Combining its Somnia infrastructure and metaverse tech platform Msquared, UK tech company Improbable recently launched Chunked, its most ambitious project to-date.
Built as a fully onchain composable MMO sandbox world with obvious Minecraft inspiration, Chunked was created in less than three weeks. This was possible as it doesn’t require traditional game architecture such as a backend. This is because all Chunked‘s game logic and storage is managed fully onchain, with no separate game server required.
Improbable’s extensive experience of building scalable metaverses in combination with Somnia’s EVM compatibility contributed to the speed of work.
Chunked itself is a browser-based real-time multiplayer sandbox game. What it isn’t, the developer is keen to point out, is simply Minecraft with an added feature of digital ownership.
“From the outset, we didn’t want to simply clone an existing property and add a layer of token ownership, instead we wanted to really demonstrate what can be achieved with virtual worlds when built using a high performance blockchain, meaning that ownership, extension, and participation are baked in from the start.”
To that end, every block mined in Chunked is a tradable ERC-1155 token held in a user’s wallet. The technology doesn’t define how users exchange assets, it just enables it. The purpose of token ownership and open-sourced contracts is to encourage creators to build their own experiences through forking and new adaptations, evolving the foundational Chunked world built by Msquared.
This could easily develop into a deeper player-driven economic system.
In a recent X Spaces, Improbable chief product officer Rob Whitehead imagined player-built marketplaces, saying, “If you have the time to mine some diamond ore and someone else wants to buy that to make their house look awesome, it’s all on-chain, it’s all tokens. So that’s really easy for us to put in.”
“But even better, we don’t have to make that, someone else could make the trading dapp, we’ve just made the low-level contracts.”
Chunked is currently available for playtesting, either by creating an account or using a guest login.
Discover more about Somnia in our previous interview with Improbable CEO Herman Narula.
Comments are closed.