Faraway and Novel Labs will make Serum City in the Bored Ape universe

Blockchain gaming firms Faraway and Novel Labs have teamed up to create Serum City, a city-building game set in the Yugaverse of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Mutant Apes.

Faraway is a developer of one of the largest blockchain games, Mini Royale: Nations, while Novel Labs is a community developer of the Mutant Cartel, which consists of many people who bought the Mutant Ape non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from Yuga Labs.

The two firms are collaborating on Serum City, an episodic city builder set in the Yugaverse, which has more than a dozen character universes now. Serum City takes players into a dystopian world showcasing a class divide between the ruling class, the Bored Apes, and the Mutant Apes, who were cast to the outskirts of society after taking the Serum.

Inhabited by the Mutant Cartel, an infamous group of Mutant Apes who formed an alliance in the shadow of the Yacht Club, Serum City is an extension of the Mutant Cartel Expanded Universe. The story is focused on the rise of Blaksoot and Darkfang.

Developed with the proprietary Faraway Developer Platform, which provides the ground layer for full interoperability between Web3 gaming ecosystems, Serum City is built on Ethereum and is set to feature cross-game and cross-universe events when it launches later this year in the third quarter.

The game will be 2D illustrated so that it matches the art style of the Mutant Apes. The game will be playable on the web, so don’t expect to encounter outstanding graphics. You can use mobile devices or PCs to play and the title is expected to launch in Q3. The game will be broken down into seasons and the goal is to tell stories in those seasons.

Led by the community

Novel Labs, founded by Lior Messika, owner of the renowned Mega Trippy Mutant Ape recently displayed in the Louvre, is the team behind the Mutant Cartel and the Mutant Hounds. These represent the largest Layer-2 brands by trading volume based in the Yugaverse.

Serum City will be the first non-Yuga affiliated game powered by ApeCoin and is developed with true interoperability and composability as core tenets in its game and narrative design.

At launch, Serum City will be an exclusive NFT-gated experience aimed at rewarding and giving additional utility to existing Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Genesis Oath and Mutant Hound NFTs.

Highlighting the focus on interoperability, items won or crafted in-game will have utility in both Serum City and other external games and universes — additional details coming soon. This collaboration represents an unprecedented step forward in delivering on the ethos of web3 interoperability and persistent utility to collectors across the Yugaverse.

“Serum City is our most ambitious expansion of the Mutant Cartel universe to date, and we couldn’t think of a better partner than Faraway,” Messika said. “Together, we plan to deliver industry-defining experiences through engaging stories, a constantly expanding universe, and permissionless innovation. We’re excited to be working with Faraway on expanding some of web3 gaming’s most interesting ideas: permissionless interoperability, cross-game interactions, and much more.”

Faraway’s background

Founded by executives of Glu Mobile and Scopely, Faraway launched its Solana-based Mini Royale: Nations in 2021, then the first live multiplayer game on Solana, and is currently successfully underway in its fourth season.

With a staff of 60 developers, founders Alex Paley and Dennis Zdonov have grown the vision and scope of Faraway to encompass more than Web3 game creation. Faraway has taken the framework of its successful shooter title and created the Faraway Developer Platform, a suite of battle-tested cross-chain smart contracts, prebuilt components, and developer tools that allow game developers to build web3 economies and game mechanics faster. Novel Labs has about 80 people.

“The expanded universe that Lior and the Mutant Cartel team have created and their vision for interoperable economies perfectly matches our vision at Faraway,” Paley said. “With Faraway driving the technology and game design, and Lior driving the narrative design and world building, it is an unbeatable combination.”

Yuga Labs has set up its Bored Ape, Mutant Ape and other communities so that others can benefit from selling things in the same universe. Once people buy the NFTs, they no longer owe any money to Yuga Labs, which then gets the benefit of others trying to build its community. Yuga doesn’t collect a royalty after it sells its NFTs. Based on what character you own, you might see different parts of the game or be exposed to different power-ups.

For the last 18 months, Novel Labs and Mutant Cartel have been building the largest community within the Bored Ape universe, Messika said. Yuga Labs made this possible by launching its Bored Ape and Mutant Ape non-fungible tokens (NFTs), where people get the right to use their characters in any way that they want because they own the characters.

“Yuga Labs has given people a very, very broad license to their intellectual property,” Messika said. “We’re actually the first very large and probably by now most successful community at creating from that base IP layer and then building upon that world.”

Messika refers to the Mutants as a benevolent cartel of about 13,000 people. Hatched on Discord, the group has launched numerous collections. Messika himself made a lot of early investments in the ecosystem. He bought in at a high price and saw the prices crater. But the community has gotten bigger and stronger, he said.

“It’s been a really beautiful journey,” Messika said. “We have taken a very deep developed brand that rose within Web3 very natively on one side, and we’ve got these really deep and story-driven universe that has been consistent for the last 18 months.”

The community is teaming up with Faraway to develop the game. Regarding no royalties, Messika said, “That’s the beauty of this model.”

Messika had been a “whale” in the Bored Ape Yacht Club when he bought into the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. He started the Mutant Cartel with a kind of punk rock spirit at a time when Mutant Apes were selling well below their opening prices. Yet he felt empowered to go do things with the IP based on encouragement from Yuga Labs. And so he looked for new ways of creating value in the ecosystem.

“What we’re trying to do is kick it up a notch,” Messika said. “Now, we’re building our own ecosystem that got started by this IP.”

Paley has been making free-to-play games for the past decade at companies like Glu and Scopley.

“There has always been this dream of open economies, interoperable economies, but it hasn’t really been possible before because you needed this primitive to exist,” Paley said. “That was an open and distributed database that anybody can have access to. And that primitive does exist today. It’s called an NFT. And if you want to make your item interoperable across a variety of other ecosystems, you put it onto the blockchain. Today, the most interoperable and composable blockchain today is Ethereum.”

Paley’s dream is to take an item he owns in one game and to user it in another game. And that’s what he likes about Web3.

“Serum City allows us to expand the brand more proactively,” Paley said.

Overcoming the blockchain’s challenges

If they wanted to reach the most people, they wouldn’t build a game on the blockchain, Messika said. But Web3 is where the innovation is, he said.

“We see an opportunity to spearhead this movement,” Messika said. “It’s been nothing but rampant experimentation. We’ll figure out the scale later.”

Mini Royale, first built on Solana will migrate to Ethereum. The game has 2.5 million users, which is good for a Web3 game but not so for a Web2 title.

“The main reason why nobody plays Web3 games right now is that most of them just suck,” Messika said. “We actually want to change that. We want to make you want to play the game, regardless of whether it’s on crypto or not.”

There aren’t that many daily active crypto wallets today — around 1.7 million, according to DappRadar. That’s a small market in terms of daily transactions, and the market needs to go mainstream in a bigger way for games to succeed. But Paley likes the fact that the users are passionate.

“We’re still very early on, and this is a user experience problem, right?” Paley said. “The big focus for us right now is not on reaching the most people. We’re actually focused on cultivating the community that exists today. If you look at the Mutant Cartel, they are the most passionate people.”