Drakos Keep and dRealms

Drakos Keep Progress

As many people in the EOSIO community know, GoodBlock has been developing our game, Drakos Keep, for many months. We believe that when Drakos Keep is released on Telos, that it will be the first blockchain game that will play like a more traditional mobile game with fast-paced play, turn based actions, and a depth of nuance and strategy. Drakos Keep will be available on Android, iOS, MacOS, and Windows platforms with players able to battle transparently across any of these. We are building tools to ensure that mobile gamers will be able to buy Drakos Keep in app stores and play without any knowledge of blockchain. In time, many of these players will come to be interested in the true ownership components of Drakos Keep’s tradeable game assets and discover their Telos accounts in this way. Games are a proven onramp to new technologies and we see Drakos Keep bringing masses of new users to Telos. (We just launched the updated website for Drakos Keep.)

As our plans for Drakos Keep suggest, GoodBlock has an inclusive mission which empowers gamers not only to own and control their game assets but also to play with them across platforms as they choose. But our commitment to empowering gamers and expanding the gaming universe are much bigger than this. For months we have been exploring the meaning and expectations around “true ownership” and what buyer expectations should be about the assets they have purchased or created. It is apparent to us that the ability to sell assets is a step forward, but falls short of its true potential value if game items are still bound within a single game. Our vision for blockchain-empowered true ownership of assets includes the ability to use items across games the way that a physical toy can be played in any number of games or adventures. This is the big vision of science fiction stories such as Ready, Player One and we have been working to make this a reality — not in the distant future, but starting right away.

Introducing dRealms

We are excited to introduce the dRealms Gaming Universe. dRealms is a group of tools that empowers creators to make true ownership digital game assets that work across games and across blockchains. This is a concept we shared briefly in our video A Revolution in Blockchain Games where we describe how other creators could use the dragon assets from Drakos Keep along with game assets from other publishers to make new games that people with these assets can play. dRealms is how we can make this a reality. The opportunity here is massive.

Perhaps the strongest force in computing today is user-generated content. When a platform empowers users to create and distribute their own content — especially when that content can build and riff on other UGC, the result is an explosion of new content, genres, remixes, and opportunities that could never have been imagined before. One of the best examples of this is YouTube: before YouTube, video was siloed by the large studios and network, smaller companies and individuals were at the fringes, but today, because of how YouTube unlocked video distribution for the masses, more video is created and consumed than ever before and a vast array of new genres exist. No one before YouTube could have conceived of unboxing videos, for example. By unlocking user-generated content for interoperable game assets, dRealms will do for games what YouTube did for video.

Exploring dRealms

For gamers, dRealms will be seen as a smorgasbord of exciting game assets that can be used in an ever-growing number of games. They will be able to buy and sell these assets in the dRealms Marketplace or via wallet-based decentralized exchanges. Gamers will finally be able to build avatar characters that can travel from one game to another. They will be able to buy a weapon, vehicle, spell, or magical item and use it across many games. When they no longer need an item, they can sell it or rent it. With many game assets, building the stats of an item will add value into it in a way that can be easily converted into digital currency.

For game and game asset creators, dRealms will also be a token standard and set of tools that make creating these interoperable assets and the games that use them easy. No longer will developers need to create every single element of their games. dRealms game designers of the near future may simply create cool new items to add into existing games or to await the imagination of other game makers who don’t care to create new assets, only games that take advantage of the massive amount of exciting game items. Today’s modders, whose creations are locked into single games, will soon be able to bring their talents to a massive gaming universe. These creators will be able to earn micropayments when people play their games and even ongoing royalty-type payments whenever their assets sell in the future, so they can participate in the appreciation of their creations.

dRealms is a gaming platform that grew out of our game design for Drakos Keep, so it is an expression of our real needs as experienced game designers, looking at game design and publication through the eyes of major AAA brands, big game publishers, small game publishers, independent asset creators, and of course, gamers themselves. We know these stakeholders very well through our many years in games. We have created a system that incorporates their needs so that they will be able to participate.

We have released the dRealms Whitepaper, website, and Github repository including the dRealms cross-game, multi-chain token standard and documentation. Over the coming weeks we will have much more to share about this exciting initiative to change the future of gaming.

About the author: Douglas Horn is the Telos architect and whitepaper author, and the founder of GoodBlock, a block producer and app developer for the Telos Blockchain Network.

More about GoodBlock can be found at: www.goodblock.io

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