Near Space

Inspiration

The project was heavily inspired by Eve Online, the game with one of the most complex economics and strongest communities in the entire game industry. We believe that blockchain mechanics are a good fit for social role-playing games, so we decided to put it all together.

What it does

In this version of the game, we focused on launching the tournament mode first. In this mode, players compete on a closed part of the galaxy which changes between the tournaments. The aim is to gather resources on asteroids, buy artifacts and invade planets. There are 5 planets on the map, and the tournament will be finished when all of them will be seized. This could take from 2 hours to several days, depending on the number of players fighting for the planet. This way the game utilized strategic and social components. Joining a clan is important in order to have more chances to win.

The following blockchain mechanics are used:

You can bring any NFT into the game and put it on the ship as cosmetics NFTs boost players’ abilities based on NFT rarity
Every tournament has a fund of custom Space tokens that distributes between the winners that conquered the planets. These tokens can be used to improve NFTs' abilities.
You can play alone or as a clan. The clan is the smart contract that has the mechanic of distribution of the prize Space tokens. It could be done by the DAO principles, or just be equal redistribution with the ability to kick members who didn’t contribute to the clan through the voting.

How we built it

We have created Unity3D Near Toolkit – the plugin which allows game developers to connect their game to Near Blockchain and used it to develop our game. Also, we have integrated NPunks into the game using Metaseed module-based smart contracts.

Challenges we ran into

It happens that our Toolkit wasn’t ready to be used in the server-based games, so we needed to modify it in real-time to fit the game requirements, which in the end helped us to develop two projects simultaneously.

Also, it was quite hard to stop ourselves from putting all the game mechanics on the blockchain, because as crypto enthusiasts we want games to be fully decentralized. But it’s technically hard due to the action nature of our game, so we tried to maintain the necessary balance between the server and blockchain sides.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We faced the fact that it’s hard to integrate blockchain and NFTs in the Unity3D game engine, so developed the plugin which helps to do it effortlessly.

Also, it is a bit of a challenge for a game developer to write smart contracts, so we created a moduled-based architecture that allows putting a game logic on the blockchain by using pre-written factory contracts without the need for scripting their own contracts on Rust.

What we learned

We have understood what the main problem of play-to-earn games and blockchain games in general, is that the games are not fun to play. You could attract some initial players using on-chain instruments such as NFT drops, token launches, etc., but if the game is not playable it will die in a couple of weeks. So we decided to create an environment where the community could create quests, events and have fun, thus improving replayability.

What's next for Near Space

The next step is to organize a couple of tournaments among the Near community members and fundraise to start building the open-world part of the game.