Fireside Chat with Blockade Games

Transcript

hey guys um thanks so much for listening to our talk uh margarite here with kyle we launched blockhead games in 2018. um blockade games is an nft game company uh it's funny now that we say nft games because it used to be like blockchain game crypto gaming and now we've gone full tilt to nft games um you might know us from a few of our different titles one of them is plasma bears was the first free to play blockchain game started in 2018 2019 and then neon district which is a cyberpunk rpg so we're going to get into a little bit of the background of how we have landed where we are today

with composable dynamic nfts in this rpg landscape and how it works and how we've designed the different pipelines and made some developer choices so i'm gonna let kyle go ahead and step in first question i think it just works it just works ah that's convenient especially when you're on stage okay yeah so um yep so and uh myself um we've been working on blockchain games for quite a while now and um yeah i don't know where the particular kind of grounding is here in terms of this talk but we'll just go through and

have a bit of a discussion on some of the projects that we previously worked on and also our flagship project neon district so um basically um i hope so i don't think so can you see plasma bears no one can see it that's a yeah oh there we go check that out wow okay so marguerite came to me in 2018 and was like i want gifts of bears and i want them as nfts and the first thing that's brought into my mind is technically that is an awful idea but from a fun game design

aspect it kind of seemed pretty novel and cool so i accepted her offer um and also it was very convenient that previously i just come off of a project for a cryptocurrency project called decred and we'd basically transferred or migrated their whole visual design system into a motion library which exists on lottie files and uh basically uh lotte was the backbone for plasma bears so it's very convenient it all happened at just the right time and yeah so we made a game called plasma bears which was very hacky but it it demonstrated a few really really core things at the time so it was the correct

me if i wrong marguerite but it was the first game with composable nfts first game uh free to play blockchain game with composable and it wasn't enough right just to have these bears as one nft i wanted a crafting system for the nfts where people could have a build a bear type experience and then take these bears out on quests collect other bear parts that allowed them to play more difficult quests in the text adventure format come back build better bears and um and these bare pieces all had independently animated skins so you could have a like a blend of different types of skins and not just one completed uh look so anyways we this we wanted to do this

in like i said it also be free to play so we were experiencing quite a bit of technical hurdles in that process one of which was how do we have a web app render these uh skins and the bears all in real time without loading the the web page yeah so um we'll just pop through a few slides that kind of demonstrates a bit more visually so yeah essentially it was this web app that that you had all of these bears that had numerous um emotes like movements uh depending on their emotion so they had these various like types of data that was associated with them um yeah don't need to see that but yeah this is this is probably the the most important one here so uh the one on the left is uh an example of all the

different um i guess uh components of that bear so the the arm the head the the body and the legs these were all nfts that that could be owned and traded and yeah and basically kind of formed the the basis for the game and the one on the right was an example there was a kit put together and put out to the community to basically encourage people to make their own bears um yeah so that's that's a bit of a bit of a background to that um margaret go into this is this is quite a story in itself sure the uh the short version of the story is with that proof of concept that we built with this free to play blockchain game um we never meant to provide full

support for it for long term we were just trying to uh put together this experience to inform the larger game we were building which is called neon district so at the time this game was built on what's called loom network and loom network was a layer two type solution for ethereum back at this in 2017-20 in 2018 um but eventually loom network pivoted their business model and shut down these networks that they were providing one of which plasma bears was built on and when that happened all of these bears there were probably millions of bears were lost but one thing we had done at the time was built a transfer gateway so we were the first layer two game where with the transfer gateway players had when they wanted to opted to spend a small amount

of money of gas to transfer their bears over to the ethereum main nut so prior to this year these these assets sold for fractions of a of a penny in some cases um because they were thought of worthless because there were millions of bears over in the loom network well anyways um people thought i get a call from garyvee at 11 30 at night and he wants to hear this whole story about plasma bears and they've discovered this relic nft and now they've people that transferred their bears over to the maine at ethereum saw this incredible return on profit which was a surprise to everybody and then we of course had a ton of inbound of people asking us when we were going to build plasma bears 2.0 but anyways from this point we go on

