Moon Boi Universe

What It Is

Moon Boi Universe is a 2.5D open-world RPG built on Solana by Moon Boi Studios, a London-based independent game studio founded in the summer of 2022. The game is designed for mobile (iOS and Android), desktop (PC and Mac), and the Solana dApp Store, positioning it at the crossroads of mainstream gaming distribution and on-chain ownership.

The studio started full development in August 2022 and ran completely bootstrapped through the crypto bear market — a distinction the team emphasizes as evidence of conviction in the product over financial speculation. That resilience paid off when Moon Boi Universe won the Speedrun Hackathon, beating more than 230 competing projects, and also claimed the BONK track prize by showcasing a token-gated arcade experience called BONK Barkade.

The Setting and Story

The game takes place in the year 2525, centuries after a devastating nuclear war. Humanity has rebuilt itself into a technologically advanced society living in domed utopian cities. Players take on the role of Dré, a curious young boy whose father is a space commander. When news breaks that an alien invasion has seized control of FAANG — the game's fictional all-powerful megacorporation — communication with his father's ship goes dark. Driven to find his father and save the world, Dré ventures beyond the safety of his domed city, eventually journeying to the Moon, where he discovers a civilization far more advanced than Earth's.

This narrative framing — part cyberpunk, part space opera, part coming-of-age adventure — is central to how Moon Boi Studios differentiates itself. The founders describe the web3 gaming market as overly dominated by "money go up" mechanics, and they built Moon Boi Universe explicitly to inject storytelling, character development, and world-building into a genre that often treats gameplay as secondary to speculation.

Gameplay and Aesthetic

Moon Boi Universe uses an isometric pixel-art visual style drawn from classic references including the early Pokémon games, Runescape, and Final Fantasy. This deliberate aesthetic choice connects the game to a well-understood nostalgic vocabulary while giving it a distinct identity in the crowded web3 gaming space.

Gameplay combines action battles, structured missions, and logic puzzles across extreme terrain environments. Characters in the world each carry their own backstories and personality traits, reinforcing the lore-heavy design philosophy. The game is also designed to be accessible to players who have never interacted with blockchain technology — any web3 functionality is intended to be seamless and non-intrusive.

A playable demo (a Unity WebGL mini-game) has been available via the Moon Boi Studios GitHub, demonstrating the studio's ability to ship working software.

Digital Collectibles and the Marketplace

One of Moon Boi Universe's distinguishing features is its system of digital collectibles. Players can unlock collectibles by completing in-game tasks, then trade or purchase them through the Moon Boi Marketplace. Collectibles are used to customize player profiles, giving the system both cosmetic and social dimensions.

Beyond collectibles, the game incorporates real-economy elements directly into the world design. Digital billboards and in-game lots can be rented by players and businesses alike, creating an in-world advertising and commerce layer. The studio has also secured a phygital distribution deal with a company that manufactures Bitcoin miners, indicating ambitions to bridge the game's on-chain economy to physical goods.

Thenti ($TNT) and the SPL-404 Standard

The game's economy is built around Thenti, the in-game token with ticker $TNT. The name is a nod to the founder's roots in Trinidad and Tobago. Within the game's lore, TNT is described as a powerful energy source — a fusion of "Block" tech and "Chain" magic — and it serves as the primary player-owned economy token for rewards, collaborative play, and community-voted development sprints.

What makes $TNT technically distinctive is its use of the SPL-404 standard, a hybrid token format on Solana that combines the properties of fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens in a single asset class. Under SPL-404, each token carries both tradable fungible value and NFT-like uniqueness — meaning in-game assets can behave as freely tradable tokens on the open market or as unique collectible items, depending on context. This hybrid approach is well-suited for gaming, where different item rarities can carry embedded economic value without forcing players into separate token economies.

The Thenti whitepaper, published on Notion in April 2024, outlines the full tokenomics and use cases for $TNT within the Moon Boi Universe ecosystem. The token generation event (TGE) was planned via Jupiter's LFG launchpad following the April 2024 introduction post on Jupiter Research forums.

Team and Ecosystem Partnerships

The core team behind Moon Boi Universe spans game development, visual art, music production, and crypto operations. Founder and Creative Director Ems brings two years of Solana ecosystem experience and is a demo-day winning member of Superteam UK. The Art Director is a pixel-art specialist with his own creative studio. The game programming lead holds a master's in Computer Science with five-plus years in game design, and the lead composer has more than fifteen years of experience with credits including Kendrick Lamar and NBA2K.

Strategic partnerships include MagicBlock, which provided technical infrastructure for integrating the game engine with Solana's on-chain layer, and BONK, whose token was woven into the game's early token-gated arcade experience. The Moon Boi website also lists Drip as a partner, connecting the project to Solana's creator economy platform. The game has received pre-approval from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and is already listed and playable on the Solana dApp Store.

Status

Moon Boi Universe remains in active development. The official website is live, the studio is headquartered in London, and the game has a public-facing contact and newsletter signup. The demo is accessible via the studio's GitHub. The founding team describes their next phase as securing funding to double down on development and execute a worldwide release within 12 to 18 months of the April 2024 milestone, with a stated ambition to pursue a Nintendo Switch distribution deal. Whether those timelines have held is not confirmed by sources as of the time of writing.