Etheremon Approach to the Scalability Issue and Game UI Updates

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Etheremon

3 min readJul 4, 2018

1. Etheremon Approach to the Scalability Issue

High gas price has been an issue limiting the gaming experience of our players for so long. Over the last few days, we even observed a good gas price shoot up to 100 Gwei, making the transaction cost in Etheremon go up 100x. Unfortunately, there are no good scalability solutions at the moment for blockchain games. Many teams are working hard to solve this difficult problem around the world, however, we still need to wait for sometime before a good solution is introduced.

As a short-term approach to overcome this, we decided to bring Etheremon battles off-chain. In-game assets are still kept on-chain and fully owned by users, while battles can be processed faster off-chain and EXP/rewards will be synced to the Ethereum network from time to time.

Long-term solution, we are glad to announce that we will work with the Zilliqa team to explore Zilliqa as a scalability solution for Etheremon. The higher throughput and low gas of Zilliqa’s sharding solution offer players better experience.

What comes with this change:

Energy system

Battles no longer cost a fee to play. We introduce an energy system that works for battles, including Practice and Rank mode.

Energy consumption: Each Practice and Rank match cost 2 energy.
Energy supply:

** Free claim: 1 free energy is supplied per hour. You can claim up to 10 free energy each time.

** Energy packs are available to top up energy with ETH and EMONT.

Rank Mode reward

For every wins in Rank mode, you can claim 0.2 EMONT.

Top 5 Rank player rewards will be stopped until further notice. We are working on a more comprehensive in-game reward system for both new and existing players.

On-chain data syncing

Interacting with smart contract is required to sync data on-chain. This is needed when players need to transform Mons. As such, before transforming Mons, players need to make a transaction to sync data to the Ethereum network.

2. Battle Animation & UI Updates

We have also improved the UI of some pages and we will continue doing it moving forward to improve user experience. This time, we have worked on Etheremons’ page, Game mode and Battle page

Battle animation

We added some small changes to battle animation. You will now see each attack turn in real-time.

This is the initial version of our battle page. We will keep adding more features for it in the future.

Etheremon Page

Etheremon looks much nicer now with a 3D view option

Game mode

All game modes are now accessible via a single page. You can also see your performance, rank, energy and claim rewards here. You can directly top up energy from this page