While the blockchain game market is experiencing a wave of market trends, the concept of “full-chain games” has also begun to receive more and more attention. On November 27, the full-chain RTS game Sky Strife launched Season 0 testing on the Redstone Holesky test network, and at the same time started the casting of the Sky Strife Season Pass.
The starting price for minting Sky Strife Season Pass is 0.005 Holesky ETH. Every time a Season Pass is minted, the minting price will increase by 50%. Although the minting price of Season Pass has been declining, the rate of decline cannot offset the price increase caused by the crazy charge of players. Only 1 minute after the minting was started, the minting price had already reached 1.45 Holesky ETH.
After another 4 minutes, the minting price has reached 83 Holesky ETH.
One and a half hours after the minting started, the minting price had exceeded 900 Holesky ETH. At this time, the official announced that the decline in the minting price would be accelerated, and it would drop by approximately 650 ETH in one day. However, until now, the minting price has only fallen slightly from breaking through 21,000 ETH...
Currently, only 38 Sky Strife Season Passes have been minted, and some players can already be seen on Twitter asking for Holesky ETH to mint Season Passes. However, even without Season Pass, we still had the opportunity to play the game.
How to participate in the Sky Strife test and play?
1. Visit the game testing website https://playtest.skystrife.xyz/ and then connect to the wallet to approve the website’s request to add the Redstone Holesky test network. Upon approval, the wallet will automatically request to switch to the Redstone Holesky test network.
2. Set your own game name and click Save and Continue. At this step, you will find that Holesky ETH is needed to complete the interaction on the chain.
3. Now let’s get some Holesky ETH. The following Faucets are available to obtain:
https://stakely.io/en/faucet/ethereum-holesky-testnet-eth, this Faucet will not be used after there is a certain amount of Holesky ETH in the wallet, so this can be used first.
You will then be asked to submit the link to the corresponding tweet. Copy the link and submit it. After the verification is successful, you can receive Holesky ETH.
https://faucet.quicknode.com/ethereum, the mainnet wallet needs to have at least 0.001 ETH to obtain the Holesky ETH provided by Faucet, which can be received every 12 hours.
After connecting the wallet, the Wallet Address field will be automatically populated. Note, please select Holesky as the option on the right side of Ethereum, and then click Continue.
Here you can choose to register a QuickNode account to get 8 times the Holesky ETH, or click Generate the tweet... to send the specified tweet and copy the tweet link to the Tweet URL column to get 4 Holesky ETH. Of course, you can also do nothing and just click the blue button at the bottom to get 1 Holesky ETH.
https://holesky-faucet.pk910.de/, where you can mine Holesky ETH using the PoW method. I mined 5 in about 10 minutes last night.
4. After obtaining ETH, you can successfully set the name, and then we can enter the game. Before entering the game, you will be prompted to transfer a certain amount of Holesky ETH to the game wallet to maintain in-game consumption. Because this is a full-chain game, every operation in the game is a transaction that requires Gas fees to complete. You can click the blue-gray button to automatically deposit 0.001 Holesky ETH, or you can fill in any amount of Holesky ETH below and click Transfer.
5. Return to the main interface. In Open Matches we will see many game rooms waiting to start, but most of them cannot be played. Some hosts set it up to only allow Season Pass holders to join, and some require an Entrance Fee, and the Entrance Fee can only be earned by playing games. So what to do? Two methods. One is to wait for the Bodhisattva who has accumulated enough Entrance Fee to open a welfare room with 0 Entrance fee that all players can join. For example, Game #351 in the picture below is such a welfare room. It is recommended toDiscordStaying a while, Bodhisattvas usually ask in Discord if anyone wants to play together before opening a welfare house.
In addition, at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. every day, the project will open some free rooms for everyone to play, and you can stay in the room. In short, you can only win the Entrance fee by participating in the game, and you also need the Entrance fee if you want to open a room.
game mechanics
This is an RTS (real-time strategy) game. In the game, what we have to do is to send troops to take away the opponents Settlement Base, and if we want to attack the enemy, we naturally need resources. Each game round, the system will allocate gold to the player according to the number of bases and gold mines controlled by the player. Use the gold to raise troops in the base, and then control the mine points/base points. , strike a balance between defending your own base and attacking other players bases, and operate to win.
Be aware that standing still is not the best strategy. In the game, gold can also be obtained by killing other players units or destroying other players bases. If you have played RTS games such as StarCraft and Warcraft, you will understand very well - if you dont move, others will mine, the troops will explode more and faster, and resources alone can kill people.
Take the 4-player map of Cauldron as an example. Players’ initial bases are distributed in the four corners of the map. There are a total of 6 mineral points on the map that can be fought for:
The blue square is the initial base location, and the yellow square is the gold mine location.
There is also a base up for grabs in the middle of this map. The health and armor value of this base are slightly lower than the initial base, but it can still attack troops and provide gold income every round. Taking the base in the middle will be very helpful for controlling the four nearby mineral points.