to build our other product yeah the experience that we had from plasma bears really informed the way that we were going to compose our characters in neon districts because very early on in neon districts development the the characters looked incredibly impressive but it just wasn't going to scale in the way that we required in order to to kind of design a flagship title which neon district is to give a visual example of what neon district is so this is the kind of setup that we have in neon districts this is from the prior version but we have a very good visual example here where you have a team of players which fight against another team of players which are all equipped with uh pieces of gear that are represented as nfts and have the

properties of nfts that can be traded and all of that kind of stuff um it's a game that has card elements so each you know each piece of gear weapon for example will have various cards which are drawn um between turns basically yeah so it's a cyberpunk roguelike dungeon crawling deck building role-playing game which is also play to earn a like plasma bears uh it's quite a mouthful but essentially that's what it is um and here are some comparable examples uh some of which are in different genres but these are the kind of games that influenced uh you know our production on neon district

yeah so it's a cyprunk game so we're thinking like uh neuromancer kind of like bulky headsets um you know the metaverse the kind of things that have really really inspired um you know those of us here that work on um you know ethereum applications so yeah it's very much uh you know using the tropes and kind of giving our own little spin on it yeah so we have a game world this is a kind of overall example of the world that we're building here very very sci-fi very very uh high-tech existence so hundreds hundreds of years in the future okay so in the game we have a few key resources that are not there oh they are now hello okay so we have uh an item called juice

which is used to level up characters and we have parts which are used to level up weapons and we have an in-game currency which isn't a token but can be bought with ethereum uh called neon and that's what the atm there represents carrots is so alike comparable to the plasma's example that we viewed earlier these are the allocations for what we kind of divvy up the character into and represent as nft so you can have a head nfc you can have the armed entity and you can have leg nft so this is a crude example but this is the where the armor allocations are so you could have you know flare pants or whatever for your carrots and that would be a leg uh component

so uh yeah very early on we had a lot of fun so this was our visual representation of uh natoshi sakamoto as we like to call him her bae and so yeah we brought it to life and yeah a bit of technical background everything's divided into parts and animated on this kind of like character thing well one important note is that we have um hundreds of different styles and designs for these characters and each character has hundreds of designs and that will go on seasonally we'll have additional loot boxes and some some of them will be scarce um but what that means is that this pro

what we do with our production we have to streamline this process and ways to check and make sure that there's no nothing breaks the animations um so when we're showing all the individual pieces it's actually pretty complicated to come up with these rigs multiple different character class rigs that wear all kinds of different looks and that we can plug and play in our system um in an internal ui tool that we provide for our designers yeah that's a really good point because the reason why this is as basic as it is is because you know in previous iterations we have like changeable shoes and we realize that if this is a game that is will eventually have um tens you know thousands tens of thousands of

different parts let alone combinations um to you know to have a complex system just wasn't feasible um yep so this is shells so um you know building a game like neon district you learn things and we had shells which are quite a coveted um you know set of nfts in our community because they have a an influence on on the game um and it was quite overpowered so um we've used the technology that we built for this to to inform our the way that we deal with the the skins so the different cosmetic changes in armor but yeah when you make a game like this you learn a lot and you know you just iterate and deal with those issues well with shells also we had to redesign them

from the generation zero assets which is what they were became outdated and so they had to be redesigned for the current system but in addition to that we have our smart contracts that come with them that permanently binds them to those season one assets which also informs some choices we made for our smart contracts for our skins pipeline which is coming up i feel we might have lost a few people on that one but uh more will become clear as we move forward so in rarities it being a cyberpunk game um we we kind of worked around the principle of degradation so there are five five different rarities in neon districts uh the bottom being the legendary and the top being the common um

so yeah that's basically uh we have you know different i guess uh you know different types of uh you know that's the way that we showed it visually um we did in the past have like this cut this different colors um on the on the weapons but we found it to be too problematic so over time we did move towards the system um also a legendary weapon should look legendary uh weapon classes so as we were saying this had to scale and if you have weapons of multiple different lengths dimensions things get really really messy so we standardized the way in which weapons are held and the points of which they fire from in order to maintain continuity

