Introducing Underware Game Studio: Autonomous World Design Begins in the Underworld

Special Report #3: An Interview with Recipromancer and Mataleone on the Creation of their New Game Studio

By the Herald Team

“It is kind of a lot,” reflected cofounder Recipromancer when speaking of the grand vision for Underware, the playful and trailblazing Realmsverse game studio he is piloting alongside Endless Crawler developer Mataleone. 

One of ten teams selected for funding via BiblioDAO’s inaugural Frontinus House grant program, and the only team funded twice, the scope of what Underware intends to deliver is nothing if not ambitious.

The studio emerged from the serendipitous meeting of two dynamic personalities. Roger Sodré, aka Mataleone, is a seasoned game developer and the visionary creator of the retro 2D, procedurally generated, on-chain dungeon exploring experiment that is Endless Crawler. Alongside him, Rob Morris, or Recipromancer, brings extensive experience as a serial entrepreneur and investor who established funDAOmental, a Web3 community dedicated to solving the "metacrisis" through the promotion of cooperative coordination and sustainable open ecosystems. Morris also steered the growth of Prismatik, an emerging technology consultancy that grew to a team of nearly 40 members and generated nearly $1 million in revenue per month between 2013 and 2022/23.

It would perhaps be easy to portray Rob and Roger as a quintessential symbiotic duo: Rob the outspoken intellectual statesman responsible for hammering reality into the form required for the game studio to exist, and Roger the introspective craftsman forging elementary concepts into new alchemical outcomes. The reality is far more of a collaborative partnership than their respective backgrounds might suggest. They do, however, notably differ in their motivations for founding Underware.

Roger, a natural problem-solver and self-confessed Web3 novice, is driven by a seemingly singular love of solving complex technical problems. The genesis of his career in game development may have stemmed from his passion for video games, but he prefers building rather than playing these days.

Developing on Starknet within the Realms ecosystem has scratched the problem-solver itch for Roger, as he masochistically grapples with the reductionist nature of developing within the Cairo language native to the Starknet blockchain, the ZK-Rollup based Ethereum Layer 2 on which all games within the Realms ecosystem are built. 

Developing using a restrictive programming language running within a resource-constrained execution environment is at least a mostly well travelled path. However, attempting to make use of the latest advances in machine learning and generative artificial intelligence given those same limitations, less so.

The nature of trying to build a virtually infinite world, co-created and co-owned by participants, and existing primarily within an immutable environment, requires some mental gymnastics to conceptualize. At its core, it relies on the ability to procedurally generate new content, entirely from code stored on-chain, all without relying on centralized technology such as third-party APIs. The Underware team may have drawn inspiration from the minimalist genesis that is Loot (for Adventurers), but their appetite for higher fidelity has since increased considerably. We are talking about immersive 3D worlds, emotion-enhancing soundtracks, storylines rich with interconnected lore, and character-defining interactions with seemingly sentient entities - an alarmingly complex challenge to achieve whilst still adhering to the principles of “fully onchain” game development. Indeed, some of the technical challenges the team faces currently lack feasible solutions, but they are confident that by the time those problems become mission-critical, innovation will have found a path forward.

For Rob, Underware represents the most practical vehicle for delivering on the pluralistic ideals that are foundational to funDAOmental. The latter of which he created as a grassroots movement to encourage a broad societal transition away from closed, monopolistic hierarchical organizations towards open, collaborative and positive-sum collectives, to shift system dynamics away from behaviors that he believes will ultimately lead to unsustainable and unnecessary zero-sum competition, “tragedy of the commons” style societal outcomes.

Rob’s desire is for Underware to provide experimental sandboxes so participants may interact embodying positive-sum, autonomy-aligned coordination. These forms of coordination align with FunDAOmental’s guiding principles to develop, release, and prove the feasibility and viability of discrete tactical solutions for what are mostly conceptual problems based in social dynamics. Think then of Underware’s initiatives as proving grounds for testing experimental technologies within reasonably isolated and highly monitored environments. Each component or experience the team releases is intended to explore one or more open questions around how large groups of individuals can be incentivized to work cooperatively in a way that leads to sustainable, positive-sum outcomes for all and not just the few that accrue power. 

According to Rob, “in real world scenarios like DAOs, the stakes are high and so participants tend to revert to what they know, which is usually coordination by control, and they're less receptive to trying new, unproven approaches. Autonomous worlds is a similar problem space, but gives much greater control over the constraints, incentives and narrative structures, and because it's play, people are much more willing to experiment.”

Working alongside Rob and Roger, at any given time, as many as eight others contribute to Underware assisting with art, design, engineering, 3D engines, lore, game mechanics, and project management. That might seem like more contributors than is normally required for a singular bootstrapped onchain experience still very much under development, but the team isn’t just focused on one interactive experience, they are currently working on three unique experiences plus the autonomous world and protocols underpinning of these, with many more initiatives potentially in development.

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The studio formation was inspired by many of the values and lessons from early work on Endless Crawler and their first joint project, Loot Underworld. Endless Crawler was created by Mataleone and is described as an “infinite composable generative crawler” which was linked early on to large language models to provide more interactive player experiences.

Gameplay examples from Endless Crawler

Loot Underworld took some of these concepts and applied them as an extension of the Loot Realms project, adding a subterranean system of multi-level chambers that connects to each unique surface Realm above. Each “under-realm” shadows the unique traits of its geo-matched parent Realm but with a slightly altered, somewhat Lovecraftian pastiche. Think something akin to the Upside Down from Netflix’s popular Stranger Things series and you are partway there.

Loot Underworld concept art with higher fidelity renderings from SD Images

In addition to Loot Underworld, the team has also built and launched an alpha for Underdark: Lair of the Slenderduck, winner of the second Dojo Game Jam. Underdark is a survival horror experience located within one of the subterranean chambers that make up the under-realms of Loot Underworld. It is intended to prototype the potential for users to create or integrate discrete interactive onchain experiences within the open world of Loot Underworld. So if this prototype serves to inspire others, then one day, every Loot Realm could also contain dozens of interconnected emergent fractal experiences. 

Early Underdark gameplay images

Most recently, the team launched an onchain PvP dueling experience called Pistols at 10 Blocks, which again won first place at the third Dojo Game Jam. Here, duelists challenge each other to a two-round battle for honor, revenge, or to wager $LORDS, the utility token of Realms World. At present Pistols at Ten Blocks has only a passing relationship to Loot Underworld and BiblioDAO’s flagship game, Eternum, but the intention is to weave it into these existing worlds by binding the duels to specific locations within each.

Graphic novel art incorporation w/in Pistols at 10 Blocks

In addition to these experiences, the Underware team is exploring unique mechanisms for incorporating collectible NFTs into its game worlds. Under the current roadmap, NFTs could be integrated in three possible forms: unique “storycards” that are generated and collected after encountering new monster or foes; procedurally generated eulogies that immortalizes the journey of a parties into the underworld and tells stories of their demise, and unique monster assets, which can be owned by players as economic assets.

There are also plans to expand, iterate, and integrate with other autonomous worlds projects that are in development, including introducing a comprehensive crafting system that would utilize resources found within Loot Realms along with a new unique “Dark Tar” for Loot Underworld, as a resource endemic to the under-realms themselves.

The vision for the Underware game studio is clearly ambitious aiming to steward new open protocols that enable the development of interconnected autonomous experiences. They are a studio that releases open design references to show what is possible at the bleeding edge of onchain experience design, and to test the feasibility of concepts for improving social dynamics. Underware’s goal is to challenge conventional monolithic gaming frameworks by emphasizing decentralized, narrative-driven, and interoperable experiences.

It’s too early to know when gamers will be ready for such decentralized worlds but Underware is already building out its infrastructure.

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Additional Links For Everything on Underware Developments and Logic

• FunDAOmental Substack

• Underware X Account

• Original Loot Underworld Website

• Generative AI for Autonomous Worlds by Rob Morris