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Balthazar Research Report: Join the Miium Hero’s Journey in Moonray
Written by Nicholas Korsgård, Chief Gaming Officer, Kim Bjerkeli, Sigurd Thomassen, and Heidi Anette Laugsand Johansen, Game Strategist, Balthazar Alpha Team
Contents
Introduction
In Moonray, you’ll experience intense combat and a competitive environment, allowing you to hone your skills and take on your opponents. Earn tokens and NFTs, climb the leaderboards, defeat your rivals and get to practicing – join us as we take a look at Moonray.
Moonray is a competitive 3rd-person action RPG game with an emphasis on the competitive side – the developers claim it’s made for true gamers. Featuring your own characters, weapons, and items that you can level up, a flexible system lets you choose a play style that works for you.
In this article, we’ll look into what Moonray is, some of its story, the gameplay, and its NFT Assets. We’ll also take a look at their website, the blockchain it’s run on, their team and roadmap, their whitepaper and socialnomics, and share our thoughts on the project.
Let’s get right into the background and lore of Moonray!
Background
Moonray is a Play-2-Earn 3rd-person action RPG game from Moonray PBC built on the Ethereum blockchain. The game is set in a sci-fi-themed world, letting players play and progress through beautiful landscapes while exploring a vast open world that is both surreal and creative. The game is built in Unreal Engine 5.
The game developers are passionate about PvP combat and large, expansive MMO worlds. In Moonray, you’ll level up your character, weapons, and items with the possibility of trading on the Moonrays Ethereum NFT marketplace.
To get started, check out Moonrays official reveal trailer here; it’s pretty cool!
Lore
Iltar; the sacred name of the Goddess-mother.
Many millennia ago…
Miium’s secrets were revealed by the Ur-being Iltar. Her mastery of the element granted her godlike abilities, but they were never sufficient. Over the course of centuries, she subjugated the galaxy in search of every source of miium she could locate.
She was able to shape planets, fashion solar systems, and create new lifeforms by channeling the element’s immense creative power. She ruled dominant for millennia upon millennia, dominating the heavens.
In contrast, a civilization awakened in one of the countless worlds she had long forgotten. Having discovered the extraordinary powers of the element, they began to adore it and remember the creator who had shown them its ultimate potential.
As miium-hungry as Iltar herself, a cult sprang up.
Using the holy element to shape themselves in the likeness of their god, they attempted to unleash the same abilities she had acquired eons before.
Iltar awakened from her divine rest at some point. She perceived her command over miium to be weakening. Someone was looking for her.
As soon as she arrived on the cult’s home planet, she was entrapped.
She was powerless as the high priest, and his acolytes strove to learn her secrets while she was imprisoned and worshiped as a god by the people.
However, there was still hope. She built a new lifeform in secret that was capable of locating and liberating her. The cult had risen in strength and was advancing swiftly. They would soon no longer require her. If, however, her new guardian could reach her in time…
The miium hero begins his journey
The comics open with the protagonist on a field of grass. He is fresh to the world and experiences every sensation for the first time. However, his mind contains only one thing: the name Iltar.
In front of the hero is a crystalline physical concept from Iltar’s head — an idea given physical embodiment. The hero inquires where and who Iltar is, to which the crystalline responds, “Iltar. The sacred name of the Goddess-mother that called us into existence.”
As the hero journeys, he reaches a land where sound farms collect noise for bioacoustic crops. With him is his sword — a sword pulled from the corpse of a dead god.
Our hero is created to free the captured goddess, Iltar, and with him is a crystal compass to guide him on his journey.
Our thoughts on the comic and lore available
Moonray offers some lore and background for their game. One unique idea they’ve had is to create a comic for their game, created by their own creative director, Brandon Graham, who has been making several comic books since the 90s. Moonrays comic book is split into three chapters, each with three pages featuring full-colored pages, dialogue, and storytelling.
The lore available at this time seems intriguing, and they’ve managed to set the premise of their project in a truly surreal sci-fi environment with a backstory that makes us want to experience this world and the story it has to offer.
Gameplay
To start, we need to preface this part because this game is only in its early alpha stages. The gameplay we’ve seen comes from the game’s YouTube page as well as their Twitter and own website. As such, we’re unable to go too in-depth at this point, and everything is subject to change as the development progresses.
