In April we launched the Space Drop that would eventually lead into our first mobile title, Alien Arsenal: Battle for the Blockchain. We’re deeply appreciative to everyone who has joined us on this adventure. Those involved in our Discord and early access programs have provided valuable data and feedback on their experience. We’re happy to provide you all a full update on both what we’ve learned in launching Alien Arsenal, and our upcoming plans for its future.

To lay the foundation for the next steps for Alien Arsenal, this article starts with our initial objectives and then dives into our key takeaways. Based on these learnings, we’ll be doing some retooling on Alien Arsenal and these changes will factor into our other ongoing initiatives to deliver our players the best products with the most meaningful blockchain elements.

8 Circuit Studios’ Objectives for Alien Arsenal

Objective 1: Make Blockchain Features Easy and Accessible

We recognized there is a desire to participate in blockchain and cryptocurrency but many people were finding themselves overwhelmed at the process of selecting a wallet, setting up an account on an exchange, purchasing tokens, and understanding how keys and transfers worked. Understanding the impact blockchains are going to make, knocking down these barriers for everyone was our primary objective. So, Alien Arsenal was designed to provide blockchain integration that was easy, accessible, and almost transparent to the player.

We accomplished this by setting up a wallet for the players within the game that held both their 8Bit Tokens and designed to provided access to their digital assets, AKA: Aliens. Taking the guess work out of this new technology made it a process anyone could do and, afterwards, they were rewarded with 8Bit Tokens and a digital asset (their alien).

It’s possible, we did too good a job. We discovered many people hadn’t even realized what had been accomplished in playing Alien Arsenal; using a blockchain wallet to earn, and store 8Bit Tokens. Further, incubating their aliens meant that they had created and stored digital assets on the blockchain. Feedback indicated that this process felt like a natural part of playing the game (Success! Easy and transparent!) and yet many of the hurdles presented by cryptocurrencies and blockchain in the past had been overcome without recognition by the player.

Our objective… was to provide blockchain integration was easy, accessible, and almost transparent to the player.

Objective 2: Provide 8Bit Tokens to Our Supporters

At 8 Circuit Studios we are taking the first steps to the future of gaming and commerce in a new digital economy. 8Bit Tokens will be the fuel for that economy. Naturally, getting tokens into the hands of people who believe in our vision is the best way to give back to our community. Through our Space Drop, we succeeded at providing the opportunity to collect our tokens prior to an open sale. Many people took advantage of this opportunity. (If you haven’t claimed your 8Bit Tokens you can still install Alien Arsenal on your mobile device and claim them there.)

Getting tokens into the hands of the people who believe in our vision…

Objective 3: A Blockchain Contract for In-Game Assets That Evolve

Creating an Ethereum contract for a digital asset (the aliens in Alien Arsenal) that stored changing game data was our final objective. The contract held data that was updated each time the alien leveled up. This model was designed to provide additional value to the owner with each leveling of their Alien.

The ability to change aspects of blockchain digital assets through gameplay is a feature we haven’t seen in other games, but it’s something that really makes ownership special and we wanted to offer that to our players. We used the early access of Alien Arsenal to assess the contract that made leveling up objects possible. You can see this at work each time your alien “evolves” and you choose a new skill. All that data is saved to the chain through the contract for your alien.

When updating data to the blockchain, there is always a transaction cost. As gamers, the idea of passing along that cost of the transaction to the player seemed like a costly option. So, we made the transactions free in this early access to measure the interaction, cost and again, focus on the transparency of blockchain integration. The data we gathered allowed us to make firm decisions about our contracts so we could give our players the most options without constant transaction fees.

We discovered again, through feedback, that the transparency of blockchain integration hid from the player that the Aliens were anything more than typical in game assets. So, we succeeded in creating the assets, adding evolution (level up) features, hiding the transaction cost, and again made blockchain easy, accessible and transparent, but we needed additional functionality and direction for the player to recognize that the alien was something more.

The contract held data that changed each time the alien leveled up. This model was designed to provide additional value to the owner

8 Circuit Studios’ Learnings

Through the Space Drop and early access to Alien Arsenal we learned a lot about what is important to our players, more about their expectations, and what was necessary to make a mobile blockchain game sustainable.

What is Important to Players

The feedback confirmed our belief that ownership of assets was important to our players as was the potential for those assets to retain or increase in value. But we were surprised that the value offered by our digital assets (Aliens) was not clear (see Objective 3 above).

