Welcome to Moonfrost
by Ric Moore
Introduction
Moonfrost is a social simulation / role-playing game inspired by the likes of: Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Rune Factory and Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
It’s a 2D metaverse that starts off as a small town and grows into a world. A social, online game where you can make friends, rescue animals, raise them, have adventures, fall in-love, earn money and trade with other players.
Moonfrost is about creating an idyllic fantasy life. It’s set in the present day in a fictional country village where folklore and mythology comes to life. It’s a place away from the daily grind of work where everything is wholesome and nice.
The game starts out as a farming game / animal rescue sanctuary. Each player has a plot of land which they can use to create their dream homestead in a style of their choosing. You can grow plants, trees and crops, raise farm animals and pets, rescue animals, trade with other farmers and help other players.
Over time the game world will expand to grow a town around your dwelling where you will meet and interact with other characters and become part of their stories.
Current Problems With Blockchain Games
Barrier to entry — Right now, the majority of crypto games require you spend money upfront by purchasing a game specific token on a crypto currencies exchange. If you’ve never done it before, it’s hard to figure out how to buy the crypto required to start playing. It is quite a complicated technical process which serves as a huge barrier to entry for people who aren’t already crypto enthusiasts.
The cost to start playing most games is ridiculously high. Some games require you to spend hundred of dollars upfront in order to start playing (i.e. Axie Infinity — the most popular blockchain game). That kind of price will put most people off even looking at the game. The majority of the planet simply can’t afford it.
Games based on trading NFTs — the NFTs start off cheap and quickly escalate to prices that the average person can’t afford or is off-puttingly high. The design expects the price to keep rising until the last person is left holding the NFT. This is quite ponzi scheme like.
Finding an audience — blockchain games are very niche because of the barriers to entry. Many games also struggle to appear on the App Store due to the rules the developer must comply with. In particular, circumventing Apple’s payment system to sell in-game currencies will prevent you appearing on the App Store.
Reputation — Steam recently banned all crypto related games from it’s store after a backlash from it’s audience. Many view the space as full of scams, get-rich-quick schemes, rug pulls and ponzi schemes, while at the same time being bad for the planet (due to the proof-of-work consensus that Bitcoin uses).
Our Solution
We want to solve these problems by creating a game that doesn’t require any purchases to start playing. Users will be able to install the game for free on their phone or PC. You will not have to buy any tokens.
Spending should be optional. Should you want to buy tokens they should be purchasable in-game with a single click/tap rather than exclusively through the convoluted process of buying them on an exchange and transferring them into the game.
Ever-increasingly expensive NFTs turn games into something for the rich rather than for everyone. There’s nothing wrong with being able to sell an NFT you own for profit but having to spend lots of money to start playing a game is just bad design. This game will avoid this by allowing everyone to play for free. It will release a regular steady supply of limited edition NFTs and other game content that all active players should be able to afford or obtain through play. The game will also include the chance to acquire rare items dropped during gameplay that have the potential to be worth a lot.
Play-and-earn — our aim is to make an immersive world that players enjoy spending time in and are happy to return to every day. The gameplay shouldn’t be a chore or stressful. The core gameplay won’t be competitive or skill based. It will be designed to appeal to casual gamers.
When you pay players tokens it encourages a certain type of player to appear — one that grinds just to earn the token; a gold farmer. In addition to that people will attempt to automate this with bots which creates a technical headache for the developer. In both cases the players aren’t playing the game as it was intended.
We think the best way to avoid this is to just remove any gameplay where there’s a way to regularly earn a token through a repetitive game mechanic. A better approach is to give players the chance to obtain rare items (NFTs) through gameplay.
