good, very good. Clap, clap.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[49:00] Yeah, we’re hyped. I think you can tell, like as we get closer, closer to the client release, we like, you know, we kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel. Is that the right analogy? But we’re just yeah, we’re super hyped. The finish line, we see the finish line, and the great thing— Or the starting line, depending on how you look at it.

EROD:

Yeah, the starting line, right, yeah.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[49:21] Sure. I guess the finish line of our downtime, right? because we get to kind of pick up where we left off in a sense. A lot of people, you know, are asking like, you know, how will it be different when the new clients release? And a lot of my answer is like, well, it actually won’t be super different right off the right off the bat, we got to kind of start back where we were. But we get to take our position, right? And continue that exponential growth that we saw with using Minecraft as our platform. So, we just kind of go back to where we were and then keep growing from there.

JAN MILSE:

[49:55] If I can just cut in for a sec to kind of extend on that. 

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Yeah, please do.

JAN MILSE:

[49:59] For y’all music lovers out there, if you’ve ever listened to some of your favorite music, sort of without the baseline, right? Like when you’re listening to a song, you’re not thinking about the base storming in the background, but the moment you take it away, just there’s something missing, right? Minecraft right now has no baseline, because as wonderful as the game is as it is, in order for the community to really infuse itself and make its imprint, it needs to fight the game. But what we’re going to enable is we’re going to add that baseline. It’s going to feel the same, it’s going to be playable the same, you’re going to be able to do everything you used to do, but you’re going to have just that extra little something that brings it from a wonderful experience to a magical experience. One that will allow you and your friends and your community to engage with this as a platform that no longer has limits, right? One where you’re not bound to the outdated technology to the old ideas that plague the Minecraft that people play today.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[50:54] Yeah, I mean, there is definitely going to be a new era that’s a lot more focused on our community and our developer and content creators. So, that alone will make this huge revolution of things that have never been built before.

EROD:

[51:09] Now ninjas you wanted to cut in for a second. Did you have anything you wanted to add?

NINJAS:

Not anymore. No, I’m not going up against that beautiful speech.

EROD:

[51:19] Okay. I don’t— I think it was— Miles, your answers are really awesome. But yeah, it was not— It’s not intended to be a speech. It’s just, I mean, this is really the truth and it’s awesome. I’m hyped, I am falling apart, I read that in the Discord. I’m like my, you know, these are— People say you shouldn’t ask questions that you don’t know the answers to, right? I mean, that’s just a maximum of like anything . But that’s what we do on these spaces. We ask questions that are intended to dive deeper and think about things in unique perspectives. They’re not just, you know, general team meetings or sync ups or what’s going on. This is zooming out looking at the overall macro of what NFT Worlds is building and the future of what that looks like for content creators, players. And this has been, you know, epic in having miles able to contribute to that in, you know, this public setting with the rest of the team up here. I think unless someone, unless anyone else has something to add, maybe we— Yeah, go ahead.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[52:15] I got a question for Miles.

EROD:

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[52:17] A lot of people are asking about, so Miles maybe could you talk a little bit about the web-based version of the game and it’s kind of what that experience would be like and why that’s possible?

JAN MILSE:

[52:33] So, one of the wonderful things about Rust as a platform is that it has a technology called Web Assembly as a native, as like something that it natively supports. And Web Assembly is essentially a tool that allows you to run fully fledged applications within your browser. A lot of things that you probably don’t even know use them, use them. Anybody use Figma, you use Web Assembly, a lot of really modern applications use it. But more recently, something even Cooler got released, something called Web GPU. And Web GPU does is it allows near native game speeds to be run in browser. So, one of the things we’ve been focusing on is integration, is making the experience a lot better and a lot smoother for people who are new to the game so they can help switch over. And one of the things that our client is going to be able to do is it’s going to be able to run at more, not just playable, at wonderful speeds directly within a modern browser.

[53:30] And what that’s going to mean is that your friend doesn’t even need to have the game to try it. You can just send them a link to your world and they can join directly in their browser. It also means that we can run this on platforms that people don’t really play these games on. We could have a mobile native version, we could have versions that run natively on newer computers that might use different architectures. We will be able to put this everywhere. And in doing that, not only will be able to bring players over, but it’ll also mean that our experience will be so unified that anybody who wants to join will be able to with no roadblocks. It’ll be a process that’s immediate and rewarding in a way that has not been seen.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Cool.

NINJAS:

[54:09] I mean, another really big fundamental difference between our game and the existing game is our game is being built to be built on, if that makes any sense, right? As somebody who created a Minecraft content creation team before, I can say with 100% confidence that Minecraft originally was not built to be modified, it was not built to be changed, for entities to be added for custom weapons to be made. And people have found very clever ways to do it and there is very minimal support now. But the biggest difference is our game, this is something I’m really, really excited about as a creator in Minecraft in general, or just somebody who like, you know, enjoys that creation, that our game is going to support that from the beginning and it’s being built to support that, which is going to be like the biggest weapon for all of our communities to be able to make truly fun games with that same advantage of what Minecraft gave you was like, you know, a platform that you can build on so you don’t have to make some of those baseline developments. But also, you know, really what it does is it makes what the Minecraft tool was before even better for our community to make even more fun, even more exciting games with less flaws and less lag.

EROD:

[55:17] Can you maybe contextualize that with an example? Like if you were going to add something into Minecraft, like let’s just say a sword, how would you do that? A customized sword?

