Meet one of the team behind BlockchainRPG

I recently got to chat to Dr Charles about his project and what it entails so if your looking for new game that wants to keep improving check what he has to say ..

Hey hey

Hello there

How's things?

Going well so far. Balancing work life and side passions is a bit tough haha What about you?

Chilling out watching some Netflix . Do much today?

Working on hiring some more people for my day job and then spent some time sorting and labelling some more cactus seed crosses I have from my garden and some other cactus distributors. Plus a couple minor bug fixes for BRPG of course.

What project do you want to cover tonight?

We can focus on BlockchainRPG if you'd like. I think my team would appreciate that. Maybe sometime in the future we can revisit my cactus project.

Of course . How do you your crypto journey start?

I actually originally found bitcoin in late 2010/early 2011 as a college student and the entrepreneur side of my brain couldn't let me stop thinking about potential use cases for blockchain tech. fast forward 11/12 years and here we are.

Oh wow so your in here a while how did you come across NFTs?

I think maybe just the natural progression of the crypto rabbit hole I found myself traveling down as I've donated thousands of sweat equity hours to different projects over the years. Started with NFTs on ETH and BSC but found WAX and fell in love with the chain, functions, and community.

Tell us about your project?

Id love to. So BlockchainRPG is still in a fairly nascent stage but growing quickly with our small but fairly active dev team. Right now players can hunt in two different biomes to find NFT gear and token resource drops along with the ability to craft their own NFTs in-game. A major focus for us right now is the integration and application of more game theory to drive higher player retention and engagement rates with our recent change to NFT character card requirements

What did you change about the characters?

Originally there were no barriers to entry to gameplay which, of course, led to system abusers trying to take advantage of free to play/play to earn configuration. We recently made a change to require players to own one of the 6 character NFT cards we have to access gameplay functions

So with these players they scavenge around I am guessing or is it mission led?

Right now it is like an instant mission, with a reward after each hunt. a "clicker game" as some refer to them but we are working on developing the more interactive gameplay side of things each hunting biome has different drops, whether it be gear or resources . Forest biome is the hardest and should be avoided by new players without gear. The swamplands is kind of the entry level area

Oh cool so there is work on going on game play can you say anything?

Yes so there are a couple different aspects we are focusing on right now. Over the last few weeks, we have been working towards bug fixes, code clean-up/optimization, and several other backend items. (non player facing) Some of the upcoming gameplay improvements (player facing) will be around a totally new NFT crafting and upgrade system, community driven social items like Guilds, competition leaderboards and NFT stickers (both from the team and community created stickers), and ultimately a more interactive battle experience with lore to create an immersive play environment for our adventurers. I am personally fascinated by things like Dr. Richard A. Bartle's Taxonomy of Player Types and how we can modify/apply these ideas to NFT gaming. I think our approach of building a MVP (minimum viable product) for the game and launching it to our community before ever attempting to raise funds has helped us grow a core user base and develop a much stronger long term strategy without going for a quick cash grab.

You said is was play to earn what can the players earn?

Play to earn/play to own/play to win are terms that we can have entire discussions around in their own rights but right now there are a number of different equipment, armour, and weapon NFTs that players can find/craft from their hunting efforts in Aurum (our mainland for adventurers).

Additionally, all in-game resources from the HPPOTS, to SLIME, GOLD, SHELLS, etc. are all tokenized and tradable on their own Alcor markets. Anything players can find in-game has a correlating market on Alcor (for resources) or a market on atomic/nefty/nfthive for the FNTS

Oh cool what was the first NFT you dropped for the project?

The very first NFT dropped was the Founders Milo pack which was dropped in November of 2021 https://www.blockchainrpg.io/2021/11/14/founders-pack-drop/

At the time, this pack did nothing but provide cosmetic functions in the game and players only bought the packs if they wanted to directly support the dev team and luckily the WAX community provided some great feedback and motivation for us to continue doing what we are doing.

So the community is quite active with the team?

Absolutely. We directly poll our discord community, and more recently the in-game chat box, for suggestions, feedback, improvements, etc. It has been a great help in overall design and direction of our game.

How many NFTs have you dropped since?

We had 3 variations of the Milo character. The original Founders Milo, The Thankful Milo (Thanksgiving event), and the Festive Milo (December Holiday Event). Those were our only drops, all of which fairly small, for the first 6 months of beta testing.

The only other pack offering has been the current on-going Character NFT Starter packs which provide players a chance of 1 of 5 new character NFTs.

Our team decided at the beginning that we never wanted to directly sell weapons, armour, or other game breaking items that players could purchase to succeed faster in our RPG realm (effectively pay to win). Players must hunt to gather resources to craft NFTs, trade other players to get them, or simply have the RNG luck on their side and get some from hunting drops.

What has been your favourite NFT in the project?

In terms of favourite NFT, I am still rocking a Rare Founders Milo haha

Lol . What process of making your NFT?

So Juan Marcos is our main illustrator, located out of South America. I recently assisted him in launching his own NFT collection for some of his amazing work outside of our BRPG team. As a team we get together every week on a conference call through discord, share our screen and hash out ideas, issues, suggestions, etc.

We will come up with a working idea/model and then work with Juan to help bring those ideas to life in an illustrated NFT form

What programs does Juan use to make the NFT?

