Hey everyone!
Today I wanted to discuss something different which we're quite excited about and currently working on; card design of captured and purchased starter creatures in @holozing! Before we get onto details of that and what we're thinking in that regard, I have to mention something first.
We reached 2M Hive Power delegation recently:
I wanted to thank the community for getting involved and being as excited as we are over the future of the game and its ecosystem. Quite a substantial number to reach only after a little over a week from $zing distribution launch on top of signs of the bear market ending which may convince some others to unstake rather than delegate their HP away.
Either way, while this is amazing, I wanted to crunch some numbers real quick for transparency. With 2M HP at 8.5% APR this means the @zingtoken account will earn approximately 170k HP in a year, but as we've mentioned before, the account isn't meant to stay powered up but the funds are instead used for development, growth and potentially other venues in the future such as marketing, etc. This means that at current delegation that's about 14,166 HP per month, 3541.6 HP per week and 506 Hive per day once we get the powerdown started. This comes down to about $172 per day which as you can imagine is not a huge amount for a "gaming studio" to be spending daily, but thankfully we have the market trend in our favor which may over time help offset the costs. I'm also thankful that most of the team who are hive users have been patient with receiving rewards for their work and effort later while we've focused on the important parts of the game - gameplay!
Since we know the gameplay is now closer to being finished and we'll be able to invite a few "powerplayers" to our closed alpha where they'll be able to test and balance the starter creatures and healers among each other, we've shifted some of our focus towards the first Starter Sale of Holozing and that's what I want to discuss here in this post so you'll know what you can look forward to.
Stat rarity
As we've mentioned in the whitepaper and announced, creatures will have 4 main stats in the beginning. Attack, Defense, Agility and Hive Power Health Points. Starting at level 1, they'll have unique min and max for each of the 4 stats, as an example, the grass raccoon starter could be a more "tanky" creature which means its minimum HP at lvl 1 might be higher than a creature that'll focus on attacking. Let's say for this example its minimum Health Points at level 1 are 60 and max are 80, meaning this creature can't have more than 80 Health at level 1. Now when the abilities are rolled, naturally to get the higher numbers you need to be lucky because it's weighted randomness meaning you're more likely to land on the lower end of stats than at the higher end. This naturally also means that being so lucky where you roll all 4 stats at max or close to max is going to be exceptionally rare.
For the starters that we will be selling, the thing buyers will want to look out for are creatures with high stats so that they'll get an edge in PvP over others, but of course, an edge doesn't mean it's a done deal as players can outplay and outheal their opponents even if their creature is a bit weaker than their identical or other one.
Aside from starters, we will also be selling some other "starter items", while we haven't nailed everything down yet as we're still in the design part (which I'll talk about a bit later), we do know that there'll be a few other healer items to be generated from purchasing the starter pack. These will be:
- healing gloves - Required to equip on the correct healer class to be able to use healing abilities
- capture device - Required for healers to have equipped to attempt to capture a weakened enemy creature (not in PvP)
- capture ammo - Required to input into your healing device for a number of capture attempts
- other consumables - Mana Potion for healer mana, Ability Potions for creature Ability Points, Food and Drinks for Healers and Creatures
Most of these will eventually be player generated through professions and found in-game in diverse ways but those purchasing Starter Packs will have a little bit of an advantage when the game is out in open beta.
Before I get more into the items listed above and how diverse they can be with stats, etc, let's go back to the main point of this post, card design.
Card Design
For the cards, we want to create something unique that we haven't seen much of out there. We envision that once the game is playable there will be a lot of unique cards out there and the cards itself will also, like many other things in Holozing, be player crafted. This is one of the beauties of a community-funded game where we give the community the power for ingame economies.
So 1, there'll be unique base cards, with Starter packs having their own unique look. This is just an example but something I prompted quickly on Midjourney if you'd wanna imagine with me that this is what the starter pack card design would look like for now:
2, the looks of future cards will change based on the average rarity of a creature. I.e. if your creature has 3 stats that are of blue rarity and 1 of epic rarity its average stat will be blue. This means that the card will have some blue color "pattern" mixed in with other colors in the body and the "buttons" displaying its stat amounts will also have a background color showing the rarity of the stats for that creature. This will give the cards a unique look and give collectors a lot of different ways to collect certain creatures along with cards.
Keep in mind that average rarity of a creature can change during level up as well which may change the looks of the card.
3, Apart from the starter cards which won't be "capturable", there'll also be unique color patterns on the cards based on what ammo and capturing device was used to capture a creature. This means that the outcome of a card's look will depend what rarity the capture device you have is and what rarity ammo you used when you successfully captured a creature.
We believe that this is going to give collectors quite some quests on collecting all creatures and their rarities but then also having them in collections of different cards with unique patterns, color-schemes, etc.
We'll try and update you on the card design of the starter packs we'll be selling first as soon as we have progressed further and decided on the finishing design.
Lastly, I also wanted to share something else with you in regard to creatures.
As you know by now, finding a creature with absolute max stats is going to be astronomically difficult, however the game will allow you to level them up to become max stats if they're somewhat close when you capture them (the lower level they are the more room to improve the stats, if trained correctly). This also means that when you encounter wild creatures you won't know what their stats are and reverse engineering them based on your creature's stats and damage output is also not going to be that easy since there's range in damage and healing abilities.
The only exception we're going to make where we tell healers the stats of a creature is when it is full max stats. The creatures with max stats are going to have a unique "holographic" skin (a bit similar to the card image above), so you can imagine one of the 4 starters could end up looking that way as well if you are that lucky! This is going to provide collectors with even more things to do where they'll aim to have a collection of not only holographic skin creatures and stats but also cards from certain sets and their patterns, colors and hue's of certain rarities.
The main reason for this decision is that these max stat creatures are going to be extremely rare so it would be a bummer if players just defeated them for XP in battle, it's already going to hurt enough if they randomly flee before you manage to catch them. :p
Aside from the very rare holographic skin, we'll also be including certain "mutations" or like in other game "shiny" creature odds where the stats won't play a role but you may just get lucky to catch or purchase creatures with slightly different looks.
Anyway, that's all I wanted to discuss today, and looking forward to hearing what you think about these plans. If you have any cool ideas related to this, we'd love to hear them as well as we're not trying to gatekeep great inputs and would love to include them in the game if others also really like them. Feel free to share in that case!
Until next time!
Images created with Midjourney.