NINJAS:

[55:26] I think a good example would be something that’s rideable because that is one of the most atrocious examples. So, one of the best ways to really implement a custom vehicle in Minecraft is you take what’s called an armor stand, which is an item in game and you basically make it invisible and you put the model on top of the armor stand. Now when the player interacts with that model, you have to place the where the player sits, like almost— The word I’m looking for is randomly, but it’s not randomly. You basically have to place the player in the air and just try to get it to visually sync with the model, right? And that is how you can get a player to sit in a car in Minecraft. You know, you have to have the armor stand, you have to place the model over the armor stand, and then you have to, you know, place the player somewhere relative to that armor stand where you think they have to sit for the car.

[56:18] Now once you implement really any animation, you actually have to have a new armor stand for everything that’s moving. So, if you have a guy standing and you want him to be animated, you’d literally have to have an armor stand for his arms, for his legs, everything, right? And the biggest issue with that, not only is it ridiculously complex for no reason, but also it’s extremely laggy because the player is rendering in five or six different models for each, you know, individual who’s moving, which is obviously very inefficient. The whole point of our custom system is our models that are animated, we can have them moving in a normal way, just like a normal game does, where the models are moving on their own. And players don’t have to do all these crazy workarounds of, “Oh, I need to get this item and make it invisible, then put our model on top”. Now you just implement your model as a custom model in the game and give it whatever behavior you can code. Does that make sense?

EROD:

[57:09] Sounds like, sounds terrible. Makes sense, kind of.

NINJAS:

[57:12] You know, modding in Java, Minecraft without, you know, having a custom mob, sorry, custom mod, is really a workaround system. It is all around taking what already exists and making it work in a way that maybe it wasn’t intended for to get a certain result. And I’m sure Miles knows a lot about this. I’m sure he’s done a ridiculous amount, because he said he used to do a lot of modding. The only way you get out of that is if you, you know, you have a mod pack that kind of changes it, but then the players have to download, you know, some type of external client and they have to like drag and drop the mod pack in. And it’s a very friction full system, we’re talking about frictionless, it has tons of friction in that system, right? So, we’re providing a frictionless system to also have custom entities, custom weapons or whatever you want to implement in the game.

EROD:

[57:57] Miles, did you want to add something to that too?

JAN MILSE:

[58:00] Yeah, I guess all that I want to say is that this whole, as somebody’s done this a lot, the process is just as complicated as it sounds, even with a custom mod, you’re always working against the grain. Like the way that you make mods these days at Minecraft is you have to like use a tool called Mix-ins to inject your own modifications into specific parts of code and you have to make sure you don’t break anything else. And then there’s a priority system to make sure that mods work well with each other. What you’re doing is you’re taking a closed platform and trying to pry it open. And I would just like to say the teams that have been working on doing this for the past million years are incredibly talented, have made amazing progress, but nothing can match just going from the ground up and doing it right going to do.

[58:42] We’re going to make sure that every single step of creativity is not hurdled by anything, that every change you want to make is going to be encouraged, and we’re going to have a platform for you. We’re going to have a scripting system, we’re going to make sure that if you want to send custom models to the client, that you’re going to be able to do that safely and securely in a way that’s easy and does not require 10,000 Armor stands. We’re going to make sure that every single inch of creativity that you want to express is going to be able to be done easily and without hurdle. And that’s what’s going to open up this new world here. Because setting aside all the social stuff, some of the minds, the creative minds that have been playing and expressing themselves on Minecraft for years are genuinely geniuses and artists in their own right. And again, they’ve been so terribly constrained by this, it’s not fair to them. They deserve a better platform and that’s what we’re going to give them. We’re going to give them a platform that works with them and that helps them be the best and make the best amazing things they’ve been making for years.

EROD:

[59:41] Why hasn’t— Sorry, just go ahead.

NINJAS:

[59:45] I was just going to say, a lot of people in this space, and probably maybe people who hear it later are like, “Okay, that’s for the developers, where does this apply to the player? Where does it apply to me?” It actually is extremely, extremely important because yes, you get more fun games and yes, you get more people, but another huge thing that it does is it opens up the streets or the avenue for anybody who wants to make a game. Right now, if you want to make a custom game in Minecraft, you have to be a Minecraft developer, you need to understand a lot of different functionalities in Minecraft. But what we’re doing is we’re going to make the barrier to entry to make these games also lower so people can, you know, kind of train people to do it or people who know the code can actually have some sort of like, step up versus just, “Oh, I have to become a Minecraft developer and learn all from scratch”. So, the game quality is going to be better, right? the obviously how much lag there is, things like that are going to be better, but also then people who can actually make these games it’s also going to be a much wider and much more vast number of people. So, you should see a lot more competition, which is good for players because it obviously means better games, better updates, faster updates, et cetera.

EROD:

[01:00:47] Now if this is such a big need, why hasn’t someone done it before? Or why haven’t they done it to the scale that we’re doing it? What’s the limiting factor? Yeah, Ninjas and Miles as well.

JAN MILSE:

[01:01:03] If I can just tap in here something. I think the main limiting factor is just resources. In fact, actually a lot of the members of the team who are working on this right now have tried doing versions of this before, but it’s just not sustainable independently. It requires a lot of effort and requires a lot of funding, and it requires a lot of things that this community just didn’t have access to. And this is part of why I feel so incredibly lucky to be working on this project is because we’ve now been given a blank check, an open ticket to make the best product that we can. And we’ve taken it and ran with it. Some of the work that the developers have done is incredible. It’s insane. We went from having nothing to a game in a matter of months. We are going to, with this level of support, create something completely unmatched. And this I think is probably the first time that the Minecraft community has really gotten this type of resources. And I think only time will tell how much this is just going to supercharge the community that frankly has been lying dormant for years now just with nowhere else to go. And to provide that platform, I think is going to just be, it it’s going to be something so incredible that it’s not even something we have the context to understand yet.

