Welcome to the Elementa Medium articles, first things first we are going to talk about the overall idea behind Elementa and what we are working to achieve, and most importantly, what you will be doing and achieving here.
Elementa is three things, a Collectible NFT, a Play 2 Earn Game and a Novel built on community actions. We are limited to 5,000 Characters for this first Novel. We may introduce new Races when we begin following Novels but only in small numbers.
The project as a whole has a very in-depth and on-going story, you can read the up to date Lore in our Discord channel or on our Website to get an idea.
Elementa as a Collectible NFT
This first aspect of the project is like many other NFT projects you would have seen, but with a unique touch that others overlook. Your NFT will be your “Character” in the Elementa world.
Character Design
The majority of NFT’s out there are 2D flat coloured images, in our NFT’s each Character is designed using the art style of “concept art” — something no one has done before. We searched high and low for a high quality concept artist and found Jensen — concept artist for a Triple A Games Studio, and he has done nothing but impress us every step of the way.
So let’s get down to it — what is my NFT going to look like?
The first part of your NFT is the background image, not just a solid colour, but a high quality concept art scene which will depict your Character’s terrain preference.
Then there is the Character itself, it will begin life as one of 7 Races that will exist in the world of Viridium (the home planet in our story), 1 Ultra Rare, 2 Rare and 4 Common. 6 of these Races will be the Native people of the world of Viridium, which will come in both Female and Male of which you can see the base models of these below, this is the very starting point of your character. There will be various colour differences between each character, but these won’t be considered in the rarity of your character at all and just to make each one a bit more different.
Each race has a back story in the world of Viridium, as part of our in-depth storyline, you can find information about each Race (Djeti, Lacuna, Kitvos, Shend, Widderhorde, Sypher) and the Primal Elements they are born of (Anima, Vitae, Aura, Geas) on our website here.
Next up, we have various eyes, available each in different colours, and mouths for your Character — the above images show just 1 example of these.
As with any good NFT, each Race will have it’s own set of hairstyles that your character can have. For some of the Races this would be a variant of their unique head decoration — for example the Djeti won’t have hair, they will have different shaped crystals on their head, and the Kitvos ears would differ.
With all the basics out of the way, we move on to the variety of hand drawn armour and weapons, making your already personal feeling Character even more unique. There will be multiple different sets of armour/weapons made from different materials, some based on the Primal Elements and others yet to be revealed at the time of writing. Each set will have its own different benefits as armour and as a weapon. Each armour set is expected to contain at least 6 parts. Your unique set of armour will be a unique mix of the materials — so no two characters will have the same set of armour, and you will likely have multiple materials on you — benfiting from different bonuses, or stacking the same one if you have more than 1 of a specific material. This will all impact your Gameplay detailed further down.
Weapons will follow suit, but we will have different weapons, at time of writing this is: Sword, Axe, Bow, Staff. If you get a Staff or Bow you won’t have a Shield as they are 2 handed weapons.
There will be space on your NFT for icons which will depict exceptionally rare events — such as winning a Tournament, or #1 in the Overall Leaderboard for a certain Season — all part of the game detailed below. But without participating in the Game you don’t need to worry about these.
Character Traits
The most exciting trait will be your charcaters unique name. Not just a number — these Characters are part of a story and a number does not cut it. So each Race will have a various amount of First and Last names, and each Character will have a unique name overall. This gives us the ability to roleplay better, and for your charcater to feature in the Novel itself if it does something special in the story! So, expect a character name such as Eurythmus Syr the main Character in our story. We will of course be prepending the token number to the name to help identify them.
Now on to the core traits of your character, you will get various stats such as Strength, Resiliance, Dexterity and Precision which will be random from 80–120. These are the stats which will impact your fighting ability. They will always total 400 between them, a game balancing mechanic — if you have a weak character, it could max out defence to counter it. Each race will sway towards some stats — for example the Shend will generally be stronger but it does not mean they always will be. You then also get your Health bar, which will be random, but similar to others, somewhere around 450–550 is what we are planning currently, but this may change once the test the game mechanics.
Your armour, race, background, eyes, mouth, hair etc will all be on there as traits too and will be accounted for in rarity tables.
Elementa as a Novel/Story
One major element of Elementa is that our Lore is not just a backstory and an odd bit of text once a month to make you feel like there is a reason for your Character, we are going to be putting together a full Novel, an entire story from start to end, and this Novel will be printed/published and be given free of charge to our holders when we get there. The exciting part of this is that we have not written it yet, and we don’t know what is going to happen.
The Novel has started already, you can read completely free the beginning on our website or in Discord. At the time of writing we are about half way through the beginning chapters and we will be releasing more every few days until we drop.
On drop day, the free access to the story ends, and only holders of our NFT will have access to the story.
From this point on, our holders will be directing the Novel. You and your Character will be living in real-time in the Novel along with everyone else. What happens next no one knows, but to find out go to our website and connect your wallet, you will then pick one of your characters. You will have a choice of the Combat Game (detailed below), or the Story Mode.
