The process of invention with CryptoCarz was largely driven by inspiration: what are the possibilities with non-fungible tokens (NFTs); has anyone thought about the options for gamers with smart contracts beyond buying and selling items? Our development has been focused on our areas of domain expertise — game design, VR design and modelling, and blockchain coding. With Nifty Hong Kong, the first summit focused on NFTs and gaming, hosting a hackathon, the chance to bring all our development tracks together in real-time was a critical opportunity for the whole team.

One of the key instigators — and sponsors — of the Nifty conference was Decentraland, the most known decentralised virtual reality platform. Their virtual reality real estate presented a chance to put our NFT-based cars to the test — could we render cars, link them with a system of smart contracts and race them? This is the promise we’ve made to our community and partners since the launch of CryptoCarz. Now we could show that it worked, and, more importantly, that it was awesome.

The premise for the Nifty hackathon was to produce the best ideas in blockchain-based gaming in 36 hours. We thought it would be the right time and place to demonstrate how CryptoCarz could work on Decentraland. It would have been ambitious to build a full racing circuit in the space of less than two days, so we decided to focus on creating a workable drag race. This would leave enough time to complete the Smart Contract infrastructure, as well as additional ideas to support the drag race — settling on an additional betting decentralised application (dApp).

The concept:

Beyond the simple premise of showing an actual race, we wanted to demonstrate how ERC721 can be functionally applied in a game. Blockchain-based gaming enables the creation of new games dynamics, such as sharing revenue using smart contracts. This has been promised, but it hadn’t been shown in practice.

We wanted the drag race to demonstrate the following features:

four different cars drag racing on a strip, all built in Decentraland

the platform and game mechanics defined and controlled through NFTs and smart contracts

all cars and the track itself are ERC721 tokens

an additional betting dApp to allow other user to bet on the result of the race

The 3D assets:

For starters, we had to adapt our high-resolution car models to a lower resolution to fit the current parameters in Decentraland, and render four different cars to use in the race. We modelled the drag strip as a 30x4 scene, which, given the parcel size in Decentraland, came to 300 by 40 meters. To give it context, we used Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour as the backdrop for the race.