EROD:

[01:02:19] So with that being said, we are getting close to time. We can push it over, you know, as long as everyone’s okay with that, but I want to take a minute now and jump to someone who’s super incredible and talented, we’ve all seen his work. It’s Dan. And Dan has been working on the rebrand, the repositioning, which I think we’d all agree is an integral part of the puzzle pieces that are coming into alignment and being assembled. Dan, can you maybe take it away and talk a little bit about how you’re thinking about the new brand, how you’re approaching it, some inspiration, what’s your perspective and yeah, just a little bit about your process. Everyone’s curious to know.

DANN:

[01:03:13] Yeah, so the name is— No.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Oh, I knew you going to do that. I knew you were going to do that.

DANN:

[01:03:20] Yeah, I’m honestly nervous that I might accidentally say it.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

No, you got this.

DANN:

[01:03:24] Because I’ve been designing it for so long now. Yeah. let’s see. So, you know, we wanted to step away from the word NFT really, ultimately, and create something that was more approachable, more friendly and just more inviting for everyone, you know, not just the NFT space, the crypto space, like literally for everyone. So, you know, we honestly together as a team came up with a bunch of fun names and it was a really cool process going through that because— I’m trying really hard not to F this up here. But we all came up with, you know, some words and names that we really enjoyed and kind of voted on them together as a team, which was a really cool process.

[01:04:28] And why it was so special is because we all came together on one approach rather quickly, and it was— So we felt it was more, you know, just in line with what we’re all thinking, you know, and we were really confident in that. So, we took that and ran with it. And again, just really focused on creating something for everyone. And with a focus on being more friendly, you know, something that you could be walking through Target and you might see this stuff on the Target shelve or whatever, you know? Like something like that. And I think we pulled it off, and I’m excited to be able to share it with everyone soon. And yeah, from there it was just coming up with, you know, all the new color palettes and everything in line with that, you know, doing rebranding all the UI in the game in line with everything, new website. Yeah, it’s still on process.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:05:04] Yeah, it’s funny, we took a long time to come up with the name as a team and it was actually Dan’s idea to do it in the fashion we did, where we had this like, long team meeting and kind of everyone voted on the names they liked and then we kind of met in the middle. But as for as long as the name took Dan, some of your first designers basically nailed the new branding and logo, and you actually did a couple iterations after that and we ended up going back with the first version. So, you nailed that.

DANN:

[01:06:10] Yes, it’s been fun. I mean, you know, it’s funny as a designer when you get really hyped on something and just really inspired, like you could just, you could just, you can crank, but you, a lot of times it’s the original vision that kind of gets it. But it’s like I tell everyone when I teach design, it’s the confirmation, right? I talk about the reconfirm process. So, you design something and then you know, you show it to people as soon as possible and then you do a bunch of other variations of it just to confirm that your original was the right approach, or the wrong approach, you know? And you just do that over and over and over and again until you, again, have confirmed you have the right solution. So, that was how he pulled that off.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:06:59] I also just want to note, if anyone is an aspiring designer, Dan has some amazing design courses that he’s created. So, if you want to learn from the best, follow Dan on Twitter. He has some awesome lessons over there.

NINJAS:

[01:07:12] Oh man, I appreciate that.

NINJAS:

Dan is definitely the best. Like his work is— I’ve worked with a lot of graphic designers and web designers before, like, you’re a totally different league.

DANN:

[01:07:23] Oh man, I appreciate that. Y’all are getting a glimpse into why I love our weekly meetings, because they just they lift me up big time. It’s pretty cool.

EROD:

You suck.

DANN:

Can I always count on you?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Wait, this guy’s going to charge us more. Let’s balance him out a little bit. Let’s give him negative feedback. Dan, is your slogan on your website still like the world’s fastest designer or something?

DANN:

Yeah, yeah. It is.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:07:54] It’s true. It really is. Love that.

DANN:

I mean, yeah, I’ve tried to sell myself like that my whole career. It’s been fun.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

So cool. Boy, it’s been a pretty good hour, I got to say.

EROD:

It has been. 

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:08:11] I’m okay sticking around. Maybe we do like some community questions to kind of wrap things up and then we can close in like 10 minutes. Is everyone okay with that?

ARK:

Yeah. And if anyone has to drop, that’s totally fine too. Don’t feel pressured. But if you want to stick around, please feel free to stick around.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Yeah.

JAN MILSE:

[01:08:26] And by the way, my DMs on Discord are open, so if anybody has any questions that is like more or less skills that we don’t get to, please DM me, my DMs are open. And you can ask in English or Korean, either works, and I’d be happy to answer that. I want to make sure everybody, everybody learns what they want to learn.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

But don’t DM Miles thinking you’re going to get any secret alpha, because she knows exactly like us. You ain’t getting nothing.

JAN MILSE:

[01:08:52] I will not be saying the name early. I will not.

EROD:

Yeah, that was bold.

[Inaudible]

EROD:

That was a bold invite.

NINJAS:

I said that once and my first [inaudible]

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Your DMS may get flooded Miles, just a fair warning.

