GAME MECHANICS
To materialize our Play-to-Collect vision, we needed to come up with a relevant gameplay. We had three constraints in mind:
- Our main goal was to create a game that could truly engage the NFT communities. To achieve maximum engagement, the idea was to have two teams, from two different communities, and make everyone play at the same time, in one big battle.
Why two teams you ask? Because antagonism fires us up as humans. - Since the major NFT collections usually have around 10,000 art pieces, collected by 3,000 to 5,000 owners, the game had to support about 2*10,000 NFTs playable by 2*5,000 owners. So a total of 20,000 characters played by 10,000 owners, at the same time! This is the order of magnitude around which the game would live.
- It was extremely important that whatever gameplay we’d pick, we’d be able to develop it realistically under 2 months. Because as I was writing in my previous article, we don’t want to disappoint the community like many other NFT games do, by not delivering anything months and months after the mint. Our game needed to be playable under 2 months after the mint. So something ambitious, but reasonable to develop (exit the insanely time-consuming 3D MMORPGs, FPS, mobile games, etc).
Being a long-time fan of strategy games (Starcraft, Red Alert, Total War, etc), I immediately thought about creating a strategy game inspired by the board game RISK.
CHARACTERISTICS
To match the 3 constraints we had, we came up with the following features:
- Playable from a web browser (easy access through Metamask and quick to develop)
- 2D turn-based strategy game
- Gameplay inspired by the Risk board game
- Top view of the terrestrial planisphere divided into 30,000 hexagons to support the ~20,000 NFTs in play
- 2 teams: ~5,000 players versus ~5000 players
- Each player controls at least one NFT (and can control up to 10 at the same time)
- At each turn, all the players from the same team move their NFT(s) by clicking on the planisphere
- An NFT can move from 1 to 3 hexes depending on its stats
- If an NFT is moved to a hex where an enemy NFT is located, then an auto-battle is triggered
- Several NFTs from the same team can be stacked on the same square, thus reinforcing the position
- Several NFTs can attack the same square during the same turn. The auto-battle takes into account the number of attackers versus the number of defenders
- Victory condition: 70% domination of the planisphere OR total annihilation of the enemy OR countdown over (after a few hours, to prevent a draw)
- Domination: each hex controlled by an NFT during 1 turn without moving is taken over by its team (the hex color changes)
INTERFACE MOCKUPS
The game is hosted in the web browser. You log in through Metamask and you can play only if you own at least one EMETH NFT, or if you own one of our opponent’s NFTs.
If you own both, then you have to choose for which team you want to play — and it better be EMETH ;)
The first screen you’ll see is the global view, with your character(s) displayed as green dots on the map.
On the left, you can check the battle stats and your player stats.
On the bottom left, you can check how many NFTs you still have in play (here it’s only one alive and the other dead).
As you can see, there aren’t 30,000 hexes displayed on the global view. So how are we going to represent ~20,000 NFTs from both teams?
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Well, the answer is that you can zoom in on the global view!
You have three ways of zooming in:
1. you can use your mouse wheel
2. you can double click on one of your NFT images (bottom left) to automatically zoom in on your NFT location
3. you can double click on any hex to zoom in on a specific location and see what’s happening there
Once you’ve zoomed in, the big hexes on the global view split into smaller hexes on the “playable” view, where you can move your NFTs, attack, defend, and so on.
When you move your NFT by clicking on it first, then clicking on a reachable hex around, you have three scenarios:
- you move on a neutral zone (grey) — nothing happens, your NFT will just be sitting there, at the end of your team’s turn.
- you move on a friend’s hex: if your friend hasn’t moved, then at the end of the turn, you’ll have your NFTs stacked on each other. Basically, you can stack several friendly NFTs on the same hex to reinforce the position.
- you move on an enemy’s hex: then you attack it! When you click on the enemy, you’ll see a popup asking you if you want to attack and you’ll see the percentage of chance you have to win. For example: 68% chances to win. This percentage depends on the difference in rarity between the two NFTs. The rarer the NFT, the stronger. But I’ll cover this more specifically in a dedicated article.
The strategy aspect of this game comes from the fact then you can coordinate your attacks on the enemies. You can totally 3v1 an enemy by clicking with your friends on the same enemy location during your turn and gang up on it at the end of the turn.
That’s why it’s also important to reinforce certain locations (the front line?), by stacking up your NFTs with your friends, in order to avoid being outnumbered.
The auto-battle screen shows up during the transition phase, between two turns, if you attacked an enemy or if you were attacked by an enemy.
It only shows your NFTs involved in battles, with the percentage of chance to win, then a small animation, and the victorious NFT shown at the end of the 5 seconds auto-battle.
If you lose the auto-battle, your NFT is not playable anymore. There is no respawn. If you’ve lost all your NFTs, then you’re out of the game (you’re just in spectator mode and you can navigate from player to player in your team, to see how the others are playing).
If the auto-battle involves 3 NFTs versus 5 NFTs, then you’ll see 3 images on one side and 5 images on the other side, with your overall chance to win. But again, we’ll cover the winning chance calculation in another article.
VICTORY CONDITIONS
The main victory condition is that your team needs to control 70% of the playable lands (you can’t control the oceans).
Destroying all the enemies is also an option. But since the map is so big, we might end up in a locked-up situation with NFTs at the east and NFTs at the west of the planisphere, and too much time required to move from one side to another (30,000 hexes in total…).
Eventually, we’ll put a time limit for the game, in order to avoid these locked-up situations.
But the victory conditions will also be tackled in a specific article, to go deeper into all the details involved there.
DISCORD
The community is growing, we’re now more than 15,000 Rebels on our discord server. Join us to participate in NFT giveaways, contests, and AMA sessions:
