Illuvium is a decentralised game studio that merges the worlds of gaming and cryptocurrency. The game studio is building an open-world RPG adventure game on the Ethereum blockchain that allows players to collect, exchange and battle NFT assets.

History

Online games generally allow you to collect items, progress and unlock achievements. Today, however, players do not actually own their in-game collections. Their collections are locked in the game and cannot be carried over to other games or platforms. The team believes decentralization and ownership are vital to gaming, and this led them to create Illuvium. Founded in September 2020, Illuvium is building a fully decentralized game that can best be described as the combination of an open-world RPG and an auto-battler. Inside Illuvium, players will encounter creatures called Illuvials that can be defeated and captured. A successful capture results in a new NFT asset representing the Illuvial being minted and stored in your wallet. These NFTs can then be used in battle or exchanged. Through a range of collecting and trading features, Illuvium looks to cater to both casual gamers and DeFi users. Moreover, Illuvium will provide these features with zero gas fees by building on the Layer-2 solution Immutable X. In March 2021, Illuvium closed its Balancer public sale with a record volume of over $90 million traded. Over three days, one million tokens were sold with a starting price of $50. The funds are being used to rapidly expand the team and bring the game to market faster. With the open beta expected to be released in late Q3 or Q4 in 2021, Illuvium is set to become the first AAA gaming title in the crypto space.

Technology

Illuvium is built in Unreal Engine 4.26. The battles run in a simulation coded in Pure C++ and are then hooked up to Unreal Engine to be visualised. This allows the team to build a AAA game. The core mechanics of the game are minting, burning and exchanging. Creatures captured in-game are minted as NFT assets and can then be used in battle or exchanged. In addition, creatures of the same type can be fused together, which burns the existing tokens and mints a more powerful creature. To enable these mechanics, Illuvium is built on the Ethereum network and uses the most common NFT standard, ERC-721. One of the primary issues of this approach is the cost of performing transactions on the Ethereum network. IIluvium tackles this problem by building on the Immutable X network. Immutable X is a Layer-2 solution that allows users to trade their NFTs without paying gas fees using zero knowledge (ZK) rollups. Instead of creating one transaction per transfer, rollups bundle hundreds of transfers into a single transaction. Additionally, zero knowledge proofs reduce the amount of data held in a transaction. As such, ZK-rollups greatly reduce the resources needed to validate blocks and allow Illuvium to build an Ethereum game without gas fees.

Governance

The community of ILV holders will govern and maintain the protocol by proposing changes to the protocol. There are two types of proposals, Illuvium Configuration Change Proposals (ICCPs) and Illuvium Improvement Proposals (IIPs). ICCPs are put forth to modify System Configuration Variables, which include council values, marketplace fees, capture mechanics, and balance changes. IIPs are used to make improvements to the protocol, such as new contracts, new systems, expansions, and character sets. Proposals are submitted to the Github repository and will be posted on the Illuvium Proposal space. There, they are voted on by the Illuvinati Council and recorded on-chain. Proposals must reach a supermajority agreement to be enacted.

Asset profile is provided by messari. Original version can be found at Messari