Enter the MetaDungeon…

The Next Generation of Blockchain Games

The first MetaDungeon boss

What is it?

MetaDungeon is a new blockchain game that allows Heroes to team up to fight world bosses and score phat loot worth real money! Players interact with 3 sets of NFTs:

1. Heroes — representing players in the game
2. Bosses — the bosses Heroes fight
3. Gear — unique items that Bosses drop

Loot

Players can earn loot from slaying each Boss — this consists of 2 types:

1. varying rarities of Gear
2. all the NFTs (Loot Project, CryptoPunks etc.) and tokens (ETH etc.) that the Boss currently holds

Bosses

These Bosses are ‘world bosses’ because they independently roam around the blockchain (world) and cross paths with Heroes who can then fight them. They’re the first ever aNFTs (autonomous NFTs) that have the ability to transfer themselves to and from Heroes’ wallets (even when players are offline), and are capable of much more — for example, changing their own images in response to the price of ETH!

Each Boss (aNFT) has an owner which represents who the Boss is currently around, and so will show up in the wallet of whoever the Boss has transferred itself to at that time. However, the owner cannot transfer or sell the Boss — only the aNFT can transfer itself. As a blockchain game, it can and will be constantly extended with new Bosses, features, and fight mechanics, building on-top of the previous ones!

How To Play?

In order to play the game, players need to own a Hero NFT — these are combinations of classic fantasy style characters with a specific race (human, elf etc.), class (mage, hunter etc.), and unique stats (stamina, strength etc.). Every Hero independently gains xp to lvl up over time as they kill more Bosses and become more powerful. You can obtain a Hero NFT in one of our whitelisted drops here!

What Makes MetaDungeon A Game-changer?

MetaDungeon is the first ever blockchain game to:

1. be collaborative and have team mechanics
2. incorporate other NFT projects as a core part of gameplay
3. have true NPCs (non-playable characters)
4. be PvE (player vs environment)

Collaboration and Team Mechanics

In MetaDungeon, you can only fight a Boss if it’s in your wallet. One of the ways you can summon a Boss to your wallet is by working together in a team! Every Hero is randomly grouped into a new set of teams every day of varying sizes (2, 5, 10, 20). The exact mechanics of the team summon are described below, but it includes using Twitter as a base for team-finding.

This brand new blockchain game type has team play functionality — allowing them to also be social for the first time ever, since it’s the first time a game can be PvE. This creates a much more engaging game and community, and greatly increases the network effects of the game.

Incorporating Other NFT Projects

One of the superpowers of blockchains is composability — the ability for one thing to talk to and permissionlessly build on-top of another thing on-chain. This has long been a promise of blockchain games — that you can use an item from one game in another game — but in practice no blockchain games have done that, and certainly none have focused on it as a core part of the game. We can only speculate as to why this is, but presumably a significant reason is because game developers want to make more money by selling their own NFTs rather than incorporating others’.

In MetaDungeon, Heroes will be able to hold NFTs (like Loot Project, Bored Ape Yacht Club etc.), which are specific to a Boss at that time, that will give power-ups and make fighting the Boss easier and/or make specific items more likely to drop from the Boss. Autonomy’s focus is not to make money, but instead to create the best, most engaging game possible that functions as one of the first metaverse lego blocks for others to plug into and build on-top of. This allows for what I call ‘self-incentivising community merging’, where different communities are incentivised to interact and collaborate (more on that below).

True NPCs

Because blockchains are passive and require an external trigger (transaction) in order to change something about the chain, non-playable characters, like those in Axie Infinity, sit there waiting for users to interact with them — this makes the scope of what they can do very limited and not engaging.

Because Autonomy allows smart contracts to essentially make their own transactions (i.e. become autonomous), people can now create NPCs that interact with the user or other NPCs without requiring a user to do anything. The first simple functionality of this is demonstrated with Bosses in MetaDungeon that transfers themselves in and out of users’ wallets, but much more advanced interactions can take place — this is only the beginning. Since 99% of pre-web3 games have true NPCs in them, this enables a 100x Cambrian explosion of new blockchain games to be created that weren’t possible until now!

PvE

PvE games are mostly or fully focused on the user interacting with NPCs or something else about ‘the world’. Blockchain games in general, such as Crypto Kitties and Cheeze Wizards, have to be focused on players interacting with other players because it hasn’t been possible to be PvE until now with autonomous smart contracts. PvE games allow for economies to be net positive, rather than zero sum as with PvP (since your gain is another players’ loss), allowing for overall wealth creation. Since 99% of pre-web3 games have atleast some PvE aspect, this therefore enables a 100x in the amount of games that are possible on-chain!

