Hey there, everyone. It’s me, Chris, again! You may remember me from the Neon District Token Model post a while back. Well, I’m back with another glimpse into how we make games here at Blockade.

Originally, I was going to structure this as a shorter, high-level look into all the parts making up our newest game, Metaboss. But then I stopped and thought I’d make it more of a Dev Log thing. Especially since those bits seemed to be the most popular parts of the token model post. We’ll see how much of that theory I can sneak by my editor.

And, for reals, my feelings won’t get hurt if you just skip ahead to the crunchy bits you’re looking for. I’ll survive. I promise.

Anyway, it’s time for …

The Origin Story

Way back before game developers stopped gathering together in San Francisco, back before scary contagious diseases, there was this thing called GDC in the early months 2019. It was at this conference that my friend Alex Amsel asked me a really, really hard question: “How would you design a game that could only work on the blockchain?”

My first, off-the-cuff answer was really bad. So bad it’s probably a good thing I don’t remember it. I’m sure it had to do with changing laser guns into cross-game laser swords or something.

Eventually, we riffed enough on some ideas that Alex stood up in the middle of the seedy bar where we were drinking, and shouted, “I want the biggest boss-fight in the world!!”

To which I lurched to my own feet and shouted, “Challenge accepted, yo!!”

[Editor’s Note: I’m sure every single one of you who knows Chris is currently picturing him doing exactly this. Your picture is accurate.]

So, we stewed and percolated and invited our other friends to join us at a cute little cafe the next morning. Between the two of us, Gabby Dizon, Chase Freo, Andrea McGinty, and Yiseul Cho, we were gonna crack this nut.

We threw all kinds of fascinating things on the idea pile and lit them on fire. The one thing we all agreed needed to be included was a huge boss monster made up of everyone’s NFTs. The idea of adding extra utility on top of all the cool (and even the less cool) NFTs already in your wallet was too good to pass up.

After that, I went home and engaged in some world-famous “Chris Shower Thinking Time” and came up with a proper design. Two hours later, I was sharing around my first 6-page draft of the faction-based, asymmetric gameplay for one “Freaky League of Extraordinary Creatures”. AKA, Metaboss.

Now that we had a concrete straw man we could mark up, the team did so with gusto. We hashed it out, fast enough and furious enough to make Vin Diesel jealous. We spitballed all kinds of revenue models, burning tokens, leveling up, and giving out crazy rewards. It was all light and chaos and noise and oh-so-raw. It was glorious. And, also, time to build something.

We all agreed, yes. Build something!

”We should do that."

"Soon."

"Well, just not this week, because I’m busy."

"And don’t forget, that team is on a different project."

"No, I haven’t forgotten."

"But, yeah, we all agree this is a great idea."

"We’re totally doing this."

"Maybe after this current thing our folks are working on.”

You, dear reader, already know how this goes. The deep feels now hitting you are doing so right in the exact same spot they hit me. The spot where you’re in a creative industry with too many ideas and not enough time.

For nine months, we bounced that hogwash around.

Until the stars aligned, and Alex, fist skyward, shouted, “Enough!”

And I raised my own fist, shouting in solidarity, “Fine! The web team I want to put on this just finished up the Loadout for Neon District, so we can probably put something together!”

That’s how construction finally began during the holidays of 2019.

Design Goals

As we started building it, we kept some goals in mind to help drive the process:

1. The MVP had to be fast and open to experimentation. This was a crazy idea, so it needed room to move, breathe, and adjust.
2. It had to be good for players AND game developers. A rising tide to lift all boats, so to speak.
3. In line with the “It’s Never Been Done” mission, it also needed to look unlike any other blockchain game that’s come before. Or really any other game at all, preferably.
4. It had to be viral. We needed people to talk about it. Nonstop. Forever. So it needed to encourage “The More, The Merrier”.
5. It had to be team-based. And, had to support any size of player teams, from small ones to giant, hundreds of thousands of people.
6. While being team-based, there still had to be something in it for the solo-player.
7. The gameplay couldn’t break no matter if you had one million NFTs or just one. You wouldn’t be able to buy your team to victory.
8. Finally, it had to be free-to-play.

It’s a heady stack of goals indeed, but luckily I’ve built under similar constraints in the past. It just so happens that one of my favorite game genres is this passive, web-based MMO thing. Way back, ten or twenty years ago, I both wrote about it and built a few myself.