JAN MILSE:

[01:09:07] I preemptively turned notifications off

NINJAS:

[01:09:11] I said that once in the first Twitter space about the avatars meant, and I remember never being able to find any Discord DM ever because there was always like that never ending list.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:09:26] Back before we had Eric to take all my DMs, I got like over a hundred DMs a day and that was like, there was a few hours of my day dedicated just to going through them top to bottom and answering everyone’s questions. But now we just spam Eric. Thanks Eric.

EROD:

[01:09:40] Yeah, you’re welcome. I I’m the intern, an assistant. So, this is my job. I’m happy doing it. And miles, you’re going to help out with that, right? Because now we’re going to push all the DMs to miles, every DM, just miles. So.

[inaudible]

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Okay, okay. Okay. Don’t give anyone any ideas. Let’s do some community questions. Let’s start raising some hands.

EROD:

[01:10:05] Let’s do it. Yeah, let’s bring some people up. Please don’t spam out. Okay, let’s bring some people up. If you have a question please raise your hand, we’re going to bring you up here. Also going to get through some of these in the discord and look through the chat in the Twitter space below. So, if you don’t want to jump on and you want to ask a question, drop the question, I think it’s purple, in the purple chat at the bottom right and I’ll go through those as well and filter through. While we’re waiting to bring the first person up, “Interested in the onboarding aspect and strategies. The key to success is to get as many people to play as possible” asked by Pbam in the discord. The question is, you know, “Interested to learn more about the onboarding aspect and strategies”. Sorry, I didn’t frame that as a question.

JAN MILSE:

[01:11:00] I can hop in and say a little bit about this if you want. In terms of onboarding, right? Obviously onboarding is going to be the hardest part of all of this because it doesn’t matter how wonderful your product is, it’s still going to definitely be a grind to get everybody to— Like at the reeducation aspect of this is just going to I think be really difficult. But at the same time, we have a lot of really wonderful tools in our tool belt. So, I’m personally very confident. So, first of all, look, our product is just going— I am personally very confident about it, and not only do I think that that is going to bring people over itself, but also we have such a wonderful community and I think that people are going to, because of that very quickly learn some of the a amazing things that we offer that other communities just don’t.

[01:11:47] But I also think there’s more of a practical aspect, which is over time, as things grow, developers, creatives, all of these people that are trying to push Minecraft to its limits are hitting a wall. And I think that our strategy, at least sort of from my understanding is that we’re going to sort of pounce on those people and we’re going to say, you can go farther and eventually when people start to try to figure out how to do things they can’t do, when people start to feel constrained, we’re going to give them an out. And I think that there is a— I not only think, I know, because I know a lot of people, there is a huge community of people who are just trumping at the bit for something that’s going to allow them to no longer be constrained by all of this. And I think that that aspect is one of the many factors that’s going to really help bring people in. Because Minecraft, it’s social and it’s creative, and as much as I love the game, it’s not creative either. And we’re going to fill in those gaps, and as we fill in those gaps, people are going to have no choice but to come over to play the game the way that they want to.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:12:49] Yeah, for sure. You nailed it. The other thing is like the fact that the client is backwards compatible with Minecraft, like people can just use it as a better game client. They don’t have to engage in all the extra, you know, NFT Worlds type things. So, you know, if there is, you know, one angle is just like, why not use it if it’s just a better client in general? I think we have that, people will just use it for its own performance improvements.

JAN MILSE:

[01:13:19] Yeah. Just to make sure like, just because I want to reiterate this. The game that we’re developing, obviously it’s original in many aspects and is going to have a ton of new features, but it’s also going to be 100% at feature parody with Minecraft. So, whether you just like to play [inaudible] casually, whether you like to play Fox, whatever game you want to enjoy, you’re not going to have to wait for them to come over to NFT Worlds. We’re bringing NFT to them, we’re bringing NFT Worlds to them. We’re bringing our game client to them. And because of that, if for no other reason it’s going to provide better frame rates, it’s going to run on more platforms, it’s going to have less bugs and it’s just going to be a smoother experience. And even if somebody wants nothing, actually, even if they’re perfectly happy with everything that’s already there, we’re just going to make it that little bit better so that people who are at all frustrated with a lot of the issues that Minecraft has these days are going to have just something better to go to with no compromises.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:14:16] Yep. Good question. Thank you.

EROD:

We’ve got Preetam, [inaudible].

PREETAM:

[01:14:23] Hey, am I Audible?

EROD:

Welcome. Welcome.

PREETAM:

[01:14:28] [inaudible] So, I just wanted to check about two questions. So, my first question would be, so what’s the short-term objectives and the long term market objective you have in your mind looking at the current market scenario and the future [inaudible].

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Is he breaking?

EROD:

[01:15:00] Yeah, I think you’re a little bit—

ARK:

[01:15:04] I think I got it. I think he asked, given like the current like market scenario and where we are, what are our short term and long term objectives?

PREETAM:

Yes.

NINJAS:

That’s what I heard, yeah.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:15:19] Is that correct? Preetam? Okay. I guess, I mean, we all have kind of a similar opinion. Ark, you want to say this?

