Many game developers want to maximise their revenue from game development. Increasing game development revenue with blockchain with one new technique can create secondary marketplaces with non-fungible tokenised items in-game. These items can be wrapped in smart contracts where the original game developers continually retain the original royalties of the sale.

Will from Rektangular Studios joins me on the podcast to talk about their new game development platform Novellia which will open up new revenue streams for game developers on multiple different platforms. Developers will be able to create in-game non-fungible token items that players can use in-game but then sell to other players outside of the game environment to be used by other players in-game.

News

Listener Question

For my first listener question, I have to say it's one of the harder ones to answer as what will happen in the future isn't always clear but I do have an opinion.

Essentially what Gene is asking is what is the future of Cardano as a protocol and blockchain and the future of the ADA token.

In general, I can see the Cardano blockchain being used as a solution by companies, organisations and countries around the world to power various different aspects from a means of track and trace solutions around supply chains, to identify with solutions such as ATALA Prism and voting systems with Cardano's Governance solutions.

None of this actually relies on those companies or even Governments purchasing or using ADA. The company could simply create their own token and enable everyone to use that instead. Take the example of SingularityNet and its AGIX token. Nowhere will we see the need for ADA to fuel the transfer of the AGIX token. With the potential of Bable fees, we may also not see AGIX token holders ever needing to buy ADA to do their transfers but instead have an agreed rate for which AGIX tokens could be used for ADA token transfer.

There will always be the value in ADA at the protocol level, but the dApps that are built on top of the blockchain may not necessarily need ADA at all. Projects such as World Mobile Token, Sundae Swap and many others will be creating value in their own tokens and most likely using ADA to fund those projects.

If you look back to the Initial Coin Offering days back in 2017, projects were using Bitcoin and Ethereum to build up their own tokens. There is still plenty of Bitcoin and Ethereum around today.

IOG Present Mid Month Alonzo Update

The teams have successfully run the first smart contract on the Cardano testnet. Just to confirm everything is working as expected.

Mid month development update from the IOG team.

Bitcoin Miners Have Voted for Taproot Upgrade

Allows for lower transaction fees and higher levels of privacy. It allows for more complex transactions to be combined into one.

Bitcoin will eventually have the ability to perform smart contracts. It means that Bitcoin won't be just an asset and a store of value, or a means of transaction, it will be able to execute agreements between parties.

Read the full article from Decrypt to learn more about the Taproot upgrade.

Interview with Will from Rektangular Studios

Interview with Will from Rektangular Studios about their dev platform for game developers, Novellia

What tools are you building for developers to start building?

We created a marketplace anyone can build with. We created the first functioning multi-asset NFT standard, which's actively being developed by multiple NFT projects. We created a wallet viewer that supports multiple asset types and is easily extendable. We have a dev kit that developers can interface with to get all assets listed on Novella. Finally, we have a development kit where developers can get all assets in a person's wallet.

We are creating a token linter & a token minter to make it easy for devs to use the Novellia standard. We are creating a wallet for people to interface with and a data pipeline so that a player can use any wallet when ready, Yoroi, ADAlite, Daedalus, etc. We are developing a DEX / DAO / token swap platform like Openseas with smart contracts right now.

Increasing game development revenue with blockchain. In the future, these games will be able to integrate with a blockchain marketplace. For example, can I collect items in-game and then sell them afterwards on the marketplace?

Most of these games have their own in-game currency, I’m assuming that could be replaced with a native token on Cardano and be traded in and out for real ADA at some point, which then can be traded on a DEX/Exchange.

People could create their own native token to replace their in-game currency. They can bootstrap their currency tradable if they want by opening up a token pair in the store. They can trade for our NVLA token, which will be used as the governance token for the DEX, which they can trade for ADA / USD etc. 

The benefit here is that the developers will get residual income from players selling and trading items in the game, which means they have more funding to build on the existing game or develop the next project, and players will want to make more money in the games and get better items to play a better game.

That's right. They will monetise transactions and increasing game development revenue with blockchain via their in-game marketplace (which will be a lite version of our marketplace). If a player wants to stop playing their game, switch to another game, sell all their in-game items, they will get a portion of the sales for the person leaving the game.

We view it as a more humane microtransaction scheme. People hate microtransactions because they are exploitative, and you can’t do anything with them. We can’t stop game developers from making broken gaming economies.

It's bound to happen because it's difficult to balance an in-game economy when you are pretty much printing money infinitely. Players deserve to own what they get in-game and have the ability to sell it off when they feel fit.

