Hello Seekers! It is I, your Headmaster, long-time soul-searcher (Long-time because I have yet to find one, but I’m no quitter. It just sucks that they’re really good hiders). Many of you have experienced, and even participated in, the Digital Game we crafted for Clan Wars. However, what you may not know are the intricacies unfolding behind the scenes the past few months. Rest assured, there have been countless heated debates over Zoom and voice calls. Rod (VMux), Dan, Chris, and I have engaged in discussions on what would work and what wouldn’t. Rod, in particular, had shown remarkable patience as he navigated the ever-changing landscape of the game’s development. Despite the challenges, we managed to deliver a fully-playable game that not only won the Hackathon but also garnered interest in the Theta network. Fast forward a bit… Rod reached a point where he felt like he was taking two steps forward and three steps backward with each iteration of the game. It became evident that to achieve a truly exceptional game, we needed to pause and reassess our approach. Most prominent digital card games on the market have surface-level strategy, rely on after-market sales to acquire a competitive deck, and are focused on investors but actual gamers. We realized that we were jumping ahead by attempting to create a digital game that was in our heads before perfecting the mechanics, game logic, and play styles. We needed to finalize the physical game first where we could rapidly iterate on the mechanics, get feedback from real card gamers, and make sure the strategy is not filled with unforeseen exploits. Not only would this streamline our digital workflow afterward, but it would also offer several other advantages, which I’ll address in this letter…

1. The Benefits of Going Physical First: By creating a physical game, we are tapping into a market of gamers who eagerly invest in card games and board games annually. This serves as an excellent entry point to introduce them to our digital platform. Clan Wars becomes the gateway to our Theta ecosystem, enticing players to explore further. Moreover, Clan Wars serves as the first major experience from the world of Montavera that we’re bringing to our community. Every aspect of the game, from its characters to its lore, contributes to the rich tapestry of Montavera’s universe. And as many of you may not know, we are in the process of writing a complete RPG Campaign book that will further expand on Montavera’s lore and mystic philosophy. This game brings us full circle, back to our roots. Clan Wars is not just a game; it’s a journey that will bring people to Theta, elevate the Mystic Gurus brand, and immerse players in a depth of lore and adventure unlike anything that’s out there right now.  
2. Finalizing game mechanics The last version of the digital game had players select a clan which gave you access to a starting Boss specifically of that clan. After some playtesting with seasoned gamers, it turns out having players pick their own starting Boss from anyone they chose was a much more enticing way to carve out your own unique opening strategy. To solve for the potential imbalances of this new mechanic we now introduced “Hand Size” to each Boss card. The default amount of cards to draw each turn was up to 7, but now this number will be dictated by the currently active Boss. This little tweak was embraced by everyone and we can’t believe we didn’t have it before. Turns out there are many small things we couldn’t quite put our finger on until we had the cards in hand and ran through several games with some clever people chasing down the win! It’s hard to put into words how satisfying it is to watch players grumble, cheer, and bang their fists each game. This has been a crucial step to locking-in gameplay mechanics. 

Our Plan Currently, we have an Instagram account with around 500-600 followers, a Discord server with under 100 members, and a real-life community of about 25 players who engage with Clan Wars weekly. #HumbleBeginnings Our aim is to organically grow these numbers to prepare for an Alpha launch of the game to help fund further development of the Digital Game. This marks the beginning of Montavera’s influence on Theta, drawing in new users and expanding adoption within the gaming community. Of course, to achieve our goals, we need a passionate and dedicated player base. We need individuals excited to compete and experience the thrill of Clan Wars digitally. And to cultivate such a community, we must deliver a game that surpasses all expectations. Hence, the need to perfect the physical game now. We continue to build out Clan Wars to create experiences for people where they laugh with their friends and loved ones and enjoy making them a bit salty with the final roll of the dice. 

To make the card collecting more enticing we also printed some holographic chase cards for players to hunt down:

In the mean time we are road-mapping how to not only make one of the best upcoming card games, but also one of the best digital card games on the market. We plan to update the digital version of the game with the new mechanics and card logic to create a tutorial experience that any players can use to learn the game. Very excited to get more people in on the action!

Yours Truly, The Headmaster

https://www.mysticgurus.club/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/TiveaRevealFinal.mp4

Stepping up the AI art game

Maintaining an art style with consistent design cues does not play well with the current image generations toolsets of today. The world of Montavera is quirky, mysterious, and charming (and soon with future properties, foreboding and dark). Finding a way to manage this consistency has been a long journey as AI generation rapidly develops before our eyes. With each new property release we want to make sure we are pushing the technology as far as we can so that what we have in our imagination can make it into the final image.

