ToniqLabs AMA：The first “PLAY TO EARN” game on DFINITY!
Yesterday we invited the genis developer Stephen Andrews, the founder of ToniqLabs, to do an AMA in the ICP League community. ToniqLabs has achieved very many interesting things: the first “play to earn” game on DFINITY, Stoic Web Wallet, Cronics NFT, NFT Marketplace. If you don’t know it yet, hurry up and try it out.
Intro
Q:
Welcome Stephen, glad to have you here to introduce toniq labs and your products. To begin with, please introduce the community your team and Toniq Labs.
A:
My name is Stephen Andrews, I’m CEO of Toniq Labs and lead developer. My business partner, COO and lead-designer is Mac and we both live in New Zealand. We have a small core team, and utilize other developers, designers and illustrators on a casual basis. We have worked together for a number of years, and have been involved in blockchain development work for the last 5 years. We have only recently joined the ICP development community in May of this year.
We started RotM a number of years ago, and only transitioned to ICP this year.
About NFT
Q:
NFTs have real adoption this year, especially in digital art, games and finance space like Uniswap-V3 LP-NFT. Recently Toniq Labs launched the game Rise of the Magni and attracted many players. As the first play to earn game, can you give us some introductions?
A:
Rise of the Magni is a concept I came up with 4 years ago, and started scribbling down ideas and concepts on paper. I worked with Mac to design characters and we worked with an illustrator to start to bring the look and feel of the project alive.
We then worked toward a MVP demo to use to develop a user-base and work toward raising funds to build out our dream game. The alpha demo of Rise of the Magni is very basic, and we hope to really add more depth, strategy and hopefully generate regular competitions (like traditional esports).
Token Economy
Q:
What is the token economy of this game, how do players earn tokens and NFTs, and the demand for these assets?
A:
Rise of the Magni will consist of a number of different “tokens”. Magni will be collectible NFT’s which you use to fight in battle. We will also have “items”, which are also NFTs and can be used to “fuse” with your Magni to make them stronger. Items give Magni different benefits, so the idea is you can build a team that suits your play style. Items will be won in-game by completing daily challenges, completing chapters in the Adventure mode, or by beating opponents in the ranked PVP arenas.
We will also have an in-game currency, which can be used to purchase items/magni, and will be used to complete “fusion” upgrades. This will create a Play to Earn environment for users who are good at the game and earn tokens that other players will want (for upgrades). We also hope to setup a competitive scene for Rise of the Magni.
Q:
ToniqLabs has released 5,000 Cronics before, what’s your plan about these tokens, what is the relationship between Cronics and Rise of the Magni ? Do you have any plans to use these NFTs?
A:
We are also working on an NFT/gaming platform, Exponent, which we hope can rival Enjin for ethereum. One aspect of Exponent is EXT — our extendable token standard. To demonstrate the power and versatility of this standard, we deployed a Token creation tool and minted Cronics (for our upcoming game Cronic.Fun). We gifted Cronics to users who donated to our TipCan page, and couldn’t believe it when we distributed all gifts within 48hours. Because of this, we have made plans to bootstrap a community and begin working on “mini-games” for Cronic.Fun, which are a fun digital pet type game.
The two games aren’t really related, other than being developed by us AND both running off our NFT/gaming platform Exponent. We want to build a gaming metaverse, with elements from one game being used in another, so we do have plans of having some cross-game events and items occurring between Rise of the Magni and Cronic.Fun. We plan to have our first minigames, out auctions to purchase the next batch of Cronics, available in Q4 2021.
Q:
What’re the future plans of Rise of the Magni , when will you launch this game, when will you launch the props and the token economy?
A:
We mention a bit about the token economy above. We don’t have a set date for our full launch of the game as we are currently working toward building our team and raising funds for development. We do plan to have our demo running concurrently with development, with improvements and adjustments being applied regularly, as well as ongoing competitions to keep the user base up. Ideally we would like to plan a major release with our Play to Earn tokens for early Jan 2022.
Advantages
Q:
I noticed that Rise of the Magni is an online real-time strategy wargame, which is very different from traditional blockchain games such as axie infinity in terms of strategy, why is it designed in that way? What are the advantages and backwardness of past games?
A:
I have a big passion for multiplayer games, and love esports in general. I hope that Rise of the Magni and grow to be a prominent Play to earn game as well as a casual esports game. Rise of the Magni is simply a game concept and idea that I came up with and really like, and want to pursue it as a blockchain game.
Q:
Can DFINITY support online instant interactive games in terms of gas, performance and latency? Tell us about your data. What types of games can be built on DFINITY? What are the imaginative possibilities?
A:
Our game is turn-based, so doesn’t require instant gaming performance so we can get away with a little bit of latency. Currently the server latency is a few seconds, we could maybe drop this a little with some optimizations but for a game like ours it’s not too important. In terms of gas, it is very efficient and the best thing is that gas prices are pretty much fixed. I think with some adjustments ICP can be used to handle games with better latency requirements, which then opens up a wide world of possibilities. We would love to develop more games in future to add to our collection, or work with other game developers to build on top of our platform, Exponent, and bring a wider gaming experience to the IC
Play to Earn
Q:
For the gamefi, it sometimes comes out that, someone plays this for fun, some play for income. So how do you reach the balance between the players for fun and those who come for profit.
