The idea:
And so, I built an ecosystem of fully customizable characters that users could evolve over time by logging in regularly and collecting Traits.
The end game is to build games for those characters where playing in one game meant leveling up in all games. The project is on hold for the foreseeable future, but you can still collect, customize, and evolve your characters however you want.
Collection Mechanics Design, UI & UX of the Dashboard, Art for all of the Traits, Edited Content, Game Design of 2 games, Product Management with a team of 2 developers and Roadmap planning
NFT Collections
Trade Volume & In-Project Revenue (USD)
New Users to Solana
In order for the collection aspect to be fun, we needed to give users lots of things to collect. Most generative NFT collections have 6-8 attributes and a few of them are usually backgrounds or non-character traits. Both collections have a lot of Traits with built in rarity to them, and I made all of the art.
Every 7 days, you could get a Traitbox for your Unicorn. Traitboxes give 1 free Trait and you can buy the other two with Solana or Credit Card.
When you fuse a Trait, you're stuck with it forever unless you overwrite it with another. Another angle is NFTs are supposed "Non Fungible" as in unique from one another. Every NFT starts the same or at least very likely to not be 1:1. That's where colors come in. Each of the 404 traits have 8 colors to choose from making the chances of having a 1:1 character after just a few fusions very likely. In order to increase the likelihood of nuance, those colors turn the characters into different classes.
Learn more about the mechanics at https://strandedverse.webflow.io/guides
The only way to exit from a play to earn game token is to sell to newcomers. But if the newcomers can play to earn more tokens, then at best you have a pay to win game economy and at worst you have a ponzi scheme where old veterans are waiting for newcomers to sell to and leave the project meaning that newcomers pay to skip progress.
By making it so the game is about collection and loot for your character, it keeps the focus on the game and the collection of better gear, not on tokens that take you out of the progression. Then, by letting people sell their loot for real money we were able to effectively put the earning mechanic in place as a healthy mechanic for the game ecosystem rather than just people were are ready to leave.
The staking game was all about production flow management. You could task your characters and upgrade parts of the production pipeline, but if you didn't spread it out, it'd create a log jam and halt production of the previous step in the pipeline.
It's a game all about building your turret network to defend against an onslaught of enemies. You can skill-shot the waves of enemies and then lay down turrets based on your class. The turrets would have passive abilities which would activate if you stand nearby because this game is all about positioning.
I designed and built this in React. The initial proof of concept phase was all games of chance where the Rainbow Dust (in game currency) could be wagered to increase your holdings. Within a week, over 20,000 Traitbox-worth of Rainbow Dust was wagered. I designed a tamagotchi game that would let you earn more Rainbow Dust and also some games of chance that would be leaderboard-based as well.
Web3 is the fastest-paced tech I've ever been part of. Some of the most intense moments of my life was releasing our collections to thousands of onlookers as our servers crashed and we scrambled to keep them on.
It's also some of the funnest times I've had as a product designer & builder. There is truly so much fertile ground that has yet to be covered. The complete customizable nature of the project is still not touched by anyone else and though NFTs get a bad reputation by gamers, I think once indie developers realize that NFTs are more like kickstarter than cash-grab, people will flock to game-based NFTs.
I think there is still so much untested and so much unproven that things will look completely different in just the next few years.
I am so proud of what we accomplished on a bootstrapped budget, spending $30k to do a completely free airdrop, and educating+onboarding thousands to the Solana ecosystem. We made over $150k revenue from a free to play NFT project while other get-rich-quick schemes were shaking people down for millions. We built a game development team exclusively from our build in public community. And we almost made it to "wen games" with 3 collections and an expansive future roadmap.
Whether it was from not delivering on the games quick enough, being in the middle of the bear market, or because I sneezed that one time while running, after crunching for over a year exclusively on StrandedVerse, we ran out of runway and had to put the project on pause.
