- In case you would like to take part in today’s activities, jump in :
- the Nifty Kicks Factory AMA (« Ask Me Anything ») session, at 11 pm UTC. There’ll be a tokens and prizes giveaway to everyone who wins a spin of the wheel!
- a jam up giveaway is being held here: https://giv.gg/nkfisfree2play Click the link to enter and have a shot at entire Factory setups. Make sure to share and get your friends to enter as this is a great way for them to get started in Nifty Kicks Factory.*
On Saturday October 15th - tomorrow, the doors of «Nifty Kicks Factory » (NKF, in short) will open for anyone willing to become a Play-to-Earn Factory Owner in a free of charge fashion. You’ll be allowed to grab the following 4 assets from the « Nefty Blocks » marketplace, with a sole condition : to have a Wax blockchain address.
Once you’ll have done that, go to https://www.nkfactory.io/ and stake those NFT’s, for them to generate the 4 raw materials, expressed as tokens, that we manage as Factory Owners : Energy (the NKFE token), Rubber (NKFR), Textile (NKFT) and Leather (NKFL).
The purpose of this article being to introduce you to the NKF ecosystem and to bring you my take on the game, I’ll let other players publish step by step tutorials on how to handle your mining and crafting operations :-)
A « classic » mining game...
As the 2 pictures above – and the name of the game – give a hint about, in NKF our first goal is to set up a sneakers industrial production facility, and to expand it, to a maximum of 6 factories (where the energy is generated) and 18 machines (the ones that produce the 3 raw materials translated into 3 tradeable tokens). The user interface is overall very smooth and responsive, compared to other Wax based mining games, and requires a relatively small amount of CPU (one of the Wax blockchain resources) for the on-chain transactions to be propagated.
A valuable element, that was introduced around 2 months after NKF launched, is the possibility for all Factory Owners to craft (or purchase, if in a hurry) « Warehouse Badges », that grant the players an increase of up to 8 hours of the timespan between 2 tokens harvests, thus reducing our « clicking job » to a maximum of 3 times a day.
… that suddenly turns into « World War Z meets Fast & Furious »
Yes, NKF as it is right now is already a fully playable game – and sometimes, depending on the level of advancement of our factories, a profitable one too.
But that whole mining activity is actually a launch pad for THIS :
Phase 3 of NKF converts the daily production clicks into a tactical warfare odissey, where the mere fact of delivering our precious kicks to their final consumers drives us to battle against hordes of zombies and jealous competing Factory Owners.
NKF at the highest level : long term vision, decentralization & organic partnerships
a) Long term vision
The company that released NKF in March of this year, C.R.A.M.NFT LLC, is established in Florida, and the game creators are fully dox’d. Its base Team includes a well-know, respected and very active Wax Twitch streamer, Franklin14th - « FrankBot », for his close friends – as Community Manager.
A relevant NKF characteristic is to have been designed from day 1 to be « pump & dump proof ». Many of us have witnessed – or suffered – P2E games where the first 2 or 3 weeks see all their NFT’s prices skyrocketing, and a bunch of the OG’s flipping the game’s pieces for a substantial profit. The same usually happens with the game’s token(s). As a result, many NFT based games have literally died 6 months only after their launch. On the contrary, NKF is in for the long run : in spite of having been playable since March of this year – 7 months ago – it still offers plenty of space for new Factory Owners to grind and climb, starting with a relatively small budget. If you watch the last NKF AMA (« Ask Me Anything ») session, you’ll see that the September’s winner of 4 «Employees of the Month», the top player crafting wise, is a recent Factory Owner, of whom nobody knew the Wax address.
I use to tag NKF as having chosen the « Hive P2E regime », built to allow games to unfold during 4 years or more (in reference to « Splinterlands » and « Rising Star »), and discarded the « Binance Smart Chain P2E regime », where the letter « P » stands for « Pump » ;-) and many games pass away in their first year of existence. I agree there are exceptions, both on Hive and on BSC, but we’re speaking here of a general trend.
b) Decentralization
NKF also made the choice of essentially relying on the players’ activity, and on their prosperity, for the project to blossom financially. From the current factories and machines to the coming delivery vehicles, weapons and security forces, almost all game assets are craftable, hence sellable on the secondary market, by ourselves, the Factory Owners (after we’ve produced enough raw materials tokens to do so).
The NFT’s directly sold by the Team are an exception, limited to the initial crates, the future Lands, and small Labourers drops, when the latter have become too scarce on the secondary market.
More so : all the remaining factories & machines crates, once the initial drop ended, have been burnt, to ensure that from now on who would be able to provide new players with the needed NFT infrastructure are the Factory Owners who’re already committed with the game.
The same applies to the game’s tokens management : all the « Alcor Dex » NKF liquidity pools funds come from players, in order to better reflect the genuine supply and demand, and to stay away, there too, from pump & dump phenomenons.
c) Organic partnerships
The second NKF’s decentralization pillar are partnerships. Much beyond being an agreement with other collections to perform joint NFT drops, they’re the threads of which the game fabric is woven.
The minimum requirement for all NKF collaborations is for the co-created assets to bring utility in both collections, and in an autonomous way, so that those NFT’s generated through a partnership hold their value and use case(s) : for instance they remain stakable inside our Factory, independently of the other collection’s fate.
But several partnerships are built to offer « grindbreaking » products to the game Community, among which a new kind of music NFT’s, and phygital sneakers based on the Factory Owners’ activity. I’ll for sure dedicate other publications to those developments.
Partnerships are so intertwined with the NKF identity that the Nifty Isles map where we’ll deliver our kicks production will literally be a kind of Collaborations Metaverse, with events being driven by other collections (e.g. the zombies, thanks to « Tales of the Crypto »).
Life is not a bed of roses. Game development neither.
On the critics side of things, we’ve tackled here above the fact that the current version of the game is a very classic one in the browser based crypto mining P2E universe – a too classic one for certain players. If you’re rapidly tired by the perspective of having to claim tokens several times a day, by clicking on buttons, it could be that NKF isn’t a game for you. Nevertheless, as mentioned before, within 1 to 2 months that « click-to-earn » mechanism will become secondary, gameplay wise, and be reduced to the economic substrate to make possible a much more thrilling tactical warfare apocalyptic phase.
The deployment of code changes in the « in production » game have had some hickups, in particular during its first week, something that can have deterred certain percentage of the people having taken part in the factories and machines initial sale – and that resulted in some of them dumping their recently purchased assets. But anyone coming back to the game from the end of March – and up to now – will have witnessed that the gears are now well oiled, and that the players’ eventual doubts find quick answers thanks to the Team and the Community’s responsiveness.
In conclusion, Nifty Kicks Factory is a higly recommendable experience, and I hope to see you soon on the Factory Floor!