Supervillain Inventory: Blending the Boundaries Between Web2 and Web3
KS, Tech Lead at Supervillain Labs, highlights our focus on simple onboarding UX and building trust via on-chain transparency among gamers.
In the world of gaming, the inventory plays an indispensable role.
It acts as a personal vault for gamers, housing the array of items, potions, and gold amassed during their digital quests. Therefore, effective inventory management is paramount for leveraging the assets acquired throughout the gaming experience.
However, this system exhibits a critical weakness: the control and ownership of the inventory’s contents are entirely in the hands of the game developers. Such a setup could result in an unforeseen flood of items into the market or the trading of counterfeit items. Moreover, should the game services be terminated, all the items stored in the inventory would disappear, effectively leaving players empty-handed.
This dilemma leaves players unable to recover the time and financial investments made in their virtual collections, a common concern within the gaming community. The issue has grown into a contentious subject across gaming forums, underscoring the critical demand for early adopter groups to embrace Web3 as a new future.
At Supervillain Labs, our mission is to develop captivating games that not only entertain but also offer substantial value to our players. Pursuant to this objective, we are exploring an initiative aimed at transforming traditional game inventories through the integration of Web3 technologies.
What would it be like to create a game inventory with Web3 technology?
So, we focused more on the idea of managing inventories and game items through blockchain technology. This approach can ensure the permanence of inventories and items. Because inventories and their assets are recorded on the blockchain, users’ items and assets can be securely protected.
Furthermore, players have the ability to claim ownership of their items. By transparently disclosing the origin and characteristics of items via the blockchain, it becomes feasible to ensure the reliability and integrity of data.
Despite these innovative concepts, representing the complex relationships among gaming items within smart contracts poses a real-world challenge. Fortunately, we have technical solutions at our disposal to tackle this issue. By leveraging Aptos’s Digital Asset Standard (Tokens as Objects) and the Move language, we are able to accurately capture the complexity and dynamics of relationships between game items.
The illustration highlights the connection between a Web3 Inventory and items portrayed within Web3. For instance, a Web3-based Inventory is assigned a blockchain address of 0xA. Items belonging to this inventory, such as NFTs, hold distinct addresses like 0xB and 0xC. An essential aspect to observe is the relationship of ownership.
By focusing on mapping these ownership connections via the Digital Asset Standard, we can straightforwardly depict the intricate data dependencies that exist among gaming items in the traditional gaming realm we play.
This is the core motivation for launching “Supervillain Inventory.”
This system instantly awards users with an inventory token, fashioned as a Token Object, upon their entry into a game. While this token is kept in the user’s wallet, its management is retained by the game company. Additionally, any gaming items that users gather during the gameplay are promptly associated with their Inventory.
Our aim is to offer a seamless experience, ensuring the establishment of the Inventory and the procurement of items are smoothly executed within the technical framework. This approach removes the necessity for users to directly connect their wallets or deal with transaction fees, especially before they fully understand blockchain technology. The provided illustration showcases how NFT items, created via the SuperVillain Suitability Test, are displayed on the Aptos Explorer and the web.
This innovative system instantly provides users with an inventory token, crafted as a Token Object, right when they begin playing a game.
Let’s examine an example of this inventory token from our previous ‘Supervillain Suitability Test’, as illustrated in the image below.
This token is stored in an address linked to the user’s social account (e.g., Google) and remains managed by the game company. This method guarantees transparent ownership through on-chain data and delivers a seamless gaming experience, allowing players to accumulate assets in their ‘Inventory’ over the course of their adventure.
Given our goal of ‘making gaming accessible to everyone, regardless of their understanding of blockchain technology’, it naturally follows that the creation of Inventory and acquisition of items occurs seamlessly from the moment of initial game entry, without the need for users to connect their wallets or pay blockchain transaction fees.
Then, what about the ownership?
As previously outlined, it’s crucial to note that our process unfolded without the need for separate wallet connections or the payment of transaction fees to onboard the masses.
This strategy was crafted to offer a frictionless experience for players new to the web3 environment, with the goal of seamlessly integrating the realms of Web2 and Web3.
Consequently, in the absence of a wallet connection, the initial ownership of items in the ‘Supervillain Inventory’ was maintained by the service provider, akin to a traditional gaming inventory system. Nonetheless, as shown below, users have the capability to effortlessly transfer ownership by connecting their wallets. Importantly, this transition occurs without imposing blockchain transaction fees on the users within our system.
The asset import/export feature will soon be implemented in the system. Moreover, we will be making our users enjoy the benefit of gas-less exports, during the SuperVillain Suitability Test Campaign.
We are also excited to make this steps even frictionless with the upcoming passkey idea from Aptos network — but most important thing, we will be finding the best approach that gamers would love.
The next big thing is coming..
We aim to enhance the gaming experience for our community by merging the rich lore of gameplay with the technical possibilities offered by the web3 domain. The inception of the ‘Supervillain Inventory’ marks the initial stride in realizing our vision.
Now the real fun begins, who’s ready?
