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Holding Out For a Hero
Despite last year’s unforgiving market conditions, the Play To Earn sector managed to see considerable growth: In Q3 2022 alone, $1.3 billion was raised by blockchain games and Metaverse projects according to this report published in October. So it seems a safe bet to expect more games to join what’s shaping up to be a crowded market.
One game to look out for next year is IOTAHeroes, a Web3 gaming experience that has joined the Touchpoint Open Builders Program to enable the IOTA community to have some fun with a casual RPG while engaging in Play2Earn activities. If training heroes and sending them out on adventures in the big bad world to hunt for loot and develop new weapons sounds appealing, this could be the Web3 game for you! We’ll let IOTAHeroes explain in more detail.
At the heart of IOTAHeroes are our NFT Heroes. More than just another NFT collection, they grant access to the IOTAHeroes ecosystem and unlock Play 2 Earn activities. By acquiring a hero, you’ll be able to train them and send them on adventures to gather loot. The loot is tokenized and can be freely traded at the in-game Trading Post with anybody else. You can also utilize the loot to strengthen your hero or craft new items. If you’re lucky, your heroes will find and gather enough Hero Tokens to mint a new Hero, who you can either keep or sell.
The first IOTAHeroes experience will launch as a browser game. In the future, we’ll add more features such as Player vs. Player tournaments and ranked matchmaking with seasonal rewards, as well as additional token-generating activities for Hero holders. We have many more ideas that we don’t want to disclose yet, but rest assured everything will revolve around the heroes.
We’re a new project. The first lines of code for IOTAHeroes were written in December 2021, but the general idea for an RPG in the IOTA ecosystem has been with the team for much longer. The first Proof of Concept was released in April 2022, when more than 100 users made an account and went on adventures.
Recently completed milestones include an integrated NFT marketplace, a flexible combat system, and the finalization of the Hero NFTs, which are now ready for the upcoming Founder Hero Sale.
The IOTAHeroes smart contracts are developed using Solidity and will be deployed on the Shimmer L2. Being based on Solidity and conforming to most general token standards (ERC721, ERC20, ERC1155), we expect that it will be easy to integrate our assets in various other projects like marketplaces and other games. We believe that the extensive use of different tokens in IOTAHeros makes it stand out. There are 100s and later 1000s of different ERC1155 tokens, to be gained either through adventures or crafting. You even use Hero Tokens (ERC1155) to spawn new Regular Heroes as well as the in-game currency token, Gold (ERC20). So items in the world play a huge role, which is also why we have the Trading Post, and in the future more ways to trade.
Image: IOTAHeroes.We plan to make a limited batch of Founder Heroes available for purchase on the release of the game to help with the accumulating costs of running the project and developing the game.
We are a small team and do not have any VC behind us, which means we are free to take the project in the direction we feel is right rather than what is most profitable. With an interest in Web3 games dating back to CryptoKitties, Christian is a developer with a master’s degree in software engineering from the IT University of Copenhagen and has almost 10 years of experience working in an industry-leading bioscience company building data services and platforms for their customers. IOTAHeroes’ design is the work of Freshcakes, an artist who specializes in concept art, character design, and background art.
Whatever 2023 has in store for the Play to Earn market, IOTAHeroes is shaping up to be a fun addition to the genre and we’re pleased to welcome them to Touchpoint and the IOTA ecosystem. Check out their website at www.iotaheroes.com, where you can sign up for the email waitlist.
About Touchpoint
IOTAHeroes joins the Touchpoint Open Builders Program, offering participants a community of like-minded builders, direct access to funding, experts, knowledge, and general support to launch and scale the next generation of decentralized applications and infrastructure on the Shimmer networks. You can learn more about how Touchpoint works and how to become a part of it here.
About Shimmer
Shimmer is an L1 innovation network providing the core building blocks for a scalable, modular multi-chain architecture. Similar to the IOTA network, Shimmer is built on a UTXO-based parallelized, directed acyclic graph (DAG), guaranteeing higher scalability than conventional Blockchains. At the same time, Shimmer ensures interoperability and composability of L2 smart contract chains, capable of connecting any type of L2 smart contract chain anchored to it. With its unique tokenization framework, Shimmer will become a multi-asset ledger for feeless minting and transfer of native assets without middlemen or crippling gas fees.
The native token of Shimmer is SMR, which serves as the network’s economic backbone, facilitating value transactions and interactions within the Shimmer ecosystem. Shimmer users use the SMR token to launch new DeFi applications, DEXs, NFTs, DAOs, and other dApps.