Collecting Power Ups: How the Univers SDK Helps Game Developers Build the Metaverse Players Want

Game development isn’t traditionally an easy task. Triple-A studios spend millions of dollars and years of time creating the latest releases. In the 1980s, video game companies weren’t just creating cutting edge software, but hardware too. The pool of available developers was a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the overall population.

In the last decade, aided and abetted by Steam’s digital distribution model, has seen the upward climb of the indie game, to the extent that releases by small studios are often now the highlight of the year, and sweep the critics awards. The current quality, variety, and quantity of games has never been higher. It’s truly a golden era of video games, and one that’s set to continue.

This is, for the most part, due to the constant improvement in the quality of game engines, tools, tutorials, and knowledge that developers have gained access to. Bedroom coders can now cobble together a decent, playable game with just a few months work. Game development engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot are on-ramping budding game designers into the vocation faster and easier than ever before, while giving seasoned pros faster and more effective tools. The results speak for themselves.

P2E Gaming Nowhere Near Potential

Blockchain games, on the other hand, are still finding their feet. Axie Infinity may be wildly popular, but the game is currently basic by the standards of indie games. Blockchain games and virtual experiences are still wrestling to integrate the power of DLTs, whereas Web3 game development is playing catch up, with teams more used to coding smart contracts than nodes, vectors, and the rest.

Make no mistake though, on-chain games, or Play-to-Earn (P2E) gaming, is about to become the next great blockchain use case that penetrates the public consciousness. The metaverse is expanding daily. Thousands of projects are scrambling to create the defining virtual experiences that become the cultural electric that signals the next digital era for our species. Forerunners like Axie Infinity and DeFi Kingdoms will continue strong, but over the next few years, P2E games that upend traditional gaming economies and onramp a mass market user base are coming that will make these early success stories look like chicken feed. Developers just need the right tools. And, currently, they don’t have them.

How the Univers SDK Helps Developers

Univers is building an SDK that helps game developers connect their experiences to a truly interoperable metaverse. It gives them the scaffolding to create the core tenets of a standard P2E game: NFTs, marketplaces, breeding, wallet Sign-In, oracles services etc. and lets them focus on what they do best: creating innovative gaming experiences. The Univers SDK also acts as a go-between for the game server and the blockchain, ensuring game data is transmitted fast, effectively, and securely as it needs to be for the metaverse to work.

Any game connected to the metaverse with the Univers SDK will have access to the Univers General Format (UGF). UGF will let developers build on whatever game engine they are comfortable with – Unity, Unreal, or many others – and be confident that their game and the content within it can be shared seamlessly with other gaming and virtual experiences. The broadest base of developers will be attracted to the Univers UGF, as they can stay in their lane and use the skills they already have, save in the knowledge that they’ll be able to integrate with the metaverse effortlessly, as Univers has done the hard work already.

Why Interoperability Leads to Better Experiences for Players

This intermingling of gaming content through transmittable tokenized value is what will make P2E the revolution it’s bound to be. Every effort in all your gaming experiences will reward you, the player, directly – and you can transport, exchange, and utilise that value in multiple gaming landscapes, carving a name in the pantheon of the metaverse through your achievements.

Yet if the gardens are walled, the games aren’t interoperable, and various gaming dApps failed to connect with one another, then we are left with a pale imitation of web2 gaming service that already exist. That’s what Univers is aiming to do. Give the next generation of blockchain developers the tools they need to create games with the decentralised ethos that truly gives the metaverse value in the first place.

As well as having all those tools that make coding blockchain games easy, developers will also be able to draw up action plans based on the voting of the Univers citizenry in the Choose-to-Earn mechanic. Projects will be able to get timely, focused governance, guidance, and support, as the community comes together to make sure P2E games serve who they need to: the players that play them.

The Whole Univers In Your Hands

By creating an SDK that lets developers make metaverse interoperable games that connect easily to the blockchain, as well as providing white-label in-game toolkits for major in-game features like NFT breeding, Univers has given projects, from one-man indie game coders to large studios, the tools they need.

The Univers General Format will make it attractive for developers to code for the blockchain in the engine they are most comfortable with. It’s early days, but Univers is already beginning to grow its indie game developer community, and is focused on ultimately unifying the metaverse with the Univers General Format, and in doing so ensure the metaverse continues to place the human, the player, the individual, at its very centre.