rocketdude.eth

After gaming all weekend in @wolfdotgame's cave game, I've got some thoughts on the current cave game and as well as some improvements... Lets put on our game design hat and dive in! The Free-to-Play Cave Game 💫Balancing gameplay and monetization is a delicate dance between the company's revenue and player satisfaction. The original version of Cave Game didn’t sell energy, and this makes sense. Charging ETH for boxes that contain essential items like energy significantly alters the gameplay dynamics. The team needs to generate revenue, and this is one way to do it, but there’s a different approach to consider. 🐑Remove energy from ETH boxes. Instead, make it available in the shop, purchasable with $bwool, and on a flexible bonding curve. The more thats purchased the higher the price goes. The less time between purchases, the price will decline. Critical items like headlamps, goggles, and golden shovels should be exclusive to ETH boxes. It’s a divide and conquer approach that creates another sink for $bwool. 💫Caves currently stay open for a week. Consider opening them for 24 hours. When you're buying energy, you're digesting the game faster. A week is too long. You lose the player's attention as they're waiting for the cave to collapse. 24-hour intervals are quick hits that pack a powerful punch for onboarding new players into the ecosystem. This also benefits players who just want to play for free – they have the same opportunity to find items, albeit not as fast as with an amplifier. This modification will make the game satisfying for both groups. 🐑Let’s talk about pouched wool. It’s kind of the 'black sheep' of the game because it’s a strange concept to understand, especially if you're coming into the game from the Blast ecosystem. When you first hit it, you're excited because you just snatched a pouch of wool. However, it’s dripped to you over a four-year period. In degen terms, it feels like eternity and doesn’t translate well to the Blast farmer. Just as the Blast community doesn’t know what pouched wool is, they also don’t know what the points are, how they work, or why the game’s leaderboard matters. I’d love to see the team communicate this to them very clearly. 🐑Even though Wolf Game doesn’t currently have Blast Gold, and they can’t speculate on how much will be given away, what they could say is that the points are distributed based on how you rank per cave. This ranking will be considered when Blast Gold gets distributed. In these two areas, the team could really put out some great marketing communications. They’re missing the mark on explaining how this works and why it matters. Step into the shoes of a native Blast Gold farmer and make it make sense. 🐑Gems. It’s what we’re all searching for in the caves. Would love to know what they do! But I have some thoughts one what I would design them to do... It would be compelling to make gems a crucial part of the entire ecosystem's gameplay, where the only way to obtain them is by playing the free version of Cave Game. These gems should not be available in the NFT caves, nor can they be acquired in the main game, creating an exclusive element for players who engage with the free game. It incentivizes the entire community to continue to play the free version even after nft caves launch. (more speculation coming...) 🐑If I could add any element to an ETH box, and make it much rarer on the loot table, it would be the map. Once activated, it can show you where the shiny are at and you won’t have to wait until 75% of the cave is mined to see it. It’s the thing of dreams, especially in the free version. The NFT Cave Game 💫Please don’t blow up the game by selling energy in the nft caves. Selling energy would allow weaker generation sheep to be stronger than a genesis sheep/wolves. Energy should not be sold in the NFT version of the game because the power rests in the NFT and its rarity. Selling energy in the nft cave is an automatic game killer. 🐑The NFT side is all about strategy. We only have 100 steps. Move wisely. Increase the energy items drop rates a little more, that way, when we hit energy, say found milk for 75 energy, it’s euphoric and feels like a whole new day of game play. Goggles, golden shovels, headlamps, sell those in the shop for $bwool. This also means that these caves DO NOT collapse in 24 hrs. It’s a longer, more thoughtful game. 🐑While I’m recommending that gems can be found in the free-to-play version only, I think they can have a similar ish use case to jugs in the main game but applied to the NFTs. They could allow the speedup of energy for anyone you attach them to. One energy every 11 minutes... if I put a rare gem on it, I'm producing energy every 9 minutes. This makes your NFTs stronger. You're going to buy or farm the gems. This will give Blast Farmers something to go after. 🐑There are a lot of common gems—really, a lot. Why not burn 100 gems to create a rare gem? This would reduce inflation on the commons, while encouraging farmers to play more to obtain those gems. For those with liquidity, purchasing them is always an option. This also encourages people to buy the NFTs, since it’s the only way you can use your gems. 💫Additional ideas while I'm running with the game design stuff. A lot of these require some minimal tweaks (to be honest the code’s already there) it’s about reorganizing for fresh game modes (and having the dev capacity to do it) 🐑Game Modes & Traits: Caves come with unique properties! Ex: caves spawn with already existing traits like goggles (think x-ray vision for those that haven't played), enhancing gameplay with a unique twist for all. Not every cave is equal—each offers unique bonuses for adventuring within. Could get a lot of variety here with minimal changes to code. 🐑Quick Competitive Play: Imagine a 20 person cave where energy isn’t depleted on move steps. Entry fee: 1000 $bwool. Prize pool: 15000 $bwool (5k burned). The player scoring the most points wins. Can be with or without buffs. Even teams can compete (communities? guilds?), with every point scored adding up to the total. 🐑Gem Prize Pools: Inject a bit of excitement—some competitions could feature a gem as the grand prize. One lucky winner finds the gem and takes it home. Every point counts in these high-stakes games! Or just open a cave with 1 legendary gem in it. Players pay an entry fee in $bwool and are on the hunt to find that gem… 🐑Peak Games (but in the cave 🤣): Every two hours, a new cave launches, with a unique game mode/modifier (like the stuff above). Whether it's NFT-exclusive or free-play with gems, it’s all about mixing elements for an enjoyable experience. Free cave game should be fast, fun and a huge onboarding mechanism to bring new players into the community regardless of budget. 💡Random thought... Allow bulk purchase discounts. Let me buy 50 pickaxe with $bwool for a 10% discount vs buying them 1 at a time. This is just scratching the surface of the suggestions and ideas I've got cooking for Cave Game. @Gfunkera86, I'm all in on the genius you're crafting here. Let's team up and draft some killer game designs. I’d even be down to take $bwool as payment 😉🤣 If you are part of the community, what would you like to see added or removed? Comment 👇