Dressing Up in Digital
Conceiving the vast Bitizen wardrobe
Greetings, Guildmates!
After launching the first version of the Portal, I thought this might be a nice time for another peep into the inner workings of Bitizens, an upcoming blockchain game for the digital you on BitGuild. On the last post I mentioned mining and the key part that it plays within the game’s economy and its core loop. This time we’ll be focusing on what those items can potentially mean for you and your digital bits.
Across a vast number of companies and industries, you’ll often hear this phrase:
“Content is King”
While I mostly consider this to be true, it’s vague when you’re looking at it on paper. I could put 20 pounds of tofu on a plate and call it content; doesn’t mean I’d eat it. So let’s delve a little deeper into how it applies to the life of the digital Bitizen, and perhaps along the way we’ll find some sauce for all that tofu.
First, to give this phrase some context for our game, we’ll need to evaluate a few components that give content meaning in any game:
Quality of the Content
This is how I’d rate the item visually. Are the colors effective? Is it detailed enough? Are the animations believable? Does the item feel cool? I think this is an important thing for us to stay true to, especially when measured against games as a whole.
When we approach the art in Bitizens, the standard that we establish must suit our needs, please the eye, and provide the kind of stimulation that we’ve always fought hard to integrate into any game we’ve worked on. The trick here is finding the right balance. When gameplay is concerned there’s really only so much you can do before you’re beating a dead horse.
Another component to quality lies with our audience as well. Standards are also impossible to place when you’ve no idea who you’re catering to. The content has to be relevant to the audience, and though it would be pretty tricky to wear a lambo, a space suit or two isn’t out of the question.
Quantity of the Content
This doesn’t always mean that dumping as much as we can in one go is the way to do it. When we look at player consumption rates as well as opportunistic appeal, there’s a definite balance that we’re looking to strike between what’s available on release and what the new content cadence is thereafter.
This also speaks to the variety of the content as well. There should be enough stuff that would give all players the feeling that they have access to a very diverse set of items. These items will span multiple eras, multiple cultures, all ranging from the super practical, such as denim jeans, all the way through to the fantastic, including carnival de venise styled outfits or high-tech robotic suits. We’ll even get some community participation along the way.
How the Content interacts with the game mechanics
This, in my opinion, is the most critical of the three. Because our Bitizens are avatars, our inherent challenge is to make the items and clothes they’re wearing appealing in a way that makes sense. Doing that is going to take more than creating some obscure historical lore for a cotton T-shirt. We’re actually implementing unique stats as well as clothing with different rarities so that there exists some function that contributes to the item’s intrinsic values.
Since we grew up on games where getting “phat lewt” was key in progressing, incorporating rarities into our item roster was a very natural thing to do. Some of these items will even have very special properties such as giving our players the ability to decrease mining time, or increase chances of finding higher rarity items.
Other Challenging Choices
When discussing the game in its earliest concepts, there was a debate about the best way to present the avatars.
I’ve worked on both 2D and 3D games throughout my career, so the idea of making a full 2D game, though interesting, may have limited our flexibility in the long run. The ability to scale with new tech and new platforms is an important part of the vision. This also provides other developers with additional flexibility if they decided to incorporate our avatars into their games.
AR Bitizens casually hanging out on a tabletop maybe? How about a world of Bitizens you can explore in VR? Interesting thing about working on smart contracts: planning for the addition of features that encompass a wide breadth of possibilities in these games is very important so we don’t allow ourselves to get pigeonholed into something that may limit us in the future, because a smart contract is just that, a contract.
And so, I’m pleased to say that we are building the Bitizens, all of their items, and even Dril’rBot in full 3D!
Content, as it is in many other mediums, is important, some of which would refer to it as “king”. It’s important to us as well, right up there with PLAT in fact. So let’s build all this stuff out for Bitizens just the way we want it, as cool as we can get it, while we maintain a clear and broad vision for the future.
That’s all for today’s post! As always, feel free to take a look at our previous posts here. As we continue to ramp up on development, these posts will include more UI, new concepts, and models we’re working on. Stay tuned!
-Jason Millena, Head of Product & Design at BitGuild
BitGuild’s mission is to revolutionize the global gaming industry by creating a platform for a brand new class of games that live on the blockchain. Blockchain games completely redefine the relationship between players and developers by facilitating full and true ownership of in-game assets, cheap & safe item trading, cross-game compatibility of items & currency, and more.