I especially loved this little game you guys have never heard of called Travian. For you youngsters, it was Clash of Clans, but eight years before Supercell emerged as a household name.

So, yeah. Casual, persistent, multiplayer virtual worlds? I think it’s time we blow this scene. Get everybody and the stuff together.

Okay … 3, 2, 1, let’s jam.

The Mechanics Execution Behind Those Goals

Now, here’s where I quickly (ha!) run through all those goals and talk a bit about the mechanics and techniques we used to achieve them.

This is where you’ll find all those crunchy bits I was talking about earlier.

A Fast, Agile Experiment

One of the nice things about non-blockchain web work is that you can move fast and break things. So, we decided to lean on our webstack to get this done.

Additionally, we’re not actually writing any contracts. Which means, we could lean on the codebase we’ve already developed in order to connect to a wallet.

All we’re doing is peeking into your ethereum wallet and making note of which NFTs you’ve got in there. Everything else is just a handful of normal, boring database transactions.

Because that’s how I roll — Normal and boring.

Good for Players and Developers Both

We here at Blockade Games are really, really into fostering a healthy blockchain game ecosystem. It’s one of those things where we’re entering this new age of both open source code as well as open source data — and, believe it or not, that second part changes everything.

It’s because of that we believe interoperable game assets are going to be a boon for everyone involved.

In this particular case, it’s really about having a light touch. Since we’re not really doing anything except counting your supporting NFTs (see the “no contracts” bit above), we can play fast and loose with incentives.

Meaning, there’s no permanent damage to anything if this week, we make Axies super-powerful, where next week something crazy like Urbit tokens are king of the hill. That gives us the ability to rotate through everything for players. So, they don’t have to stress about whether or not some particular asset they own is going to be modified or permanently (eek!!) disfigured. Your stuff is still yours, and it all works just like it always has.

From a developer perspective, this gives us a chance to highlight different projects in the ecosystem. Maybe stuff nobody had ever heard of. Maybe that week, some obscure NFT is MEGAPOWERFUL and folks want to go chase them down. Maybe people enjoy a particular faction, so they pursue all the NFTs that work well with Rogue Division or whatnot.

Players safely getting more value from their existing possessions? Yes, please!

Developers having another discovery mechanism for their NFTs? Yes, please!

Everyone wins.

The world is cooler when everyone wins.

A Unique Look

This one took less forethought and planning, but required a healthy dose of blind luck. Basically, since we’d opted into the passive, web-based MMO thing, we could do whatever we wanted with the art. It’s all for flavor instead of having arbitrary constraints because of the technical design.

From the start, my original sketch was very 60s Spy themed. So, we were looking for someone whose art could carry the same weight as those old vintage movie posters we all love.

That was when Alex said, “Hey. I know a guy.” He introduced me to Matthew Lyons and I fell in love with his work. In no time at all, I was assembling awesome key art mood boards for him to get the feel of what I was looking for.

And, man, Matthew CRUSHED it.

I personally think our look is both incredible and unique. I’m sure you will, too. It’s really unlike anything that’s already out there, and we’re super-excited about that.

Going Viral

While the unique look can only help with the virality, we still needed a deeper hook. Sure, we can do the same ol’ normal and boring “invite a friend” thing, but we needed something more inherently social.

We wanted people to talk about the game when they weren’t actively playing it. And we wanted those conversations to happen out in large, established public places in order to pull in all the bystanders. The places where players would hang out. Subreddits, official twitter hashtags, and discord channels were all on the menu.

Now, we just needed to figure out exactly what everyone was going to be talking about.

I started solving that by making it a prerequisite for all of our major features to be wired up in a “to succeed, people need to talk about this” sort of way. These mechanics needed to be the kind where optimal choices are only agreed upon as a group. And, determining what the group wants to do requires discussion.

Some concrete examples:

• The game is world-event-based. There’s one clock, and everything happens on specific days. Recruitment is a 4-day period where the main goal is to convince people to join your team. The best recruiters and influencers will shine.
• Goofy and engaging text-based storytelling and battle snippets. Being text-based helps with the copy-paste sharing. We want to encourage people to take the story with them to all their places — their private forums, boards, and websites — to help with recruiting.
• Bonuses for not just for working as a group, but also working to counter the other group. This introduces things like “espionage” to this social gameplay. Players will sneak into other factions’ communications channels to figure out what that team is going to use for their group strategy that round.
• Procedural, episodic storytelling as a group. Whichever team does the best during that week’s “episode”, the story will pivot in their direction. They’re actually driving the story. So, it’s kind of like the weekly watercooler talk about your favorite TV show, but only if your group’s choices affected the outcome of that week’s episode.