In this early access state, we put the Alien contract on the test network for Ethereum. The result was the Aliens would eventually be lost when we migrated the contract to the the main (live) network for Ethereum. To avoid confusion between test and main net digital assets, we chose not to implement the feature to transfer assets out of the wallet. The combination of not advocating the value of the digital assets as they evolved, coupled with no indication that they are in the players wallet, we believe, led to the value of the aliens being unclear to players.

Feedback on the art design came back very positive. The artistic theme of our game and the look and feel of the aliens and bosses really resonated. We’ll be continuing on the same path for art and theme moving forward.

Lastly, in this early access phase for the game, we were focused primarily on the development and testing of the blockchain and technical features. Though this was what 8 Circuit Studios needed, the lack of emphasis on the gameplay and rewards, drew the focus from the technical achievements.

What is Important to Blockchain Products

As identified above, focus was on the technology and making blockchain easy, if not fully transparent to the players experience. Though we accomplished this, feedback showed that ease of use was an expectation by players, not a selling point. Though we feel that making blockchain integration easy, accessible and fun is still our primary goal, the emphasis, for players and our games, moving forward, will be the “fun.”

The data we gathered through gameplay provides us the information we needed to make some future decisions on the contracts we were using for digital assets. Primarily, we were able to make a series of decisions about what should be on-chain versus off-chain for the assets themselves.

Additionally, as gamers, we wanted to reduce the friction of transaction costs. The information gathered about the number of transactions and the types has allowed us to make some decisions about further reduction of transaction costs to the player, as well as how to manage them when transactions are a necessity.

Lastly, we identified the value of building scarcity into the contracts for the digital assets themselves. This will provide the players and collectors assuredness on the long term value of the assets they possess.

What’s in Store for Alien Arsenal?

We hit our objectives for the Space Drop and early access to Alien Arsenal: Battle for the Blockchain, and we learned a great deal. Using that information, here are the updates you can plan to see in the future for Alien Arsenal.

Contract

We’re in the process of a full redesign of the alien contract. This decision comes directly from the feedback from our players as well as the analysis of the game play data. The contract we are producing will be used in all of our games, so it will be easy to use assets from game to game. The contract will also be focused on keeping transaction costs to a minimum.

Game Play

The new contract design has provided an opportunity to review the game and make decisions on game play. We’ll review the mechanics and likely develop new ideas on how they can function more effectively with the new contract. This will also allow us to take the time to focus on the fun instead of the technical aspects of the game.

Alien Value

Our digital assets, in this case the aliens, are created by the contract. With the new contract being developed for the main net and game play review, we will demonstrate to the player the ownership of the Aliens as well as the ability of the asset to retain data relevant to the alien’s usefulness. The aliens and their data will be advantageous in cross game scenarios with other products from 8 Circuit Studios. Likely, they will also be available to other developers as assets for games outside our ecosystem, providing further potential value to the player.

In Summary

What we really learned is that our community is amazing. We can’t wait to wow you. We’re investing in our contract and infrastructure (which will take a bit of time). And there are several other initiatives in progress that we’ll be announcing soon…and the success of those initiatives are also dependent upon the behind the scenes work we are performing.

It will be some time before there is an update to the game. But we want to remind the community that all participants of the Alien Arsenal Space Drop will have the first looks at Season 2 when it’s launched. And this includes anyone joining before we’re ready to reveal Season 2. We’ll also be providing early access to limited edition, first run, aliens on the main net! Thank you for your help and effort to get us to the next steps.

What we really learned is that our community is amazing.

Alien Arsenal On The Mobile Stores

Alien Arsenal is still available in early access from the mobile stores. The good news, if you haven’t tried it yet, we’re still conducting the Space Drop and you’ll still be able to earn 8Bit Tokens for your participation. Additionally, if you are already a member of the early access you can invite your friends through the Alien Arsenal menu screen and earn even more 8Bit Tokens. In the near future you’ll be happy you have those tokens in your wallet.

Tell Us What You Think

We’ve created a poll to gather information about what you are looking for in games. It will only take a few minutes to fill out and it will tell us what you value in the blockchain gaming space. Complete this poll to have your voice heard.

Finally, we have many announcements coming in the near future. Make sure you are a member of the 8 Circuit Studios Discord channel to get early access, sneak peeks, all of our other important information about 8 Circuit Studios and our games first.