ARK:

[01:15:32] Yeah, I mean you know, there’s a bunch of different facets. Obviously, first and foremost the most important thing is the game engine and you know, getting the game client to you know, a release date and a time period that, you know, is within the realms of what we expect. That’s on the shorter term. The longer term is really just like continuing development across, I think, at least in my opinion, going beyond like the express ability of what, you know, how Miles was saying Minecraft and what it’s incapable of doing currently and going into what NFT Worlds can bridge and bring there, as well as you know, opening up all the new opportunities for content creators, content ecosystems, more player social functionality, creativity, everything all around there and continuing to grow the NFT World’s community as it is already. But I’m sure the rest of the team has stuff to add to that as well.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:16:31] Yeah, I mean, super high level, like number one rebrand, number two, release the alpha version. Three, get the like creator ecosystem back up and running with, you know, basic like the verified builder system and all those other creator tools, start to onboard players and then, you know, just improve the game client and network features as we go.

PREETAM:

[01:16:52] Okay. And my second question be, so when could we expect, like the mobile [inaudible]

ARK:

So, if I heard that you asked when can we expect a mobile version of NFT Worlds?

PREETAM:

Yes.

ARK:

I think that’d be a question for Miles in the context of Rust, but yeah.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

He also asked about will he be able to use a MetaMask wallet? So maybe that’s like, maybe we explained [inaudible] integrates with the mobile client, if there was one.

JAN MILSE:

[01:17:28] Sure. So, I’m not on the MetaMask team so I’m not going to speak too much on that, but just speaking sort of to the game side. Rust is an incredibly versatile language and it runs pretty much everywhere. So, porting our game to mobile will primarily just be a challenge of packaging and like user experience. In theory we could just run it on mobile whenever we want. We just want to make sure, of course, like if we’re going to put on a mobile, we need controls. So, but that’s not too much a challenge. So, likely what we’ll be looking at there is, while it most likely won’t be in the initial release, one or two releases down the road, at least the preliminary mobile version should definitely be expected. I guess it would just sort of depend on what the community wants and what our priorities are.

[01:18:11] Once we release the client, it’s going to be— There’s a lot of things we want to add and mobile is definitely one of them. So, I think we’ll just go full speed ahead, but it’ll definitely happen. It’s not going to take too long after the initial client release. Definitely not. It’s not a huge task at all and it’s definitely something that we want to have because I also know like a large amount of the community plays Minecraft on mobile and Java just doesn’t serve them. So, hopefully we’ll be able to take advantage of the new technologies that we’ve been integrating with this process and use that to put Minecraft on devices we haven’t seen before. Maybe with little bit of effort it will overtake doom as the put it anywhere game, but we’ll see how that goes.

ARK:

[01:18:50] That would be awesome. I think to the meta side you asked as well, just to like touch on that really quickly. Like, I think the first and foremost goal is we don’t want crypto to be a blocker for new players. So, we don’t want people to have to be like, “you have to go create a MetaMask, get a wallet” or anything, like it should feel and play just like a regular game. But what we’ve been building, like Temp was saying, on the MetaFab infrastructure side, it’s a bunch of like web 3 gaming infrastructure that completely hides the wires of players having to even recognize that there’s anything [inaudible] in related tied into a game while still getting the benefits down the road. We’ll basically have it where players just register, sign up and play like game assets, cosmetics, things like that will just be deposited into a default wallet we’ll have just through player registration, they may not even know is crypto. And then the players that are more crypto familiar, they can connect their MetaMask wallet or third-party wallet if they want to own the assets in a wallet they control themselves and that’ll be no problem. So, it’s really intended to be the most frictionless experience and the best of both worlds.

PREETAM:

Thank you. Nice explanation.

EROD:

[01:19:55] Awesome. Thank you so much for your question. Appreciate you jumping up here. Temp, did you have something to add?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

No, no, I was just going to say thanks. Good question.

EROD:

Okay.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Do we have a speaker in line or should we wrap it up?

EROD:

[01:20:17] Yeah, yeah, we have All Your Loot news or Smitty.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

I don’t know why I can’t see the speakers. Where is that shown?

EROD:

Are you in the— Are you looking at the space or no?

NINJAS:

I think you have to be a co-host.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

I see. Okay.

EROD:

You should be able to see the speakers. What’s up Smitty? Welcome.

SMITTY:

[01:20:36] What’s going on? I just want to say this space has been incredible. Thank you team and Miles for all the insight. It was good to hear you speak about it. Just a question regarding like networking I guess, what kind of player volume are you guys expecting like realistically on launch and do you guys think you’re prepared for it? I don’t know how networking features are compared to Minecraft, I don’t know how much better it’ll be, but just wondering,

JAN MILSE:

[01:21:03] So, just sort of speaking from a purely technical perspective on this, luckily most of our work is on the client. So, networking is actually not a bottleneck here. So, no matter how many users want to do this, we can— Worst case scenario is completely to fault to existing Minecraft infrastructure. Since people are going to be able to join normal servers, they’re going to be able to use their normal Minecraft accounts. We’re not too concerned even if hypothetically every single Minecraft player just moved over that day, it shouldn’t be a problem. The only like very minor concern, but of course bugs are going to inevitably exist. But with the size and quality of our team, we’re going to be able to fix these within the hour. So, once we get over that initial road bump, we’re going to be prepared for however many people join over and I think me, the team, are all expecting it to be quite a few people. So, we’re prepared and we’re ready.

EROD:

[01:22:01] Sweet. Smitty, anything else?

SMITTY:

No, that covered it. That’s awesome. Thank you.

EROD:

Awesome.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Sweet. Thanks.

EROD:

Always good to have you up here. Potter.