skins yep so this is commonplace in video games skins are a very very highly monetizable element of game of the game so yeah this is just an example here we have um the bottom being that the base weapon which is is kind of like a pretty plain and then the top is a uh an example of a skin so this is something a unique entity that is uh binded to to the bottom to have a cosmetic uh change in battle i think i think it's worth noting that with the skins like this technology we're talking about there's no other application that is exploring this sort of function and utility um the ability of being able to use skins as an nft and

even down to the idea of nft stickers where you can work with major brands to use stickers on your on your assets um so i'm excited about this particular feature because it allows players to have more customization including that that crafting experience with the composable characters to now be more granular and be able to have these little details that they personally apply to their assets okay so how do people interact with this so this is very very early on in neon districts production so initially neon district was designed as a game that that you would be able to um i mean at one point we were thinking even nintendo switch so it was supposed to be downloaded through one of the many different

clients out there and really just designed to be interacted through a for you know through a console or or you know a very very rigid delivery but essentially over time we kind of realized that players would want to interact with these assets in uh a load of different ways they weren't playing the game the way we thought that they would so we've gone from this kind of design that you see here i mean there's there's some description below yeah we realized that it really wasn't going to scale um when you had players that had uh tens hundreds maybe even thousands of unique characters all with with these nfts attached to them yeah so we took inspiration i'm a big

xcom fan so this is a a screenshot from xcom so we have like this map so i could be you could say that neon district is the is the key character in neon districts that the world itself is you know is what people come to the game for they want to live in that world and and explore all of its faults um yeah so this is a this is a very early example of that dashboard interface so we we we do at the moment uh you know give it give it a couple of weeks and we'll be in a position to share uh what that interface does look like but yeah we really really wanted to showcase the world that we've poured uh our like our heart and souls basically into over the past uh two to three years so yeah look into environments arenas so

it's a it's a game where people battle each other so we have a load of different arenas based around in the numerous sectors of the game world we're really really really um leaning on the fact that we're going to have players that engage in player versus player combat in a variety of different environments i think it's important to note that early on we as a team we went to gdc in 2018 and we learned that it was not a good choice to make to launch with pvp right out of the gates because that we wouldn't have a player base to populate for those matches so we then originally were exploring pve and eventually we came to passive pvp which

we currently have um which were leading up to active pvp with these arenas and a lot of that is just strategically you need to have a wide player base to have a really fun active pvp experience so um basically one of the main monetization um aspects of many of the games that exist out there you know you can take you know i guess you know you hear the word loot crate and uh sometimes it makes certain people shuttle shutter but it is the main way that that many of the the biggest titles out there are monetized and neon district works in a similar way but in a play to earn context meaning that players can earn in-game currency

um and use it to buy loot crates in which they they essentially get assets that they can equip their characters with engaging in the gameplay that exists there or they can trade openly on the marketplace so basically the way of distributing those assets in the game is done through loot crates and soon we're going to introduce a cadence of special events or special crates that have unique assets in and the first of which is going to be called end of days named after a particular undisclosed location uh within the game world and we have some very interesting items that are coming through these are two of the um 18 that we will be releasing through

that particular crate and uh the crates look like this they are themed in the game world and uh yeah we look forward to introducing uh this particular crate in the first quarter of next year um yeah i think that's it i'm i'm not sure if we uh no they came we're like initial this is a wrap-up yeah so um no i mean this is your outro margarita yeah so actually we're uh preparing to launch our version to you so in january this year and late january we launched the mvp uh which was a a model to show that we could have the free-to-play game experience where strategy was allowing players to that have never spent money in game to compete at the top of the leaderboard with players who have spent money in

game and once we did prove out that that model is true now we are taking time after a ui ux audit that we did over spring and summer and we're dropping our v2 which is expansive of new features that are coming and within the next month in addition to this new loot crate and new assets which introduce scarcity into our model and are also our player base we have 160 000 unique asset owners so we're really excited to lean into our pvp develop active gameplay development on the other side of that so i was going to say don't be a stranger if you have any questions about the project please feel free to kind of ask questions and we'll be happy to uh happy to talk a bit more about neon

district uh but anyway i think uh that is that is us wrapping up so uh thank you and everyone have a brilliant time here