In Moonray, you’ll have to upgrade your powers, weapons, and skills to survive the cult’s relentless assault. In an epic battle to recapture the precious element miium, you must traverse vast, broad areas and tight, labyrinthine tunnels.
Explore a bizarre, futuristic terrain to discover all of Moonray’s hidden secrets.
Alpha gameplay and modes
With many teaser trailers and small gameplay shorts, we can see quite a lot of the alpha gameplay that the developers have chosen to show us. From these videos, we see a 3rd-person hack-and-slash game with the common use of skills, skill combos, HP, stamina, and mana bar, presumably and more.
Check out their alpha gameplay in the UE5 teaser:
Competitive gameplay
Even though the gameplay might look like your standard hack-and-slash game, the developers have been evident in that they want to make a competitive game where you have to see your opportunities and not always just rush in. This game is PvP based; thusly, the player has to make good decisions based on their game knowledge and game sense.
Game modes – PvP Combat
The game’s developers have announced the following game modes and said that more would come as they continue developing.
According to their website, we know that 1v1, 2v2, 4v4, and 50+ Battle Royale are game modes that will be in the game. In these game modes, the players will have a chance to earn tokens and NFTs.
4-minutes gameplay video
(video is unlisted, however publicly available through Moonrays discord).
Game UI,
The game’s user interface at the moment of writing looks clean and straightforward to understand. However, it also looks a bit boring and very standard. We’re sure this will change as the development progresses; however, this gives us a pointer in which direction the developers want to take their games’ user interface.
Being a competitive game, a clean and minimalistic user interface is probably the best way to go. This will help the player easily control their characters, always stay on top of the gameplay, and won’t disturb the gameplay.
Quickly swap your playstyle and adapt to the challenges.
After the player goes down, they seem to be presented with a quick swap menu, where they can adjust and change their playstyle as needed. In this video, the player uses the Great Sword as their weapon of choice.
Other choices, as we can see from this list, are;
- Katana, a Traditional sword characterized by a curved, single-edged blade with a circular or squared guard and a long grip to accommodate two hands.
- Parier; A sword with a slender and sharply-pointed two-edged blade.
- Claws; A mid to close-range weapon that allows the player to manipulate the heat-blood element, used mostly to damage enemies but also sparingly to support yourself and your allies. The unique thing is that the user is using up their health as the resource instead of combat points and mp.
- Mage Locomotion Prototype; Damage-dealing spell-caster that specializes in burst damage and areas of effect spells.
- Dual-wielded daggers; No description found in the video
- Sword and shield; No description found in the video
Different character designs
One interesting thing we noticed from this video was that each time the player respawned, they respawned as a different character, with a different look to them. The variety of the character designs seem immense and they all looked very interesting to us.
NFT Game Assets
Once again, we want to reiterate that Moonray is at a very early stage. Currently, there is not much available information regarding the NFTs and what will be available on how the structure around them will look like. There are, however, some bits and pieces here and there that give us a slight idea of what the end product will look like.
From the webpage, we gather the knowledge that NFTs will be upgradeable, and a progression system is built into the game and in-game assets.
As of today, Moonray has two different NFTs listed on Opensea; The Moonray Presale Pass and the Moonray – Foundation Collection. Let’s take a closer look:
Moonray Presale Pass,
The Moonray Presale Pass, is a collection of 1,145 NFTs that grant holders exclusive early access to the Genesis NFT Drop and the next two NFT drops from Moonray. As a bonus, holders are also given a free claim opportunity of one of the limited edition genesis character skin NFTs when participating in the drop for these. In other words, if you fancy Moonray and have faith in the long-term, you might want to acquire one of these. There is a playable video with music on Opensea:
https://openseauserdata.com/files/f7eba5733cd8de0440140c2c7910e441.mp4#t=0.001
Moonray – The Foundation Collection
The Fondation Collection contains a total of 2073 character skins, which will be playable in Moonray.
The current skin collection is for the Miium Hero, the mythic avatar, and the same character feature in the comic book we reference in Background.