PODDER:

[01:22:14] Hey, what’s going on everyone? Stellar space. Thanks again. My question is, since everything is built really on a Minecraft template, I mean, not a template, but inspired by, let’s say that, which I’m really excited about because the game is amazing, as everyone here knows, I’m curious how we avoid or how you avoid the second rug from Microsoft or Mojang or whoever, which is copyright. And then I have one other quick question.

NINJAS:

[01:22:40] I can talk a little bit about this at least from the game models and textures et cetera side. So, we are obviously aware that that is, that would’ve been a possibility had we just copied it one for one, which is why we have done some pretty, I would say a pretty hefty amount of research in terms of anything that could really be “Minecraft copyright”. Like, I’m just going to throw something out there. For example, I think we can all agree that the Creeper from Minecraft is pretty iconically a Minecraft thing. We are not just going to one for one recreate those types of models. We will be implementing our own completely custom version now, they will still be recognizable, they’ll still say serve a similar purpose, but anything that is truly copyrighted in game from Minecraft, we won’t, we just won’t have, we will have our own completely unique, completely custom design versions that the team has made, and the reason we do that is simply to protect us from that exact scenario. When we don’t have anything that is copyrighted from Minecraft, they won’t have anything to come at us with. So, I mean, obviously our cow and their cow might look similar because, you know, no one has copyrighted what a cow looks like, but things like a creeper, we will completely redesign and reimagine to avoid any of those issues.

[inaudible]

PODDER:

[01:23:56] Oh, I was just going to say, I mean recently we saw the release of the zombie, which, you know, it’s the zombie, but it looks so much better. So, yeah, I was just curious when you have a whole ecosystem that really echoes the prior or the other system, you know, can they even say that, you know, “This just feels like Minecraft” and I don’t know anything about copyright law, but I know if like a one Brand’s logo basically looks like the Pepsi logo, but isn’t, I don’t know if they have some kind of say there.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:24:27] Yeah, I mean— Go ahead, Miles.

JAN MILSE:

[01:24:28] Okay. So, first of all, just something just sort of a comment here, by the way, the game client will be compatible with existing Minecraft texture packs. So, if you’re not a huge fan of like the whole new look and feel, as long as you provide the assets yourself that puts us completely in clear and you’ll be able to style it however you want. I just wanted to throw that in there because obviously, especially if we want to bring over a bunch of new players, I want to make sure that they have as frictionless of as experience as possible. So, that’s something that the team has definitely been focusing on

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:24:55] And intellectual property is a really complicated thing and a lot of the time it’s not black and white, it’s you know, a spectrum. So, you know, that’s kind of why our strategy is that, you know, be very vocal about making a Minecraft like game because it is a similar game. But the point is that we have, you know, we’re being transparent that we’re building a similar game, but also being transparent that we’re doing our due diligence to not use any Microsoft, any Minecraft intellectual property. So, the thing— You know, the elements of the game that remain similar are things that, you know, can’t technically be owned as intellectual property, like gameplay mechanics, things like that. I mean, there’s plenty of games that use inventory systems that are a grid, right? Like World Warcraft, you open your backpack and it’s a grid of items. Well, I mean, Minecraft’s inventory system is very similar to that. It’s a grid of items.

[01:25:46] So, those type of things are just something that you can’t patent, copyright, trademark, you know? And our strategy is this way because, you know, if we talk openly about it, that the fact we’re intentionally avoiding any intellectual property, then we’re not going to get a C&D where they’re like, “A-ha, we got you!” You know, there’s no smoking gun, we have done the due diligence to make sure we don’t infringe in any way. So, yeah, so we’re happy to talk about it, that we’re building a Minecraft like game any time because we know we’re not using any IP, we’re not infringing.

JAN MILSE:

[01:26:19] And by the way, there is also precedent for this. If you look online, there’s a lot of, not only Minecraft, there are a lot of games that just flat out clone Minecraft, including the protocol, the assets, everything. And Mojang has shown to be completely okay with those as well. So, if anything, we’re actually going to be a lot lower on the list of priorities just because we’re actually going to be straying a lot farther than some other implementations might, but we’re going to still be able to— We’re going to still be able to provide that same experience without infringing on any of Minecraft’s intellectual property that could end up being problematic down the road.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:26:56] I mean, the Java code is completely different from the Rust code, so I mean there’s absolutely no— There’s not even a way to copy it in that respect.

NINJAS:

Yes, it’s literally apples and oranges.

EROD:

[01:27:09] Before we— Go ahead, Podder.

PODDER:

[01:27:14] Oh, sorry. [inaudible] If anyone pulls it off, you guys, it’s been amazing, I can’t wait. Similar to that, since it is kind of, you know, inspired in the same, is movement the same throughout the game? Like the beauty of Minecraft is that I just get in there and I’m lost. I mean, I’m literally looking for a world to move into, and that’s what Minecraft offers. And so, I’m just wondering if any insights into like the mechanic of how you move, even like, I’ve seen some games, I think Roblox, that you have to click and hold to move as opposed to just Minecraft, you just look around and go, and I’m just wondering if it’s the same mechanic as Minecraft that we’re used to

JAN MILSE:

[01:27:48] Just again, I’m sorry I keep drifting over from the technical side. This isn’t even a plan. Right now, currently we have a hundred percent physics parity. So, we have a completely custom implementation of a physics engine, but the physics engine is a hundred percent— Produces a hundred percent same results as Minecraft physics engine. So, it’s not even going to feel any different. There’s not even going to be anything ineffable. You’re going to walk the same speed, run at the same speed, TNT is going to launch you the same way. And not only will that allow you, of course to feel like you’re playing Minecraft, but it’ll also mean, let’s say you join [inaudible], they’re going to have no clue you’re not using Minecraft because to them it’s going to look exactly like you are, even though you’re using something completely built from the ground up custom. And that’s important to us because we want to make sure that we preserve the same feel the people who are moving over don’t feel suffocated by the changes.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:28:38] Yep. I mean, when we say it’ll be very similar, it’ll be very similar.

