Shifting from NFTs to something (more) meaningful

#nft #procedural #assets #programming

Inb4: This is not a post against NFTs (neither the actual concept nor how it is currently executed). I actually love the idea of NFTs, specifically ERC-721, and the things you can do with them other than create and exploit a secondary market. In fact, that's exactly what drove me away.

We have all seen the hype and the decline or consolidation over the last few months. We have been inundated with collections that had little to no purpose and whose only purpose was to make some money. Many have failed, and so have we. Again, this is not a critique of NFTs, nor is it a post mortem or an explanation of why our collection failed. This is a post about why we started this collection to begin with and why we see more value in not turning it into an NFT collection.

The idea behind Loot from a Chest was to make high quality gaming assets available to everyone. Perhaps we need to go back for a moment to understand why. I started as a game programmer when I was 15 years old. I learned to program by developing games using C++ and OpenGL (those were the days!). I am pretty good at programming, designing architectures, and bringing it to the cloud/server, but I can not draw a stick figure even if my life depended on it. So developing a polished game was out of my reach, aside from working with a designer or buying/using free assets. I always felt limited by that. That changed when I stumbled across procedural content creation. This is a technique where you generate content by understanding the structure of the content and building it in a mathematical/algorithmic way. Here is an example for Loot from a Chest.

A sword is a composite asset consisting of a blade, guard, grip, ornament, and pommel. Each of these components is made up of sub-components that one can be described mathematically and then drawn, without requiring any skills (other than programming, which suits me fine). If you are interested in a more detailed example, let me know and I'll write it up. With this approach, I was able to create high quality assets as long as I understood the structure of those assets well enough. Even better, by writing a flexible algorithm, you can parameterize certain aspects and create a wide variety of assets with the same code base. For someone who can not draw and has always dreamed of creating a polished game, that's a huge accomplishment! Here are some examples of the current Loot from a Chest generator:

Note that such things as colors, type of the blade, length and height of components are parameters that can be easily changed to create unique weapons. We discovered the lance with the blue blade by accident when I set the height of the grip to a value that was much too high.

Getting back to the topic at hand: We tried to understand the content we wanted to generate, and developed a flexible algorithm to generate a unique variety of these assets - and then turn them into an NFT collection, which is still available on OpenSea. But the mere fact that these assets are available as NFTs has not added any value to the original idea - to make high-quality assets available to everyone. So what do you do in such cases - you make it work. After a while, it did not feel right and gradually the motivation to work on this project decreased. Also, it goes against the idea of turning these assets into NFTs, as avatar collections (this is just a variation of that) are about uniqueness and perceived limitation, while we wanted to enable everyone to have this.

And that brings us to the end and the current state of Loot from a Chest. If NFTs are not the answer, what is? There are two answers to that (at least to our current knowledge).

Asset packs
DIY Editor

Asset packs are a common thing in game development. Normally I am the consumer, but with a procedural content generator in hand, I am now a producer. We created a simple asset pack with little effort and uploaded it to itch.io and Unity Asset Store (no advertising intended). Although they cost money, one could argue that they should be free, or at least cheaper, since they are easy to create. I'd like to take this a step further. Why not provide the algorithm and generate the assets yourself (with all available notches /parameters)? This is actually what we are working on at the moment. To summarize this, I would like to show you some screenshots of the current Loot from a Chest Asset Studio. I would really appreciate feedback (on the idea, on the design, on the features you would like to see, whatever you would like feedbacking ).

Thanks for reading and sharing (either your ideas or this article to spread the idea)!

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