Crypt0Dude

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Nbd, just working to build the next evolution of UGC games platforms here. @HYTOPIAgg

I think these points are fair. My response here won’t be to argue or push back. Grail's not wrong. Instead, I want to add more internal context and transparency, show where we stand now, and let everyone, including Grail, make their own decisions on how they engage with HYTOPIA (formerly NFT Worlds) going forward. Addressing Grail’s Points: - Game dev is tough: No question. Building something at this scale is never straightforward. - Hindsight is 20/20: We were initially overly optimistic after the Minecraft ban with our Minecraft client. Milestones slipped, and until recently, it often felt like we were navigating blindfolded, making multiple pivots trying to find solid ground. - “Number no go up, scam!”: I respect Grail not having the typical perspective of if the numbers don’t go up, then a project is a rug or a scam. - Gray Boys and Other Assets: Gray Boys didn’t pan out as originally hoped. We still care for that community and folded them into HYTOPIA instead of just dropping them. We do still want them to have a meaningful place in the ecosystem. We know holders were frustrated by the lack of clarity or progress after shipping proxy ownership and other roadmap pieces. - Multiple Changes, Limited Communication: We tried pleasing everyone at once, made big changes on utility and plans, and didn’t maintain consistent communication. Updates sometimes slowed and picked back up without enough external explanation. I don’t disagree with the core of what Grail is saying here. The frustration is understandable. I think what's going to be most eye opening here, I want to respond with my perspective on the last 2 years and just full transparency into what’s gone on, and why I finally feel like we’ve rounded the corner and are coming back to our original form that everyone loved in the pre-Minecraft ban days. Pre-Minecraft Ban (as NFT Worlds) October 2021 - July 2022: We were moving fast. Shipping fast. Progress updates almost daily. There were over 20 partner integrated Minecraft servers live and 100,000+ Minecraft players signing up for NFT Worlds accounts within the first months. Everything at this point was built and shipped internally. This is important. We coded, tested, deployed—if something broke, we fixed it quickly. We delivered at a rapid pace, and that momentum felt great - there was no dependency on external actors or misaligned incentives. Post-Minecraft Ban: On July 20, 2022, everything changed. Our idea of building on top of Minecraft directly. We had to pivot fast. The new vision: build our own voxel-based UGC platform to rival Minecraft. But everyone we spoke to—experienced game devs and engine builders—told us it would take years. This was a tough pill to swallow: we wanted to ship fast so we thought we had what would be come a quick interim solution in the meantime. The Minecraft-Compatible Client Attempt: We tried building our own Minecraft-compatible client from scratch as that interim solution. Something that wasn't dependent on the Minecraft codebase but could interface with the protocol to bypass the EULA. The idea: recapture some momentum by letting creators monetize and improve on the vanilla Minecraft experience. We knew it was complex but hoped outside Minecraft experts could guide us through the protocol and various anti-cheat’s quirks to build this client. We also assumed unlike what experts told us about the game engine, that a Minecraft compatible client would not take years and would be faster to ship. The one caveat is we had to fully own the software to bypass the Minecraft EULA and allow creator content sales in the client - we couldn’t just create another mod-loader client like Lunar Client and others are. We hired team #1 (external experts from the community) who understood the Minecraft protocol. Initial progress was encouraging. But as we approached a working product, small protocol edge cases piled up, blocking progress and dragging out timelines. It felt like we were always “almost there” without actually arriving. This limbo lasted from late 2022 into early 2024. Communication to the community suffered because we didn’t always have good news—just ongoing, grinding attempts to fix obscure issues. Moments of thinking we’d rounded a corner, followed by more frustration and that resulted in up and down community progress updates. Switching Contractors (Team #2): In early 2024, we tried again with another external team. They suggested rewriting everything with a new strategy. We were skeptical but yhey promised quicker progress and had a strategy that on paper made sense. Initially, they delivered. We got very hopeful again with immediate progress. What took team 1 months to build initially, team 2 built in weeks. We were so confident we even timed some announcements (like HYCHAIN and HYPLAY) to align with what we thought would be client milestones. But after a while, the same pattern emerged. We hit those tricky protocol barriers again we thought this team would push through quicker. And while they did make better headway, eventually the product development slowed, cost escalated, and we still had no finished client to show. It's important to note that the third party contractors did not want us directly contributing to the client codebase which I think also