By accessing the Story Mode, at the very start you will pick a Class you want your Character to undertake while adventuring through the story. This would be Defense (Tank), Attack (Warrior) or Healer. This makes no impact on your actual NFT and is purely for the storyline. At certain points in the story there may be large scale battles, although you won’t visually fight those battles, based on your class the outcome of that battle may differ for you. Defense characters get a defense boost to absorb damage, Attackers get an attack boost to do damage and Healers don’t get any buff, but they are given an amount of potions (healing, revive, cure etc..). After any battle Healers will apply potions to other characters of their own choice — so they play a vital role in ensuring the best chances of the Characters to win the next fight. Do you revive any dead healers? Did a lot of defense Characters die and maybe we need more defense?
So, you picked your Class — maybe you discussed with the rest of the community what everyone felt they needed the balance to be to survive — you will be able to see how many of each class has been chosen at that point to help decide. Once done, you will see the current step of the story, this will be an actual part of the Novel, and you will be able to go and back read all of the previous steps of the story. Everyone see’s the same step at the same time, there is no going ahead. Give this bit of the story a good read, and maybe discuss it with the rest of the community. You will be presented with a number of choices to make, for example you may hit a path in a road, do you go West or East? You will see a live count of how many people made each choice along with the classes so you can tell if all the Healers go West, maybe you go with them to be safe… Once you make a choice, it cannot be changed, so pick carefully.
After a certain amount of time, our incredible writer Tyler will review the choices that have been made. Then, and only then will he decide what happens next, maybe you split up and each route gets it’s own unique step next, maybe a vast majority picked one option so they convince everyone to go that way, who knows, we for sure don’t, and we will be taking part just like everyone else.
This will go on until the story ends, you just need to pop in when the next chapter is ready to read and act upon. This is a truely community directed novel, being written in real-time. You and your Character will be so involved and following the story live, that it will feel like a second life. If your character makes any special contribution to the story, for example Tyler may pick a random character to be the one who makes the final blow to a major enemy/boss and the name of that character will feature in the Novel to be forever remembered — potentially increasing the value of your NFT too.
If you own multiple characters, you could make different choices with each, and that way you could experience every single journey that is possible.
There will be times that we allow people to change their Class if they want, we will be running a “Season” concept on some aspects, one will be in the Story, so we would consider a Season to end with a major battle, or event that is faced, after this we would allow Characters to “rest” and when going back out on the story they could pick a new Class to try their luck at.
When we finally end the first storyline, we will compile all of the written story into a printed Novel, and holders at that time who have taken part in the story mode at some point, when the closing chapter is finished, will receive a 100% free copy shipped to them as a thank you — this is the very least we can do for you supporting our project. Other people can then purchase the Novel from our merch store if they want to read what happened, or to simply own a copy of the very first NFT community written Novel.
Once the main story ends, as always, another one begins, we start the second part of the series of Novels, and you will still be involved for as long as it goes.
If the Novels really take off and we sell a lot, we will be sharing a large amount of the profits from sales with the holders, since you helped direct them, it only seems fair!
Elementa as a Play to Earn Game
Part three to this comprehensive NFT is our Game. Now, play to earn is just an option here, you can enjoy the game aspect without earning, but we are going to create an ERC-20 token called “ELEM” that you can cash our your winnings for.
So, similar to the Story Mode, log in, pick a character, but pick the Combat Zone this time. When you land here, you will see your character in their home location (based on their race), you will see its stats and gold level. Looking around, you will find a few options — Fight, Shop, Leaderboards.
Leaderboards
We will be running Seasonal leaderboards, probably looking at about 3 months per Season. These leaderboards are TBD but there will be various ones from Most Kills to Biggest Defeat and also an Overall leaderboard.
By being placed high up in these leaderboards, you could earn a prize. The prizes and number of places winning it will vary based on which leaderboard it is, but anything from Eth to Merch to Airdrops are all possible.
Winning the overall leaderboard will also add an icon on your NFT to highlight that your character was a Champion of a specific Season.
Shop
Here you can spend the Gold you earned by fighting. You will be able to buy Potions, Revives, Cures and other items to recover from your last battle.
You will be able to buy our ERC-20 token “ELEM” with your gold. The rate of gold to Elem is TBD until we finalise the Math behind the whole game mechanics overall.
If you have “ELEM” tokens, you can buy in game Gold. This means you can swap Eth for Elem tokens, then buy gold, which means you can heal/revive to fight more if you ran out of Gold.
Fight
Landing here, you will be matched with an unknown opponent, it will be a real character NFT of another holder (you cannot fight your own held Characters), you won’t know who it is until you Start the fight. BUT, you will be able to pay a small fee of gold to see who your opponant is before fighting — maybe they have a weapon that would be powerful against your armour and you don’t want to risk losing the fight. If you Reveal the opponent, you can then choose to Withdraw or Accept the fight. If you withdraw, you just lose the money you paid to reveal them. If you Accept either way, you go in to the fight itself.
The fight, in the first version of the game, will be programatically generated, taking in to account every detail of your NFT. However, the fight will not just be presented instantly, you will watch the fight unfold over time as it describes each action that gets taken. A brief example would be as follows:
You swing your Axe towards the legs of Hyduk, as your Axe strikes Hyduk the flame of Anima burns her.
