Battle Lab

[alexgetty]

Name: Battle Lab

Battle Lab is a trading and crafting game that blends elements from Roguelikes, RTSs, and MMORPGs. Play across multiple single and multiplayer game modes to train your genetically modified specimens, collect and build unique and powerful gear, compete in challenges to win prizes, and support real non-profit organizations through play.

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Purpose:

The purpose of this district is to give complete control over the game’s platform to the community. As the game is developed, more and more creative control will be handed over to the community.

Battle Lab’s district will allow the community of players and designers to curate community content for the game and allocate revenue generated from transaction fees. Participants can submit, challenge, and vote on new content to the game via a curation market. They are responsible for maintaining the quality of artwork and balance in gameplay stats for all new items added to the game. Members will also be able to decide what non-profits players can support via gameplay, as well as the percentage of marketplace fees that go to those organizations or to the district’s own fund.

The long-term goal of this project is much bigger than a single game: It is to create a platform where players, artists, and developers can come together to build awesome interoperable games. Just like people can submit new content for Battle Lab, they will be able to propose new game modes, experiences, or even launch entirely new games by forking the platform. Content and items can be shared between games to create a strong ecosystem and a diverse but interconnected experience for players.

Description:

In Battle Lab, you play as employee at Battle Corp, a weapons testing facility that has developed technology that allows them to dynamically edit DNA in living specimens, changing their appearance and abilities and increasing their ability to adapt to different combat situations. Your job is to train these specimens, design new gear and mutations to support them in combat, and discover new materials and resources to aid you in your mission.

The foundation of our free-to-play model is that all items in the game can be obtained through gameplay. If players want a certain item, they have to find it, craft it, or buy it from other players. They can’t buy a competitive advantage. Too many blockchain games, and collectable games in general require players to spend lots of money to get enough content to play and be competitive. We're going to prove that isn't necessary to make a financially successful game.

Game Mechanics

• Procedurally generated maps, characters and items provides a unique experience each time you play.
• Turn-based gameplay on hex-tile maps with strategic combat.
• Permadeath means you can loose your stuff if you die. Don’t die.
• Mutations allow you to customize the appearance and abilities of your characters.
• Collect unique gear and items like weapons, armor, power-ups, or components.
• Craft unique items by following existing recipes or experimenting and discovering new recipes.
• Create blueprints of your unique characters and gear in order to create new copies if your originals are destroyed. Sell your blueprints on the marketplace and make a profit every time someone else uses them.

Game Modes

Game modes will be developed and released one at a time in the order listed here.

Test Chambers: A Roguelike single-player campaign where you start with a randomized specimen in a procedurally generated map. The choices you make throughout the run will determine the unique combination of attributes and skills your character develops. Beating this game mode converts the specimen and any gear it’s carrying into unique non-fungible tokens, allowing you to keep it to use in other game modes or sell it on the market.

The Colosseum: A collection of single-player and multiplayer games like seeded test chamber runs, capture the flag, king of the hill, control points, and more. Winners receive Battle Credits and rare artifacts as prizes.

The Labyrinth: A single-player exploration and crafting sandbox where players can hone their skills, build up a collection of unique mutations and gear, and find clues about the world they live in. A player must beat the first game mode or purchase a specimen from the market in order to play with in this mode.

Battle Infinitum: An MMORPG with small instantiated multiplayer battles that affect a universal game state. Players pick factions and battle for control of persistent territory in a massive universe.

Economic Model

The Battle Lab economy is designed to benefit players, curators and independent content creators. Battle Credits, the game’s ERC-20 token, is used to facilitate all transactions within the ecosystem. It is awarded to users for playing the game, participating in the curation process for new content, and successfully submitting new content to the registry.

Battle Credits can be used to purchase items in-game from NPC stores, buy entry into some special challenges or special area in a map, and to buy and sell specimens and other items in the marketplace. Credits can also be bought or sold with fiat or crypto. The plan is to use some kind of collateralized continuous token model with a bonding curve, but the details of this have not yet been defined.

When buying and selling items in the marketplace, the platform will take a small fee, a percentage of the total transaction price set by the district. Fees will be pooled and this fund is split between contributions to approved non-profit organizations, funneled back into airdrops for players, and captured by the district as revenue, which can then be used to reinvest in the platform via posting bounties, or extracted by district members as dividends.

Aside from transaction fees, there are numerous other sinks built into the game to maintain the circulation of Battle Credits. These sinks are integrated into game mechanics as to not feel arbitrary or forced. For example, players can use credits in-game to purchase gear or consumable items like medpacks or power-ups, pay NPCs to access special areas of the map or to transport themselves faster between areas of the world, buy battle passes for competitions, and much more.

We are also exploring the possibility of asking players to use a portion of their processing power to mine cryptocurrency while they play the game. Players must opt in, and are rewarded with more in-game currency drops. It’s not anticipated to be a substantial source of revenue, but it would help contribute to the district’s funding pool.

[Bradymck]

Whaaa!!! I love it! Please tell me this is in development!

[alexgetty]

Hey Brady, it's been a long time! Yes, I have been working on the concept, artwork, and a prototype web app for a few months. A small team here at Andculture Lab is gearing up to build a free, public demo which we are hoping to launch in March or April of this year. The demo will be pretty light weight as far as features and art go, but our hope is that we can use it to generate interest in an item pre-sale and kickstarter campaign to fund development of the full platform.

Let me know if you have any questions! This description is edited down quite a bit from my full vision for brevities sake, but there is a lot more to it.

[Bradymck]

I would like to see some more info about how you would like to use the district0x network and the ARagon entity if you won the vote. Would you be using our TCR designs to give the users a way to curate and submit characters, art, and changes to the game? Or possibly even donate a portion of game proceeds to an Aragon community pool that gamers can help decide on the direction and funding proposals for further development? Could create an amazing positive feedback loop

[Bradymck]

Possibly even use our d0xTasks app as a way to accept work proposals and have the community vote in Aragon to fund those tasks. The great thing is, most of this could be hidden from the gamers and developers would be the only ones who see it.

[alexgetty]

Right now I've been pretty heads down on ironing out the game mechanics and need to put more specific documentation around the functions and abilities of the district, but I see curation markets being utilized to evaluate new content submissions like characters, mutations, gear, etc as well as new game mods or entirely new campaigns or game modes. Content creators and game designers will stake in their submissions, then get a portion of the revenue collected from any of their content in-game.

The tasks app could absolutely be used like this. My hope is that artists can contribute to a game-designers new campaign by creating a cohesive set of artwork, or visa versa. Much of this stuff will definitely be hidden from players in order to streamline the user experience, but I'd also love to see a market emerge that allows players to request custom artwork for specific cards (re-skinning a gun to match your character's armor or something like that).

[Bradymck]

I really want to see a standardized game stats TCR where any ERC721 token could be submitted along with game stats. If it was a generic TCR design any game could implement easily I think many game devs could be empowered in a big way and open up use cases for any ERC721 token. Just something that has been on my mind a lot.

[alexgetty]

I've thought a lot about that too. I'd love to allow this platform to be used to manage any kind of card game, not just the specific one we're building, but the more standards, the less flexibility you have with how the properties of a specific card affect game mechanics. Depends on how much you want to abstract, I suppose.