Blockchaingamer
Touchhour Inc, an experienced game development team based in Ontario, Canada, has announced their new player vs. player (PvP) role-playing game (RPG), 9Lives Arena. Designed as an asynchronous cross-platform experience, 9Lives Arena is a competitive online RPG at heart but will also feature a unique companion app for iOS and Android that will give players an innovative commandable, Tamagotchi-style sidekick to help them gather and craft resources. Designed for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, with its companion app targeting iOS and Android, 9Lives Arena utilizes the latest in blockchain technology developed by Enjin.
With resource gathering, item crafting, no fixed classes, permadeath, and persistent progression, 9Lives Arena offers intense combat sporting swords and magic,creating the perfect mix of risk vs. reward for its competitive target audience. A unique AI companion serves as a player’s sidekick, working 24/7 to help gather resources and craft armor and weapons. This one-of-a-kind companion is accessible through a mobile app at all times.
Blockchain-Based Characters
“Touchhour is ecstatic to announce 9Lives Arena. This is our passion project, and it’s truly one of a kind,” said Touchhour CEO Ralph Laemmche. “Enjin Coin’s platform is exactly what we needed to create a unique blockchain-based experience that helps us innovate and push the competitive experience of 9Lives Arena to a whole new level.”
Touchhour has adopted a suite of blockchain integration tools created by cryptocurrency project Enjin Coin (ENJ). Enjin Coin’s development platform will enable players to store characters from 9Lives Arena within their own secure blockchain address, giving them true ownership and sovereignty over their heroes and sidekicks. Using the blockchain’s offer of true item ownership, 9Lives Arena will raise the stakes of play above what any game has ever offered before.
“9Lives Arena is going to be nothing short of epic,” said Enjin CEO Maxim Blagov. “The way they are utilizing Enjin Coin’s ecosystem will create a gaming experience like no one has ever seen. It’s incredible to see the blockchain being adopted by Triple-A quality games.”
Character Progression
9Lives Arena features a unique mix of persistent progression and character development that guarantees an exciting risk vs. reward balance with permadeath. This skill progression and character development system grants players maximum freedom. Archetypes like Warriors, Rogues, and Mages will face a vast combination of player-created hybrids in the Arena.
Heroes will come in the form of next-generation ERC-1155 tokens stored securely in each player’s blockchain address. Resources can be found, collected, and won in-game and used to craft weapons, items, and accessories for battle. Skills and abilities are character traits that can be earned through training or battle, which levels the heroes up, making them more unique, powerful, and valuable over time. These ERC-1155 characters can be bought, sold, and traded in third-party marketplaces, creating a community-oriented form of economic gameplay unique to blockchain games.
Characters and their accompanying attributes can also be bought, sold, and traded peer-to-peer. Touchhour will implement a unique system of blockchain-managed trading fees to monetize all secondary markets. Using Enjin’s smart contracts, the blockchain will allocate a small portion of each seller’s trading revenue to Touchhour, creating a balanced and fair system of economics for all involved. This ecosystem of organic commerce is sure to become a game unto itself.
Permadeath
The core concept behind 9Lives Arena is that each character gets exactly that: nine lives. Upon losing his or her ninth life, the character is lost forever, and the player is left with a trophy bearing the hero’s history, achievements, and ashes, which are stored permanently on the blockchain. This uniquely-designed permadeath mechanic offers players a high-stakes experience with real consequences, in which every moment of battle matters.
Permadeath will also introduce some interesting risk-reward decisions for players to make during their journey. For example, if you’re an influencer with a large following that has watched you win hundreds of incredible battles with your god-like warrior, and your character is down to its last life, you may think twice about fighting that character one more time and possibly losing it forever. Instead, you may prefer to retire your hero, give it to a dedicated fan, or sell it on the open market.
If you’re a player who finds the fear of loss too paralyzing to battle in the Arena, perhaps you prefer crafting items and creating heroes. You may even consider yourself a trainer of gladiators or a merchant who deals in top-shelf fighters. Knowing that your warrior can die permanently may completely change the way you play.
Regardless of how you choose to approach 9Lives Arena, it’s sure to feel like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.
24/7 Cross-Platform Companion
The lovable Ooogies are a species of in-game companions that will accompany players through their growth and development in 9Lives Arena. Ooogies can craft items, mine for ore, chop wood, and basically do everything a player doesn’t want to do. These trusty sidekicks can even complete players’ chores for them while they are asleep, at work, or going about their everyday lives. Players will be able to control their companions remotely by setting tasks and assigning duties through an Android or iOS app.
These in-game companions are completely customizable, so players can select from sets of different skins and choose a name they love for their Ooogy. Players can own multiple companions and discover, win, and earn custom accessories for them. They will even be able to level up their Ooogies. In a true sense, a player’s companion(s) will belong to them, because Ooogies will also be stored within their secure blockchain address.
Players will also be able to buy, sell, and trade their Ooogies on the open market. CryptoKitties, a successful blockchain game whose gameplay revolved solely around the buying, selling, and trading of cute cat images, cleverly utilized peer-to-peer blockchain-based markets to generate over $20 million in transactions in less than six months. If Touchhour were to achieve a similar level of popularity and charge a 10% trading fee, it would equate to an extra $2 million in revenue for the game studio. Enjin Coin is the first platform in the history of gaming to enable a developer to use smart contracts to profit from peer-to-peer trades made on unpartnered third-party sites.
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9 Lives Arena is currently in the later stages of production. The internal alpha is live and being iterated upon by Touchhour’s dedicated team of international developers. To find out more about this unique, blockchain-based PvP RPG, visit Site http://www.9livesarena.com or join their Discord channel: https://discord.gg/Fw6k6U.
About Touchhour Inc: Ralph Laemmche, a games industry veteran of 20 years, created Touchhour alongside singer/composer Cindy Gomez, who is most famous for singing on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Touchhour’s lead artist Darry Chen, who left EA to join Touchhour, is responsible for 9Lives Arena’s Triple-A quality graphics. All animations were performed by Maciej Kwiatkowski, who also performed the motion capture acting for all three Witcher games.
About Enjin Coin (ENJ): Enjin.com is a social gaming community with over 20 million users. Enjin created Enjin Coin, a cryptocurrency that gives developers access to Enjin’s blockchain development platform, which they can use to mint powerful ERC-1155 tokens that represent tangible and intangible assets. All tokens created using Enjin Coin’s platform are more advanced as a technology than any existing ERC-20 token, including Enjin Coin itself. Acting as a digital gold standard, Enjin Coin is placed inside of ERC-1155 tokens to certify that they were created using Enjin’s platform and can therefore plug into Enjin’s ecosystem of smart contracts, SDKs, APIs, wallet, blockchain explorer, and scaling solution. For more information, visit http://enjin.io.
PRESS RELEASE From Touchhour Inc.