The most time consuming part of developing the images for the Montavera properties is a battle between rooting out stable diffusion results with negative prompts and a healthy diet of constant image model training repeated over…and over… and over again. A big part of this process is tapping our feet waiting for our computers to deliver the next result as we relentlessly punish our 3090 RTXs building the final 12k Tivea location. Having Theta introduce EdgeCloud and the hosted GPU resources sharing this summer will be an absolute GAME CHANGER. I can’t tell you how excited we are to access the computing horsepower available of an A100 right at our fingertips on the upcoming EdgeCloud update. Like, this is incredible.

Anyway, the Tivea release marks the completion of the Southern part of Montavera from the Long River and below including “The Streets”. I want to share some of the novel techniques we used in creating the Tivea tree-village location. Not only are they individual NFT images, but the properties are part of one single super high-resolution image. This way the properties are both individualized and now share a cohesive single location in the dramatic magical tree village. To show this off the video above will zoom in on each property in detailed full resolution from the final 12k image.

To accomplish this task we invested a lot of time in mastering Control Net, creating our own Lora models based on previous custom art training, and embedding them within a 2nd Architectural model we trained to our tastes. Most of the work was jumping between invokeAI and Automatic1111 to retopologize the low resolution concepts, then running a script to cut sections of the Tivea Tree for “image to image” processing. The up-res process took awhile to master so that the interpretive upscaling perfectly matched across all sections of the Tree. That is, up to the best it could get until we moved everything into Photoshop for final clean up and tone-matching. 

Congratulations to the Tivea property owners! Your NFTs will be minted soon and arrive in your wallets!

Next up in the blog:

1. The rental smart contract has been completed and tested, expect a demo of the functionality and how your dreams of being a Landlord in Montavera will finally come to fruition.
2. Clan Wars has seen an incredibly successful playtest series with seasoned gamers in the physical trials of the game. Look forward to a fat blog entry on that as well and the upcoming plans!

Discovering the blockchain approach for property NFTs

The beauty of blockchain is the end-user freedom to trade and the natural perpetuity of digital assets. When approaching smart contracts for Montavera, the concept is simple with a focus on ownership and utility. “Future-proofing,” however, quickly raises new challenges. We have these main goals for properties:

1. Ownership of a property offers exclusive access to your discord “neighborhood.”
2. Ownership allows you to house Gurus up to whatever the max occupancy is designated from the metadata for that property. 
3. Unused rooms will be available to be rented out to other Gurus at a price set by the owner.
4. Residential properties will act as a shelter to maintain Aura income for staked Gurus.

Leaning on our battle-hardened experiences in contract development, we created a lengthy list of FAQs for our stakeholders: How are Gurus attached to properties? What if a property gets sold and has Gurus? What if a Guru is traded while in a property? How do we do bulk move-in or vacating? How is rent collected? How does eviction work if rent is not paid? How do we make sure Gurus can’t be used twice in different properties? 

The list goes on and on, but the good news is that we think we have solved most of our questions with our approach.

We need property NFTs to be able to grow new neighborhoods and change over time. Therefore, there will be a “burn” function implemented on the contract as well as re-minting on the same token ID. There are also resort and business properties which require unique contracts to serve purposes beyond occupancy. For this reason, we can’t have occupancy recorded on a property contract. We will see multiple property NFT contracts in the future. We also don’t want there to be actual transfers of Guru NFTs to a properties contract because that could get way too complicated when unstaking a Guru. That’s why there will be a delegation method where a ledger is kept of where each Guru is housed. If a Guru is unstaked, we will use this ledger to vacate them from any property they were previously on.

The solution we came up with will be the introduction of an Occupancy/Rental contract which is separate from the Property contract. Ownership of both assets will be validated within the new Occupancy contract where owners will also be able to set and collect rent as well as move Gurus in and out.  We are also setting up batch functions using mapped arrays so multiple Gurus can be housed/vacated in one transaction.

We’ve made good progress on the Property contract with a batch minting function so that we can release entire neighborhoods as they come out. Waiting for them all to be done at once will take too long, so we plan to release the properties by district. And speaking of properties …

Property Art!

Behind the scenes, we have been absolutely obsessed with the look and architecture of Montavera. The properties of each district will share distinct features so, at just a glance, you’ll know if you’re looking at those snobby Gurus from Lakeview Estates or a grifter buying up all The Streets. 

We’d also like to announce that EVERY property NFT will have its own unique art asset! Many locations within Lakeway Estates, Long River, The Streets, and Tivea are currently under development. We’re also doing our best to include context in the image if your property is near a major bridge, water feature, neighboring district, etc. It’s been so much fun fleshing out Montavera imagery! Here is one of our favorite assets so far — the Tivea Tree.

