Blockchaingamer
The very first NEO Blockchain Game Development Competition has closed the doors for submissions and all works that have gone through are now in the judging phase. Along with this, the official parties have opened the channel to vote for the game that will win the ‘Most Popular’ award.
In the upcoming days we will be selecting some of the cool entries and introducing them to you one by one. Today’s team is CDLGAME Studio who have developed the game ‘Sect War’ and which is the first portrait format tower defense game on a blockchain.
Official site (Voting Now Available) : http://neo.game/index-English.html
Tournament Committee: Congratulations and how are you guys? What exciting news does your team have for us?
CDLGAME Studio: Hello, thank you for your belief in us and we are thrilled to be part of this contest. Although we have been developing games for nearly a decade this is the first time we have created a game with new technologies that is changing the world and so there is a sense of attachment involved by being part of this.
Tournament Committee: What kind of games have you developed before?
CDLGAME Studio: We used to develop web browser games for the PC with two IP series. One is a magic RPG action game called ‘The King’s Warriors Series,’ and the other is a landscape shooting game called ‘FireWire.’ Both of them are popular domestically, with over 1.2 billion views, tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions of searches, but our target players are youth and teenagers.
Tournament Committee: Wow, I have also heard that many teenagers are playing ‘The King’s Warriors Series’.
CDLGAME Studio: ‘The King’s Warriors Series’ has been our best ever performing game. There were many players playing, even in the smaller cities and we haven’t developed it further for over a year. This year we have been devoted to and studying only the development of blockchain games.
Tournament Committee: What was the reason for you to start developing a blockchain game and to enter our NEO competition?
CDLGAME Studio: I am interested with new fundamentals in technology and I don’t want be a follower. I released an open source tower defense game editor nearly 20 years ago and many open source flash games. Then a lot of developers chose to develop web based games, while I chose to develop independent games with an added micro-payment system. Now I am tempted to create a cross-feature product and a blockchain game is one of my opportunities to do this.
Tournament Committee: Amazing, so can you tell us more about how you went about developing a blockchain game?
CDLGAME Studio: Well, I have been familiar working with Bitcoin for almost 10 years and have been mining for a while. That is when some of the ideas came to me and not until a year ago the openness and transparency of blockchain enabled my ideas to take root. I have quite a bit that I can say about this.
Tournament Committee: Sure, please go ahead and explain.
CDLGAME Studio: Many blockchains were valued in tokens in the beginning and many of them could be obtained by using hardware that performed the token calculations. So my original idea was to create some applications which could utilize the hardware. For example, an online application would first call a CPU to calculate, then the APP can be calculated by using the GPU which allowed a product to produce a specified token. But after I thought that this would not make proper sense.
- Because instead of creating an APP to calculate we can use only two lines of code. The application itself takes up most of the resources which are scarce but important for the miners.
- Once the APP starts mining, then the hardware can’t do anything else, so we can not call that APP a game.
According to the characteristics of blockchain, the current situation is that a simple program can not produce a decentralized token. Therefore we can not produce money through some of the operations in an application, unless it is not decentralized. For example, Link Token developed by Xunlei was actually a point that can be acquired and generated by the rules you specified.
Since then various blockchain applications have emerged but they have been roughly divided into three parts:
1.Those who understand the application of blockchain technology but no gameplay and operations are in their games. I call their developments financial coursewares not games which is not acceptable to people working in the traditional games industry.
2.Those who don’t understand the application of blockchain technology and believe that the data in their game could be converted into money. I don’t think this is a long-term solution because this is the promotion of gambling and leveraging it.
.3.This last one are those who are still learning about how to combine traditional games with blockchain games, and we are in this group.
Tournament Committee: Wow, so how does your ‘Sect War’ game integrate with blockchain?
CDLGAME Studio: To explain, I am going to distinguish between a traditional game from a blockchain one, what the differences between them are and what the user demands?
A blockchain game is not the latest technologically, the most transparent nor permanent and irreversible game. When blockchain tech is a feature in the game, notice that I’m talking here about games not financial courseware, then it is of little value when it comes to a real game. Because we know as a gamer that when we get tired of playing or don’t like a game we will not care about whether it exists or not.
So then what is the true core value of blockchain? It is the added value! Traditional game data can also add value but it is limited to a small group of people while blockchain games allow most or all users to add value to their assets.
‘Sect War’ embodies what I call the added value feature. First of all, it is a very fun traditional game and is also the first portrait format tower defense game on a blockchain. You can start a strategic tower defense game plan, cultivate heroes and attack another user’s city. Players can also trade their weapons and equipment in the market set on the blockchain to get in return blockchain currency. As far as how to place the items inside the market to trade on the chain I will not publish it yet as we are waiting for the players to find it out.
So the gamers can add value while playing the game, which is a blockchain transaction between users and that is the essence of a blockchain product.
Tournament Committee: I am so excited to hear about the intro of your game and can you tell us more about the characteristics of the game?
CDLGAME Studio: Okay, we are set in the perspective of a world view. It is a world in which you are invited to join a sect and after successfully joining it you find out that it has been exterminated. The master of the faction passes the leadership on to you at the end of his life and so you begin to develop a new sect, attack the city, make money and raise a family!
The world view of the game is important because as a super gamer myself I wanted to still incorporate some of the best qualities of a true video game to ours.
Second, for this game we chose to apply the portrait view because we think for most people being on their mobile devices is the most favored way to pass their extra time. Thus to play casual games on their phones and tablets makes that time even more fun. Our tower defense game requires you to think strategically instead of just offering money and there are the three core gameplays which greatly increase the playability of the game itself: strategy tower defense, attacking cities and challenges.
Finally our blockchain applications are divided into two parts. First, we use blockchain currency to replace RMB to recharge, which is the simplest and most effective way. Second, our hero function is on the chain. So the extraction of heroes, generation of them and their attributes can be traded on the blockchain. You can sell your heroes to someone else and the people who can’t get a hero for themselves can buy directly from another player.
Finally we have created a method that allows the users to create more heroes and we won’t release this technique until the game launches.
Tournament Committee: These features sound very interesting and great ideas. I really look forward to the early launch of your game.
CDLGAME Studio: We are continuing to concentrate on polishing our game product and we will promote it in our player communities. We will also start creating some of our own resources to get more people to understand blockchain games and support the evolution of blockchain tech’s transformation from data storage applications to entertainment platforms which will be accepted by the public.
Tournament Committee: Thank you for having this interview and wish you good luck in the NEO competition!
CDLGAME Studio: Thank you for providing us with this opportunity and we will work hard to make more great game products!
