How to Incorporate NFTs into Gameplay Rather Than Skins
The Tezos Foundation announced this week that it is working on the Tezos SDK for Unity. Unity (also known as Unity 3D) is a popular game engine for desktop, console and mobile games.
If it succeeds, game developers will have a universal solution to connect wallets and work with transactions and NFTs. We’ve researched the subject and found a few ways to integrate NFTs into the gameplay and make them really useful.
Are NFTs Useless in Games?
The main drawback of NFTs in games is that contracts are too standard. Users and developers are used to non-fungible tokens simply representing digital objects: avatars, 3D models, characters, or objects. But these are only some of the use cases.
Thus, plenty.network will use vePLY NFTs to represent locked tokens and their voting weight. In SalsaDAO, proprietary NFTs can be staked to receive a portion of the commissions.
If NFTs can be used in DeFi, then they can do more than just display pictures in GameFi. We have come up with several use cases.
Nested NFTs
Imagine a base token with a separate address that can store other tokens. Such a system can be used in different genres:
- Assemble cars, robots, or weapons from NFT parts;
- Put NFT armor on an NFT character in an MMORPG;
- Store a limited amount of hidden resources in a piece of NFT land in a metaverse and allow players to mine them gradually.
That said, nested tokens can perform both cosmetic and gameplay functions. For example, an NFT supercharger embedded in an NFT car can be rendered on a car preview in the wallet and also add 10% to its maximum speed in-game.
Adjustable On-chain Parameters of NFTs
In multiplayer games, players enjoy their stats and achievements. CS:GO has guns that counts successful shots, League of Legends has stats for completed in-game tasks, and FIFA has stats for ball possession and chances taken.
Similar tools can be implemented using NFT profiles. Take Blockxer: the user mints an NFT cartridge at their address and connects their wallet to the game. Blockxer perceives the cartridge as activated and triggers gameplay.
Take the cartridge contract, remove the transfer function from it to send to other addresses, and you get an NFT representing one address and identifying the player. You can write any statistics into it: the number of times you beat the apefluencers, the percentage of successful attempts to defeat the boss, the time of the best run, etc.
Player reactions in multiplayer games can be implemented similarly. If you like playing together, like your teammates, and the contract will record your reaction in the token’s properties. Wallets might render that likes and dislikes it in the previews.
Adjustable NFT Preview
Multiplayer games are all about progress. Players level up, gain achievements and unlock unique items. Their progress is often shown by badges in their profiles or beautiful frames on their avatars.
With NFTs, which replace profiles, you can do the same. If you’ve played 100 games, there’s a relevant frame on your avatar; if you win five times in a row, you get a respective badge.
You can also change the previews of NFT items the same way, especially those designed as expendable in gameplay. For example, NFT armor can be cracked with damage, and an NFT tree in a metaverse can grow by the day.
Public NFT Collections
Gamers love to express themselves, so Steam has a thriving market for skins, and free-to-play online games make millions from selling them.
No matter how fantastic the collection is, not all players will want a Tezzard or Ottez on their profile, especially since they’ll have to buy them and compete for one out of 10,000 tokens.
Public collections will solve this problem. After a brief moderation, players can produce their own NFTs within existing collections with support for rendering by external conditions and the frames and icons mentioned earlier.
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