Primer: Kijun Seo is the Co-Founder of Planetarium, the company behind the blockchain game Nine Chronicles. In this episode of the Zima Red Podcast, Kijun shares how he met his co-founders, what Planetarium and Nine Chronicles are about, and his thoughts on play-to-earn gaming and the Metaverse.
Background
Co-Founder of Planetarium, the company behind Nine Chronicles
Studied computer science at Caltech. Started off as an engineer
Went back to Korea to serve in the military. Instead of going to the military, he spent his next 2 years working for several internet companies, including Nexon, South Korea's number 1 game company
Moved on to work at Dropbox as an engineer
Left to work on indie games. Collaborated with artists then realized that they could embark on decentralized gaming. Started Planetarium in 2018
How Did He Avoid Military Service
Korean government gave spots for companies to hire engineers from the army so that people can still serve the military while contributing to the economy in the private sector
Went to boot camp for about a month. Spent the remainder of his 2 years as an engineer
Initial Interest In Gaming
Growing up in Korea made him witness Starcraft, Diablo, Dota, and PC cafes
Reconnected with his passion in gaming when he started to look at programming in a creative way
"So gaming, and even like, modern gaming is very familiar to us from very early age." - Kijun Seo
Before Starting Planetarium In 2018
He was actually trying to become a contemporary artist. Was really deep into art
Started this adventure of making games in 2016. After going through a lot of prototypes, he realized they became less like games
Instead of making games, he took another route and started collaborating with performance artists in Korea, providing media creations that they need in their performances
"But what's crazy is I never knew that the NFT sector and the art sector would actually start blowing up and start reconnecting three years later down the road." - Kijun Seo
After 1.5 years, he started Planetarium
When Did He Learn About Crypto/NFTs
After Dropbox, he had a few friends who went to work for Ethereum Foundation. Didn't really understand too much of it
After starting his company, JC, his co-founder, suggested that they build open source online games
Started studying the Ethereum whitepaper and the ethos behind decentralization
Thought deeper about NFTs
Meeting His Co-Founder JC
Met him around 2009/2010
Lived together and previously worked on a company together
JC had a programming group. After work each day, they would get together and work on their social networking services and mobile products on the side
While he went to the US to finish his degree, JC stayed in South Korea and continued working on the company. Reconnected with him when he came back from the US
Their founding team has 7 people. They have worked with each other for 5 - 10 years before this
Planetarium
Founded the company trying to really understand how blockchain and decentralization can be paired with gaming
Their strength is in engineering
Built the base technology called Libplanet. Kind of like a Cosmos SDK, but for games so that each game can have its own protocol and Mainnet
Wanted to show what experiences people could built using Libplanet. Hence, they started Nine Chronicles, a decentralized RPG
Libplanet
A blockchain core library that can be used to build your own blockchain
Thinking from a gaming background, he couldn't see the future where Triple A game companies come in and use someone else's network infrastructure to build their game. It is unlikely for them to use a general purpose blockchain
"If we build a blockchain in C#, then Unity developers should be able to just jump in right away into same environment and get going without having to onboard a lot of different platform technologies." - Kijun Seo
Used C#, which is the language of choice for Unity developers. Unity has over 60% market share in game development
No barriers to entry using Libplanet. It is open source and free
Why Would Someone Want To Build A Closed Source Game?
Closed source games ensure that the companies are rewarded for creating the content
For them, they want to innovate. Realized that MMORPGs are walled gardens, the relationship between the game and the player is just one-directional
Games actually innovate when people come in with new ideas or there's a fork and new possibilities are created
Dota, League of Legends, Counterstrike, Battleground are all mods based on existing games
Have been running Nine Chronicles for a year now. Giving players the vested interest to manage the game helps the team to be more connected to their core player base
Nine Chronicles
Introduction
Open source decentralized RPG built on their own blockchain
Players can figure out what they want inside the game and talk to the team or other developers to have those features built into the game
Game is currently an idle RPG where players farm for ingredients. Those ingredients can be used in complex crafting decisions to forge NFTs based on those ingredients
Players have created half a million NFTs inside Nine Chronicles' network
Players can trade inside the decentralized marketplace within the game
Game was launched on Mainnet on October 2020
Gameplay
Combat is inspired by autobattlers
Players equip their characters before sending them into battles
Forging an item takes time and resources ranging from minutes to days
Players have a limited number of energy on a given day, so they have to weigh the decisions that they want to do (e.g. more battles or spending energy to forge items)
Getting Started With Nine Chronicles
Players jump in to learn about the world
Proceed to the first stage of the first world
When players get stuck, they need to figure out what they need to do (e.g. upgrade weapons, armour, etc.)
Have to figure out strategies for crafting or trading
In the first week, PvP access will be unlocked and players can try fighting other players and climbing the arena
Play-To-Earn Elements?