Every illustration is hand drawn on a Huion H640P tablet that Juan uses (as uses well) to bring our ideas to life. We will save all of our working files in a shared drive and bring over to the WAX contract to build the schemas/templates as needed

Have you space in the project for collabs?

Absolutely, we are interested in developing organic, non-paid relationships with other projects across the WAX ecosystem. So far I have worked most closely with the awesome team over at Metropolis-Origins to host some weekly collab events for their free to play tournaments where players can win a mix of BRPG and Metropolis-Origins NFTs. Id love to develop this avenue for collaborations even further as we continue to grow our community and our game.

Who would be your dream collab?

Oooohhh great question and I am honestly not sure as there are collabs that can drive huge exposure and player growth vs those that are just with a solid project.

Personally, I am driven by great teams with great visions. People and projects who have a story to tell and a passion behind their mission. I think that is one of the things that first really attracted me to reach out to the Metropolis-Origins team and try to work with them. They have an all-star cast without a doubt.

Off the top of my head, I think the MillionOnMars team would fit the bill for me personally, in terms of a great team, with a great vision, and a forward thinking mentality. Its also a plus that they have a huge player base although there is not much crossover between player communities just yet lol

Do you have a favourite artist on wax

I am honestly not sure about a favorite just yet but I like weird things haha I am a big fan of odd animations like those from bohnart and the boneheads collection BreadleyToast, brokendollz, and one day I wish I personally had pen skills like penartdborjs its really tough to nail down just one but id throw Juan Marcos from our team in that realm as well.

I've started creating kind of fan art out of my cactus NFT collection for some of these artists because I find them inspiring.

What's been the best part of doing the project?

Honestly, my favourite part about the project so far is the team we have working to bring the game to life. I think we have a great team dynamic with people from varying backgrounds which has helped contribute to our current success and will continue to do so in the future the ability to meet and work with other like-minded and passionate people in the wax community. I have worked within several different blockchain sub-communities on different projects over the last 10+ years and WAX is definitely the most unique and ultimately motivating for me so far.

Has the team meet up in real life?

While we meet every week, sometimes multiple times a week, I haven't had the pleasure of meeting all of our teammates in person yet so we have been using team stickers in the meantime.

Like this is me for example haha

What been the hardest part?

Helping bootstrap a game without funding haha I am comfortable with building, implementing, auditing, modifying and redeploying business plans/structures without issue but often times that requires capital.

I can say that has been the hardest part but also the most motivating and I think it helps drive creative thinking when you can't just throw money at issues to make them go away.

A small business mentality for being effective and efficient without wasting time or money is key for us.

What do you like to do to unwind?

I am a big fan of reading classic science fiction books, I am a big gamer myself. mostly MMORPG, FPS games right now but changes in time. Put Starcraft or or Age of the Empires in front of me and you'll lose me for a few hours/days haha and I cant forget about my cactus garden and my own art. Surprising how stress can melt away around beautiful plants for me.

Tell us something random about you?

Hmmm something random lol Well outside of donating time to my passion projects like BRPG and Cactus.Art, I own/manage a company that focuses on industrial equipment and warehouse solutions (forklifts, racking, automation, logistics, etc.) and I have been racking my brain for years on a way to introduce that extremely blue collar industry to the functionality of blockchain platforms which tends to be on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Once I find a way to bridge that gap, there will be no stopping the progression haha

Lol worked years in warehousing myself . Where is the best place to keep up with the project?

right now the best place would be our discord channel which anyone can join by going to https://discord.blockchainrpg.io

I am also fairly active on Twitter

https://twitter.com/BlockchainRPG?s=20&t=4S1CIRiqiFjfXen0uhZulg

and share most updates on Publish0x at https://www.publish0x.com/@DrCharles

Where can we buy your NFTs?

We currently have two primary collections - 'BlokchainRPG' is the original one and 'brpg' is the new one. For some reason, we still don't have whitelisting on the new name from AH though.

Original Collection can be found at this link- https://wax.atomichub.io/explorer/collection/blokchainrpg

new collection - https://wax.atomichub.io/explorer/collection/brpg

In the meantime, we partnered up with NFTHive to host our new character pack drops at - https://nfthive.io/collection/brpg?tab=drops

We are also hosting the new pack sale directly via our website at https://shop.blockchainrpg.io

When the next drop?

I cant share a date just yet as we are wrapping up a couple things and I dont want to over-promise but we will be releasing the team sticker packs within the next few weeks.

Shortly after, players will also have the opportunity to mint their own sticker NFTs.

Oh nice so not even a small sneak peak?

Thankful Milo

A small tease for one of the stickers for 'Thankful Milo' haha

Oh nice any chance of a competition for the readers?

Id love to help organize something specifically for your readers I'd be happy to offer up one of our OG 2021 Holiday Packs and a few equipment NFTs to readers .

Sweet so before we finish up is there anything you would like to say to the readers?

Just that the community support is a big motivator for our team and we love having people directly involved in the game making process. If anyone is interested in helping build out/test our ideas or share their own, we often offer our discord members direct access to our dev builds so they can test new features or functions before they are pushed to the production builds.

Its been a pleasure bro

Absolutely, I really appreciate you taking the time to set this up.

Anytime.

Check the link below to enter are competition we have going .

https://twitter.com/Crackers832/status/1532129391756681216?t=OFRw63f1fvHorodq5TAwIg&s=19