Louis King is making major noise with his triumphant return to the Gala Music ecosystem. This time, he’s bringing a list of major heavy hitters from the hip hop world.
Famous in the Metaverse
This 10-track Gala Music exclusive album is jam packed with all stars. The list below should speak for itself.
DMX
Snoop Dogg
Wiz Khalifa
CURREN$Y
Pusha T
Benny the Butcher
Ab-Soul
Big Krit
Royce Da 5’9
Conway The Machine
Boasting a combined 105M+ monthly listeners on Spotify and 120M+ Instagram followers, this roster of featured artists is nothing short of legendary for a web3 exclusive album drop.
Each track on “Famous in the Metaverse” is a testament to Louis King’s prowess and adaptability, blending unique styles seamlessly with the futuristic beats that characterize the album. Rap and Hip Hop artists have historically been the pioneers that have pushed the music industry forward and this album is doing just the same. This iconic album serves as a beacon, guiding the way for future generations of artists to embrace the limitless possibilities that technology and artistry can achieve together.
With hip hop stars like these on the featured list, we couldn’t resist spreading out the excitement a little. Let’s give each new weekly exclusive track pair the attention it deserves and invite the followers of hip hop megastars to empower themselves for the first time with web3 track ownership on Gala Music.
Individual tracks hit the store in limited supply (Only 100 of each Signature Edition track) at a price of $200 each. Keep in mind that these tracks are reward enabled—When paired with a Jukebox Node, owners receive $MUSIC rewards based on the number of listens. With nowhere else to hear them, you better believe these tracks will get some serious listening action from Gala Music OGs and newcomers alike.
What’s Already Dropped?
February 6 – 1pm PT
Stand Out (feat. Conway the Machine & Monia Ashibi)
Signature Edition Sold Out
Next drop: Pioneer Edition (300 Supply)
“Stand Out” is a smooth yet high flying shoot out of a Hip Hop introduction featuring Griselda Records’ own Conway the Machine & Gala Music’s Monia Ashibi. “Stand Out” transcends genres, taking elements of hardcore Hip Hop, conscious rap, and contemporary R&B. The chorus, beautifully sung by Monia, serves as a melodic interlude that adds a touch of vulnerability to the track. Her soulful voice carries a sense of longing and hope, providing a contrast to the explosive verses of Conway and King. The soothing vocals act as a musical bridge, connecting the diverse elements of the song into a cohesive and emotionally charged experience.
“4Eva in LA” is a monumental collaboration between two rap titans, Big K.R.I.T. and Louis King, paying homage to their shared experiences and celebrating their rise in the rap game. The beat kicks off with a soulful, bouncy southern-inspired melody, layered with deep bass lines and smooth percussion, creating a hypnotic backdrop that captures the essence of their Mississippi and California origins. As the track unfolds, the production mixes classic Southern vibes with West Coast, along with innovative elements, setting the stage for the lyrical mastery to come.
February 11 – 1pm PT
Sweet Music (feat. Snoop Dogg and Hope) Signature and Pioneer Editions Sold Out
Next drop: Limited Edition (1000 Supply)
Welcome to the sonic landscape of “Sweet Music”, a collaborative masterpiece that brings together the iconic Snoop Dogg, the poetic brilliance of Louis King, and the ethereal enchantment of Gala Music’s own Hope. This soulful rap symphony harmoniously blends West Coast Bounce with introspective lyricism creating a smooth and jazz-infused backdrop in an otherworldly atmosphere.
Two lyrical maestros bringing together the timeless essence of Nostalgic LoFi Hip-Hop with an infusion of radioactive lyricism and soulful vocals from Alianna. As the beat kicks in, a smooth, laid-back groove takes over, echoing the golden age of hip-hop with a modern twist. Royce da 5’9 and Louis King effortlessly ride the wave with their intricate wordplay and reflective storytelling. The chemistry between Royce’s gritty, seasoned flow and King’s introspective cadence creates a dynamic interplay, elevating the track to new heights.
Benny the Butcher & Louis King ignite the metaverse with this interstellar street anthem dressed with creamy vocals from the talented Leven Kali. A poignant reflection of the struggles and triumphs of life in the streets, blending Benny’s raw street narrative with King’s introspective storytelling. The track explores the complexities of life, offering listeners an experience that is both profound and exhilarating. “Best Life” is a testament to the power of collaboration, as three of the industry’s most innovative artists come together to create an ambient treasure.
What’s Up Next?
February 27 – 1pm PT
Dorothy (feat. Pusha T & Courtney Mimz)
Anybody (feat. Ab-Soul)
March 5 – 1pm PT
Spotlight (feat. Curren$y)
Make it Pay (feat. Wiz Khalifa)
March 8 – 1pm PT
Anthem 4 the Underdawgz (feat. DMX)
Q&A with Louis King
Why was this project created?
Famous in the Metaverse breaks through the boundaries of traditional projects and sets the tone for a world where artists are given the opportunity to take back control of their ownership, where artists are judged for who they are and what they are bringing to the world instead of how much clout they have on social media.
Why did you choose these featured artists?
