As part of a new series of interviews we are chatting to NFT projects on Cardano that are, or have launched games around their projects.
Our first interview was with Crypto Raggies, and we now chat to XRace who have a racing and management game.
X-Race is an NFT racing and management game, how does this work?
X-Race is a play to win game, and is non-interactive. There are no long grind sessions to earn a small amount of a native asset that you most likely want to sell back to ADA anyway. It is similar to games like Zed Run and Pegaxy if you are familiar with them.
We have now been accepted into the staking program in the Ape Society Cabins so your X-Race NFTs can now earn $SOCIETY and $HEXO from CardanoLands.
Before I explain the gameplay a bit of basic information about the NFTs and the game is probably important.
There are 4 arenas that can be raced in, red, green, blue & open. All NFTs can race in at least 2 of these arenas, open is as the name suggests open to all vehicles, the colored arenas are open to vehicles of that specific color.
Each NFT has the following traits in their metadata:
- Vehicle color; this determines what color arena that NFT can race in (Red, Green, Blue or Purple) (Purple are our rare NFTs and can race in all arenas).
- Open power; this is the base power stat in the open arena for that NFT. &
- Color power; this is the base power stat in that NFTs designated color arena.
So, if you have a Red Vehicle with an open power of 90 and a color power of 95 it can race in the open arena with a minimum power stat of 90 and the red arena with a minimum power stat of 95.
The gameplay works as follows:
- You log in to your profile on our website and go to the dashboard where your Vehicles are listed for you to select the NFT you want to race with. Each NFT can race a maximum of 5 races in a 24 hr period to prevent spamming of the fastest bikes.
- You then pick an arena to race in (each bike has certain arenas they are able to race in depending on the attributes of their metadata), a pilot and a racing style from our standard list. The choices you make here are the key to winning races, the pilot and style interactions are hidden and different for each NFT, pick well and you will get a massive boost to speed so, tracking your times and working out your best setups for each of your NFTs is crucial.
- Pay the 2 XUT/ADA entry fee. XUT is our platform only currency and is not a native Cardano asset. It is and always will be worth 1 ADA, deposit 1 ADA get 1 XUT, withdraw 1 XUT get 1 ADA. WE chose to do this as we built during massive congestion so rather than place load on the blockchain and slow race entry we chose this method. It also reduces all excess fees on users by only submitting a TX when you want to deposit rather than every bike in every race you enter.
- Once 10 NFTs have entered into the lobby the race will automatically run, you can watch the animation of the race and see how you went. The top 5 places get paid out prizes in XUT directly to their platform balance, a small amount goes to the end of season leaderboard payouts, a small amount goes to the staking pool to be distributed to stakers (we are onboarded with Mutants staking for this we will start by using the rugpulled Neon Racerz NFTs as our staking assets but have a PFP free claim drop for holders of our racing vehicles they will get 1 for to use for this so we don’t remove all the racing assets from circulation) and a small amount goes to the team for maintenance and development.
- Each bike in every race gets championship points that go towards the month-long season leaderboard with the top 20 on the leaderboard taking a share of the prizes and the top 3 getting one of our garage NFTs.
- At the end of each season all the championship points you have earned get distributed to your discord account and can be spent in our discord shop on things like practice sessions, raffle tickets, Cardano native assets, NFTs and ADA.
We also run a monthly free to enter weekly battle royale race in our discord server with a monthly prize of 40 ADA.
Do you have to play against other NFT holders? If so, how is this facilitated?
Yes the game is only PvP at the moment. It is facilitated in the way explained above.
We are currently working on a range of mini arcade games that we hope to integrate into our website for holders at some point, these will not be massive and are hopefully going to be a fun way for people to spend 3-5 mins chasing the high scores like it used to be in the arcades.
We have 5 mini pixel art arcade games built that are available to play in our discord server now, I will be uploading them to our itch account shortly as well, we hold monthly high score contests for these so come have a go and maybe win a bunch of raffle tickets. I am a retro arcade gamer mostly so enjoy the challenge of a good short timed high score game challenge.
Do you have to hold NFTs to play the game or is there a way for non-NFT holders to play?
Yes at this stage you need an NFT to be able to play we are open to a mechanism by which holding is not required however this will be down the track as we think our entry price to the collection is extremely affordable at only 18 ADA if you hold a partner project NFT or 25 ADA if you do not.
Soon we will be opening up X-Race for other projects to use. So other projects can complete an application, once integrated they will get their own dashboard and their own arena on X-Race. Their community will be able to race their NFTs on our platform adding instant racing gamification to their project.
Racing will work very much like ours, there will be no cost and no X-Race NFT holding requirement to the project team or the users. A small portion of each race entry fee will add to the monthly leader board prize, the non X-Race NFT races will not count towards the users leader board points however so to have a chance of winning the championship and the leader board prizes you will need to race in the X-Race arenas.
How do you play the game? Is it browser based or will it be available as an app download?
It is browser based and we have no plans to make an app or downloadable version.
We have used email login and the transaction to verify wallet method of connection as well so the game is able to be played on multiple devices with just the email login and is able to be played now on mobile and tablet as well (it is still to be optimised for mobile however it does work and is playable).
We chose this method because although Cardano tech is improving mobile compatibility is just not there yet for the chain, also a lot of our users are Daedalus and Yoroi users which have no compatibility with dApp connect so this gave us the most flexibility with compatibility.
What makes the game a “blockchain game” as opposed to a standard game?
You own the NFTs that you play with, they can be used or sold and they are not locked just to the X-Race game, currently you can use your X-Race vehicles to stake on Cardanolands, they can be used in the Space Troopers battle arena game and we hope to be able to integrate with multiple other projects, we would love to see an X-Race vehicle zooming around the metaverse at some point.
In your opinion what does the future hold for blockchain gaming?
I think the future of blockchain gaming is going to be massive, personally I think in the next 10 years almost all gaming will be on the blockchain and these game assets will hold huge value. I think at the moment the blockchain gaming space is still extremely disjointed and segregated. Each project has their assets that are usable in their game, I think one of the strengths and abilities of blockchain is that these assets don’t need to be tied to a single game or ecosystem I think that the future will see entire gaming ecosystems sprout around a single asset so rather than having a gaming console you have an NFT that acts as a quasi console. That NFT is your ticket to play multiple games and can be used in different ways across them.
In X-Race your bike might be a race bike but in game ‘X’ it could be a weapon or a powerup, for example. I think that for blockchain gaming to infiltrate the mainstream these sorts of value adds need to be achieved to show to non-crypto people the benefits of true game asset ownership.