Edited by vera Dhrumil Shah and Dhvani Patel are the team behind Biomes, an onchain, Minecraft-like sandbox where you can explore, mine, craft, attack, and compete in user-generated experiences. We’ve known the team for almost a year, back when Biomes was known as Tenet, and the team was building a multi-layer, multidimensional physics simulation engine. Now, Biomes is in full swing on Redstone, as a fully-realized Minecraft-esque game, with docs for users to build plugins and games on top of...

Edited by vera Dhrumil Shah and Dhvani Patel are the team behind Biomes, an onchain, Minecraft-like sandbox where you can explore, mine, craft, attack, and compete in user-generated experiences. We’ve known the team for almost a year, back when Biomes was known as Tenet, and the team was building a multi-layer, multidimensional physics simulation engine. Now, Biomes is in full swing on Redstone, as a fully-realized Minecraft-esque game, with docs for users to build plugins and games on top of...

edited by vera For this installment of Devs on Devs, we sat down with ARB and Alex Declino of Moving Castles, the team behind This Cursed Machine (TCM). TCM is “a scifi horror warehouse management RPG” where you, a stump, fulfill orders from the game’s eponymous company, and earn $BUGS as a reward. In this chat, the team discussed their inspirations, designing a game with emergent gameplay, and much more. Play This Cursed Machine here. Reinforcement Learning as a GameARB: What could be a well...

edited by vera For this installment of Devs on Devs, we sat down with ARB and Alex Declino of Moving Castles, the team behind This Cursed Machine (TCM). TCM is “a scifi horror warehouse management RPG” where you, a stump, fulfill orders from the game’s eponymous company, and earn $BUGS as a reward. In this chat, the team discussed their inspirations, designing a game with emergent gameplay, and much more. Play This Cursed Machine here. Reinforcement Learning as a GameARB: What could be a well...

by Dante, Jseam, and Sofia. Edited by veraThe Autonomous Worlds ThesisAutonomous worlds are digital ecosystems governed by their own set of rules and entities. These worlds, much like physical or conceptual spaces we inhabit, operate under a unique “diegesis” or the set of conditions that define what exists within their boundaries. Examples range from elaborate fictional universes like Lord of the Rings to real-world economic systems like the US dollar. Three core concepts critical to Autonom...

by Dante, Jseam, and Sofia. Edited by veraThe Autonomous Worlds ThesisAutonomous worlds are digital ecosystems governed by their own set of rules and entities. These worlds, much like physical or conceptual spaces we inhabit, operate under a unique “diegesis” or the set of conditions that define what exists within their boundaries. Examples range from elaborate fictional universes like Lord of the Rings to real-world economic systems like the US dollar. Three core concepts critical to Autonom...

by NeilsonAutonomy & AutomationYou need to be world maxxing. You need to be automating your autonomy. Developing emergence. Creating emergencies. NPCs. AI. You need to be mocking those with the sight of what they might have known. You need to build a big bonfire, each player a hot coal. At the altar of autonomy, the crystal sword plunges towards a sacrifice, then—stops. Quivering, the dagger suspended millimeters above. Cut to black. It is you, waking up in your bed, you have been working on ...

by NeilsonAutonomy & AutomationYou need to be world maxxing. You need to be automating your autonomy. Developing emergence. Creating emergencies. NPCs. AI. You need to be mocking those with the sight of what they might have known. You need to build a big bonfire, each player a hot coal. At the altar of autonomy, the crystal sword plunges towards a sacrifice, then—stops. Quivering, the dagger suspended millimeters above. Cut to black. It is you, waking up in your bed, you have been working on ...

edited by vera, cover image by kooshaza From July 31st to August 4th 2023, Lattice hosted a small summit for onchain application developers building on MUD. The week illuminated just how far MUD and the teams using it have come in a short amount of time. Our previous summit, in Fall 2022, was a residency where teams tested out MUD v1 and built hackathon-style games. This time around, almost everyone present was iterating on long-term projects (on MUD v2!) that are preparing to launch beyond a...

edited by vera, cover image by kooshaza From July 31st to August 4th 2023, Lattice hosted a small summit for onchain application developers building on MUD. The week illuminated just how far MUD and the teams using it have come in a short amount of time. Our previous summit, in Fall 2022, was a residency where teams tested out MUD v1 and built hackathon-style games. This time around, almost everyone present was iterating on long-term projects (on MUD v2!) that are preparing to launch beyond a...

by vera For reasons that will soon become clear to you, at Lattice we’ve been discussing the well-known Alan Kay quote: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” The quote, which has gained notoriety (to the point of being self-evident) in the post-iOS, Tesla, Bitcoin ASICs, NVIDIA AI GPU, era we live in, has origins that are actually quite difficult to trace. After some searching, I found this blogpost from early Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld, with notes ...

by vera For reasons that will soon become clear to you, at Lattice we’ve been discussing the well-known Alan Kay quote: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” The quote, which has gained notoriety (to the point of being self-evident) in the post-iOS, Tesla, Bitcoin ASICs, NVIDIA AI GPU, era we live in, has origins that are actually quite difficult to trace. After some searching, I found this blogpost from early Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld, with notes ...