Thank you, seekers! We will definitely have more updates as we get closer to releasing the first district!

The Core Set Staking Re-Factor is Complete!

Yes, I know this was a long time coming, and I’m eager to share with you some of that journey… 

…accumulating eagerness… 

Earlier in the summer, we experienced an unexpected transaction failure with the Core Set Level-Ups. Yes. It’s true. You may now gasp dramatically and choke on your scrambled eggs. With the Promo set, the 500 or so staked gurus was no problem; all sunshine and rainbows in Montavera. The New-Gen Gurus came in (The Core Set), and this set was a different beast. With over 4000 staked NFTs and version 1.0 of the staking contract, it just wasn’t up to the task. This unforeseen problem advanced our plans for building new contract upgrades from the Fall to… like… NOW. There was a lot of testing, a lot of building, and a lot of “I’m not sure what this error is but looks like I’ll have to read another 40 articles and debug some 10,000 lines of open source code.”

Finally, the time came to “finalize the commit” (fancy blockchain lingo for “going live”) on the final upgrade, when, to our dismay, we discovered a mismanaged proxy manifest from our previous developer (Dramatic Music Plays). I know that all sounds complex, but it’s actually just another day in Montavera.

This was no problem, of course, except the fact that this developer was in the Ukraine and he became extremely difficult to get a hold of. After playing the role of Dog the Bounty Hunter for a while, we decided to switch gears: rather than take the easy route, we had to rebuild the manifest, which required more time, but we were able to get back on track to commit the upgrade. Next, we had a very slippery bug that hid from us for a while in our Truffle Development Environment – a framework & asset pipeline for blockchains using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (The Montaveran Virtual Machine was being used at the time). After much back-and-forth with Truffle and OpenZeppelin developers, followed by long nights of debugging the upgrade source codes, we finally squashed the bug.

Given all of the research, time, and testing that we went through, I dare say Mystic Gurus is stronger for it. We’re no longer a smooth-skinned baby-face soldier dropped in the battlefield of blockchain technology. This was a bit of a proving ground that took us to the point from which we can look over our shoulder and say, “Oh, I’ve been there.” And I’m sure there will be more to come. 

This seems to be the nature of life.

Yay.

The New Changes in Staking 2.0

Most of what changed behind the scenes won’t be initially apparent for our lovely Guru holders. However, the exciting stuff happened under the hood. Here are some of the important new changes:

1. Claim All is now available. This is a simple function that will be available on the Shrine page by checking the “All” box next to claim. This will take all realized AURA rewards held by all the Gurus you’ve got staked in a wallet to be claimed to your personal wallet. Some of our biggest supporters are going to love this. You might even miss the old days of clicking through MetaMask prompts for hours. Oh, Nostalgia…
2. Sync All tfuel gas costs have been trimmed down by an average of 30-40%.Take that Biden!
3. A Guru leveling-up is no longer dependent on being written to the chain by a daily update. This means the moment a Guru levels up, it will be shown in your dashboard. All those times you spent biting your nails waiting to see your Guru transcend into a higher level of consciousness will happen right before your eyes (as soon as you click on your Guru again to refresh the stats, of course).
4. Staking 1.0 had an expensive daily transaction cost to maintain the ledger, individual Guru statistics, and payouts. That cost has been reduced by 95% in Staking 2.0! (This is your cue to Ooh and Ahh…) This was hugely important for us to continue to our next phase of development and by far has me the most excited. This also means we have a lot more control of the reward payouts when certain *ahem* events happen in Montavera. It’s a good thing some of these Gurus will be safe inside their homes.

Promo vs Core Set Guru’s (Oogway vs Club24… wink wink) 

            I want to reiterate some of the differences between the two sets. As you all know, the congregation is known as the total gathering of Gurus meditating. The more in the congregation (or staked) the more Aura that gets distributed. The Promo and Core sets are 2 different congregations. This is for a couple of very important reasons: 

First, if they shared the same congregation, the Promo Gurus would easily sap the rewards of the Core set Gurus as they would always be a few levels ahead. This would lead to a devaluation of anything Core Set, and the Promos already enjoyed a very lucrative 10x rewards during their initial launch. 

Secondly, the Promo gurus are going to have access to governance roles in future mechanics and activities in Montavera (aka City Council). Keeping them in their own congregation allows them to compete for rewards in their own circle without the unfair ability to tower over the Core Set. What this means is that you shouldn’t be concerned about competition between rewards for Promo vs Core unless you plan to purchase some Guru’s from either to maximize your Aura returns.

That’s it for my update, and now a word from our Headmaster:

Kidney.