On Moonrays youtube, there is a video detailing the Foundation Collection further, stating several benefits for owning these NFTs; this is, however, not detailed anywhere else that we could find:
Benefits:
- Exclusive NFT Airdrops
- Whitelist for Genesis drop and future Moonray NFT drops
- Whitelist for Land Sales
- Lifetime access to Moonray’s closed Alpha experiences
- Access to Foundation Club, an exclusive area in the Moonray metaverse
- Access to special events and tournaments in-game
- Founders Skin
Land
There has been teased about Land on the Moonray webpage, but we don’t at the current time have more information regarding the structure or logic revolving around Land in Moonray. We will be on the lookout for this in the Whitepaper when that arrives. The Land sale is specified on the Roadmap for Q4 2022. And the webpage showcases a grand overview picture with the text “Buy land if you want to be elite and reach your full potential”
Moonray website
We compared Moonrays’ desktop version of its website to its mobile site to see how it measures up and if there were any changes that Moonray could make to the site to improve it. Follow along to see our verdict. In this testing, we used a Samsung Galaxy S10+.
Desktop
When we entered the website, a short video welcomed us by playing in the background, featuring what looked like a PvP arena.
‘’Moonray, The Next Generation of blockchain gaming’’ were in big blocks of text, and underneath there was a choice to subscribe. The user can enter their email to sign up for news by clicking on the subscribe option. There was also an added arrow animation on the bottom of the page, letting users know to keep scrolling, adding to the user-friendliness.
However, nothing happened by clicking, so we scrolled down to see more.
When scrolling down, the head menu appeared, featuring a comic aspect, OpenSea, youtube, Twitter, and Discord. In addition, they added another link to the text ‘’Trade On Opensea,’’ which led to the same place as the OpenSea logo. The website explained the P2E concept, the open-world metaverse, and their PvP combat idea. These explanations were a sentence or two, made very simple for the user to understand. We were also able to see some artwork further down the site, and by actually dragging the cursor on the screen, the artwork would scroll diagonally, which was a fun surprise. We could also see a couple of youtube links merged between the artwork, showing us some gameplay and an idea of the world. The youtube window on the website was relatively small, and the user would need to click on full-screen to see the whole video. Honestly, the game looked entertaining, and we loved the open-world concept shown to us. In addition, they also promoted its game on steam in the short video.
Scrolling past the artwork displayed to us, we could read more about Moonray. On the right side of the screen, the website’s creators had also added an alien-like creature that spun around as the cursor moved on the screen. It was a little bit laggy and not entirely smooth, and we also think the quality could have been sharper. On the other side, it was still a nice touch to the text. Scrolling down, we saw the blockchain aspect of ownership being explained. In this theme, we noticed that some of the text from the first sentence was missing. If the user were to zoom in on the screen, they would be able to read the entire sentence. However, by keeping a 100% standard window view, the user could not see the full text. The pictures overlapping the sentences looked nice, and we thought the gray text boxes that overlapped with the image were a nice touch.
Scrolling down, the user would be presented with the roadmap, featuring Q2–Q4 of 2022, more on that later in the report. Scrolling down, we are presented with a comic and a link to it, which coexisted with the ‘’comic’’ link in the heading menu. The website’s overall theme is black and white, and the creators did a good job including artwork, effects and animations, and pictures of the website. At the ‘’Play & Earn’’ part of the website, the creator’s state that ‘’Moonray is all about real gameplay(…)’’ and when scrolling, the artwork would spin around as the user scrolled further down. The animated arrow was also added to the site, and the background was now switched to black. In the end, the user would be able to read a little bit of the blockchain, and a link to OpenSea had been inserted. Lastly, the partners were shown off, and an opportunity to write to the team was added. The logos of the partners were of a nice size and overall had a very clean look. However, we noticed that the animated arrow kept moving even though there was nothing more to see at the site.
Moonray comic Desktop
Continuing, we will be looking at the comic part of the website. At the time we had a look at the website, three chapters were already available. At the bottom of the page, the user could click on the left/right arrows to go to any of the chapters accessible. There was also a second choice to scroll down even more and see the two first chapters already opened. The sites would slide to the left after approximately 5 seconds, giving the user seconds to read the small amount of text. There was also the option to slide the page back or even click and hold on the page for it to stay still. Therefore giving the user freedom.
