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Deadfellas, a leading zombie-themed Ethereum NFT project, is developing a digital trading card game (TCG) inspired by Blizzard’s Hearthstone, Street Fighter, and the creators’ favorite anime shows.
DFZ Labs will begin selling digital boxes of in-game cards on Friday. Collectors of the Deadfellas NFT can create these vaults starting today, with general access opening to the public on Sunday. The Card Vault will be minted as Ethereum NFTs, while the cards within will be revealed on an as-yet-unannounced Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible chain.
While the sale comes ahead of the start of active code development on the game in October, the team has been working on the project behind closed doors for over a year.
“We have been in mechanics on pen and paper for a year,” Psychthe pseudonymous director and co-founder of Deadfellas told Decrypt. “So while this is a very important step, in terms of concept validation, we’re starting actual coded development in October.”
Codenamed RIP TCG, the PC and mobile game is still in its early stages – but the team is clear that it wants the card-battling experience to play a key role in the development of the Deadfellas universe.
“This will be the main delivery tool for Vidya.” Psych explained. “The way it comes to market is that we can create a lot of highly customized short-form content around particular characters.”
Syke said the game will feature brief descriptions of individual characters and groups native to the cartoonish, undead-themed Deadfellows universe. Deadfellas aims to avoid complex premise and instead focus on committed character exploration.
How’d it go?
DFZ Labs is staying tight-lipped on specific details about how the game will run, feel, and look. But Psych shared that it’s a card-battler similar to Hearthstone and Marvel Snap, which also has the “cinematic feel” of Street Fighter.
He explained that once you play, your cards will come to life, and turn into physical characters instead of lifeless cards lying on a virtual table.
Are you ready for a TCG that isn’t a 2D tabletop simulation? We are creating a dark, fast, brutal and cinematic 3D title with the AAA developer team. Providing gamers with something that is just the right amount of different from anything they have played before. #RIPTCGs
– PSYCH (@psych_nft) 6 September 2023
“We’re not a TCG in the fact that it’s like a tabletop, cards-on-a-table experience,” Sykes explained. “The card format is just a capsule. It’s just a square that’s traditionally flat, you know? But the way we’re putting these cards together and the different characters within them, they’re so vibrant “
Deadfellas games aim to have a short gameplay loop of approximately 10 minutes per game. It takes inspiration from Marvel Snap which has 3-minute games – and has recently become a pioneer of the genre – but offers a little more time for potentially complex, strategic battles.
blockchain supported
Instead of focusing on Web3-native concepts like play-to-earn token rewards, DFZ Labs plans to provide users with a free-to-play experience with blockchain technology in the background.
“This is not being made as a ‘Web3 game,’” says CEO and co-founder of pseudonymous Deadfellas betty explained, “It’s being built as a really, really well-developed game that’s supposed to be very, very fun, very addictive. And the interaction with the blockchain technology will be much more siled and seamless.”
In other words, it is not designed to be crypto-forward; The prevailing goal is to create the best-possible user experience, but blockchain can help with this in a few ways. According to a blog post, one example of this is the “Deep On-Chain XP” system. Every card you collect in the game will be an NFT with its entire history recorded on the blockchain.
“You can pick up a card off the street that someone is selling that has seen a lot of tournament wins over three years and it has eliminated a lot of cards,” Syke told Decrypt. “It’s also about connecting those data points to unique unlocks. The fact that it’s not just a card on the table means we can add meaningful visual differences to what you see in the match.”
road ahead
In October, the game will enter development with the support of the professional services team of Unity, the company behind the popular video game engine and development platform of the same name. The aim is to have an “early alpha” product ready for release by the first quarter of 2024, with a beta version following in 2025.
Throughout this period, the team will be creating a series of development diaries called Road to RIP. They’ll lead the team’s path as they work to bring the game to life – and try to shake up the card-battler genre in the process.
“Deadfellas as a brand has always been a supporter of culture and creativity,” Betty told Decrypt. “We see this as something that’s disrupting the gaming ecosystem – in terms of really merging different industries and modalities and all kinds of different contexts into each other – creating completely new experiences in the TCG format. For. It’s really exciting.”
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Source: decrypt.co