Nifty Football — Next Generation Football Management Game
Last week Andrew Ivison was hosted on the Koin Press podcast, where he discussed the upcoming blockchain-based football management game Nifty Football, the beginning of the project and the future plans.
Nifty Football
Nifty Football is a next-generation football management game where all the components — players, coaches, scouts and stadiums — are an asset, actual NFTs which you own or trade. This kind of gaming experience is unique. In the early stages of the game you play against the computer but this is just then first phase leading to player leagues and cups, where all the players are on chain and you’ll actually be able to trade players with other real people and have a real PVP NFT football manager game.
It was launched as a digital card collecting game in 2019 by Manchester-based company BlockRocket. During this time you would buy a pack of cards (standard or premium) on the website and generate five cards with players of different nationalities, hairstyles and random visuals. People were trading for different rarity, for example there was a chance that they’d have gold boots.
Moving to Flow
After the explosion of gas fees onEthereum in 2019 the project went into limbo until Andrew and his team took the project into their hands and moved to the Flow network, where the onboarding process was smoother and user experience safer, as they review every smart contact going on the network. It is fairly gated, reducing the number of scams. Some prestigious names are already building there such as NBA Top Shot. Flow was an ideal place for Nifty Football because there is no barrier; people don’t have to buy a token in Coinbase, instead it lets them use a fiat payment system they are familiar with. For these reasons, it was decided that it was the right place for Nifty Football.
How to Play Nifty Football
Nifty Football is a game where thereare no upfront costs at all. At the beginning of the game in Beta, you’ll get 18 player cards and in the full game you’ll also get a stadium, treatment room, coaches and scouts — all minted as NFTs. In the first version, it’s kept simple. These players will be pretty low-level as it’s meant to mimic joining a very low-level team. Take your low-level team and try to take them all the way to the top. So by playing the games and doing certain tasks you’ll earn XP that you can then spend on your players’ development, for example to improve someone’s shooting ability or their dribbling. Over time, just by playing the game you can improve your team. Where the extra kind of purchase comes is with Nifty’s native token. That is how they sell packs of XP. Using the Nifty token, an XP pack can be bought to upgrade players, your stadium and facilities. Each one of those has different benefits.
If you increase the capacity of your stadium, then more people attend your games which means earning more XP per game. You have the possibility to customize and trade it. To balance spending XP, there’s a limit to how much can be spent in a game week, so it’s not something that can just be bought really easily. Aside from that, there’s a random factor to the players as well. Although the attributes of your players are shown (for example shooting ability), there’s a secret capacity of potential hidden behind each player. That is unseen at the beginning. By signing up, anyone might have a player that’s got a 90 potential and that is completely random. Having scout cards enables you to see more. It gives you more insight into what these potential abilities are and spend your XP to train them towards that ability and then sell them to someone else at a profit.
Security and Transparency
Security monitoring and penetration testing is a major part of developing Nifty Football because there is the blockchain side and this game side which really needs to be protected. That’s the reason that XP will be on blockchain as well. There are many details that make it difficult to cheat the game system engine: the current ability stats for each player; team formation; even the weather. The approach is to start fairly centralized and decentralize according to the community’s wishes as there is a big community part to the development. Eventually, it’ll take the form of a kind of governance in the token to form a DAO-esque scenario.
For those, who are waiting for the Nifty Football release, it was mentioned that next month for certain people will be able to play Beta.