Big and Small Teams

So if we’re pulling in all these players from everywhere they’re hiding, we should probably make sure we can handle them all when they get to the game itself.

While there’s technically not a minimal number of players each week — only a minimum number of 4 wallets — we’ll ideally have at least a few dozen players in there. Enough to make it interesting. And, the way we’ve constructed it, the game should even scale well to large numbers of players.

On the front end, we’re exposing real-time signup numbers and the potential winnings that come with them. We’re basing the winnings each week on the strength of the other team. Meaning, if everyone piles into Skirge and they rack up 1000 points, and poor little FLEC only has a couple people, and they score 10 points, that giant pile of Skirge players end up splitting those puny 10 points between all of them.

Since you have visibility into all these signup numbers AND can switch teams as many times as you want, right up to the end of the 4-day recruitment phase, the teams should do a really good job of self-balancing based on expected value.

Now, the final trick here is balancing NFT contributions for such a varied player base. Not only do we have to deal with balancing the numbers of players, but some folks will only have a few NFTs, while others could possibly have thousands.

Luckily, this issue dovetails neatly with the issues surrounding the support of a dynamic, self-balancing number of players. The more common the NFT, the greater the number of players that will have them, and the more that will end up used in the game. So, really, balancing it all is a function of getting widely available NFTs to balance alongside the more scarce ones.

There are a couple things we’re doing to handle this.

First, the simple one. We’re setting a maximum number of the specific kind of NFT that we track in a particular wallet. We’ll probably start off with around 75 or so (tho, don’t quote me on that), depending on how it plays in testing. For example, we’ll start off by only counting a player’s first 75 (out of your 500) cryptokitties to fight alongside their 60 axies and 4 pieces of SuperRare art.

Next, the more complex one. In the game, we’ve got three different attributes that we apply to each NFT in Metaboss — Subterfuge, Intellect, Combat. We’ll assign percentages to each of the three, per NFT contract.

So, for example, something with a smaller distribution, like a Chainbreakers NFT, might break down to Subterfuge: 35%, Intellect: 15%, and Combat: 50%. Whereas something with a massive distribution, like Cryptokitties, will be more balanced across all of the attributes, like Subterfuge: 33%, Intellect: 34%, and Combat: 33%.

This enables the “best fit” team for those smaller distribution NFTs to have a larger impact, where the more common ones will fit pretty evenly anywhere you choose to apply them.

A deep dive into our actual game balancing probably calls for its own post, however.

[Editor’s Note: Yes. Please, just move along. Please. Our eyes are getting tired reading all of these words. This thing is going to have a 10-hour read length on Medium.]

Entertaining Solo Players

All this talk about teams and teamwork is kind of tiptoeing around the elephant in the room. What about a solo player? What effects can just one person have on the game? Why would they even want to play?

If we’re talking about the folks who only love games like Fortnite and Overwatch? They’re not going to play. Sorry. This game just isn’t for them.

Lucky for us, there are lots of other types of players out there. I mean, while Fortnite at one point had an impressive record of 78 million people playing in a single month, Farmville had 35 million people playing daily. On average. And a virtual world you’ve probably never heard of, Roblox, just passed Minecraft with north of 100 million players per month. So, we’ll let those hardcore FPS players keep enjoying their FPSs and make a game for the folks who are looking for something a little different.

For these other types of players, we’ve got activities to keep them plenty busy. Mostly consisting of procedural, customized storytelling for Explorers, team strategy and recruiting for Socializers, and lots of fun badges and trophies for Achievers.

Explorer player types will enjoy the collaborative aspects of both our “team-based choose your own adventure” style storytelling, and the individual diary entries which update episode to episode based on player choices.

Socializers will be able to earn referrals and other recruiting bonuses for gathering people to a specific team. They’ll also probably enjoy much of the espionage and intrigue involved in getting their team to vote cogently on a strategy, while trying to figure out what strategy the other team is employing. After all, we’ve built this game to give people something interesting to talk about all week long.

And, it goes without saying, Achievers will probably have the most fun. Aside from our badges and trophies, the entire NFT ecosystem is powered by collectibles and stats. Blockchain gaming on the whole is an Achiever’s dream come true.

We’ve gotcha, fam. Doncha worry about all them there play styles.

Free to Play

One of the core tenants for Blockade Games is making quality, free-to-play blockchain games. We, along with Claymatic and Altitude, aren’t deviating from that with Metaboss.

That’s one of the reasons we opted to not have any smart contracts with this game. Players have already acquired their NFTs from other developers in the ecosystem. There was no reason to charge people yet more money to play with toys they already own. There are no blockchain “corkage fees” in my house.

For gameplay, you simply sign in with your wallet, and you can play every round of every day of every episode. At the end of the week, you’ll get proportionally rewarded just as much as any other winner.

We, of course, have also added options where you can do extra things, paying a bit of crypto or fiat, and acquiring abilities that can pump up your team’s score. (or even the other team’s, because remember your team’s end reward is based on the other team’s total score!)

The best part? For the paid features of the game, we take the same currency we gave out as rewards at the end of last week. Keep winning and you can keep pumping up those scores for free!

Avoiding Egregious Exploits

Similar with most free-to-play games, there’s a real danger in that it’s very easy to let your players buy power. That particular danger should be avoided in all cases for multiplayer games, but especially in virtual worlds with persistent game data. It will quickly ruin your player base. A single bad actor can deter literally thousands of players from playing your game.

For this game, we’ve obviously got several ways for a player to easily exploit a pay-to-win vector, so we needed to design around them. Kind of like how we’re limiting the number of NFTs one wallet can bring. Or how if one side is heavily overloaded, their reward is much smaller, and divided by a much larger number of NFTs.

Which means the ideal situation, with the highest expected value, would be for your preferred team, to barely eke out a win over the other team, having pumped both sides to the moon in points. That gives your side the final victory, over an enormous value stacked up on the other side.

So, we’re letting everyone pump everything — good guys can crank up the bad guys’ score and vice versa. This even mitigates the risk of players wanting to split their NFTs into four different wallets and simply sign up for each of the four factions. The good news? this way, they can always win! The bad news? They win a tiny fraction of what they could have.

High risk, high reward.

Honestly, the best defense we have against many of the potential exploits is that we’re anchoring rewards to NFT count, but giving game-affecting decisions on a per-wallet basis.

This means, when it comes to rewards, your share is going to be relative to the number of NFTs you brought to the game. Totally fair, right? A whale brings a bunch of NFTs and gets a large chunk of the reward. A minnow drops a single NFT into four wallets, signs up for all four factions to spread the risk, and sees themselves rewarded appropriately.

However, when it comes to boosting your team’s stats, it’s per-wallet, not per-NFT. And it applies to more than just your NFTs. So, a wallet (a player, really) with only one Cryptokitty can wield just as much power to help their team as someone with 200 Cryptokitties. Your ability to affect the outcome of the game is just as great as someone with 100 times as many NFTs as you.

But, there are always exploits.

For example, if you really wanted to exploit this particular scenario, you could pay to put one kitty in each of 10,000 wallets, and join all the teams everywhere.

But that just sounds like a whole lot of work. A lot of terrible, expensive, painstaking work because the incentives just don’t line up. All so you can switch 10,000 times and vote on a team strategy with all those individual wallets. Every. Single. Hour.

Bleagh.

Or instead, you could spend all that time, effort, and those gas fees to pump the scores for everyone else? In order to net out the same reward you would have earned anyway?

Yeah, no thanks.

But, again, this part probably warrants its own, non-War-and-Peace-sized blog post.

So What’s Next?

Now that I’ve bored you with the hows and whys of Metaboss, what comes next?

Honestly? We play it.

We’re putting the finishing touches on it as you read this, with the goal being a limited release this week. Assuming that goes well, we’ll broaden the audience, hopefully including all of you into our super-fun, grand NFT experiment.

I’m excited to finally be able to show this beast off. Especially since Alex, Gabby, and I have been talking about the biggest boss-fight in the world for over a year now.

And the wait is almost over!

[Editor’s Note: OMG, finally. Thank goodness it’s finally over because I need a drink after all of that.]

Written by Christopher D. Chapman of the House Blockade Games, First of His Name, Executive Producer, the Unburnt, King of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons

NOTE: I originally wrote this for the Blockade Games Blog.