Summoning Bosses

The 1st Boss will transfer itself to a new wallet every day — if this was the only way of fighting it, then only 365 people would be able to play the game every year, which obviously isn’t alot! Luckily, you can summon the dragon in the following 2 ways:

1. Summon With Items

Heroes can, at any time, summon a Boss by spending a specific NFT. The set of accepted NFTs changes over time and between Bosses, and could be a specific set of NFTs within an overall NFT project, or it could be any NFT within a project.

If the Hero wins the fight, they’ll win back the NFT they spent, along with all other NFTs/tokens that the Boss holds. But, if the Hero loses the fight after spending an NFT, they permanently lose that NFT (unless they fight it again and win). Example Item Summoning Rules:

1. required to spend 1 of any of Loot Project’s NFTs
2. required to spend 1 of any of the following of Loot Project’s NFTs: [#2, #9999]
3. required to spend 1 of any of the following of CryptoPunk’s NFTs: [#3, #55, #1337]

2. Team Summon

Every day, each Hero is randomly matched with other Heroes for that single day (though the frequency could change), and are specific to each Boss (so each Hero needs to collaborate with a different team for each different Boss when there are multiple). Each of these Heroes must then find and contact eachother. Once they do so, they can jointly summon the dragon, and this won’t require spending or holding any other NFTs. If they lose, they lose nothing, and if they win, they win the same as winning in any other situation (all the dragon’s tokens and NFTs).

It may sound hard to find the owner of a random address on the blockchain, but there are 2 things that make this much easier:

1. Everyone who owns a Hero already is, initially atleast, necessarily aware of this game (otherwise how would they have bought it from the whitelist) and therefore knows they can ask around in the Autonomy Discord. However this is still quite manual and full of friction, so a much better method is:
2. Autonomy Team is including a native tool that lets people tweet a wallet-signed message that basically says “I own Hero X, tweet @ me to team up #MetaDungeon”, along with a database that listens to all these tweets and shows who owns which Hero at any given time. So the UX is basically that the user clicks “Team Summon”, is shown the address of their teammate. If that person has identified themselves on Twitter, it’ll show their username and have a button to directly message that person. If their teammate hasn’t identified themselves on Twitter, then the user is incentivised to identify themselves on Twitter, if they haven’t already, so that their teammate can find them and they can summon the Boss together. This tool allows for organic community-created and community-sustained virality in a way that’s never been possible until now.

This mechanic is what makes MetaDungeon the first ever collaborative and team-play blockchain game, but does it in a way that is also new — by creating an ‘off-chain meta-game’ of investigation. Interestingly, all of this meta-game happens off-chain, and doesn’t require any on-chain transactions, but the completion of which can still be verified on-chain, which is why I refer to it as a meta-game.

Heroes

Each class will be available for every race. Each Hero will have base stats that are randomly generated with a binomial distribution around an average specific to that class. E.g. the average intellect of mages are higher than warriors and the average strength of warriors are higher than mages, but occasionally you’ll end up with a ripped mage and weak warrior.

The Fight

For the initial release, the Boss fight will essentially be chance-based. In the future the difficulty of a given Boss will be reduced as the Hero lvls up. The only thing that affects your chances in this is whether you fight the Boss with the specified power-up items — this power-up could come from any of the players if fighting as a team.

Power-ups

Like items that can summon a Boss, there is a set of items specific to each Boss that can be held by Heroes which act as power-ups when fighting it (regardless of how it’s summoned). These items could be the same as or different to the ones used to summon a Boss. However, whereas summoning a Boss requires Heroes to spend an NFT to summon it, using an NFT as a power-up may not require it to be spent when fighting it. For example, a Boss could have the following power-up rules:

1. owning any of Loot Project’s NFTs, not required to be spent, for (+10 stamina, +10 intellect)
2. required to spend any of the following of Loot Project for (+20 stamina, +20 intellect): [#2, #9999]
3. owning any of the following Bored Ape Yacht Club, not required to be spent, for (+40 strength, -20 intellect): [#1, #69, #420]

Benefiting from a team member’s power-up would lead to some very interesting situations where Heroes are incentivised to seek out the owners of specific NFTs (Bored Ape #4 etc.), meaning we can essentially fire a bunch of degens at Eminem’s BoredApe or GMoney’s BoredApe and therefore get Eminem/GMoney aware of and talking about the project.

