The next Meltelbrot Giveaway will take place in eGamers.io Facebook Page on Friday 5/4 at 23:59 GMT+2. (Check here for time converter) eGamers is giving away 1 Wizzard Hat (only 399 available) sponsored by 9Lives Arena and 10 Meltelbrot & eGamers.io Tokens. To participate you have to like both eGamers & 9Lives Arena Facebook pages. Also, Don’t forget to follow Meltoid on Twitter for more great articles and updates. As usual, we will ask 10+1 questions based on this interview.
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Today I’m chatting with Ralph (aka Dread Lord) from Touchhour Inc, who’s a major part of the brains and brawn behind the upcoming PvP game – 9Lives Arena. I’ve been following this one for a while, but it’s been some time since we caught up. With so much going on, I feel it’s a perfect opportunity to speak with the Dreadlord himself.
Firstly Dreadlord, well done on a successful Kickstarter and Indigogo campaign! It was cranking from day 1, so it’s brilliant to see the items hitting our Enjin wallets and allowing us to check out the wonderful craftmanship. From the outside it seems to be a great success, how do you and the team feel about the campaigns so far?
We feel truly blessed by all the love and support we have received from the community. That first 24 hours of the Kickstarter campaign was super exciting and to have reached the initial goal on that first day has motivated us that much more to deliver the best game possible.
How’s the minting and sending of the items going? Is it close to being finalised and what’s the process?
The process of minting and sending items works like a charm. It’s great to have our own store online where gamers can pre-order in game item blueprints and early access. The minting of items takes place every Friday and we are minting the items directly into players wallets.
Like I said, I love the craftmanship of the 9LA items. How much effort goes into making them look so good, and what’s the background of your master skinner?
A lot of love and work goes into crafting each item. They are all researched, created as concept art and then modelled and polished by our Lead Artist Darry (Legen-Darry). Darry used to work at EA modelling for the FIFA franchise … as an example a whole item set(5 pieces) takes a good 6 weeks development time. Sometimes more as we need to adjust things for physics to work fine and to minimize clipping etc…
I’ve received every item now, except the Ooogies, and btw love the title deed, but is Ooogy being dealt with differently due to functioning in a side application?
Ooogies are receiving a special treatment! We are developing a system to randomly create Ooogies based on genes and royal bloodlines that actually show uniquely in players wallets!
Each Ooogy will get its own unique token image rather than 1 image for all Ooogies! This is a worlds first for ERC-1155 NFTs. It will be worth the wait! 😉
So let me get that straight, Ooogies will be a Non Fungible Token (NFT) and each image will be different?!
Yes, we use both NFT and FT in our game. Blueprints are fungible (FT) and Ooogies are non-fungible (NFT).
That’s damn cool, as the bloodline aspect of collectibles seems to be very popular ie Cryptokitties, Axies etc. Now with us warriors receiving our fungible blueprints, how do you see the owners of them making the best use of their functionality?
It’s up to each player what they choose to do with blueprints. They can keep it for themselves and be some of the most unique looking heroes in 9LA or they can craft some for friends and family. Those players who love to craft and want to make money can also craft items from their blueprints and sell it to other players. Thanks to blockchain technology players finally get the chance to truly own items so the ball is in their court what they prefer to do with it.
We are essentially the first game that lets players in on the monetisation of skins through our blueprints. It will be exciting to see how things develops! Blueprint owners are essentially retailers for that particular looking armor piece or weapon.
Another thing I love about this game, is the chance to really explore the lore and background stories of the land and inhabitants of Atlantis. The atmosphere and landscape you’ve created conjures much for the imagination. Is the backstory something that you will keep expanding, kind of like what Tekken and Mortal Kombat did back in the day?
Yes it’s a little bit like what they did with those games and a bit like the Souls games. We are not spending money on cinematics at this point, however we will find subtle ways to share the story.
On the subject of Mortal Kombat, has your team given anymore thought to creating signature kill moves that can be purchased, traded and won?
We will probably add taunts and victory animations that can be won or purchased and selected for your heroes… finishing moves could also be added at some point but they would have to be purely cosmetic so that they don’t add power… otherwise we would become a pay to win game… which we have to avoid!!
Other Early Adopter games are currently now in their closed beta testing phase. Your team has had a playable game for a while now, when will it be open to the community to test? And what will be the process to select participants?