Implemented, but they are still working on it
A top-tier player is constantly able to create really good gear if they put in the time and resources
Initially, people can get Nine Chronicles Gold (NCG) when they join the game, level up, and invite new players. They are thinking of adding an Axie-style subcurrency where players can earn currency in the middle levels
Currently have a strong gameplay loop, but is also observing what other games are doing
Constantly looking at ways to introduce new token economies into Nine Chronicles
Building Mods in Nine Chronicles
If players want to implement a breaking change (e.g. extremely powerful sword) to the game, they would have to go through the governance council (e.g. having a discussion, creating a proposal, and putting it through community voting)
If anyone would like to, they could just fork and launch their own network and say that they are launching Ten Chronicles
Who Is Hosting The Game?
Players' computers are mining and earning NCG
Download the application and the app itself can act as a full node
There will be a prompt asking whether players want to participate in mining
On an average day, there is 2000-2500 nodes running. Their team only run 4-5 nodes. The project is decentralized
What Would Happen If Planetarium Gets Shuts Down?
Thinks that the game community would just come together and run their own network
How Does The System Scale
Currently bounded by what can be calculated on a single machine
In the process of moving towards a Proof of Stake model which has higher transaction throughput
To scale into something very large, they would want to have different types of nodes in the network (e.g. some do calculations, others validate, so that not every data has to be synced to everywhere at the same time)
Want to research on how data can be transmitted live and checked and verified by a player later on
Does The Open Source, Decentralized Nature Of The Game Impact Gameplay?
Their approach to bots is different
In a decentralized game, they can't prevent bots from coming in
Made their game in such a way that the impact of bots on the gameplay is minimal (e.g. decreasing the yield if someone plays beyond a certain number of hours)
Everyone gets a limited number of energy per day. Bots can't even issue new transactions if they have used up the entire energy bar
Energy bar can be purchased from the markets. Potions are created when players stake NCG
Interoperability Between Games
Can build a bridge to move assets over from one game to another
Will be done through governance proposals
Future Developments
Focus on PvP, DAO, guilds, and collaborative missions and events
Open to ideas and implementations from the community
"You can have nuanced and very tight knit relationship between your players because of economy and because of how you want to defeat certain goals." - Kijun Seo
Purpose Of Nine Chronicles Gold (NCG)
Base token of Nine Chronicles
Used for governance, staking, and payments between players
Supply is capped at 1 billion
Players can earn it by mining, inviting friends, and leveling up together
Thoughts On Play-To-Earn
Thinks that play-to-earn is awesome
The player base becomes the holders of your ecosystem. Aligns incentives and make players actually care about the expansion of the game
Games should not solely rely on play-to-earn mechanisms because when the earning potential fluctuates, players get mad and leave the game
Safe, sustainable way is to share some of the profits coming from the game with the user base
How Can Fun And Play-To-Earn Coexist?
A game can be skill-based. Players can earn more when they get better at it. Hence, enjoying the game
Thoughts On The Metaverse
Metaverse consists of 2 things:
Self-organization into pocket economies
Interaction between the economies
More ways to interact with people in the virtual realm than compared to the real world
Sector He Is Most Excited About
Excited about art and how contemporary art may change through the Metaverse
Technology and new economic models have always influenced art in really wild ways
Any News To Share
Recently launched a bridge to Ethereum. NCG exists in Ethereum as wrapped NCG
Connecting to Ethereum gave them a lot more exposure to new users
Will be creating Triple A-level art collections that will be available on multiple platforms
Grand 5-10 Year Vision
For his personal vision, he wants to enable developers and modders to unleash their creativity in a way that they get paid
For Planetarium, he wants to drive the culture of open source and decentralization into gaming
"But I think for people to be able to contribute and interact with Double A, Triple A level games can actually have a huge impact on how games or game communities are created and sustained by their user population." - Kijun Seo
Favourite Video Game
Galatea by Emily Short. It is a text-based game where you have a conversation with a statue and try to figure out their emotions and understand them
Love Dota. Not the Dota 2 by Valve, but the evolution of Dota from Warcraft 3
Single Favourite NFT
Origin Nine Chronicles Costumes. There are only 80 copies of it
The company did not give it to him. He had to buy it himself
Most Controversial Thought On NFTs
NFTs can be very conceptual, but also can be understood in such a visceral way that it can impact how people relate to physical things
If You Could Improve One Thing In The Space
The discovery model for NFTs
Even established artists have to hype their works to a level where their art will be received by NFT collectors
Wish that the community would accommodate people who are more intrinsically shy or people who want to just focus on building and not having to advertise as much
NFT Ecosystem In 3 Years
By 2025, there might be a blockchain game with a $50 billion market cap
People recognizing the value of virtual communities
A lot of crossover, education, and understanding between contemporary artists and NFT artists
Double A and Triple A game studios starting to jump into the space. Might be too late for them by then
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