Doomsday: Survivors of the Blast
At the dawn of the 25th Century, faster-than-light travel allowed mankind to spread across the universe.
The discovery of the resource-rich Omega Galaxy became the focus of human expansion.
A thriving new civilisation flourished among the stars, as outposts and stations grew and prospered.
Until an ancient destructive force was awakened…
Set your eyes to the stars, and begin exploring a new galaxy, because today we are going to discuss our latest game Doomsday: Survivors of the Blast!
Overview
Doomsday: Survivors of the Blast is a fully-on chain survival strategy game on the Blast L2, where players must earn ETH and compete to win prizes. It is a sequel to, and takes much of its mechanics from our previous game Doomsday: Settlers of the Wasteland, which was on the Ethereum mainnet. The first season of that game occurred in July 2023, and over the subsequent 3 seasons we continued to iterate and improve on the design.
Although launching a game during a bear market had its challenges, it means we’re fortunate enough to be entering a bull phase with a game that has been refined by months of in-the-field R&D.
Rather than assuming you’re familiar with our previous games, I’ll do a quick breakdown of the key features, and discuss some of the economics and incentives.
For a more technical breakdown of the core mechanics and economics, check out this article about the previous game.
Prizes and Earnings
Players can win and earn ETH in multiple different ways. All game tokens (Stations) earn ETH when new tokens are minted, and players can extract this ETH by burning their tokens. Rarer tokens earn more ETH per mint, but can only be minted when the existing supply is high.
There is also a Last Minter Prize given to the last player to mint a token before the end of the mint phase (the time extends every time a token is minted).
This means earlier minters are rewarded for being early with greater earnings on their tokens, while later minters benefit from potentially higher earning tokens, and there is always an incentive to mint another token for a chance to win the Last Minter Prize.
Lastly, there is a major prize pool which is distributed to players who burn their tokens during the Elimination phase, with the majority going to the last surviving token. The ETH in the prize pool comes from minting, as well as Reinforcing (ie, decreasing odds of being eliminated) which is discussed below.
This means there is always a greater potential reward for players who continue playing, rather than burning their tokens and exiting the game.
Mint Phase & Elimination Phase
The game has two main phases, the mint phase (called the Expansion), and the elimination phase (called The Wasting). Players can only mint new tokens during the Expansion, and during The Wasting, on-chain, random Blasts slowly eliminate them until only one remains, then the cycle begins again.
Tokens must be mined first before minting, which can be done using your browser. This helps with randomness and scarcity and creates an added uncertainty to the minting process. It also makes it more difficult for players to last-second-snipe the Last Minter Prize. Mining time is much shorter than in previous games, as the block time on the Blast network is only 2 seconds.
When a token is minted, data from the mining process determines all of its properties, including its location on the Galactic Map. This data is on-chain, and can not be changed by anyone including the game creators.
During the Wasting, every 8 minutes a Blast will appear on the Galactic Map. Its type, location and size are calculated on-chain, using past block data as a source of randomness.
Any token that is within that circle will be damaged or destroyed by the Blast (unless it is immune, described below).
Blasts and Reinforcement
There are four types of Blast, and every token is immune to one type. If your token is within a Blast that it is immune to, it won’t be affected.
For the other 3 types of Blast, players may choose to Reinforce their tokens. The cost to Reinforce a token is based on the current mint-cost for tokens, and doubles for each level of Reinforcement for each type.
ETH from Reinforcements is added to the prize pool, which means that while the individual player’s stake has gone up, the potential reward has also increased, while the price-doubling prevents whales from being able to buy a guaranteed victory.
All of this combined means that the cost of Reinforcing is initially low, but as other players continue to Reinforce, the potential reward also grows. In previous rounds, the most significant prize-growth has occurred during the Elimination phase. The greatest reward is given to the player that survives the longest.
Blast L2 enabled features
One of the benefits of moving to the Blast L2 is that we are able to take advantage of chain-specific features that weren’t available on Mainnet.
Yield and Gas
All ETH held on Blast earns yield over time, and this includes smart contracts. Therefore the Doomsday contract will be earning extra ETH just from the money held during rounds. We will be collecting this ETH, and adding it back into the prize pool.
Similar to this, Blast also allows Dapps to collect the gas fees spent on them, which we will also be collecting and returning to the prize pool.
Blast Gold
The Blast L2 offers extra incentives to developers in the form of Blast Gold tokens. These tokens are allocated to Dapps who launch on Blast, and Doomsday will be giving 100% of its Blast Gold to token holders as an extra, random daily prize.
Social and Off-chain features
Although the game is fairly simple at its core, the strength and complexity comes from the social dimension. Projecting strength or feigning weakness, while trying to anticipate your opponents intentions and resources may not require a transaction, but are still key parts of gameplay.
Alliances
In previous rounds, players have opted to combine their resources in makeshift Alliances to try and win the round, using tools like Multisig wallets. Because this game is fully on chain, this is still possible, however some players found the slowness of multisigs to not be ideal for Doomsday.
Therefore we’ve custom built an interface, and contracts, that allow players to create Alliances, where members are assigned shares based on their contributions, and where game actions such as Reinforcing can be done without requiring a majority of signatures from members.
These Alliances are designed to work at the speed of the game, while not requiring complete trust between members.
Telegram and Discord Info Bots
Because there is no way of knowing if or when your token will be hit by a Blast, it’s not possible to always be monitoring the map. For this reason, we’ve created a bot that posts all game events (mints, burns, reinforcement and damage) to Telegram and Discord.
Players may also subscribe to get DMs about specific tokens, meaning you can get a DM if you need to make an emergency Reinforcement, or be notified whenever your rival makes a move. You are not required to verify ownership of a token to get notifications about it.
Coming soon to Blast L2!
We hope this article has been informative, and that you now understand the core mechanics of the game.
The Blast L2 is set to go live 1pm PST, February 29th. Doomsday: Survivors of the Blast will go live shortly after.
For updates on the game, follow us on Twitter, or join our Discord!
