Chimaera, a company aiming to lower the barrier to entry for building gaming worlds on the blockchain, is set to begin a crowdsale, with the pre-token generation event scheduled to go live in the next month. Following the pre-token event, a crowdsale of CHI tokens will take place to raise necessary funds and encourage community participation. The platform being worked on will eventually provide a complete set of tools to enable creatives and companies to create decentralized universes on a specifically built blockchain

The Chimaera platform has its own independent blockchain powered by CHI tokens, making use of the technology to reduce the costs involved in game development and deployment. The tokens are key to in-game economies, ensuring participation, engagement, and transaction of value between games. It also has a range of features that enables it to reduce the costs for developers, while increasing the scalability of games.

Andrew Colosimo, founder at Chimaera, commented: “Creating rich autonomous virtual worlds is a complex and costly undertaking. Many independent developers are unable to get their concept to market because managing the game complexity, the cost of infrastructure (such as servers), as well as publishing and account administration, represent significant barriers.”

Chimaera is designed to provide flexibility and convenience to the game developers, with features including game channels and ephemeral timestamps. The Chimaera blockchain is built to ensure that all participants in a decentralized game reach consensus on the current game state. With off-chain scaling technology, it avoids burdening the shared blockchain with unnecessary data.

Lead Blockchain Developer Dr. Daniel Kraft said: “We have developed an extension of the payment channels in Bitcoin that can be applied to game moves between multiple players off the blockchain and thus aid in scaling Chimaera to its global target size. The same concept can also be used for ‘shards’ of a global game world, to enable limitless and near-real-time gaming on the blockchain.”

Gamers on the Chimaera platform will only have to process and store states for games they are participating in, rather than requiring every full node to fully process and store the state for each contract.

The platform is designed to be compatible with popular game development environments like Unity and Unreal Engine. The ready SDKs and APIs should make it simpler for developers to create blockchain games that can utilise the Chimaera infrastructure across various genres. The platform can be employed to create decentralized autonomous MMO games, turn- based games, real-time strategy games etc.

The ultimate goal of Chimera is to create an entire developer ecosystem, complete with code samples, tutorials, developer forums and a dedicated support system operated. With the resources, developers of varying experience and skill levels could then start building games over the blockchain, and integrate them with a range of Chimaera modules including wallets, mining applications, matchmaking, payment integrations, secure social network, trading or other applications.