Big Head Hackathon — DOOMIES
Last month Big Head had an internal hackathon in which the whole team spent a week building out an on-chain strategy game inspired by Dom Hofmann’s tweet.
Dom offers a framework of rules and features for a game similar to a mash-up of the board game Diplomacy with a 2D Battle Royale. Our first task was to reduce the scope to something we could build and test in a week.
We quickly realised that alliances, processing submit/reveal after each turn, and the shrinking player map were all features which would be unfeasible within the 5-day time constraint. We pared back the game to focus on the move functions, player stats, and a randomised weapon system inspired by the ‘resources’ feature in the tweet.
Another problem we identified was the potential for a 51% attack in which a malicious actor coordinates to control >50% of the players within the game to extract 100% of the reward. The simplest solution to this problem is to hold back 51% of the prize pool, and in the interest of time, this is the option we chose. Another solution is to prevent coordination through an allowlist or similar mechanism — which introduces a new problem in the form of a Sybil Attack.
But that’s enough of the planning stage — what did we build?
Introducing DOOMIES🧶
An old witch who lived deep inside a forest used to weave special dolls for all the children of the nearby village.
The ungrateful children, unimpressed by their crudeness, took it out on the dolls, tormenting them for fun; picking buttons off their faces, slicing their sewn limbs, and burning the enchanted gifts with matches.
The dolls suffered in silence, until…
On the morning after the second blood moon of the year, as the village folk began to rise and start their day, to their horror they discovered that all the village children and their dolls had disappeared, never to be seen again.
No one knows for sure, but legend has it the witch captured the souls of the children and transfixed them into puppets to get revenge. Every night she gathers them in a sick, twisted game, tormenting their souls by forcing them to pick each other apart just as they had once done to her dolls.
Their only hope is to fight each other to the death in the witch’s sadistic game, with the promise of one day returning to their mortal form.
Rules
The goal of DOOMIES is to strategically move around the board and pick up weapons to help you defeat the other players. The last player standing wins the entire prize pool*. If the game results in a stalemate, the prize pool is distributed according to the number of kills (battles won) each player has — so it pays to be aggressive!
Each game consists of up to 16 players. Each DOOMIE NFT is the equivalent of one player and can only participate in one game**.
Upon mint, each DOOMIE has 7 randomly rolled skill stats:
1. Sadistic
2. Ruthless
3. Devious
4. Conniving
5. Brutish
6. Resourceful
7. Sneaky
Two of the seven stats are randomly assigned as ‘dump stats’ and are assigned 0 points. 35 points are distributed across the other 5 stats to a maximum of 10 in any stat.
NFT holders can join an open game and choose their position on one of 16 predefined positions on the exterior of a 9x9 grid. Once 16 players join, the game starts. The contract owner may also start a game.
*Prize pool is calculated as — mint price * players * 0.49
**A DOOMIE NFT only has one play, so due diligence is required when purchasing on the secondary market
Gameplay
Players can choose to move to any adjacent square. If another player occupies that square a battle commences.
A battle consists of 7 skill roll contests. The player with the most number of skill roll contests won within a given battle, wins that battle. If a skill roll contest is a tie, the contest is re-rolled. If at the end of a battle the number of wins is tied, a coin is flipped to determine the winner.
The player who is defeated in a battle is dead and their piece is removed from play.
If a player moves to a square which holds a weapon, they automatically pick up the weapon. If they already are holding a weapon, they automatically equip the new weapon and the old weapon is removed from the game.
Weapons consist of 5 randomly rolled positive and negative modifiers of values between -2 and +3.
1. Granny’s pushpin
2. Burning matchstick
3. Rusty scissors
4. Grimey key
5. Vintage syringe
6. Slimy brick
7. Dad’s screwdriver
8. Bloody dental floss
DOOMIES will launch on Polygon on the 31st October as a free claim. Stay tuned to our Twitter for more.
We believe the game as it stands is skill-based, however, there is some RNG and luck involved which leads to murky waters with gambling and lottery laws. With that in mind, we made the decision to make the NFTs free to claim. With some alterations to the mechanics giving players more decisions within the gameplay this would not be an issue and we leave that as an open mission should you choose to accept it.
What’s next?
This hackathon was a great way for the team to work and play together. The Big Head team works out of 8 different time zones with a 17-hour difference between east and west. Consistent and clear asynchronous communication is vital to how we succeed. The DOOMIES project was a great experiment to strain these lines of communication with the pressure of building out an MVP with a tight deadline. DOOMIES helped us build out processes to help coordinate our efforts in making this fun on-chain NFT game. We are open-sourcing all of the DOOMIES contract and front-end code, and making all artwork and assets available copyright free.
