The Mechaverse
Enter the Mechaverse - A world of advanced AI species searching for humanity on the Polygon blockchain. A generative artwork project to be evolved into an immersive P2E game.
Created on 11th December 2021
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The Mechaverse
Enter the Mechaverse - A world of advanced AI species searching for humanity on the Polygon blockchain. A generative artwork project to be evolved into an immersive P2E game.
The problem The Mechaverse solves
Idea
The idea behind Mechaverse came from the end-scenes of 2001 Steven Spielberg movie “A.I - Artificial intelligence”, where a highly advanced AI species (Mechas) wanted to explore and learn more about humanity and humans.
With this project we are recreating that character (Mechas/ AI Species) and their universe and want to depict this journey from a piece of code to a fully functional civilization: How the species evolved - physically, cognitively & socially.
Problem
One of the biggest challenges with generative art projects is the lack of secondary market involvement - While it's easier to create buzz during launch, most of the project die because of the lack of utility with the NFTs other than trading.
How we address this
By making NFTs interactable; gamification & making the entire Mechaverse experience more immmersive:
- Configurable "Name" Property: Idea is to allow owners to give a name to their Mechas (NFT). Firstly - every Mecha can be taken as a character with a personality that owners can resonate with. Secondly, having called all of Mechas with a custom name and showing off gives some value to collectors.
- Easter Eggs Hunt (embedded gamification): In our NFTs artwork - we have embedded eggs (or hints) in a visible/ invisible formats. These hints are from Sci-fi movies, science fictions, books etc.
The idea is to create an Easter Egg Hunt event - Solving 12 puzzles using these eggs and that unlocks a 10ETH value wallet. (12 symbolically represents seed phrase). This kind of gamification engages the community + attract those secondary market investors who really resonates with the project. - Mechaverse Evolution - A P2E strategy game: The NFTs also have a property called "Faction". We further want to evolve Mechaverse by building a "Hunger Games + Bandersnatch + Axie Infinity" inspired P2E strategy game as we drop in more generations. More details will be revealed in a Medium post.
Challenges I ran into
Nothing major:
- Few bugs around updating Token URI and also sorting out the submarine effect using Pinata Cloud.
- OpenSea doesn't have a very good documentation on Polygon - so we had to build our own token on Rinkeby and test there before deploying on Polygon Mumbai. It could have been more efficient..
- A lot of courses on Solidity and lots of tutorials from Youtube certainly helped.