heavily hampered results as they had their own opinionated way of doing it, we also didn't have the expertise to handle the Minecraft complexities ourselves so we leaned on trusting them to get it done. The Breaking Point & Building Our Own Engine: By August 2024, I’d had enough. I stepped away from HYPLAY/HYCHAIN day-to-day to focus purely on building our own engine. With our own engine, we control all the variables—no reverse-engineering Minecraft’s protocol or relying on outside developers. I wanted to fold everything back into our team being the ones internally building again and shipping rapidly like the good-days pre-Minecraft ban. No third parties, no protocol baggage, our expertise, our control. I started coding this with a little bit of Rust and mostly TypeScript. Our internal team was even initially skeptical, some of them talking with those prior game dev “experts” and engine “experts” who continually said I was crazy and my approach wouldn’t work. These "experts" takeaway was building a performant voxel engine the way I approached it would be non-performant, non-traditional, or just plain impossible. Most laughed when I outlined the architecture. But two months later, late October 2024, performance and capabilities exceeded what the “experts” said was possible or would work. The benchmarks were enough to show the traditional, drawn-out approach wasn’t the only way. My personal tldr; Respectfully, Fuck “experts” at this point who through their lens of expertise believe there are only a handful of ways to make something work. Progress and evolution comes from distilling down to fundamentals and factoring up, even if that yields what others think are unconventional and non-traditional approaches. Why This Matters Now: Yes, it looks like another pivot. But it’s actually a return to form in my eyes. Before the ban, when we controlled the full stack, we moved fast and delivered. After the ban, we tried to solve problems through intermediaries we managed because they wanted to work as independent teams, and dealing with complicated protocols we didn’t build ourselves. That cost us time, resources, and community goodwill. Now, it’s all internal again. We control the stack, the engine, the roadmap, and how we integrate NFTs and tokens. No more external team dependencies or hitting Minecraft protocol brick walls. NFTs, $TOPIA, and Community Considerations: Another point to respond to, the NFTs and token, and how we’re thinking. I think it’s important to preface that we don't care to be a big crypto game in the small pond of crypto games. We want to build a true Roblox competitor, and there are genuinely meaningful non-hype, non-gimmick aspects of crypto and NFTs we do want to take and see a technological advantage in using. We want to do this without pushing out the majority of players and creators, all of this majority in user interviews having the same default opinion of crypto is bad or a scam and are highly skeptical - we cannot force it down their throats and we don’t want to. We want the good with little-to-none of the bad. The legitimate pieces of the technology. - NFT Integration: We want NFTs and token utility that don’t scare off mainstream users. That means making sure a player can jump in without crypto friction. We’re using language like “digital items” so it’s not a confusing or off-putting experience. - $TOPIA’s Role: $TOPIA remains relevant, but we also know that relying solely on a volatile token for marketplace purchases is a tough onboarding process for a non-crypto player base. That’s why we’re making a hybrid approach—USD-based credits by default, with $TOPIA as an incentivized option for those who want it. Over time, as the ecosystem matures, we’ll see where we can add more direct value streams back to NFT holders. - Worlds & Avatars: We can’t gate developers by making them buy expensive NFTs upfront. That would kill growth. Instead, worlds and avatars need to have roles that enhance value rather than block entry. If regulations ease, we’ll consider revenue or token-sharing models. But right now, we must tread carefully to avoid regulatory pitfalls. - Gray Boys: They remain part of the vision, particularly around the cosmetics and marketplace. They haven’t been forgotten. TLDR; These last two years were rough. We tried to salvage traction by relying on external solutions and that hit us in the face and impacted the relationship with the community. That approach didn’t pan out any way we had hoped. Now, we’re back in control, building fast, and operating without the protocol shackles. The team’s morale is higher than ever. We’re done being stuck. I mean look at the @HYTOPIAgg Twitter and dev discord in just the last week. There's engine features and updates being polished and shipped almost every day again. Now we’re back to iterating, and pushing to deliver a thriving UGC platform on our own terms, in line with the vision we've always had without any roadblock interim solutions in the way like the Minecraft client. From here, it’s up to the community to decide how they want to engage. We’re going to continue building, updates and progress are happening fast like the good days of old, pre-Minecraft ban, and we’re working to make good on the core vision that started this all. It’s been a rocky last few years. But I genuinely see this as us turning again and coming out on the other side of the frustrating last two years.