PolyWars | Cross-Parachain P2E Game on Polkadot

PolyWars is a Multi-Blockchain Play-to-Earn MMO Game where players compete with NFT battleships to loot RESS, level up their planet's mining and mint the rarest battleship.

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Inspiration

PolyWars is inspired by the 2000's text-based browser games, which proved that simplicity isn't an obstacle when it comes to an engaging game. It felt only natural to combine those game dynamics with NFTs and ERC20 Tokens and build a fun and engaging, but also truly unstoppable game, with multi-blockchain at heart.

What it does

PolyWars is a simple browser game in retro-style, fully governed by multiple smart contracts written in Solidity, where players build NFT battleships to compete with other players, to loot $RESS (the in-game ERC20 token) and level up their planets' mining.

The RESS token can be created only by playing the game. Planets mine RESS, which can be looted by other players, or secured to be transferred to a wallet as an ERC20 token. Ships can be minted as ERC721 NFTs by burning RESS, and are assigned random attributes, determining their overall attack, defence, rarity, and appearance.

The game features procedurally generated artwork (planets, ships), and our own open-source NFT marketplace.

Besides some other networks, PolyWars is active on the following parachain testnets:

  • Moonbase Alpha (Moonbeam/Moonriver testnet)
  • Shibuya (Astar/Shiden testnet)
  • Arctic (ICE/SNOW testnet)

Just switch your wallet to your preferred network, and visit the PolyWars game, or get ready in minutes using our "getting started" guide.

How we built it

PolyWars is built with two main principles in mind:

  • 100% on-chain - whereas most other games are rather "blockchain-enabled", our servers only aggregate data from the blockchain. Every action is carried out by the user's wallet only, interacting with the smart contracts directly.
  • Multi-chain from the ground up - all of our infrastructure is easily scalable and adaptable to new networks, and we integrate new blockchains on a regular basis.

Challenges we ran into

Luckily, we're already pros in integrating heterogeneous EVM chains into our ecosystem ;)

  • Public RPCs on Moonbase Alpha not supporting 'eth_getLogs' posed a difficulty, since our backend heavily relies on event data from the blockchain, which we were able to overcome using nodes by Blast API.
  • Acala's EVM+ approach posed some challenges, most of which we were able to overcome and build a working proof-of-concept, but couldn't get a few vital contract calls working to launch the full Beta. We hope we can work together with the team in the future, to bring PolyWars to Acala soon too.

Aside from technical challenges, we've been struggling to reach gamer communities on Polkadot, to build a user base for our Beta test. It's hard to cut through the noise with limited funds and manpower, and we'd appreciate any help connecting us with potential players in the ecosystem.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We've built a robust and flexible infrastructure to support multiple chains, which enables us to integrate new networks in less than a day in most cases.
  • The team has already mastered a mainnet launch together (Polygon), with a lot of learnings and subsequent improvements we've applied to both the gameplay and our infrastructure.
  • Our extensive documentation covers every aspect of the game, and our "getting started" guide gets you ready to play in minutes.

What we learned

  • how important it is to foster and grow your community, and to do proper Marketing - and how hard that turns out to be without any budget and limited manpower.
  • the importance of focusing on security and performance, being able to scale our infrastructure as our user base grows, and to identify potential bottlenecks early on.

In the end though, it's not the tech you build that makes your project successful, it's the community you grow while doing so. We at PolyWars love our players ♥

What's next for PolyWars

  • Find the right partners to support us making our multi-chain vision come true, and launch PolyWars on Polkadot successfully together.
  • Expand PolyWars to other EVM-compatible parachains on Polkadot and Kusama (Acala, Clover, Darwinia, ...).
  • Explore cross-chain bridging between Polkadot/Kusama parachains, and the Moonbeam XC-20 standard for cross-parachain assets.
  • Extend the gameplay further (Commander NFTs and their power-ups, shields, lasers, ...) and introduce Staking for $RESS.
  • Explore the available exchanges and marketplaces in the Polkadot ecosystem, and find suitable DEXs which support testnet to complete our Polkadot showcase ($RESS trading can be tested on Moonbase Alpha only currently).

Check out the further Roadmap and join us on Discord and Twitter to stay up-to-date!

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