When clicking, the main picture would appear as the chosen background picture on each chapter with a big title introducing a short sentence of what’s to come. In addition, we noticed that another heading menu had been added, which could be used to go back to ‘’home’’, known as the Comic area of the website. This was an excellent addition to the website since there was no other option to go to chapter 2. Below the comic pages, there were options to react and even comment on each of the slides.
If scrolling all the way down on each chapter, we were able to see the same window which allows users or potential investors to write to the team.
When we were at the last chapter, chapter 3, page 3, we could not read any further in the Comic. The arrows that symbolize the prior and next page were available to us; however, they did not work. We are guessing that there is still more to come since the cartoon didn’t have an ending. In addition, we could see when scrolling down before picking the chapter that only chapters 1 and 2 were available. We assume that the 3rd chapter perhaps shouldn’t be available yet.
Now, let’s get into the mobile site of Moonray.
Mobile
By opening the site on the mobile, we were introduced to roughly the same as when using a computer. Because of the nature of the mobile screen, the video in the background had been cropped on both the left and right sides of the screen, making it so that the PVP featured in the video was difficult to see. We could also see the same animated arrow pointing down on the mobile site, letting users know to continue scrolling. On the desktop version, the heading menu appeared as the user scrolled down; however, this was not the case on the mobile site. The layout of the mobile site looked really good for the most part. When we reached the diagonal artwork gallery, we noticed that some of the pictures came across as cropped. Scrolling down to ‘’About Moonray,’’ we could see the text first, which was a nice size, and underneath it, we found the spinning alien-like creature as we mentioned before. When trying to make the animation spin, it didn’t work, but by tapping at different places on the mobile screen, it did move a little bit. We think this effect could be upgraded somehow since it was not perfect using the desktop. So for this animation, we believe there is room for improvement.
Scrolling down, we could read about ownership. We found an error on the desktop version, causing the pictures to overlap with the text, causing a few missing words. Using mobile wasn’t an issue; the pictures and cloudy text boxes looked excellent. The roadmap was also nicely suited for the mobile screen.
We then had a chance to enter the comic by clicking on a hyperlink in the text ‘’Read the comic’’. This would be essential even to know it existed since the heading menu did not appear on the site. Continuing down the site, the background theme and animations looked very professional using a mobile device, and the partners’ logos further down all fit in the same frame. This site ended with the ‘’Get in touch’’-form, which was also available in several places on the desktop.
Moonray Comic Mobile
When we entered the comics hyperlink using mobile, we were a little confused for the first few seconds. The artwork was automatically changed between chapters 1, 2, and 3. We tested this on a second mobile device to ensure the automatic artwork didn’t happen for the second testing. The artwork was cropped, and the ‘’Moonray’’ logo could barely be seen, let alone if this happens to be the first site a user see, they would have no way of reading that it says Moonray. However, scrolling down, we could see the first comic, chapter 1, sliding through the screen as it did, using the desktop. The text came across as a little bit small. However, we did manage to read it just fine.
By using the bars below the play icon, we could click which chapter to read, starting with book 1. When clicking on the ‘’play’’ icon, a youtube link opened, which didn’t happen on the desktop version, and the video seemed irrelevant to the story and was on a different youtube channel than Moonrays’. To say the least, we could not click into chapter 1 of the comics, so we tried for chapters 2 and 3, but the same happened here… The 4K video of Italy’s mountains was pretty for sure, but we know this must of been an error that occurred along the way.
The Verdict
All in all, the website was enjoyable, and we liked the effects and artwork added to it. There were some errors or mistakes on the website using a desktop, such as a bit of a sentence when explaining ownership had been cut off by the photo and we would have liked the animated figure spinning round and round while we scrolled down to feel a little more smooth. We also felt there could be even more information on the website about the game. The team was also unavailable on the website, giving us a poor understanding of who is behind this project judging by the website alone. We did enjoy the comic, and we think it was an excellent way of making the users engage with the project and stay on the website for a little longer.
The social media was also nicely shown off to the users, making it accessible and easy to find.
