Blockchaingamer
In early July the “Nominee Award” was announced as part of the NEO Game Incentive Plan. The Nominee Award is presented in advance and in addition to the major prizes and has received a positive response from all competition participants. The award is given out weekly and winners receive 10,000 RMB in GAS to further encourage their development efforts. The winners of the award for the first week of July was Norchain Team, who was subsequently invited to participate in an interview with the NEO Game Competition Committee. The Norchain Team gave us a comprehensive overview of their “Carry Battle” card game which helped us understand how it evolved and eventually won the favor of the judges.
NEO blockchain game contest event page: http://neo.game/index-English.html
Tournament Committee: Hello, I heard that Norchain is an international team. Can you tell us about yourselves?
Norchain: Hi, Norchain is a blockchain technical team based in Toronto, Canada and our other team members are from America, China and India. Everyone knows each other through the internet and whenever they hear about a blockchain-related competition or hackathon they are free to form their teams. At present, there are more than 10 active members. We just won the Outstanding Works Award in the first NEO Global Developer Contest. Most of our members participating in this competition are professional game developers.
Tournament Committee: Why did you choose to develop your first blockchain game on NEO?
Norchain: The NEO competition prizes are higher and its community is relatively mature, so we are able to implement our game idea more quickly.
Tournament Committee: How did you feel when you heard you were receiving the Nominee Award for “Carry Battle?” What are the next steps for the project?
Norchain: It further encouraged us, after all, it covers 20% of our work. Development of the game is a good driving force and at the same time the “Carry Battle” team will continue to work hard regardless of the award so as to make this product the best and finally go online to reach the players.
Tournament Committee: What is the difference between a card game like “Carry Battle” being on a blockchain and general card games?
Norchain: The design approach is to fix bugs and once the game is deployed the developer will no longer interfere with the game world: no new logic and no server. However there are challenges to achieve this and CryptoKitties has not been able to overcome them but there have been many successful examples in the history of game development. In fact, there is an essential difference between blockchain games and traditional centralized games which is as long as an operator has the means to change the market it will affect the value of player’s assets. Most players will realize this sooner or later.
Tournament Committee: Can you explain the meaning of the various grid patterns on the card?
Norchain: Cards are divided into 3 types, relative to 3 units – Archer, Cavalry, and Infantry.
The nine grids on the card represent the formation of a unit and each grid can hold one unit. The number of icons in each grid represents the strength of the current unit, for example; nine icons indicate that the strength level is 9, and three icons indicate the strength level is 3.
A Shield with crossed Swords indicates that the current grid will go to battle. Our battle mode is to overlap cards from different players and the grids that do cross will fight and the grids that don’t will not battle.
Tournament Committee: So far blockchain games, especially games that are completely on chain have not been user friendly for traditional gamers. Have people rejected them?
Norchain: Very good question. One of the main reasons we feel the experience has not been user friendly is because of the learning threshold. For example, many people want to invest in CryptoKitties but don’t know how to buy Ethereum and install Metamask. “Carry Battle” implements an RPC to help players avoid the cumbersome steps in setting up a local node and it also ensures that users can play on a mobile device or web page anytime and anywhere through a UI/UX client. Usually the targeted players of card games are relatively rational and can adapt to new concepts. On “Carry Battle” some of the sub-plays have been excluded to take the blockchain transaction speed limit into account and the theme and art style of the game aim to expand the player’s senses. We have introduced an unprecedented new random creating mechanism that helps avoid any information advantages for post-participating players and the design of our settlement algorithm is such that if a hardcore player skips the client and directly calls smart contract functions to achieve more precise operations, the client player won’t have a huge strategic advantage. The more you see, the more you will find that the details of “Carry Battle” have been thoroughly discussed and repeatedly debated as a product to support more traditional game players transition to blockchain games.
Tournament Committee: The art style of “Carry Battle” is very impressive. What do you think is more important to current blockchain games – gameplay or art style?
Norchain: Thank you for your compliment! The main thing that is important for a produced game is the user experience. In order to improve it, the gameplay design, art, special effects, code logic, promotion and community building… they all need to be taken into consideration and even work together if necessary. You will know that we have accomplished this by the end of the competition.
Tournament Committee: It is a great start to win the first Nominee Award. We wish you luck in winning more prizes in the final review of the competition!
Norchain: Thank you for your blessings. I also hope the competition goes well and the prizes will emerge for our team.
This competition is hosted by NEL
The competition was hosted by the NEL New Econo Lab.
NEL is the Chinese developer community of NEO.
NEL was co-sponsored by NNS founder Liu Yongxin and NEO core developer Li Jianying.
It aims to develop NEO ecology, cultivate community developers, and promote project landing.
Official Twitter for competition @NEO.Game