A:
Great question! I have actually been thinking of a way to work around this exact problem. I’ve noticed that Play to Earn games can be negatively impacted by PlayToEarners, those just in it for the income. BUT they do provide a valuable income source to the development team which allows them to build these types of games. So we need to find a balance between these two forces, and a concept we have thought of is a cross-game currency. A single token currency that is used by multiple games. So someone could earn this currency in one game by solving sudoku puzzles, spend it in another game to upgrade their Magni, or earn it in another game by completing in-game tasks.
The minting of each token is controlled by a dao, which controls how much is minted per game action, and how much a game item costs. The idea is that this cross-game currency will be designed to self-adjust. If a game is seeing a lot of the token being earned playing sudoku, it will adjust the reward for sudoku down, and vice versa if it wasn’t being used. It would also self adjust the cost of items, items in high demand would increase in price and so on.
I believe that this will change the priorities of PlayToEarners, as they will transition to the game with the better earning potential. Dedicated gamers will continue to play the games they like to play, but all games benefit from better ecosystems due to more players and more funds going to the devs. We see PlayToEarners as a resource that should be shared, and if done right, will enrich most gaming ecosystems.
Plans
Q:
As we mentioned before, the ToniqLabs has a bounce of products, we would like to ask you to show us about the products you are creating. What’s your plan on expanding the user base? Will there be any incentive events?
A:
Our main focus will be Exponent, which is our flagship NFT/gaming platform that we want to get off the ground and running. We plan to build both Cronic.Fun and Rise of the Magni on top of it, so it’s important for us to get going on it as soon as possible. Exponent will consist of 3 main elements — the token standard, a head-less wallet named Spatial (for non-crypto users), and eDEX, our built in exchange protocol.
We hope to build out our team with the help of funding so we can also work on Cronic.Fun and Rise of the Magni concurrently, which we are very excited about. We plan to expand the communities with some cool upcoming tournaments, events and eventually airdrops to our fans.
Q:
The game https://riseofthemagni.com/ just has a web version now, and using the dfinity wallet is still complex for users, what’s your plan to optimize it?
A:
You can use OpenLogin to get away from Internet Identity, which makes it available for non crypto users. I actually shared the game link with a lot of my non-crypto friends and told them to click OpenLogin to access it. They played a few games and then I told them it was all on a blockchain, they were amazed. They thought they would need to use a special device or write down random words on a piece of paper. Huge thanks to TorusLabs for their work on this, it’s awesome.
In future, we want to rebuild the game completely for mobile devices, PC (on Steam) and a web version.
Technology
Q:
What do you think is the biggest difficulty to develop a good blockchain game? Can you tell us the blockchain game ecosystem? Do developers have enough tools to use?
A:
Building a game in general has its challenges, blockchain or not. In regards to just blockchain related challenges, for me the biggest issue is working with crypto-wallets and paying transaction fees. Users don’t want to have to set up private keys just to play a game, and we have made some improvements on this by utilising OpenLogin by TorusLabs. This is an easy way to generate a non-custodial key linked to an oauth account, like Google login, without the user having to worry about private keys or seed words.
The second issue is transaction fees — it makes it almost impossible to make a game mainstream if fees have to be paid with every transaction. We are extremely fortunate with ICP as it runs a reverse gas model, which if done right will be more successful than games run on other blockchains.
Q:
Some teams are ready to come to DFINITY to develop games after seeing the demos of Rise of the Magni at dscvr hackathon, do you have any advice on development? What is the most important thing about play to earn games on DFINITY? Any ideas for paradigm shift?
A:
Come and build! You won’t regret it. Best advice is to join the community and jump on the dev channels, there’s a lot of people happy to help with questions and issues. There will be some challenges, and you shouldn’t expect it to be like traditional game development (especially when working with on-chain data) but everything can be done in some shape or form. Just make a start and build!
The hackathon was a great way to build up dev interest in games, we are currently in the voting stages and we hope to come out on top!
Definitely check out the submissions and get your votes in if you haven’t already, you can check it out on DSCVR: https://h5aet-waaaa-aaaab-qaamq-cai.raw.ic0.app/post/111154/official-poll-dscvr-hackathon-season-1-the-game.
Q:
A lot of development on DFINITY is following the ERC20 code to implement the tokens, why are you implementing EXT from ERC1155 ?
A:
We want better interoperability between tokens, and believe 1155 offers this. For example we deployed our Multi-token canister, and allowed people to mint their own tokens. Over 300 tokens have been minted at less than 20c USD. With traditional canisters, you’ll be paying a lot more to deploy individual canisters per token, and more ongoing for storage.
We also want to see “exchange” built into tokens, similar to “transfer”. So from a wallet a user can create a sell order for their tokens (fungible or NFT). Other tokens can match with these orders at settle directly or even cross canister. We don’t think tokens need to be sent to a middleman exchange.
Community Q&A
Q:
Is the gaming domain your main focus in the future on Toniq Labs?
A:
main focus is Exponent, which is a general NFT platform, but to begin with will have more of a gaming focus. We are building both of our games on top of this! We hope to work with other clients who can utilize Exponent for things like realestate tokenization, and other NFT/token needs.
we are not restricting ourselves to just games, but yes — that’s going to be how we start off.
Q:
When will the game come online with the economy?
A:
Depends on funding and how quickly we can build out our team. We want to ideally launch this year, if not Jan 2022. But we should be able to get an early economy working prior to then.
Q:
Will the game be launched ios and Android ?
A:
Yes, plan is to make them super accessible and mobile friendly.
Website: https://icpleague.com
Discord: https://discord.gg/TUvFXfK9Dv
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/qNiiCG5GAB9mZjc1
