Special Edition: Interview with Drunken Dragon Games and dIP

Introduces the interview with Bletic and Jorge of Drunken Dragon Games, a community-driven Cardano project, as a beta test of a more professionalized podcast format.

Introduces his executive assistant JJ as the podcast's Jamie who will look things up on request.

Bletic, the creative director, says Drunken Dragon Games' mission is to create the most epic fantasy universe, currently an online game using Cardano NFTs.

Bletic shares his backstory: originally from Mexico, living in Amsterdam five years, a software engineer specializing in functional programming with Scala and a love of Haskell.

Bletic says his passions for technology, fantasy, and positive impact drew him to blockchain and then Cardano, whose scientists like Philip Wadler are personal heroes.

Bletic recalls attending Plutus Fest in 2018 and keeping napkins with the Plutus formal specification, and tells how Philip Wadler asked to photograph his Lambda tattoo before he could ask Wadler first.

Hoskinson asks how a functional programmer moved into game development instead of academia or writing papers.

Bletic says he nearly returned to university for mathematics but realized technology is just a tool for making a positive impact on people's lives.

Bletic says humanity always finds a new level of abstraction to be miserable about, so he wants to make lives feel meaningful, recalling his happiest moments sharing fantasy playing World of Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons.

Bletic says he is a fifth-edition Dungeons and Dragons player who became a dungeon master himself in the Netherlands, watching Critical Role to try out voices.

Hoskinson reflects that video games are one of the last mediums where people go all-in and pay singular attention, a forgiving medium for telling great experiences.

IO is starting a game division with Crypto Bison as its first foray, and that he has been buying the intellectual property for fantasy games to prime the pump.

Jorge introduces himself, from Mexico with a fine-arts background loving illustration, comics, animation, and sculpting.

Jorge says he saw cinema as the maximal medium combining many disciplines and then video games as the next step, arguing art reaches the mind through the language of dreams and games are interactive movies that move hearts.

Jorge names Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, as a favorite, with Forrest Gump his all-time favorite for simply telling a story you care about.

Hoskinson notes games and movies fail when they do not create emotional stakes, citing John Carmack saying Doom's plot is like a porno's, there but nobody cares.

Bletic explains Cardano brought them together, since he started the DND stake pool as a weekend project after a friend suggested it.

Bletic says he added NFT collectibles as an extra incentive for the pool since incentives and game theory matter, drawing the first pixel-tile cards himself.

Bletic says he needed a skilled pixel artist and found Jorge through a friend and a Latin American game-developer Discord after a long conversation about blockchain and games.

Bletic says he invited Jorge to create the Grandmaster Adventurers collection, wanting something special and investing a lot of effort and emotion.

Bletic describes the collection as full-body animated adventurers with a fantasy world in the background across 10 Dungeons-and-Dragons-style classes like fighter, guardian, cleric, and druid.

Jorge walks through his creative process in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet, sketching a silhouette from Bletic's ideas then painting colors and animating everything, inspired by studying D&D lore and Blizzard games like Hearthstone and World of Warcraft.

Hoskinson notes world-building is an endless river, citing George R.R. Martin's 30 years on Westeros and Tolkien, with diminishing returns if overdone.

Bletic says after the Grandmaster Adventurers sold out they used the money to build a game studio of about 15 full-time people working on a more beautiful next collection with splash art.

Bletic says the last six months were the startup challenge of discovering processes and a work pipeline, now building League-of-Legends-style splash art.

Bletic says he wants a world behind the beauty, developing the lore of the first region, Fielden, on a Miro board over winter vacation.

Bletic describes a 14-step art pipeline moving from a high-level lore concept of civilizations and languages down to concrete character concepts gathered from references.

Jorge says what makes them different is that after the Grandmaster Adventurers sold out, Bletic went to the community and gave the most invested members access to participate in the story and world-building, converging Fielden's ideas in one week through their 5000-member open Discord.

Bletic says community moderators called innkeepers came directly from members, and they use the same Discord for private development channels plus a Council of Elronidas channel gated by a gamified XP bot, so community management itself became a video game.

Bletic says monthly developer updates like IOHK's start with the mission and their three core values of quality, transparency, and community involvement.

Hoskinson asks Bletic to sell the game vision: whether it is an MMO or single-player and what you actually do.

Bletic demos the drunkendragon.games website with an alpha where a Play button takes you to itch.io to download the current game version.

Bletic shows the game reading your wallet via a pool.pm-style URL wallet to display which pixel tiles and collectibles you own.

Jorge's Grandmaster Adventurers splash art is shown alongside community artists, including an artist called Look who created the in-game pixel-art world as a warm Ghibli-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings style.

Bletic notes they considered a cell-phone game but the community voted overwhelmingly for desktop, built in Unreal Engine for artistic freedom with shaders and effects.

Bletic says he wants the multiplayer combat system easy to get into but with esports-level depth, which needs a keyboard and mouse.

Hoskinson says they are using Unreal 5 for Crypto Bison, praising it alongside Unity, Godot, and Babylon.js.

Bletic says the music is by a friend in Seattle who composes for video games and film scores, and the game uses a pool.pm-style receiving address for now with a lightweight in-game wallet planned.

Bletic describes two modes: the Collectors mode called the Eternal Realms, and the Adventure mode called the Mortal Realms with deep gameplay, a complex economy, cities, and quests.

Bletic says the Collectors mode uses ADA and shields the gameplay from pay-to-win mechanics by not importing the real-life economy into the game economy.

Hoskinson recalls macro-mining ice in EVE Online with an AutoHotkey bot across four accounts, adding stochasticism to evade CCP's macro-mining bans and playing free via PLEX cards and in-game ISK.

Bletic says right now you build a Tavern diorama to display your collection using a miniature metaphor in a fantasy tavern with training dummies, rendered as vector graphics over 3D.

Bletic says they release a new version every week in agile sprints to get constant feedback, with town-walking and more coming.

Jorge says they embrace the limitation that animation is expensive by using a miniatures metaphor, wanting thousands of limited collection adventurers that feel as special as owning a first-generation Charizard.

Hoskinson praises the statefulness that lets him have them back in six months, marveling that in 2015 he never imagined projects like Drunken Dragon Games would run on Cardano.

Bletic's final thoughts are that technology and money are just tools to impact people, and where IOHK gives financial tools to the unbanked, they want to give people an epic universe to share and feel happy.

Bletic previews decentralized intellectual property: opening up the Drunken Dragon universe, making all art Creative Commons, open-sourcing the game, and using Project Catalyst for on-chain governance so anyone can contribute like contributing to Star Wars, the world's biggest Dungeons and Dragons experience.

Hoskinson recounts how Wizards of the Coast open-sourced the D20 system in third edition, leading to Paizo's Pathfinder surviving the fourth-edition schism into a rich world with games like Wrath of the Righteous.

Hoskinson calls decentralized IP very interesting and invites them to write a white paper, tying it to NFT utility and a Twitter Space with Sean Lennon on artist monetization and fan-created canon in Star Wars, Warhammer, and Game of Thrones.

Gives the email jeffrey.seiler@iohk.io for projects wanting to showcase, marveling that people he met at Plutus Fest built a 15-person game studio, and invites them back to see their progress.