GameSalad + The Legend of Eros - Web3 and a mini-game metaverse.

adent42

If you've been paying attention to @gamesalad tags on twitter, you might have seen:

https://twitter.com/LegendOfEros/status/1582404860606939144 

So on to what this is all about?

Legend of Eros is going to be a story based RPG style game "metaverse". The idea is that a joint GameSalad & LoE team will be building a series of RPG style story based mini-games to tell the story of the Legend of Eros:

https://legendoferos.com/

The games can only be played by holders of the Legend of Eros NFTs. There will be 6000 character NFTs created for this project.

Players will play to earn in-game items which will take the form of NFTs and Tokens (also known as P2E). These items and tokens work a lot like In-App Purchase items in a traditional game, but the player has ownership over the asset and can keep, sell, or lend them it as they wish.

For those of you who know about this stuff: Legend of Eros NFTs will be on Arbitrum One and the games will likely run on Arbitrum Nova. Arbitrum is a Ethereum Layer-2 network, which basically means it lets you deal in ETH (ethereum) but with cheaper transaction fees.

So what does this mean for you?

1)  Community Growth. Sometime in 2023 (maybe sooner), we'll be getting an influx of community members. So they'll be looking up to you elders for help and guidance.

2) Opportunity. We haven't worked out all of the mechanics yet, but we're trying to work out how creators will be rewarded for contributing to the community and the expansion of Legend of Eros. We'll also be looking for GameSalad game designers to work with to build games for the Legend of Eros. So DM me with your rates and some sample games if you want to help build this epic world!

We're also trying to think of other ways for community contributors to benefit from contributing games to LoE. Everything from cross-promotion of your mobile games to allowing you to monetize your games directly with LoEs eventual in-game currency.

4) Free NFTs!  We're going to give away some free Legend of Eros NFTs to the GameSalad community, fill out this survey to be considered:

https://forms.gle/AauE1ze3an86S5vSA

This particular pool of NFTs is only available to paying GameSalad customers or long time members of the GameSalad community, just in case someone come this post via twitter or something and decides it's a loophole to get on a whitelist. We'll only allow for address per user.

Finally, I'll put a quick web3 primer for everyone who is new to all this in the next post.

adent42

Web3 Primer (with slightly less than accurate analogy-based definitions to help people get up to speed).

Blockchain - a distributed (not on one computer) database of transactions. Can be used to track everything from financial transactions to turns in a game.

Crypto - short-hand for crypto currency, this is the financial part of the blockchain. Each blockchain has a primary currency (Bitcoin, Etheruem, etc). Bitcoin is really popular as a way to save or send money. Ethereum is really popular because it allows for smart contracts, which makes things like NFTs possible.

Smart contracts - Programs that can run on the distributed servers hosting the blockchain. The programs can do anything from recording records of ownership, handling complex financial transactions, or recording game turns. The servers get paid to run the smart contract and a transaction is only finalized when enough servers agree on the results of running the code. Transaction fees are usually paid by the user or player.

L2 Blockchain - Blockchains can be expensive to work with. Recording transactions or running smart contracts pay the various servers that host the blockchain in cryptocurrency. Level 2 Blockchains let you perform transactions much more cheaply and then transfer the results to the main blockchain later. For instance, a game might require hundreds of transactions for a single game session. On the main blockchain that could cost the equivalent of $1 a transaction, so playing the game could cost $100. On a L2 blockchain, the same traction might only cost $0.001, so the same game session would only cost $0.10. Arbitrum is one such L2 blockchain and where the Legend of Eros project is running.

NFTs - digital assets. They are a combination of a smart contract that handles tracking records of ownership over the digital assets and a pointer to an actual asset like an image. Beyond simple "ownership of a jpeg", you can also use NFT as a membership token to a walled garden community or a ticket that can be traded in for other rewards, or simply an achievement marker. Usually NFTs contain pointers to a metadata file that points to the image and holds information describing the NFT.  Some NFTs even hold things like RPG style game stats.

Mint - what it's called when NFT ownership is recorded on the blockchain for the first time.

Whitelist - a list of address that will be allowed to buy the NFTs early before the general public (or sometimes a list of people that will get the NFTs for free).

Airdrop - When a NFT is minted and placed into your wallet without you doing anything (usually for free).

Web3

• Technical answer: An interface that lets you interact with the blockchain from your browser.
• PR answer: The next iteration of the web that focuses on distributed computation and records of ownership. A “better” version of the web where big companies don’t have ownership over user data or services.

P2E

• Play-to-earn gaming. Games that allow users to earn some form in-game assets that may have monetary value outside the game. The assets could either be used to further gameplay or sold to other players who want to buy advancement in the game.
• Think of gold, gems, or cards you earn in a traditional game, but with real ownership of the item. The outside value gives users freedom to trade for different game items, help their friends level up more quickly, or sell them to new players to advance them more quickly. The external market value provides an additional incentive for users to play games and some smart contracts can add things like royalties so that the game creator can make a cut off every transaction. Aside from having fun playing the game, everyone works to make the game more popular so there's more demand for these in-game items, making them more valuable.
• FYI, this is a very tricky thing to build on your own, correctly. It's very easy to build a game that gives out so much that the value of the assets lower in value. So it's good to partner with someone else when you're just getting your start.

Web3 Games

• Games where the main game mechanics are run in a smart contract. Usually turn-based, they require players to run a smart contract to see the results of a game turn. The contract then records results of the gameplay on a blockchain.

Web3 enabled games

• What we’ll be doing at first, web2 (normal HTML5 games) that are web3 enabled. These games are more traditional games, but integrate NFTs and other web3 mechanics. So a “normal” GameSalad game could have web3 free gameplay happening in the engine, but take advantage of web3 components like NFTs as user avatars or contracts just to sell IAP items.

If I see any questions in this thread, I’ll make edits to this post to clarify things.

adent42

We posted a thread for something we worked on over the holidays as part of this effort. As part of our 12 Days of GameSalad card, we added some web3 functionality.

Learn more here:

https://twitter.com/gamesalad/status/1609287101719224320