Each specific artist was chosen based on a connection I have to the artist or their music. Something in each of these artists speaks to me and the message I wanted to send in Famous in the Metaverse. Also these legendary artists were bold enough to take a chance on an independent artist, prioritizing my music, lyrics and who I am as an artist over the fame (or lack thereof).
What was it like working with these collaborators?
Ab-Soul and Krit were the first to jump on the project. Soul doesn’t do many features in general so that was very special! Krit said he wasn’t doing any features because he was focused on his album but said once he heard the song he couldn’t help but write a verse.
Snoop has always been a great support in my career and he was a dream to work with on this project. I will always value kindness over fame. A coach of mine used to say “it’s nice to be important but it’s more important to be nice,” and Snoop is an excellent example of that.
How has it been working with Gala?
Working with Gala Music has changed the way I think about music, art and entrepreneurship. Gala helped me to shape my vision and execute it every step of the way and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to work with such a fantastic, innovative and hardworking team.
It has been a wild ride from a gaming startup with a powerful vision to an undisputed innovation leader in entertainment and beyond. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about what the world needs, and it’s much bigger than a gaming company.
This blog explains why you’ll be seeing Gala Games less and Gala more. We are a massive and rapidly growing web3 ecosystem. We are becoming more open and decentralized every day, and we’re removing the barriers to mainstream blockchain access one by one. Basically, what we’re doing is a lot more than fun and games.
The Story to Now
Gala Games was started by experts in both gaming and blockchain who saw the true potential of converging these two industries. Gaming was one of the easiest ways for newcomers to understand the capabilities of web3 tech. For example, we made deals with some of the most legendary game devs in the world to ship games on the Gala Games platform.
Once we opened the Gala vision up to the broader entertainment world, it was on. While Gala Music and Gala Film were being created, our blockchain developers were hard at work building a native layer-1 blockchain that would serve as the foundation of the entire ecosystem. It was a thing of beauty.
Once we got a taste of what GalaChain was capable of, new potential applications began to emerge one after another. Then in early 2024, we took several huge leaps toward empowering not only Gala devs, but external teams with innovative visions of their own. By releasing the GalaChain SDK and Gala Creator portal, we made it easier than ever for developers to build on our chain with little to no assistance needed from us.
That brings us to the present, where GalaChain is open for business, ready to level up the greatest ideas in the world and bring them to life in web3, where they belong.
All About the Chain
GalaChain is what powers this incredible and rapidly growing ecosystem. It’s not about the games, the music or the film–It’s about the empowerment and the world-changing potential of a more open and decentralized future.
We are Gala… and So Are You
Galachain is not simply a blockchain that was created for a company that makes and ships games, no matter how awesome and empowering those games may be. We’re in the business of empowering everyone, not just the people on the Gala payroll and we know that what’s coming to this ecosystem will be nothing short of incredible.
Welcome to a new era of Gala, focusing on GalaChain and uplifting numerous platforms and projects within the ecosystem. You’ll love this community just like we do.
With the recent release of the GalaChain SDK, we couldn’t resist bringing the developers of the community together for a caffeine-fueled, remote hackathon to test it out. Take a rest now, hackers–You deserve it, and we salute you.
GalaChain Hackathon II: The Results
4 teams went head to head for the grand prize in this 48-hour Discord hosted event.
The Legendary grand prize token (only bragging rights)
Each team performed very well under pressure, making the most of the multitude of resources available in the GalaChain SDK, but one team shined brighter than the rest according to our distinguished Hackathon judges. The grand prize winner was our very own Last Expedition team!
The hacker team behind the extraction FPS you know and love exceeded our expectations in this Hackathon, creating a fully functional end-to-end product. They leveraged the SDK to deliver an application complete with chaincode, even with no prior experience with the GalaChain SDK!
Well done, Last Expedition team. It’s a good sign of things to come when a team of our internal game developers can take home this victory in the face of such tough competition from the other teams!
Every participant gets the Epic participation prize!
Runner-up Highlights
The Dex Team made excellent use of the SDK, incorporating chaincode and e2e testing. Their initial UI showed great promise, but unfortunately within the 48 hour time limit, a lack of complete delivery and integration landed them firmly in second place.
The GEXP Team went outside the box, opting to use the Explorer API rather than the GalaChain SDK, disqualifying them from the win in spite of a valiant effort on their part.
Until Next Time
We had a blast hosting this event, and our community is always awesome to work with. It was a great learning experience for everyone involved; in the future, we’ll lay out more clearly defined rules and goals. We may even experiment with additional criteria like GUI development.
Thanks to everyone who participated in GalaChain Hackathon II! Your success and dedication is paving the way for all sorts of future GalaChain developments and expansions.
Stay tuned for more GalaChain updates and keep pushing the boundaries of blockchain innovation!
Building a massive open world of exploration and adventure is no walk in the park. The team has been hard at work squashing bugs, shipping updates and polishing the game’s unique look and feel, making Mirandus a truly magical place.
You’ll find a more in-depth list of recent tech stat updates at the bottom of this article!