Hyduk draws her Bow and takes aim at your Head, using your fast reactions you duck just in time.
Lets break this down so we can see how your Characters traits are involved. The first part suggest you have an Axe, that much is clear. Your base damage done will be based on your Strength trait, and your opponents Defense is based on their Resiliance trait — this produces a base modifier of damage.
Next we see you are aiming at your opponents Legs. Yes that is right, every time your Character attacks, it will be towards a specific body part of your opponent. Now, when you hit her legs we see a note about the flame of Anima burning her. This is because your weapon is made of Anima (fire) based material and your opponent is wearing Geas (earth)based Leg armour, and as we all know Fire beats Earth, so Critical Damage is applied. It will not always be critical damage in these cases, but the chance of it will be much higher. If next time you hit your opponents Arms and they had Aura (wind/air) based armour on their Arms, then no extra modifier would be applied. Your Precision stat will influence your chance of hitting a bit of armour that will cause Critical Damage.
When Hyduk attacks you back, we see she has a 2-handed Bow and is looking to plant that arrow right in your head. However, your Characters Dexterity is high, and your chance of dodging attacks is increased, in this case you successfully did.
That will go on, each attack the modifiers involved will be recalculated, they are never a fixed value but a range, so nothing is guaranteed, although some fights you clearly will win easily, some you will lose for sure.
We won’t go on to explain every materials benefits just yet, and there are some we wont ever announce but will be for you to fight with and see what they do for yourselves — some are quite unique!
Further to your equipment, your Character came with a Background image remember? This is a Terrain Preference. Each fight will be in an arena of a specific random terrain. If that matches yours then you will get a chance of a small boost to some or all stats in the game, again a scale of chance here but there will be an increase in some respect for sure.
As the fight goes on, you will see Health deplete, and the winner is the one who is standing at the end.
There will be a UI showing your character and your opponents, as the fight goes on things will happen in the UI to add to the feel of the fight to keep you tense and excited throughout.
At the end of the fight, if you win you will earn an amount of Gold based on many aspects of what happened in the fight, at the very least it will be enough gold to cover healing costs. If you lose you get nothing, however they may be a small chance of a little bonus if the system thinks you deserve it.
Also you will get a shareable link for your fight, this will allow you to send that to others in the community and they can re-watch your fight exactly as you did. Lets say you destroyed someone and lost no health, no one will believe you, but share the link and it can be proven!
There is a lot more to it behind the scenes, but that covers the basics of what the first phase of the Fights will be. As you play you will discover more, and we will be adding more features as we go, this will include Guilds, Duels (where you request to fight a specific Character), Tournaments and more — all ways to earn bigger prizes and more gold.
In the long term, we will look to add real-time fights, but we want to get the mechanics nailed down first with mass usage, and then we would love to bring your characters in to the Metaverse more, and even in to Augmented Reality.
Elementa as a Community
The leading part of any NFT project is it’s community. We opened our doors early, very early. This is because we want to include the community in the very development of the project itself, from voting on the Artwork style we ultimately chose to proceed with, to suggesting names and descriptions of our Races, to telling us how you prefer to mint your tokens and so much more, we have listened to every single one of you, and those who named our Races will forever cherish them knowing they did that.
As of writing, we are just moving in to the design phase of the Armour and Weapons, and we will be feeding that to the community too as and when it happens. Of course, some stuff has to stay secret for a nice surprise when you get your Characters, we do not want to take away that excitement at all.
We have opted for a fair pricing model, so everyone will pay the same, with the excepion of the 1000 early adopters which we already have after just 2 weeks of being open, who will get a discount on their first Character.
We have also opted not to go for your traditional percentage based Roadmap. This is because those Roadmaps basically scream “we won’t do it until we earn loads of money”. The game will be built, the story mode will be built, the novels will be written. We will provide 10% of all profit to a Community Fund (about 50 Eth if we sell out). Of that fund, 40% will be guaranteed to go to Chairty, with the other 60% voted on what it is used for by the community, possibly adding even more to Charity, or spent on artists to animate your NFTs, or one hell of a party, offer free merch, anything they can think of.
Don’t forget you also 100% own your Character, you are free to make derivatives of them, crop them, print them out, anything you like.
We will look to open a Merch store too, get your own Character printed on t-shirts, mugs, or even a top quality Archival Print of your character using the same techniques as leading artists to frame and hang on your wall above your bed.
We want you to build the Elementa World with us, take your Character through the journey with the whole community and love them as much as they each deserve, afterall their home planet just got destroyed.
Thank you
For reading this article, we really appreciate everyone who has helped and will help this project thrive, or even if you just take part a little, you all mean the world to the team.
More information on the team (Eddie, Jensen, Tyler and Jamie) can be found on our website, along with Lore information and our Whitepaper — https://www.elementa.game
Join our community for the latest updates, they are always the first to see everything. Plus giveaways, chances to get on whitelists for pre-sales and more in our Discord Channel — https://discord.gg/HvDKqWyBFA
For more chances to win a Free Character, you can always follow our twitter for updates and giveaways too — https://twitter.com/ElementaNFT
