Dear Bloxers,
Thank you for your continuous support and for providing us with valuable feedback. One thing we get asked quite often is to share more on our journey and how we got to this point.
So today, we’d like to share more on our process and how we went from a mere idea to an actual platform.
The background
Most of our team members have been playing games ever since they were old enough to hold a Gameboy. We’ve played various games, from strategy games to multi-player online role-playing games. Our devs also have experience creating such web2 games.
Yet eventually, we all realized that there was a problem with these games. Whatever you earned or created in-game wasn’t actually yours. If the gaming company decided to make a rule change, all your hard work could have been for nothing.
And we weren’t alone with that realization. The genius behind Ethereum recognized this pitfall of centralized services when playing World of Warcraft.
“I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.” — Vitalik Buterin
And game developers had to forgo a massive cut for their work to sell through a particular studio. But it’s hard to be an indie developer when most players get their games through the big names.
Then blockchain came around.
This technology wouldn’t just enable the trustless transfer of assets, but also bring a new level of transparency and ownership to games. On top of that, it’d allow players and builders alike to monetize their assets better.
Explosion of GameFi & Play-to-Earn
We’ve seen GameFi (Game + finance) take off in the last few years. This subsection of crypto describes a combination of DeFi with gaming elements. It can be traced back to 2019 when the founders of MixMarvel first mentioned it during a blockchain conference.
While in GameFi, the focus is more on applying gamification elements to finance, Play-to-Earn got us even more excited.
When we heard of people quitting their investment banking jobs to dedicate themselves to earn through games fully, we knew that this was here to stay.
But then our team started playing these games. And we quickly realized that a lot of these games were not actually fun to play. The only reason to continue with them was to earn the in-game token.
As gamers ourselves, we figured that there must be a better way. Why not combine having fun while playing and earning?
For us, both aspects are important. A game is only sustainable when people enjoy playing it in the long run. We are not aiming for a quick hype like a Pokemon Go type of situation. We’re in it for the long run. So we got to work.
Character Development
We wanted to provide players with more than just one place to explore.
So we came up with a world that has three different layers and houses different varieties of creatures.
We started out with the following races: flowers, fish, and the techno race. Our design team drew inspiration from a wide array of existing characters including Murakami’s famous flowers, sharks from DC movies, and the futuristic designs of robots all in silver.
We also started looking at more than 16 different body types that our characters could have that were inspired by popular characters from pokemon to ghibli.
We got to work and tried figuring out which body type would work best for the characters that require changeable parts (so they could be minted with generated features). After creating the first designs, we decided we didn’t want to go with a round character as so many other projects had, and went for a very cubic design.
Here is one work in progress that’s already fairly close to the Bloxes as you know them today.
Once we set on a concept, we went on to polish the characters.
We went through a similar process for the creation of the enemies.
Of course, there are also legendary Bloxes among each family. To make them stand out, we spent a long time finessing how they could look like and figuring out which parts could best be combined to create a cohesive legendary Blox.
You can check out how many legendary parts a Blox has easily on our marketplace by adjusting the “legendary” filter to 1–6 legendary features.
This is just the first part of our story. Watch out for our next post which will go more into developing the UI/UX, and assets needed for RougeBlox.