Mirandus Offsite
The team just finished an awesome offsite meetup with the Mirandus Directors and key community members in Austin, TX February 8-10. The offsite was vital for discussing decisions in the game design that affect all vectors of Mirandus. We now have consensus about major game features like looting, combat contribution, MTRM connections with GalaChain, Exemplar data and more.
Greetings from the Mirandus team and community at the Austin offsite meeting!
We can’t emphasize how important it is to collect and embrace community feedback and input through this process. We have brilliant minds in the community that love Mirandus as much as the team and it’s amazing to see how we all want to make the greatest game ever.
In a Fireside Chat with the team sometime next week, we’ll offload all the decisions and share our latest updates on the tech stack. We’ll let you know in Discord what the date and time will be for that Fireside Chat soon.
Hinting at things coming in the future
A new era of Mirandus is coming. The next tech test will prove vital for monitoring the tech stack and running diagnostics on issues in real time, as well as flushing out the most elusive problems.
During the upcoming tech test servers may be taken down whenever major problems arise, and remain down until the problem is solved. We thank you in advance for your patience while those problems are dealt with.. Additionally, certain features and parts of the game may be selectively disabled during the test so we can troubleshoot those areas.
Check out the tech test screenshots below!
Specific Tech Stack Updates
Reworked the few remaining ModRequests into the new fully server-authoritative format, mainly surrounding Equip/Unequip/Draw/Sheathe.
Delivered the cemetery/purgatory system and we now have a full death loop stood up. By putting players somewhere, we can more easily try out different options for how we handle death, and it dramatically simplifies the code in the event someone logs out dead and comes back later.
Built an automated unit test for all the item manipulations, so we know if/when we break something instantly.
Fixed some bugs with spawning and also made dead creatures spawn a dynamic tag for “Carnivore Food” so creatures that want meat can find it. We kind of had that working before, but it was a bit hacky, so we got to remove that code we don’t want to support moving forward.
Improved the concept of our NPC AI “making progress” so they can figure out they are outmatched during combat, one way or another, which allows them to be smarter about target selection or choosing when to flee.
Dug into the asset bundle rebuild issues and uncovered two important details that we solved to make our workflow faster.
Improved our environment art team tools to quickly switch prefabs to atlased-material versions so we can A/B check that things look right with final high performance materials.
Built the initial version of the Mint Manager, which also handles the movement of MTRM into and out of player records from GalaChain. The first version is just a mock DB system that lets us test without needing access to the chain, but the real version will be built soon.
Worked on phased vocoder for the voice modulator, focusing on this early as it’s one of the hardest, riskiest parts of the voice system left.
Made big strides toward solving some dependency issues with the asset bundle system. This will improve our build download size drastically.
Tech Art is putting some extra effort into helping the character team get the new human and female Exemplar models in as we discovered some issues with the skeletons. This will get us really close to final character assets for Q1.
Fixed a bug issue with environment atlasing and the sampler states not working properly, which had to do with poorly documented lightmapping behavior when building static geo.
Created an admin control page design that will allow QA/CS to help players even without logging into the game (sometimes critical when things are truly broken).
Wrapping up the navmesh exploit detection and look-at data for NPCs so they can pay attention to things while doing something else.
Migrated code over to the new ModRequest system, pulling the PlayerMove out of that system since it’s the one thing the server doesn’t need to respond about. If you cheat, it’ll do something worse than roll you back…
Upgraded the spawning system data to properly use material tags for determining where things can spawn in the environment, and if something is required but missing, avoid spawning at all. Also, popping small things in is ok, but trees grow into place slowly now.
As the most ambitious and extensive gaming project in the Gala ecosystem, Mirandus is gearing up to really show the world what GalaChain can do. Get ready to experience a fantasy world that’s more immersive and imaginative than you ever thought possible. Learn more about what makes Mirandus so special at Mirandus.game.
One of the most brilliant aspects of web3 is the end of unnecessary secrets. Through open source creations like GalaChain that use smart contracts and cryptographic data, everyone has the freedom to access the data they want.
In many ways, decentralized (distributed) systems are replacing the corporate idea of trust. From the trust that keeps you from questioning the energy usage required for your cloud-based storage, to the trust that your banks are actually holding the money held in your account–Real trust thrives in an environment where corporate trust is not needed. It’s easy to put your trust in transparent stored data when it’s presented in a way you can understand, so we no longer have to simply take the company’s word for it.
We love it when our community steps up to develop new ways to enrich the Gala ecosystem using the GalaChain SDK and open source blockchain data. This explorer is just another example of decentralization in action made possible by GalaChain.
GYTrace.com
You’ll find a robust GalaChain blockchain explorer at Gytrace.com, with all the most important metrics and capabilities at your fingertips.
Create Account: Create an account for your own user dashboard (Coming Soon).
Light or Dark Mode: This community favorite will make sure your data deep dives are easy on your eyes.
Block Explorer: Browse previous blocks page by page or search by block#
Transaction Explorer: Look up past transactions and locate block numbers based on address.
Thanks to the Gytrace team for building on GalaChain, and we look forward to sharing more community built projects with you!