After entering the game, each player will receive 1,000 gold and 1 initial hero. The blood volume and armor of the hero are more powerful than all other producible units. Then we can click on our initial base, select arms and produce them.
A round lasts for 15 seconds, and there is a lot to do in these 15 seconds. To control the violent troops in the base and to control your own units to move or attack, once there are more control units on the field, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Therefore it is important to prioritize what you need to do each turn based on the situation on the field at all times.
Click on the produced soldier to control it to move or select objects within the movement range to attack (occupying mine points and base points is also an attack).
There are currently 5 types of arms that can be produced in the game: Swordsman, Predator, Knight, Archer and Pikeman. Different arms have different characteristics in terms of attack power, siege power, health, armor, and mobility. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of performance (movement range), attack distance, etc., and the amount of gold required for production is also different. We need to consider a reasonable combination of our own combat power composition based on the situation on the field.
We can also see in the game screen above that there are stones and trees on the map, and these two terrains will have different effects. Units that move onto trees and rocks will gain armor bonuses, but they also have higher requirements on the units mobility.
As the game progresses, bases and gold mines will deplete their gold reserves and no longer generate gold income for the player each turn. The gold production duration of the initial base is 8 minutes, and the bases and gold mines on the map that are up for grabs are 5 minutes. This setting prevents players from staying at home and everyone has to go out to compete for resources on the map. It also makes a round The total length of the game is within a reasonable range.
If the initial base is removed, players can still control the remaining units to play on the field, but the ranking is determined the moment the initial base is removed. For example, if I exploded a lot of soldiers, but I was the first to have my home stolen, then I could only get the last place result.
I played one game and finished in 2nd place. This is a very funny battle. The player in the lower right corner of the map is huddled in the base and violently attacking from beginning to end, otherwise motionless. The remaining three people, including me, fought hard, and finally I was carried away by the remaining soldiers of the third flog 2499 player...
As we mentioned at the beginning, this is a full-chain game, so every action in the game is an on-chain transaction. In this game, I actually initiated more than 100 transactions on the chain, and after the game, I consumed 0.000057 Holesky ETH.
Token economy
Compared with the familiar GameFi or blockchain games, Sky Strifes Token economy is very different. Its Token economy embodies the important feature of autonomy of full-chain games.
The Entrance Fee we mentioned earlier for establishing a game room is the Token $ORB of this game. The total amount of $ORB is 1 million, and there are currently 240 holders. All players do not have $ORB at the beginning of this season. Therefore, the initial game is initiated by the Sky Pool smart contract according to a certain rhythm. There is currently no way to earn $ORB other than playing games to win $ORB.
In addition to the operation of creating a game room (setting admission fees, prize pool ratio, etc.), Sky Pool does not have the authority to perform any Token-related operations on $ORB, such as withdrawing or transferring Tokens.
After players win some $ORB by playing the initial game initiated by the Sky Pool smart contract, the autonomy of the game will begin to be reflected. Players can set the admission fee for the room they create and allocate the prize pool by themselves, gradually replacing the Sky Pool as the initiator of the game, that is, becoming the distributor of $ORB.
Players can set how to allocate the entry fee to rewards
When the number of games that occur gradually increases, the fixed prize pool for each game will decrease. On the contrary, if the number of games that occur becomes less, the fixed prize pool for each game will increase to stimulate more games to occur. The purpose of this is to maintain the value of $ORB by regulating the circulation of $ORB.
Compared to yesterday, the current fixed prize pool per game has dropped from 200 $ORB to 100 $ORB. Take a Free Entry game with no additional prize pool as an example. If it was a fixed prize pool of 200 $ORB yesterday, then initiating a game is equivalent to the player issuing an additional 100 $ORB; if it is a fixed prize pool of 100 $ORB today , then initiating a game will not issue additional $ORB, but will only be redistributed among players.
In short, the rules designed by the game regulate $ORB, and the actual flow balance is based on the players autonomous (playing) behavior.
Conclusion
Sky Strife currently has relatively little game content available to experience. As the game continues to iterate, I think we can expect a lot of new content to appear, such as:
- fog of war
- More initial hero types and initial hero skills
- More summonable troops
- Item system
- ...
Regarding the players’ various assumptions, the team’s response is:
The team said that these functions are very exciting for me to think about.
But with the update of game content and the emergence of more new game projects, there will inevitably be an influx of more players in the future. Can the Redstone network handle the load?
In any case, when I think about using my computer to play games in the world computer of Ethereum, it feels like building a game console in MineCraft and then using it to play games - in one word, cool!
What’s even cooler is that the reason why a full-chain game is also called an “autonomous world” is because it is not just a game, but a system entity whose logic and rules are completely stored on a transparent blockchain. Just like us as humans, even though we have the ability to create a lot in this world, the world always has established rules for how it operates.
There is no God who dominates everything here. You and I are players, and we are also operating this virtual world.