On the other hand, we found some issues using a mobile device. Firstly, the heading menu disappeared, leaving the user no choice but to enter the comic, OpenSea, Youtube, Discord, or Twitter. This could lead to interested gamers overlooking the game because, from their point of view, there was simply no choice but to discover more. Luckily, a couple of hyperlinks were added so that we could enter the Comic and OpenSea, but we see an issue caused by this. We think that once the user is already at the bottom of the site, the hyperlinks are already long forgotten by the user. Because of this, the heading is so essential. The issue could also be fixed by adding another menu at the bottom of the page, as we’ve seen on many other project websites. Another problem became apparent when we tried to read the comic using the mobile site. When clicking on the play symbol on the desktop linked us to the comics, we were now using mobile, linked to a random video featuring Italys’ mountainside. To end on a good note, we liked how we could scroll down the comic part of the website and have both chapters presented to us.
Blockchain
What Chain Does the Game Run on?
Moonray uses the Ethereum blockchain for its NFTs. Ethereum, as most know, is the largest blockchain in the world, second to Bitcoin. It claims to be a technology that is home to digital money, global payments, and applications.
Our Thoughts on the Chain?
Ethereum is the most used smart-contract platform out there, surpassing the average of over 1 million daily transactions (to see more statistics on Ethereum, you can visit the Etherscan website). However, being the most popular blockchain for smart contracts also makes it expensive to use, as it still has its limitations in throughput. What has been Ethereum’s biggest drawback is the high cost of doing a transaction on the chain, also known as gas fees.
With the popularity of NFTs in the past year, the transaction cost can often be higher than the actual price of the NFT.
As Moonray hasn’t announced any tokens or token economy yet, we’re not as worried about this yet. Having a token economy directly on Ethereum layer-1 would, in our eyes, be a disaster in the making, as the costs of doing transactions are expensive, and an in-game currency would not work for the consumers in practice with such high fees. However, when it comes to NFTs, there would most likely be only a few transactions, or just one, to get into the game. Doing this transaction on Ethereum could still prove costly, but it’s only that one time.
NFTs on the Ethereum layer-1, although expensive to transact, seem to be the “staple” and quality assurance when it comes to NFTs in the crypto space. Therefore, launching on Ethereum could be a strategic move on Moonray’s side, catering to the crypto OGs and broader crypto community which mostly know and trust Ethereum. However, we hope that once their token gets launched, it resides on a layer-2 scaling solution, where transaction fees won’t hinder the players from actually participating in the in-game economy.
Team
Who is on the team?
- Rodrigo Etcheto – Founder & CEO
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigo-etcheto-4994495/- Partner (2003 – Jul 2021) at Nutriom LLC
- Director (2003 – Jul 2018) at Nutriom LLC
- Diego Etcheto – Co-Founder & COO
https://www.linkedin.com/in/diegoetcheto/- Vice President (2017 – present) at PRECISIONadvisors
- Senior Manager (2010 – 2017) at Cofactor Group
- Director of Business Development (Jun 2008 – Jan 2011) at Nutriom LLC
- Hans Andersson – Co-Founder & CBO
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hans-andersson-630b441b/- Founder (2018 – Oct 2021) at Tribridge Advisory
- Senior Manager (2013 – 2017) at Applied Value
- Principal (2008 – 2012) at Droege Group
- Senior Consultant (2004 – 2008) at Applied Value
- Aleksandra Romanenko – HR Manager
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandra-romanenko-88208055/- Freelance: HR Consulting (Apr 2020 – present)
- HR People Partner (Mar 2021 – Nov 2021) at FORM.com
- HR Business Partner (Sep 2018 – Feb 2020) at Genesis
- People and Team Development Manager (Oct 2017 – Sep 2018) at Depositphotos
- Learning and Development Manager (Feb 2017 – May 2018) at Innovecs
- HR Specialist (Jan 2014 – May 2016) at Luxoft
- Alab Adviento – Procedural 3D Artist / Computational Designer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alabarchvisuals/- Co-Founder & Creative Director (Dec 2016 – present) at Aisect Architectural Visualization
- Project Manager (Oct 2020 – Apr 2021) at NOW Corporation
- Architect (Feb 2020 – Oct 2020) at Diamond Builders Conglomeration
- Andrii Arendariuk – Tech Leader
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hakuhonoo/- UE4 Developer (Sep 2020 – Nov 2021) at Fractured Byte
- Unity 3D Developer (Sep 2019 – Mar 2020) at Strange Loop Games
- Lead UE4 Developer (Jul 2018 – May 2019) at Gamecan
- Unity Developer (Jun 2016 – Dec 2017) at Vision Games
- Full-stack Software Developer (Nov 2012 – Jun 2017) at Vision Games
- Jack Korkis – Game Designer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack-korkis/- Internship: Game & UI Designer (Sep 2021 – Mar 2022) at Meelfoy Games
- Valentyn Chumachenko – Sound Designer / Audio Producer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/golstrider/- Freelance: Music Composer & Sound Designer (Oct 2017 – present)
Team assessment
Moonray is still in the very early development stages. The only place we were able to find information about the team was on LinkedIn. Their LinkedIn page stated that their company size is 2-10 employees, and they have nine people linked. One of these members had a hidden profile, and we could not assess this team member.