edited by vera and Emerson, cover image by turbo For our next installment of Devs on Devs, we spoke to the Primodium team about their adventures building onchain games — and the wisdom they picked up from the hackathons, personal projects, and startups they worked on beforehand. Emerson and Morris are brothers who started out building web2 projects from mobile games to social apps. After selling their first company (a YC-backed LLM company focused on predictive maintenance in the rail industr...

edited by vera and Emerson, cover image by turbo For our next installment of Devs on Devs, we spoke to the Primodium team about their adventures building onchain games — and the wisdom they picked up from the hackathons, personal projects, and startups they worked on beforehand. Emerson and Morris are brothers who started out building web2 projects from mobile games to social apps. After selling their first company (a YC-backed LLM company focused on predictive maintenance in the rail industr...

edited by vera For our latest installment of Devs on Devs, which we’re releasing for the Redstone Race to Mainnet, we sat down with Cherry Blue and 9STX6 of the Dark Forest Archon team. The team is building Dark Forest Ares, a community-run deployment of Dark Forest on Redstone. In this interview, the two devs discussed the glory of Dark Forest plugins, their approach to breathing new life into the classic Dark Forest game, and their experiences with Redstone (and plans to port Dark Forest to...

edited by vera For our latest installment of Devs on Devs, which we’re releasing for the Redstone Race to Mainnet, we sat down with Cherry Blue and 9STX6 of the Dark Forest Archon team. The team is building Dark Forest Ares, a community-run deployment of Dark Forest on Redstone. In this interview, the two devs discussed the glory of Dark Forest plugins, their approach to breathing new life into the classic Dark Forest game, and their experiences with Redstone (and plans to port Dark Forest to...

edited by vera, cover image by turbo For this installment of Devs on Devs, we sat down with alvarius, one of the core developers of MUD, and Dhvani, an engineer on the Tenet team. Tenet is developing an onchain multiplayer simulation environment, loosely based off of OPCraft, which alvarius and other members of the Lattice team released last year. This conversation took place this past summer, when Tenet was experimenting with a multiscale, multiphysics simulator. While the concept has evolve...

edited by vera, cover image by turbo For this installment of Devs on Devs, we sat down with alvarius, one of the core developers of MUD, and Dhvani, an engineer on the Tenet team. Tenet is developing an onchain multiplayer simulation environment, loosely based off of OPCraft, which alvarius and other members of the Lattice team released last year. This conversation took place this past summer, when Tenet was experimenting with a multiscale, multiphysics simulator. While the concept has evolve...

by vera When an onchain game (dare I say autonomous world?) reaches maturity, the core developers transition from building contracts and client code to building tooling for third-party developers to create plugins and bots. It’s a sign that the game mechanics are ossifying, the emergent behavior has surfaced, and the real fun can now begin. Words3, the madcap onchain iteration of Scrabble (if Scrabble were built by a futures trader with a sweet spot for VRGDAs) has reached the botkit stage. T...

by vera When an onchain game (dare I say autonomous world?) reaches maturity, the core developers transition from building contracts and client code to building tooling for third-party developers to create plugins and bots. It’s a sign that the game mechanics are ossifying, the emergent behavior has surfaced, and the real fun can now begin. Words3, the madcap onchain iteration of Scrabble (if Scrabble were built by a futures trader with a sweet spot for VRGDAs) has reached the botkit stage. T...

by bytes and yonada As creators of virtual worlds, our goal is to create environments that are engaging and interesting for users. This means finding a balance between designing a digital physics that allows for complex and unexpected behaviors to emerge, and ensuring that the available infrastructure can support these behaviors. To do this, we must consider three main dimensions of digital physics: time, the form of its laws, and the scope within which these laws apply.TimeWe refer to the pa...

by bytes and yonada As creators of virtual worlds, our goal is to create environments that are engaging and interesting for users. This means finding a balance between designing a digital physics that allows for complex and unexpected behaviors to emerge, and ensuring that the available infrastructure can support these behaviors. To do this, we must consider three main dimensions of digital physics: time, the form of its laws, and the scope within which these laws apply.TimeWe refer to the pa...

edited by vera, cover image by turbo For this installment of Devs on Devs, GVN of Moving Castles sat down with Neilson of the Gaul team and lermchair of Emergence. GVN is (as noted in the conversation below) a jester or gadfly of the AW space – playfully pushing people to refine their definition of autonomous worlds, and using his own experimentation onchain and online to seek truth and explore the terrain. With Moving Castles and Trust Support, he has worked on projects like Mascot Stream 3D...

edited by vera, cover image by turbo For this installment of Devs on Devs, GVN of Moving Castles sat down with Neilson of the Gaul team and lermchair of Emergence. GVN is (as noted in the conversation below) a jester or gadfly of the AW space – playfully pushing people to refine their definition of autonomous worlds, and using his own experimentation onchain and online to seek truth and explore the terrain. With Moving Castles and Trust Support, he has worked on projects like Mascot Stream 3D...