Can this all be done without blockchain and Cardano? Why can’t developers just build a regular currency market place something like Second Life? What’s the benefit of going blockchain for this solution?

As developers, we are cautious not to have solutions looking for problems. Some aspects of the project would work in a centralized model. You can't actually own your video games, your in-game items, etc., in a centralized model. The server could go down at any point. In the past, we have seen that people sink thousands of dollars into a game, and developers stop supporting it.

Worse, developers stop supporting marketplaces that are still being developed. You saw that recently with the PSP marketplace almost being taken down, without warning, when developers were still making games for it. Some aspects of the project could be done in a centralized model. 

At the same time as Novellia is being developed, you’re also building Occulta Novellia. What is it?

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Some of the card artwork from Occulta Novellia

We are creating a surreal horror strategy game. Ok, that's a big word salad; what does that mean? We are creating a gameplay game mix of a normal trading card game mixed with the strategy and depth of a combat system like Divinity Original Sin. Each of your collectibles have different stats, and different moves, permanently tied to the cards.

They will have different abilities, some basic attacks, some ranged attacks. In addition, some will be able to apply terrain modifiers that can stack with your other creatures abilities.

You will have healers, and some creatures like the Ghost Rotakin will have unique abilities such as self-destruction. The universe is set in a dark horror universe that mixes Lovecraftian horror elements spaced out trippy elements like Alice in Wonderland. We have a whole universe planned out. You can see some of it out on our website, and you can read short stories attached to most of our NFTs. 

Is this a desktop game being built in Unity? What are people expecting to see, is there a similar game already that it can be compared to? I’m trying to paint a picture of what it is. Usually I’ll be watching game trailers to get a feel of the game.

Yes it’s being built in unity, but our SDK will support all major game development platforms. We are building the backbones of the game, the mod loading systems, the combat, the terrain system. I promise there will be more in the future, it’s just walls of code right now.

If you look at our NFTs, you will see the kind of quality and art style we are going for. That kind of quality is put into everything we make. It might take a bit longer than other games being developed, but we promise it will be worth the wait. Our goal is for an Alpha this year, with Beta next.

We will be sharing more in the future on our Discord, Reddit, and Twitter.

What challenges and hurdles are you working through now? Legal? Development? Smart Contracts?

We have had a lot of hurdles to jump through. We plan to be around a long time in the Cardano Space. That means we have to think carefully about the legality of what we are doing. The last thing we want to see our projects being taken down or sued because they aren't following regulation. This doesn't mean that we aren't huge advocates for privacy. We do everything we can to protect that. We would hate to see Cardano projects fought against in litigation. There is something called anti-money laundering (AML) laws in most countries.

If you accept Cryptocurrency in most countries, you have to follow these laws, which means normally getting certified in every country that you do business in, which can take years. The workaround is to work with a platform that handles it for you. We are using a payment processor that, to my knowledge, hasn't asked for anyone's identity that follows all proper regulations. Until smart contracts come out, our system is slightly slower, but we don't deal with the same issues many NFT projects have.

We have a successful automated, auditable marketplace that is legal, and anyone can purchase our NFTs (and in the future other projects NFTs from). We have references of the purchases stored so we can resolve any customer service issues if any arise. Now our developers are all active in the Plutus pioneer program. We plan to have smart contracts out asap.

Smart contracts legally make everyone's lives easier - at least for now. 

There is a project catalyst proposal that I saw in regards to Novellia. I also saw one for another platform called PlayerMint… whats the difference between the two.

They are a cool project, we have chatted with their lead some, but we are designing in different areas. They are making a way for current games to have NFTs attached to them, which can be then used for purchasing other player made items, in-game.

They want to take the metaverse concept to the blockchain. We are making a framework for game developers to launch their products and integrate their own NFTs into it. Ares project is really about enabling players to own their items and video games by encouraging developers to build with smart contracts. 

What’s next for the project, when can people expect to see things and how can people get involved and support the project?

We are working tirelessly on our game. We plan to have a working game as soon as possible. For customer-facing products, the next big overhaul will be a wallet-like Metamask that can be used on any website and a DEX / NFT swap overhaul to our current store.

For developers, we are building a lot of cool tools. Besides them being able to see what NFTs someone owns, they will link accounts to wallets, verify payments, validate transactions, etc.

• https://app.rektangularstudios.com/marketplace/items
• https://rektangularstudios.com/
• https://discord.com/invite/S8xqvWzf
• https://www.reddit.com/r/OccultaNovellia/
• https://rektangularstudios.com/discordinvite

Also check out the interview we did with PlayerMint about tokenising and rewarding gamers for playing various games.