We would’ve liked to see more information on Moonray’s team and their team members’ experience.
We also haven’t found any job announcements listed anywhere.
Given how little information there was for us to find, we cannot go any further into details on their team, and we’ll have to see what they can achieve going forwards.
Do they have relevant experience?
With the information publicly available, this team looks unsteady. Most of the employees have little relevant experience in game development and no prior experience in gaming.
Some of their members have experience in leading and managing businesses as well as experience within advisory positions.
Their Tech Lead, Andrii Arendariuk, has experience in UE4 development and Unity 3D development. This is probably some really needed experience for this team. The game is built on UE5, and from our knowledge, developing on UE5 is similar to UE4, and thusly this is a very relevant experience for the team to inherit.
Overall the team looks to have little relevant experience.
Who are their backers?
Roadmap
Game developers roadmap
Alpha teams’ thoughts on the roadmap
Moonrays roadmap is simple, short, and concise. In Q3, we can expect an open beta of the game Genesis NFT Drops and a tech demo of Metaverse City. Towards the end of this year, in Q4, we can expect land sales to start.
Their open beta is aimed for “early fall.”
This roadmap doesn’t give us a lot. However, Moonray is still in early development, and we can understand that it might be better for them only to show the roadmap of the things they’re sure of at this point. We would’ve loved to see some more goals and aims within the roadmap, but, at the same time, we can appreciate the no-promise overachieving approach Moonray seems to have taken.
Guild Facilitation
Delegation: N/A
There is no available information regarding any guild facilitation systems for this game.
Whitepaper
Moonray does not currently have a whitepaper. Often games will highlight the release of their whitepaper in their roadmaps. However, this isn’t the case with Moonray either.
The only information we could find was from searching through their Discord, where the developers stated in early April 2022 that the whitepaper would be “coming soon.”
Following up, in May 2022, their admins said that “We are releasing a litepaper soon, then the full whitepaper.”
However, no other statements have been made regarding their release of a whitepaper.
Socialnomics
Social Media Followers Count
| Platform | Follower Count |
| Discord | 84,843 |
| 31,381 | |
| YouTube | 1,010 |
| 608 |
Their Discord, Twitter, and Youtube can be found by opening the games’ website on pc. However, on the mobile version, the social media profiles could not be found due to the unavailable heading menu. Now we will look at Moonrays’ socialnomics, starting with Discord.
The server has a lot of chat rooms that we usually see, such as Q&A, announcements, sneak-peaks, and media shares to share artwork or memes relevant to the game. The general chat seems to be active. However, for a server with almost 85 000 members, we would expect to see some more ‘’life’’. On a good note, the admins are usually close-by and are quick to answer if anyone has a question.
On their Youtube, Moonray posts more significant updates every 1-2 months, and their first post was over 2 years ago, 4th of May 2020. The videoes they post here are mainly gameplay, featuring their progress in the game aspect of the project. For now, they got just over 1,000 subscribers. We noticed in their bio that it had not been adequately updated, stating that the game would be built on bitcoin.
Moonrays’ Twitter has approx 31 300 followers, seemingly trying to post 1-4 times a day, judging by their history. By using the number of followers, followed by the number of interactions, we see that the Twitter profile has an engagement rate between 0,1%-0,3%, with most posts reaching about 0,1-0,2%. We cannot find a whole lot of interactions with the community either, which we’ve found to be true with other projects.
