Creating the 1st NFT Meets Metaverse Game

Trials and tribulations. While we can celebrate now that we are launching Crypto Conquerors the 1st NFT meets Metaverse game it was a journey to get here and this is the story.

Back in 2010 I had the idea to make a game where every state is a game piece and users could compete to buy and sell off different states as if they were collectibles. The idea at the time was called State O Rama.

Over a decade later during the NFT boom a friend and fellow entrepreneur said hey now would be a great time to revamp your idea and create the game but with countries vs. states.

So as my friend Marc was moving to Thailand for a change of scenery from San Francisco we decided to create. Our first go round interviewing programmers to come on board was with a company that was focused on MVP development. We loved the idea as it fit with our mantra to make a small investment and turn up the heat if it has legs to run.

So we hired a firm headquartered in Port St. Lucie, Florida but their development team was overseas. Marc the partner moving to Thailand put together designs and outlines but the coders were lost in outer space. After 45 days they completely ignored all the designs and instructions and had such poor work performance we offered a mea culpa to their CEO who was rather embarrassed by his teams work and agreed that we would just cancel the project and refund the 50% paid to date and go our separate ways....

So back to the drawing board... Stage right introduction is TopTal which stands for Top Talent a higher end coding service that works on weekly project rates vs. a one time price. My lesson for anybody wanting to go this route is be careful for scope creep and make sure you can budget to finish. I'm fortunate that we could but we ended up spending 3x more than expected.

So we interviewed a few programmers through TopTal and ended up hiring one out of California as some had front end experience but no back end experience and vice versa. Our hire ended up being somebody who really gelled with our team and we started breaking down for him the different game play and ideation.

The breakdown of finding a map of planet earth with each country labeled and how we could vectorize it into an interactive game piece was one of the first steps that we took on while the programmer worked on bringing our idea to life.

The idea was to have a land grab challenge in the 1st month where each game piece could be bought and sold to anybody who bid higher in the 1st 30 days. With certain blockchain rules we found that this may have been more difficult than thought and after a lot of back and forth figured for the sake of time in November we would be better off using OpenSea's API to let players buy and sell through there. It would be instant and is already a trusted brand name in the NFT space.

From there we initially used ETH for purchases and found that the gas prices had gone crazy sometimes being more than the initial floor prices. We setup ads on Instagram and right away sold game pieces but also found out right away that we were banned from advertising on the platform. The numbers were backing out in an early stage test so we're hopeful a push with influencers on TikTok, IG, and Twitter we should be able to make some strides and grow our games presence.

We've now switched to MATIC for payments to facilitate faster transaction times and have completed the initial global map with interactive pieces for collection. With grand plans to let owners parcel out their countries and purchase other collections akin to playing the game of Risk but with our NFT twist to it.

Lesson for other Indie Hackers: While programming seems simple and easy no job is ever as fast or easy as it seems. Always budget 2x the funds and 2x the time to complete.

Stay Tuned to see our progress and baby grows and for those interested in exploring here is the Crypto Conquerors Site.