Block Babies — AMA with VeriArti

The First NFT gaming dApp on VeChain is set to launch in weeks with 10,000 battling babies and they popped in for a chat!

On Wednesday, 22nd April, Sara from Block Babies popped into the VeriArti telegram to answer any questions about their upcoming VTHO burning baby battle royale. While most of the basic game mechanics questions can be found at https://www.blockbabies.world/#guide there were still plenty of questions for them.

Block Babies is the first dApp to use VRA tokens and the first gaming NFT dApp on VeChain Thor. It’s first wave was taken up in 6 minutes by 150 players and their second wave is nearly full. Here’s a summary of the AMA yesterday submitted by the community!

Could you enlighten us about the history of Block Babies. Like how it all started?

Well some of us were from a clothing graphics company called Watermelon which specialised in baby designs for children’s clothes with Marks and Spencers. That’s myself and Aimee. And then we moved to Bamboo Labs which is more web graphics and game design. So the art was easy enough for us as we’ve been drawing these kinds of things for a long time. Our department director was the one who suggested we move into gaming with our characters. Our game developer Navdeep has already been lead dev on a number of games too, and we had worked with him on prevous projects. So it all just slotted into place really. There are 5 of us altogether.

What was a challenge your team has faced, and how did you manage to solve it?

The blockchain stuff! We loved the idea of having all our characters and items unique but didn’t really have to knowledge to do it and our budget to hire smart contract developers and such was out of reach so Jamie basically told us all we needed was our art, battle logic and idea. And we had that, and it has since snowballed.

Are the babies released in the first wave more rare than those in later waves?

100%. I saw Jamie shared some of the cards yesterday which is fine. But you’ll see that they are 5 star rarity. That’s because they have 5 star stamina, 5 star multiplier and are in the first Wave. Even the babies with only 1 star Stamina and 1 star multiplier will have 3 star rarity because they’re in the first wave. Let me find an example.

What are your milestones after full launch?

Well. We already have our first wave of 500 babies and item cards made. As you know, we’re getting them on the blockchain as we speak. Wave 1 registrants filled up pretty quickly and Wave 2 has nearly filled up. The way we want to work is that with each Wave of cards we will be adding to the game engine and development. We’re a small company and so only want to add to the tech with what we have. For example, we now have our game engine, dashboard and so on all developed on Mongo, Unity and Photon (and Vechain!), but we’l be adding more and more features and the waves progress from community interaction.

How much VTHO do you think you will need to run block babies for the 1st month?

Ha! We were warned us this question would come up so I spoke with Navdeep about it. He made me a message for this, one second:

“They are referring to how many times there will be blockchain interaction — VTHO usage. Gas will be utilised on each of the 10,000 NFT creations, each trade it makes, each auction created, each battle, each quest, and each experience update per baby, per player. So we’ll be pushing their limits for sure. “

So hope that makes sense to you guys!

Will you organise tournaments/special events?

Yup! you can already make a custom room for your friends to do battle with but no reason why we can’t organise tournaments. As I said, we want to continually add features on each wave, so there’s no limit really on what we can do if people want it.

Will we ever be able to merge or forge new babies?

Yes! it was only recently we decided to do this actually, but with items, not babies. You wont be able to do it in Wave 1, but from Wave 2 onwards there will be ability to combine and burn items to level them up. For example, the ‘Poison Pacifier’ knocks off 10% of an opponent’s appetite. We are going to allow you to combine two of those to create a Level 2 poisoned pacifier which would shave off 20% instead.

So will everyone in the initial 150 people be able to get a baby? Or will people be able to grab as many babies as they want?

This is a question we’re still asking ourselves if we’re honest. We have to balance making sure our cards are in demand but also we don’t want one person to swoop in and take all the best babies straightaway. Right now, we’re heading towards a 2 lead baby limit on Wave 1. Meaning one person can’t take them all and then sell them on for 2x the price immediately!

How do quests work, what will they involve?

Every 2 hours your baby can go on a quest. If you lead baby has more than 1 star then this is sped up by a %. For example 5 stars is 100% faster so you can quest every 1 hour (if you really want to of course). Quests are either Stories, Quiz or Choice which will result in either an addition to your attribute, deduction from an attribute or addition/deduction to your experience.