On October 17, we introduced our first big update on NovaX. In this article, we will talk about the design/vision behind this update and what’s ahead in the future of NovaX.
But first, as usual, let’s talk about some stats.
NovaX’s place in the Avalanche Ecosystem
- There are 1178 planet holders.
- The average sale price of a NovaX Planet is 4.011 AVAX
- Total Sales Volume on NFTrade has passed 5000 AVAX.
We are already one of the top NFT projects on the Avalanche ecosystem in all these rankings. As the ecosystem grows, we believe our share in the ecosystem will grow with it too.
We believe that we are the top gaming project on the Avalanche ecosystem that has the most gaming feature that is playable right now.
You can
- Own a planet.
- Generate resource tokens from your planet.
- Construct / Level-up building on your planet.
- Generate troops (Soldiers/spaceships) from the buildings on your planet.
- Participate in PvE content such as Missions or Boss Fights with your troops.
- Earn loots/rewards from missions & boss fights, and use these loots on a research center to unlock new features on our game.
- Manage all your planets on a control center.
- Track your planet’s position on a leaderboard.
We give full ownership for every asset in our game to players.
- Planets are NFTs that every player can buy/sell on an NFT marketplace.
- Resources are ERC-20 tokens that every player can withdraw to their wallets and trade on a DEX.
- All troop units (soldiers or spaceships) are NFTs that could be traded on an NFT marketplace.
- All loots earned from playing the game are also NFTs that could be sold to another user.
Operation: Seek & Destroy Economics
We did develop and introduce an infrastructure for
- Producing troop items ( soldiers & spaceships)
- Attack power system for troops.
- Reward/loot system for players to earn by playing the game.
- New features that can only be unlocked with specific actions.
- Randomness solution
These developments made us possible to introduce:
- Academy & Factory buildings for generating troop items like soldiers and spaceships.
- Missions & Boss fights, where players can participate with their troops. Managing their troops to arrange total attack power complete these missions or fights.
- Users can earn loots from missions and boss fights. Thanks to our randomness solution, we implemented boss fight loots as random loots.
- Users can use the loots they earn from missions or boss fights on the research center to perform specific researches. These researches unlock new troop items that they can produce from their buildings.
All these new features are consuming resource tokens. For participating in a mission, you need the spend the necessary resource tokens required for it. The same applies to generating a troop item or constructing the new building types.
We kept the price (in terms of resource tokens) of these features as high; a player with owning 1 planet will need to spend weeks/months to complete all these features. Yes, they can construct new buildings, basic troop units and complete some of the easy missions within 1–2 weeks. But as the missions get more challenging, they will need to wait and harvest more resources, maybe level up their buildings first to complete those difficult missions.
This decision is made to lead players to spend their tokens in the game, and as you know, all the resources used in the game are being burned. If we did make these features cheaper, than
- Players will be able to complete all the PvE content in a very short time, and then since there isn’t any place left for them to spend their resources, they may decide to sell all the resources they harvest all the time. This will lead to selling pressure on the resource tokens.
- Currently, since it takes a lot of time to progress, a player may want to buy resource tokens from other players to speed up their progress. But if he doesn’t need many resource tokens, he can decide to harvest them by himself, so this will possibly decrease the demand for resource tokens, and which will also lead to selling pressure on the resource tokens.
Since PvP isn’t here yet, we didn’t want these PvE features to end so quickly because of the reasons we mentioned above.
Whales & Small Players
Even these new features require many resource tokens to be spent; a whale on our game with many planets could effort them all within a very short timeframe. Because of this, we are designing our PvP system so that the player with the largest troop will not always win against a small player.
How are we going to handle it? We will be introducing a new building called WarZone when PvP arrives. Players that want to play PvP will need to construct this building on their planet.
We can think PvP system as two main actions
- Defense
- Attack
You will be able to place the troop units you choose for defending your planet. For example, you can put 5 battleships on Planet#0 WarZone. So if anyone attacks yo Planet#0 they will be fighting with those 5 battleships.
When you want to place troop units to the WarZone for defense, you will also need to put resource tokens on it.
For example, to place 1 space soldier on your planet, you will need to put 100 Solar Energy, Metal, Crystal on it too.
But if you want to place 10 space soldiers on your planet, you will need to put more resource tokens on the WarZone. We are implementing the resource amount you need out on the WarZone parabolically, not linear. It means that in the example above, if you want to place 10 space soldiers, you will need to put more than 10*100 = 1000 resource tokens; let's say you will need to put 1500 resource tokens.
The resource tokens you put on the WarZone are not being spent; you can even withdraw it back if you want to retreat your troops too. These resource tokens are the amount you are willing to risk losing on a PvP attack on your planet. We are designing it parabolically because if a whale wants to place all his troops on a single planet, he will need to risk much more resources comparing putting their troops on separate planets. So we are leading them to divide their forces on different planets or take a higher risk of resource loss.
Ok, we got the defense; how will attack work. First of all, if you want to attack another player’s planet, you must place some of your troops to defend your planet. A player can’t use all of its troops to attack without risking any resources&troops on defense.
Why would a player with 10 battleships want to attack to a planet with 1000 battleships? In that case, since the enemy will have a much higher attack power, the attacker will lose the battle. BUT at the time the attacker lost half of his troops, their troops will begin to retreat. In the retreat process, the remaining troop units will steal a portion of the enemy's resources. The attacker may still earn more resource tokens than the costs of the troop units he lost. Even if he couldn’t steal more resources than he lost, he would destroy a portion of the enemy's troops, making the enemy more vulnerable to future attacks.
We are planning on delivering the PvP system in December 2021. We will be disclosing more details about our upcoming PvP in the upcoming weeks. We believe it will be survivable for players that have a single planet or many of them.
Visuals/Graphics of NovaX
We are currently working on a new set of graphics for our troop units. We believe it will fit more with the current UI and planet images.
We are trying our best to deliver a more quality product visually. We will also be working on some sound & music in our product.
They are some questions about will the NovaX will be a 3d playable action/strategy/MMO game in the future. Those kinds of games are being developed by big gaming companies with hundreds/thousands of developers. We are not competing with them and we don’t see NovaX on that path. We are a browser game and we will stay like it. We will always be introducing new features to our game, and also changing/improving the UI or UX when needed. But please see us a blockchain-based (fully on-chain) play-to-earn game that gives full ownership of every asset to the player.
Thanks
Thanks for reading the article. For any feedback or comments please reach us at our Telegram / Discord channels.