Self-Incentivised Community Merging

Regardless of exactly how the power-up NFTs are chosen, it allows us to get a specific community/person aware of and talking about our community, either because our players went to their community to ask for their help in the game, or because our players went and bought the other community’s NFTs and therefore merged with that community.

Incentivisation of community merging through game mechanics is a new, and I think incredibly powerful, community growth strategy. Not only is it a first in blockchain games (since there’s never been a collaborative blockchain game before), but it’s a first for any game, because web2 games aren’t composable in the same way that blockchain games are. It’s impossible to create a web2 game that integrates some items or experience from another web2 game in a provable way.

Another way of incentivised community merging is via the loot of the Bosses. We intend to partner with various projects and have their token be added to the loot of Bosses — this will both make our users aware of that project, bring their users to us, and also incentivise playing the game even more with prize pools — a positive externality. It’s essentially win-win marketing while being a new version of the P2E (play to earn) model, with the increased boost of chance. Degens love them some chance.

The Goal

Our intention with MetaDungeon, at a strategic level, is to prove another use case for Autonomy Network. On a personal level, it’s to take the 1st step on a long and game-changing path in the metaverse. All the code will be open-sourced, and we actually want teams to fork and iterate on what we’re creating since they’ll necessarily be using Autonomy under the hood to power all the aNFTs, which will generate more use of Autonomy and presumably even cooler use cases that we could never have thought of on our own. We’ll also utilize this to grow Autonomy’s general community going into our public token sale.

Initial Version

The first version of MetaDungeon will just be a single dragon Boss (yet to be named — twitter poll incoming!) and a set of 1000 Heroes. The rare drop from this dragon will be The Sword of a Thousand Degens (shown above), which will be necessary to fight future Bosses, and changes between the images depending on whether the price of ETH has recently gone up or down. We’re already working on adding new Bosses to this game, each with unique fight mechanics, but starting with 1 allows us to see what does/doesn’t work and iterate quickly. Each new Boss acts like a new ‘level’ to the game by requiring items dropped from the previous hardest Boss in order to defeat the new Boss.

Autonomy will initially fund the dragon with a prize pool of thousands of dollars worth of tokens or NFTs, which will be won by Heroes as rare drops.

For the initial version, the only benefit the user gets from having the Boss in their wallet is that they can immediately fight it without any other condition.

Initially we will focus on collaborating with Loot Project to have their NFTs be the ones that give power-ups to players aswell as summon the dragon. The necessary Loot Project items will change roughly every few days to keep the game fresh and engaging.

The initial team sizes will only be 2 Hero teams — in the future we’ll expand to include larger team sizes and therefore rarer items that drop from playing in a larger team, but we’ll start with 2 for speed of launch and to make sure it’s not too difficult to form a team (better to make it harder in the future rather than it be too hard for anyone to play).

The stats of each Hero will be shown in their images, and will later be added on-chain.

The 1st Boss will transfer itself to a new Hero daily, but other Bosses may have different transfer frequencies, especially if we move to another, cheaper blockchain.

Roadmap

As mentioned, we’ll be iterating and improving the fight mechanics to be more dynamic, adding new Bosses/levels, and collaborating with other projects to have their IP as Bosses. We’ll also be adding different difficulties to Bosses — for example in addition to being able to team up with 1 Hero, we’ll add the ability to team up with 5 or 10 people. The more people you fight a Boss with, you’ll unlock the ability to mint even rarer NFTs that aren’t available when summoning with fewer Heroes.

Our drop strategy will be in stages. The first stage will be a whitelist for 1000 NPCs that will be free to mint, and we’ll do this with a new 1000 every week or 2, or whatever makes the most sense at the time. We’re not doing this for money, so we’ll base the whitelist off of community growth metrics etc.

Technical point — why the Heroes?

Because aNFTs are fully autonomous and independent, and don’t rely on instructions or directions or data from anything off-chain, it needs an on-chain list of players in order to be able to choose who to transfer itself to next. We could have a registry contract where people add their addresses to a list, but the degens would just sybil attack it and fill it up with 100 of their own addresses each. If we add a cap to that list, then there would need to be a way for people to exit the list in order to make way for new players, i.e. transfer their spot on the list. Sound familiar? NFTs have the nice property that they’re essentially a list of addresses that have scarcity and transferability built-in. The narrative of them being players is useful because it allows us to create extra mechanics on-top, such as having specific stats and xp that dynamically change over time and keep each NFT fresh and even more unique.

Join the community!

Go to autonomynetwork.io to learn more, get on the whitelist, join our discord and telegram, and follow us on twitter to stay uptodate on the launch and whitelist. See you there! 😁