In my previous post, If Blockchain Isn't Required, When Is It Better Than a Database?, I changed the question again.
I had stopped looking for a game that was strictly impossible without blockchain and ended up with a different idea:
What if the goal isn't Blockchain Required, but Blockchain Preferred?
A normal database can reproduce a lot of the same functionality.
But maybe blockchain becomes more meaningful when things like these matter to the game itself:
Who controls the authoritative record?
Who controls the history?
Can other people verify that history?
What remains if the original operator disappears?
Can someone else use the data and continue building on top of it?
So the next question was:
What kind of game could make those things part of the actual gameplay?
This was where I finally started thinking about a concrete game.
The first idea was horse racing
The first thing that came to mind was horse racing.
I don't remember exactly why.
I'm currently building a horse-racing-related website called Where Horses Run, so that may have been a big reason.
Horse racing was probably just already somewhere in my head.
At the same time, I had just been thinking about things like history, inheritance, and identity.
Horse racing already has bloodlines.
There are parents, offspring, and generations.
A horse's past and pedigree are part of how people understand that individual horse.
So maybe that connected naturally with what I had been thinking about blockchain.
But I don't want to invent a clean explanation after the fact.
It may also have been nothing more than a random idea.
A horse-racing game isn't a new idea
Of course,
raising horses,
breeding them,
building bloodlines,
and entering them in races
is nothing new.
Horse-racing games have been doing this for decades.
So at this point, I didn't feel like I had invented some new kind of game.
It was more like:
While thinking about blockchain, horse racing appeared as an existing game genre that seemed unusually compatible with some of those ideas.
Then, while thinking about the horse-racing concept, another thought appeared.
What if they weren't horses at all?
From horses to fictional creatures
Concept illustration only — the creature design has not been decided.
The idea shifted from real horses to fictional creatures.
Again, I don't remember exactly why.
Maybe it was because there are already so many conventional horse-racing games.
Maybe fictional creatures simply seemed to offer more freedom in terms of abilities, appearance, and behavior.
Or maybe it was just another random idea.
But changing the racers from horses to fictional creatures opened up a much larger design space.
Each individual could have different abilities.
They could have different personalities or temperaments.
They could be better or worse on different courses or under different conditions.
Some traits could be inherited from their parents.
Mutation-like variation could exist.
Players could build bloodlines over many generations.
None of those ideas are new by themselves either.
There are already plenty of games about raising fictional creatures, breeding them, and creating individual variation.
The part I found interesting was somewhere else.
It accidentally connected back to the earlier idea
A creature can have parents.
Those parents can have parents.
Generations can continue.
An individual can have a history of races and results.
Ownership can change.
And eventually, that individual can become the parent of another generation.
At that point, the things I had been thinking about earlier —
Identity
History
Inheritance
— could exist naturally inside the game.
You can attach history to a weapon or a card too.
Who owned it before?
Which tournament was it used in?
Those records can exist.
But with a living individual, the past can become more than additional metadata.
The past can become part of what the individual is now.
Who its parents were can affect the current individual.
And the current individual can then affect the next generation.
I didn't choose fictional creatures because I had calculated that they were the perfect answer to the blockchain question.
The order was the opposite.
I thought of horse racing.
Then horses became fictional creatures.
And only after that did I realize:
This might fit the Blockchain Preferred direction surprisingly well.
That was roughly how it happened.
Still just a fairly ordinary breeding-and-racing game
At this point, the game idea was basically:
There are fictional creatures.
They have individual differences.
They can reproduce.
They have bloodlines.
They can be raised.
And they race.
Honestly, that still doesn't move very far beyond existing breeding games or horse-racing games.
The reason to use blockchain was also still only:
“It seems like it might fit this kind of design better.”
Nothing stronger than that.
But for the first time, the abstract blockchain discussion had turned into something that looked like an actual game.
Around this point, I started calling the project:
EvoWild Run
It's still only a working title.
And then the next problem appeared.
What is the race itself supposed to be like?
If players raise creatures and enter them into races, what do they actually do during the race?
Do they directly control the creature?
Does it run completely automatically?
Is the result determined only by stats?
That became the next part of the design to figure out.
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