EROD:

[01:28:47] Awesome. Thank you, Podder, for the questions. We’re going to jump to Too clean.

TOO CLEAN:

[01:28:52] Hey everybody. So, my question was, what’d you say the name was again? I’m just kidding. Realistically though, so are we expecting to onboard a big number of players on launch? And if so, what are the marketing plans in place to make that happen?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:29:09] We’re planning on onboarding a lot of players eventually, but we don’t have like a marketing strategy because we want to do like, almost like a soft release to our own community. Get the software in the hands of people, kind of you know, have documentation ready for content creators to be like, “Okay, here’s what the small differences are, here’s how you can continue building on the platform.” But then we’ll start thinking about, you know, how to get players. And the marketing strategy will be pretty different from what it used to be. We actually spent, I think we spent around 30,000 kind of dabbling in different marketing things for customer acquisition. And I think the traditional Minecraft server marketing strategies don’t really apply to us very well. So, I think what we’re going to do, and this is totally conceptual, like top of the head, we don’t have any hard plans, but we’re going to more, we’re going to focus more on like a BizDev, the BizDev side, getting existing servers, existing content to come over, kind of tried and true content to come over into our platform instead of building new content for the ground up.

[01:30:11] So we’ll have kind of a mix of people that are creating on the platform and existing servers that are migrating over to look for like a new business model or, you know, just to integrate with this new cutting edge platform. So, that’s kind of the general strategy. Oh, Ark has a little idea.

ARK:

[01:30:26] Oh, well I was just going to add one more thing. I think from the player side specifically, like given how superior we expect it to be over like the existing Minecraft clients that are available, or like the default one, I think that the Minecraft community is very tight knit and oriented between either developers, player, communities and all these different things. I think once it generally becomes accepted within a smaller community, the growth rate becomes relatively organic beyond that point, as we’ve seen with other clients in the past, which were, you know, just much smaller, much less complicated implementations that didn’t offer as much. And I kind of am expecting to see the same thing here, but we’ll see. And maybe Miles has some thoughts around this too.

JAN MILSE:

[01:31:13] I mean, in terms of marketing there’s 10 million approaches and they’re all going to work really well because frankly we just have a better product. But even setting that aside things like YouTube, YouTuber partnerships, server partnerships giving servers access, like early access to these tools because one of our big selling points is not only that it gives the player a lot more custom like customization and ability, but also it’s going to give servers the ability to really supercharge their playing experience. And we’ve seen hints of this things like Luna Client or Bad Line, which try to use their custom software to help give servers more power, but it just hasn’t really been seen at the scale that we’re going to be able to do it. I’m not the marketing team and I’m not going to claim to be the marketing team, but what I will say is we have a blank slate to implement whatever capabilities the community wants to see. And what that means is that we’re going to be able to truly make something that people will want to use. And as not only players, but as server owners, as YouTubers see how superior it is. We’re going to see a lot of natural publicity and dissemination of this. People are just going to use it in the background and not mention it and people are going to look at it, be like, “Oh cool, what’s that?” It’s that type of thing that’s going to really supercharge this as time goes on.

TOO CLEAN:

[01:32:27] That was a great answer, thank you. So, what about the people that, so we’re working on people that are anti NFT, right? So, what’s going to be the big incentivizing message to the devs of these servers? Because they already have hundreds of thousands of players on their servers, so what’s the big incentive for them to move over to us? Aside from owning asset, digital assets, what’s the message here?

JAN MILSE:

[01:32:59] So, I mean, just to preface this, I’m definitely not an NFT hater, but I’m also not a huge web 3 person. It’s not because I don’t think it’s wonderful, it’s just not something I’ve really had the time to dig as deep into as I really want to. But sort of from the perspective of somebody who— That’s not really my number one priority in terms of just like when I’m looking to select tools. We are going to have a lot of powers for people like server owners that are just otherwise not available. The ability to ship brand new cutting edge experiences. The ability to have a custom model without slowing down every player’s computer with 10,000 armorer stands. The ability to integrate more deeply with our social features, to allow things like server specific cosmetics, to allow for custom items that don’t require custom texture packs. We are going to give creators both on the client side and the server side a lot more tools to shift the things that they’re imagining. And with a lot of Minigame servers, there’s a whole team dedicated to translating ideas to something that can actually be made in Minecraft, but we’re going to be able to completely cut those people out because we’re going to make sure that anything that you want to create, we give you the tools to. And that extra level of creation is what’s going to drive people to switch over, NFTs or otherwise.

ARK:

[01:34:24] I think it’s really important— Oh yeah, I was just going to add, I think it’s really important too to recognize that like on the developer side and then like relative to the existing like NFT community that we have, I don’t think anyone in this web 3 gaming space is going to see like an explosive game by being NFT blockchain and web 3. Like first and foremost right in your face of the players. Like, I don’t think that’s how, at least at this stage, we capture mainstream players. It comes down to like catering to the features, like what Miles is talking about on the developer and the content creator sides, like the just the general gameplay stuff, the stuff that is fun, the stuff we’ve always loved, and then sprinkling in like where it makes sense, like for player ownership around cosmetics and like a unifying game currency across servers that makes sense, players can use and like gain from their progress and things like that. And just like the places where we’re not trying to shove it down their throat, but we don’t want to do that, we just want to add it and make it an additive to the gameplay experience overall.

