Blockchain Gaming — An AMA with Aaron St. John

On September 29, 2022, the Pixel Vault community participated in a gaming discussion with Vice President of Blockchain Gaming and Tokenomics, Aaron St. John. Preceded by a teaser of the first game that Pixel Vault is producing, highlights from that discussion are available here. The Pixel Vault community had more questions than time allowed, and a handful of additional questions were compiled for Aaron to address. Below, is a video that captures Aaron’s responses along with a transcript.

Q1: Will the game be available on mobile devices?

As soon as we get the auto-brawler out, that’s the next plan is to try and get it on to mobile devices. But obviously there’s some technical hurdles and then some regulatory hurdles that we’ve got to go through. But we’re designing it to be a mobile game. It’s built in Unity. We’re building all that, the UI and stuff like that for it, but we just want to make sure it works and it’s fun first. And then, we’ll tackle the other hurdles.

Q2: Will powers be NFTs?

Yes, they are going to be NFTs. The game is going to be using a mixture of mainnet assets and layer 2 assets. When you first get the powers which you have to, maybe open a gear pod to get them, who knows? Or win them as part of combat. They’ll start as a layer 2 NFT and then as you play with them and use the NFT more and more and level up your hero, level up the superpower itself, you have the opportunity to convert it over to a mainnet asset. And so the idea is to not dilute mainnet NFTs by making it very hard and skill based for which superpowers actually ultimately make it there.

Q3: How will the protocol benefit the Pixel Vault community?

So we’re launching the Auto-Brawler as a flagship title for this protocol and features of the protocol, including, how we’re going to be doing rentals of MetaHeroes and other NFTs are intended to benefit not just current Pixel Vault holders but ideally new audiences as they come in. It will be an example for other developers maybe interested in working within the MetaHero Universe, or developers from outside, say from other other game ecosystems, to participate in some of the features of this platform.

Q4: How will gameplay differ for Core Identities?

The cores will have just like the best powers to start with. And then there’s going to be multiple tiers of tournaments and we are considering having the cores hosting tournaments or other types of game modes built around the cores, maybe not for the first launch, but they’re definitely on our mind for the long run.

Q5: If I only own one MetaHero, do I need to draft two more?

So the way that it’s going to work is when you’re playing in tournament mode, there’s an entry fee to start and then you have a bunch of strategic choices to make. The first most important one is how you want to assemble your team. If you have MetaHeroes, it saves you choices that you can make on other things in the game, like which powers you want to use, or how many powers you want to equip in your first round. And so having MetaHeroes gives you more flexibility in the options that you have, but you still need a full team of three to play.

Q6: Do I need a gaming PC to play?

We’re going to do it all browser based. So you don’t need to buy any rig or anything like that. Again it’s designed ultimately to go on mobile. So you can buy a new computer if you want, but you wouldn’t need it for this game.

Q7: Will there be on-screen combat?

Yes, absolutely. Every round you’re going to see the MetaHeroes battling it out based on your strategic decisions. We have some interesting stuff that we’ll show, coming up in terms of how that’s going to look. But the idea here is in-your-face superhero combat with strategic decisions driving them.

Q8: How will the rollout work?

We’re building a game where balance matters pretty critically, especially since this is a web3 game. And so the idea is to have staged small group play tests, we’ll probably reach out to the core committee first as a first round of play testers and then expand from there. Each iteration we’ll be improving game balance, sort of like the look and feel of it. Bugs are definitely a piece of it, but really the focus is going to be on making sure the game is fun and balanced and fair before we roll it out to the larger community.

Q9: Will traits and powers be consistent across games?

So the traits of the MetaHeroes are most likely always going to play a role in the game. I think we’re going to leave ourselves some flexibility for different types of games to interpret those in the way that makes the most sense for the brawler. It’s going to mean one thing for future games and we’ll have to see. There’ll be some level of consistency for sure for the storytelling, but for the most part it’s really focusing on making decisions that make the most sense and are the most fun for the game.

Q10: Where does the brawler fit in the wider MetaHero storyline?

So the brawler is going to be sitting in this pocket universe that we referenced in the PUNKS 3 comic so that in the future we can take the MetaHero brand in the direction that needs to go, but then we can still have this kind of moment in time that we can bring other IP’s into and have this sort of metaverse brawler mentality where anyone can fight anyone as part of the game.

Note: Transcript includes minor edits for clarity.

If your question was not answered, please stay tuned for the next conversation as we will be progressively releasing more information on the gaming ecosystem. As always, thank you for your continued support of Pixel Vault.