Moonray also has an Instagram profile, which we could only find because it was linked on one of their Discord servers. It seems like they try to add 1-2 posts a day. However, we see periods where it has gone up to 10+ days without a single update or post. Even though they have a low number of followers, 608 on Instagram, to a contrast of almost 85 000 on Discord, we do think their interaction on Instagram is quite good. By checking out the videos posted on Instagram, we can see that one got close to 1800 views, which is almost triple their following.
Conclusion and Speculations
Moonray doesn’t give us a lot of information in general. Though the game is in early development still, we still would’ve liked to see more information about the project in several aspects. Most notably would be their team and their relevant experiences within the gaming space and GameFi.
The story is unique, and we’re waiting for a full release of their comic book. We only got glimpses of the story at the moment, and we cannot wait to dive into Moonray’s story. As of right now, it’s very interesting, and we’re craving for the continuation.
The developers are very transparent in that they want to create a competitive PvP game. In competitive games, balancing and fairness are often valued to the highest degree. Even the most minor competitive advantages can make or break competitive games. We’re eager to see how Moonray will balance their game as it releases. One of our primary concerns with Moonray is the flashy and fast-paced gameplay. We’re wondering if there will be pay-2-win aspects of the games, in the form of skins that blend into the environment, making it harder for your opponent to see you, or perhaps in abilities that change your animations or effects making your moves less predictable to your opponent.
Moonray will have to take a close look into the balancing of their game to make this a successful competitive game – we hope that we don’t see pay-2-win features, as these are often very easy to implement to earn a bit more from the gamers.
Their team is almost a mystery to us. It was hard to find team members and their previous work experiences. Given how the team has publicly announced 2-10 employees, we speculate if this is inaccurate. From what we’ve seen so far in Moonrays development, we find it likely that there is a bigger team behind the production of Moonray than we know.
One concern we have is that Moonray posted their official reveal trailer in May 2020. Since then, they’ve published several videos showing different aspects of their game and have consistently done so. However, the gameplay doesn’t look like it has progressed much since their official release trailer, over two years ago. Their most recent video is alpha gameplay in UE5. The gameplay we see here is equal, or perhaps even worse than what’s shown in the reveal trailer – especially in terms of graphical quality. Seeing this little progress in the game in such a vast timespan is disconcerting.
In addition, the fact that Moonray had this gameplay in May 2020 and they haven’t been able to produce a whitepaper, more information regarding their team, more information about the gameplay itself or what direction they’re taking their game, and more. It’s cause to worry.
We would like, or rather, we need to see more information about Moonray’s team and urge the team to be more transparent. The team members are a vital part of the GameFi space for investors and gamers – and often, having experienced team members from AAA studios or with other notable work experience is an advantage.
We hope this critique finds the Moonray team and will inspire some more openness and details regarding what could be a good and worthwhile project. We’d like to close this section by mentioning that the release of a whitepaper could be the best possible solution to this critique.
Regardless, we’re very much eager to playtest when the chance arises. If the game gives a good experience and is fun, combined with the remarkable story beginning in the comic, then all the other drawbacks will get overshadowed.
Other Research Reports
Balthazar Research Report: Past the Singularity: Delysium
Delysium has ambitions with its “Multiverse.” In short, it’s an open-world MMO with user-generated content in the metaverse with a Cyberpunk’y feel. In this multiverse, players will play side-by-side with AI Virtual Beings. These AIs won’t only be NPCs but could be companions and independent entities with which players can hang out. More about the AIs later. However, the novelty of Delysium isn’t just semi-sentient AI players but decentralized game publishing. The Delysium core team is building a game publishing platform allowing so-called “Delysium Metaverse Operators (DMOs)” to make their own game universes within the Delysium Multiverse. Ready Player One, anyone?
Balthazar Research Report: Bear with us: Bullieverse
Bullieverse is an Open Metaverse developed for the community of players and creators. It is built for Web 3.0 citizens to have an immersive environment. As a result, gamers enjoy an out-of-the-world experience combined with a transparent and fair monetization mechanism that underpins our open player-owned economy. The result is a high-quality gaming platform where users can both play and earn, but more importantly, experience it.
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