TOO CLEAN:

[01:35:26] Awesome. Well, I’m really confident in you guys and I really look forward to seeing what the finished product looks like. Best of luck.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Thank you. Thank you.

EROD:

That’s— Go ahead, Temp. Sorry.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:35:37] Oh sorry, I was just going to say— We’re 35 minutes over, we’re just kind of giving everyone a heads up. Do your wrap up, Eric, I know you got something.

EROD:

[01:35:47] Well, no, I mean, I think everyone just, you know, quick opportunity to— Well, what happened to Dan? Did I remove him by accident? I have no idea. [inaudible] Oh he is? Oh really? Okay, well, everything’s bugging. When we go 30 minutes past, you know, this is Twitter’s way of saying “you guys have talked too long”. Me especially, no, I’m joking. Okay. But what I wanted to say was, I think what I really love about NFT World’s, in my wrap up in summary, is that if the web 3 component was non-existent, the core product and client engine that’s being built is a compelling enough reason to bring players and server owners over. Now, you add on, like Ark was saying, and sprinkle in the right areas that blockchain and Web 3 side, and it makes the overall ecosystem that much more powerful baked in network effects and just, yeah, it’s really powerful.

[01:36:50] But that’s not the— That’s not the reason why people are at the core driving decision making factor. Like, “Oh wow, cool. They have in game cosmetics that I can own and sell”.  And so that’s what I really appreciate about NFT World’s and the approach that we’re taking is, it’s so much different than anything else. And I think Miles and everyone else said that perfectly. And it’s cool that Miles you are a more of a skeptic when it comes to this stuff. So, that’s my little 2 cents. 

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:37:27] No, that’s great. Yeah. [inaudible] Miles has great insight into like the perspective of the player, which is extremely valuable. So, we get to leverage that to kind of, you know, get that opinion while we’re doing our development. But yeah, I mean, Eric that’s a great point. I think the product would kind of stand on its own without the web 3 stuff. And then that just means we have more opportunity to demo, you know, what Web 3 can do and how it can improve the product. But as I always like to say, you know, thank you everyone for your support, it means a ton to us that people are still hanging around and watching us build and believing in us. You know, some of this stuff does take time. I think we are a pretty quick building team. Like we’ve moved products pretty quick, but even then, you know, sometimes the downtime is tough to endure. So, we really appreciate it. We love every one of our supporters and are extremely grateful. And this was an awesome space too. One of our best space, if not the best space ever. We have a lot of hype. We’re hyped.

EROD:

[01:38:30] Ark, anything to—? Or I guess I should go to Dan, I still don’t see Dan as speaker. Dan, anything to say to kind of wrap up a conclusion.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Alright, then

EROD:

I have no idea. Is he up here?

TEMPTRANQUIL:

He threw the heart up.

ARK:

He threw the heart up.

EROD:

[01:38:50] Oh, okay. All right. Alright. It’s all going downhill. Ark or Ninjas? And then a Ninjas? [inaudible]

NINJAS:

[01:39:00] I’m good at. Like I said, we’re building as quickly as we can and I think the progress is a lot faster than even I expected when we first talked about it. But I do definitely appreciate everyone. I know some of the updates have been a little bit slower than we all maybe have wanted to just because we have to worry about technicalities, but there’s a lot of great things coming,

EROD:

Miles?

JAN MILSE:

[01:39:21] Yeah. I just want to say, first of all, thank y’all so much for having me on this space. This is really fun. I really love the NFT World’s community, and I want to be more accessible to y’all. So, again, if you have any questions within reason, please message me. I, at least until I— At least until I end up getting too many, I will be absolutely happy to be there to answer y’all’s questions. But just thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for all your wonderful questions. It’s been wonderful meeting everybody here. And I’m just excited to see the future of the project. I mean, I can personally attest that the team that we have is incredible and I am excited for you guys to see just the crazy thing that we’ve created together.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

[01:40:06] Yeah, thanks for coming up today, Miles. Really appreciate it. And feel free to join us on all of our other spaces if you got time. We love having you.

JAN MILSE:

I’d love too.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Sweet. Okay, everyone. Well, let’s wrap it up.

EROD:

We forgot about Ark.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

But is Ark speaking? He’s been muted the past [inaudible]

ARK:

[01:40:27] I mean, I don’t really have anything to add. Everything you guys heard [inaudible] Yeah, I mean, I’m just really excited about the team that we have and like everyone is fantastic and killer in their own ways, and we’re just excited about what we’re going to deliver and what everyone’s going to get to see.

EROD:

[01:40:43] All right, Temp, now wrap it up and we’ll go JFK and then we’re done. Then we’re up.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Queue JFK. I’m already wrapped up.

EROD:

All right, we’re wrapped up.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

Thanks everyone.

EROD:

Peace.

TEMPTRANQUIL:

See you next week.

EROD:

See you next week. 

AUDIO:

[01:40:55] 40 seconds away. Why some say the moon. I choose this as our goal. The target for the Apollo 11 astronauts, the moon. Why climb the highest mountain? So for launch. 5, 35 years ago. 20 seconds and counting. [inaudible]. Texas. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to moon [inaudible]. 10, nine, ignition sequence starts, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.