Blockchain has given us the ability to tokenize in-game assets, creating exciting possibilities. Gaming economies are becoming more sophisticated and interesting, with real life stakes, and a feeling of ownership that was previously lacking. Sure, you could have risked a potential ban for buying gold or equipment in Runescape or World of Warcraft, but for us law-abiding gamers, blockchain has provided the first taste of profiting off of time spent in-game. This year, in particular, looks to be very promising. We can look at Tron's Steem aquisition and Steem booting up a new site at https://next.steem-engine.com/. We can look at Enjin's ecosystem going live at https://enjin.io/. But, I want to talk a bit about Knight Story, my favorite recent release.

Knight Story is a fleshed out gaming application that you can find on your phone’s App Store. As of now, you can link your Ethereum wallet and trade your in-game digital assets on Opensea. When booting up Knight Story for the first time, you will encounter a screen that gives you the option of choosing between an Eth, Tron, or EOS version of the game, with the Tron and EOS options blacked out for now. There are plans to expand the games functionality to the Tron and EOS networks in time, which makes sense, since the developers at Biscuit have partnered with Tron, and Knight Story is a sort of spiritual successor to EOS Knights. Biscuit were actually the developers of EOS Knights, and this is their new project.

In Knight Story, you start off with Eva, a sort of warrior, and your party expands to include Tris, an archer, and Han, a mage. You’ll notice that their initials spell out ETH.

This game plays like a sort of idle rpg, where you select a mission and watch Eva, Tris, and Han defeat enemies. That being said, you must manually click on materials to pick them up, so the more time you invest the faster you can grow. Your characters have stats for attack, defense, hp, and luck, with luck determining how often better materials drop. You can also merge lesser materials when you have three of them to create progressively rarer materials with a chance of failure where the materials are destroyed.

Once you collect the necessary materials, you craft your equipment. Pieces of equipment have various crafting difficulties, and, once created, they will have a quality rating out of 100 which determines the items stats. Ideally, you want to create equipment with a 99% rating, and, then you will want to synthesize that piece with duplicates that you will create to level your best rated pieces up. This becomes especially important when you start trying to sell your gear on Opensea. Right now, equipment with Set bonus's sell pretty well, and if you throw them into a bundle, they will likely get attention and sell fairly quickly.

In order to get equipment onto Opensea, you have to send it to your MyKi, which requires a MyKi ticket. You can get 3 MyKi tickets for a dollar on their in-game store, or you can purchase them for .0033 Eth at https://knightstory.io/.

Knight Story is currently ranked 22nd by 7-day volume, and has an average price of .03 Ethereum per sale. A level 7 Supporter's badge has the highest last sale at 3.45 Ethereum. You can buy a level 1 Supporters badge in the pre-sale Knight Story tab. A level 7 item is the highest level currently possible.

Other features of Knight story include a village, where you upgrade buildings using materials, and those building then give your characters stat bonuses, create high level materials, or create pet eggs.

3 pet eggs will get you a pet. You can also buy pet eggs using the in game currencies, water and magic beans.

You can synthesize pets to level them up, just like the rest of your equipment.

Water is the lower-end in-game currency, that is easier to earn, and can be spent to level up characters, pets, equipment and some village buildings. You can also use water in the Water Temple, a very new feature that has only been around for about a week. The Water Temple opens twice a day at set times, and you can join for 300 water, as many times as you want.

The Water Temple remains open until the someone receives the top prize. Usually, you walk away with a few materials, but every few days, the top prize is actually .2 Ethereum. I tend to avoid the Water Temple unless something good is up for grabs. It is kind of like gambling with your water. It's a cool feature, and seems like it would be worth it once you hit the level cap, and have excess water left to burn.

Magic Beans are the other in-game currency. They are harder to get and more useful. You can earn beans by hitting milestones in-game, or by purchasing them with dollars on the App store or with Eth on https://knightstory.io/. There is also a feature called "daily reward" on their website, where once a day, for the price of Ethereum gas for the transaction, they will give you 4 Magic Beans. This seems worth it, as 20 beans sell for $1 on their in-game store. Magic Beans are used to expand inventory space, level up certain buildings in your village,and to buy materials, pets, and water.

A last feature that I should mention are boss battles. If you start today, the boss battle will be unavailable. We are in between bosses at the moment, and the developers have not released the next boss.

You have 3 shots at the boss per day, and you have 6 help tickets, which you use to help others finish their boss. Throughout the boss event, you face higher and higher level bosses as you level up, and receive more rewards each time you finish a bigger boss. You receive water, item scrolls that help you make better equipment, and Boss Material. Boss Material is used to make boss statues in your village, which give you an advantage against the boss as you level the statue up.

I have high hopes for Knight Story, and high hopes for blockchain gaming in general this year. In the few weeks that I have been playing Knight Story, I have seen the updates and development that Biscuit have added to the game. It is always nice to see progress in games that you are interested in playing for a long period of time. My advice is to try out a few games to see which ones you enjoy. Knight Story, Splinterlands, God's Unchained, Crypto Space Commander, Brave Frontier Heros, or CryptoKitties, they all have great development behind them, and any one of them is worth trying out, if only to see what sort of features blockchain can add to gaming.

You can check out the unofficial Knight Story discord with this invite: https://discord.gg/xxvGv6