Avatars, humans and why we’re building a game (pt. 1)
Chain Clash is a new, free-to-play, mobile-first collectible and battle game, powered by blockchain. In case you’re new to Chain Clash, start with this introductory post, to learn about the game.
In this two-part series, we want to expand on what led to us building this game, and why human avatars play an important role in it. We’ve shown a few teasers of how the first category of avatars, the androids, may look like. But as said, that’s only the beginning. Avatars of real humans will be one of the first major additions to the game.
In this part, we will take a trip down memory lane, to talk about why we are building Chain Clash. We’ll shed some light on how we came up with the idea and how human avatars are connected to it. In the next part, we’ll then dive into how digital likenesses are created and why that’s groundbreaking for gaming and even more so for Chain Clash!
Avatars in Chain Clash
What the Avengers are for Marvel, avatars are for Chain Clash. Pretty much everything in our game revolves around them, from story to gameplay. The only difference being, there are a lot more avatars than Avengers! In our previous posts, we’ve already talked about what avatars are and that there will be a plethora of different ones. One important aspect of them, like with most collectibles and in-game characters in general, is their appearance. In Chain Clash, every avatar will have a specific appearance attached to it. Although there will be various kinds of appearances, what all have in common is that they’re high-quality 3D artwork (which, by the way, can also be fully animated).
We have two different kinds of avatars in the pipeline already:
- Androids. The android avatars are the “base version”. They will exist in all rarities and based on that in a variety of editions, with different colors and special features.
- Humans. The category we’re particularly stoked about (which is why we’re writing this series), are the human avatars. Just like the androids, they will be high-quality 3D models that will be fully animated. However, what makes them special is that human avatars are actually realistic digital likenesses of real people!
If having realistic, fully animated human avatars as collectibles on a blockchain, that can be trained and competed with, isn’t enough of an argument, let us explain what’s so cool about it. For that, we’ll actually start at the beginning of the Chain Clash story — the reasons for why we’re building this game.
Fancy tech — but now what?
Let’s talk about the first reason: because we can. Jokes apart, we’ve been working really hard on developing software that allows us to generate high-quality, realistic 3D character artwork. What’s really cool is that the 3D characters from our engine can also be fully animated. This enables us to create all kinds of cool animations like engaging fights, for example — on-demand and with any character we wish.
The engine itself is only one part of the “fancy tech”, however. What we can also do is to scan real people, by taking hundreds of pictures and creating super-realistic 3D digital likenesses from them (more details on how that works, and why that’s awesome for our game will follow in the second part of this series).
Oh, and of course there’s also blockchain. So, we’ve found ourselves in a situation where we had three cool technologies at hand — scanning, a 3D character engine, and blockchain. Like with all great innovations, the technology came before the actual use cases. However, we really wanted to make something cool out of it.
At some point, we asked ourselves “how awesome would it be to bring our super-realistic digital likenesses as non-fungible tokens to blockchain?”. This was the thought that ignited the ideation process, leading to the Chain Clash concept.
The actual reason we’re building a game
All jokes aside, we’re not just building Chain Clash because we randomly ended up with the technology to do so. We’ve been working really hard to create the technology that can power a game like ours and had the idea for a game concept that we really wanted to bring to life.
Everyone in the Chain Clash team loves gaming. We’ve been playing ever since our childhoods. From old-school trading card games like Magic to new AAA titles, like Apex Legends. You name it, we’ve probably played it. As gamers and blockchain enthusiasts, we were honestly pretty hyped when the blockchain gaming trend emerged. We’ve experienced a lot of the problems blockchain is trying to solve in gaming ourselves. So, like most proponents of blockchain gaming, we’ve been trying out every blockchain game that came to our attention.
Now, if you know anything about blockchain gaming, you probably also know that most people have the hopes that it’ll be the use case that finally brings blockchain mass adoption. Based on that objective, it’s a no-brainer, that the new generation of games we’re working on has to be catered towards the masses in terms of looks, story, and gameplay.
However, building games is hard, really hard. Especially when blockchain comes into play and as a game developer you’re not only concerned with building a great game, but also trying to overcome blockchain-induced UX catastrophes. Since we’re at the very beginning of this trend, it’s understandable that none of the existing blockchain games can yet compete with traditional (successful) titles. Consequently, that’s the reason why mostly crypto people are playing blockchain games currently.
When playing all those blockchain games, we started asking ourselves, why there aren’t more games targeted specifically to crypto people? Almost all blockchain gamers are crypto people, but most blockchain games concentrate on game concepts that are catered towards mass markets. Long story short, we’ve decided to build a game for crypto people — Chain Clash!
From idea to game concept
Once we started thinking about what Chain Clash should be and why anyone would want to play it, we basically knew three things:
- We want to build a fun and engaging game for crypto people, like us
- It will involve high-quality 3D character artwork, including cool animations, from our engine
- Digital likenesses of real humans need to fit into the game and be an essential part of it
After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with the basic concept of avatars as collectibles, that players can utilize in fun game modes. That would allow us to create a variety of 3D characters, of which some can be the humans. Next, we needed to answer the question of how to make a game with 3D characters and humans appealing for crypto people. Well, if the game is for crypto people, why not make crypto the topic of it? Eventually, after a lot of discussions at the drawing board and numerous iterations, the game concept was born.
A game for crypto people
At this point, we’ve touched on all three cornerstones of what makes our game. We’re combining cryptos as the general story, avatars as collectibles, and 3D art and animations in one blockchain game. And here’s where our capability to create human avatars comes in really handy.
As described in our game intro post and our story posts, our game story revolves around crypto clans, which are based on real cryptos and the avatars’ affiliation with them. We want people to be able to build a collection of awesome looking avatars, and do their best to support their favorite crypto clan(s) with them. And although our “generic” android avatars, and the others that will follow, are cool, we wanted to up the ante even more — with humans!
Think about any sports collectible game, for example. It’s cool to have a big, complete collection, but some players are the stars, the legends that’ll never be forgotten. Well, we wanted to have legends in Chain Clash as well. Legends that are special and recognizable because of their unique looks. In our case, that’ll be the humans. The humans will be the first “legendary” tier of avatars in our game, meaning they’ll be very rare and even have some special features. We don’t want to give away everything already but be assured that human avatars will have a very special role in our game.
Now that we’ve talked about the back-story of how we ended up doing what we’re doing, it’s time to explain how we’re actually doing it. But that’s for part two of this series. So, if you want to know how we’re getting the humans into our game, how the avatars are created, and what makes the human avatars so special (besides their appearance), stay tuned for next week!
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