Our first alpha will soon be out. We are anticipating end of April, for all those who have pre-purchased alpha and we will continue to invite players in waves.
999? Any hint on what happens when it’s reached?
999 subscribers? 999 skulls? Either way its very exciting rewards and we can’t give any spoilers out!
At 999 Youtube subscribers every purchase made on Kickstarter, Indiegogo or in our store will receive another free skull and again when we receive 999 discord members! So if people bought 2 or three or more things they receive a skull for every purchase when those milestones are reached. Essentially multiplying the skulls they already got from the purchases!
Ok that’s enough from me, it’s time to hand over the q’s to the community of avid fans.
Weritwal
Will 9LA be creating some extremely expensive and strong champions in the future? If so, I’ve seen the amount of dollars you can pay to acquire different types of “starter packs” in the game. Isn’t it really game breaking to have people pay several thousands of dollars to obtain a recipe on they can make?
No of course not – that would mean we are a pay to win game! All the stuff you can buy from us is purely cosmetic! Blueprints are neutral! Skins (Vanity items) are a 30 billion $ industry! Owning a rare blueprint makes you a retailer for that particular looking item… no stat advantages come with any of our blueprints – they are ALL neutral! You can’t buy power in 9Lives Arena! It’s a skill based game!
Pyro_flair:
Now that lootboxes are illegal in Belgium are enj game devs concerned that this could be a trend for more European countries?
EA and a few other companies have already removed the ability to buy lootboxes in the country, fortnite had already removed the random lootbox (lama) system a few weeks prior to the ban, for a new system where you can see the loot before you buy the box, with the contents of the box changing daily until your buy.
Are developers concerned enough to change their system and the direction they may go. How do you think things could play out over the year of 2019, do you think devs are concerned about these developments considering how much their games rely on lootboxes, or are they just going to push forward with their current model and hope things don’t change to much?
We don’t sell lootboxes in 9Lives Arena! Our point of view is that lootboxes can be really great if well implemented BUT they can also be really bad if the implementation is done in a bad way. Unfortunately there have been companies in the past abusing the mechanic and giving it a bad taste and image. So we decided not to even bother! We rather go with a transparent system where players know what they buy! So you can see we as a developer were concerned 😉
Cap Joe:
I am wondering if age ratings have been decided yet for 9LA? I am very interested in introducing my children to enjin backed games. I have noticed on the AppStore that age ratings vary dramatically and seem to be higher for apps that integrate crypto, so wonder if this will be an issue.
I think we want to stay on the safe side and 9Lives Arena will be an 18+ game. It has violence and crypto…
So that puts the ball into the parents court to judge weather they think their children are fit to play and buy it for them or not…
Also, how do developers of weapon centric games intend to integrate multiverse weapons? The Epochrome Sword, for instance, may need careful consideration- perhaps a unique attribute.
We announced all the details for the Epochrome sword in a medium article before our kickstarter 🙂 yes it has special features!
Boy Labo:
Ooogies will have their own companion app via mobile phones right? My question is, if I just have an Ooogy, and still don’t have the game, will I be able to play the Ooogy separately in the app, like send my Ooogy for resource gathering and stuff?
The cool thing about the Ooogy App is you won’t need to have the game to play with Ooogy. You can also craft items and do other things with the app.
BlueElvis:
Can Oogies be Kydys and Kydys be Oogies?
Had to google Kydys… yeah we will see what we can do in the future. We got big plans for Ooogies and the Ooogy companion app! If Kydys are something the community wants along the way we will look into it. First we have to get the Oogies out to players which will be a big thing for us later this year!
Billy Birdy:
When will there be another live stream demo with the 9LA team like the one published back on 2 Oct 2018?
Yes we hope to do lots more of these in the future. Current focus is to get the alpha into player hands, than we will also host our first tournament during the end of the alpha!
Let the games begin…
Thanks heaps for all the great q’s from the fans and your insights Dread, it’s really cool that you take the time out to fill us all in on what your team is up to. I bet you can’t wait to unveil the arena for the masses! The Enjin army awaits 🙂
For anyone that isn’t following the progress of Nine Lives Arena, Enjin Multiverse, or the creators of the Enjin Gaming Platform, please channel click the below links to find out more.
