Interview with the Influence Game-By the Chinese StarkNet Community (English Version)
Enjoy this written interview with the Influence Team which is building a Space-strategy MMO Game on StarkNet.
This Interview was carried out by the StarkNet Chinese Community
Let’s give them a follow here and have a look at their linktr.ee.
Introduction
What were your experience and backgrounds before you began your Crypto journey and before getting started with the Influence project?
The team has a wide array of experience. However our founder has led multiple tech startups as CTO and VP of technology. Our game designers and artists come from AA and AAA gaming backgrounds and some have worked for CCP who produced EVE, which Influence has some similarities with. All this experience is extremely valuable to us.
Why did you choose StarkNet? Which aspects on StarkNet intrigue you the most? (High scalability, ZK-Rollups, account abstraction, etc)
StarkNet is a pioneer in the ZK Rollup space and the relationship with StarkWare has always been characterized by a huge amount of professionalism. After speaking with all the L2 teams, we felt that our goals, ethos, and product were better aligned with StarkNet. StarkNet was also clearly capable of providing a forever home for Influence that would grow and increase our ability to properly support our growing user base.
Influence and On-Chain Gaming
How did you come up with the idea to build Influence, an on-chain MMO game?
Chris Lexmond, Influence’s founder, was a massive EVE online player during the first half of the previous decade. He helped starting one of the largest alliances within the game and he later organized and ran their treasury. Even though it soon became like a second job for him, none of that work felt rewarded. While he loved (and still does) EVE Online, there was an imbalance in the time sunk and what he got out of it.
This sparked the idea to create a hard science based space strategy game that included players into the actual economy of the game. This was all the way back in 2012, well before blockchain gaming was even an idea. However, as the years went by, Ethereum was born and Layer2s were introduced, it became clear this would be the perfect place to create an unstoppable game where everyone could own their assets and play untethered from centralized control.
In 2021, Jean-Paul and Chris met through Reddit and, after having a few conversations about building Influence, they began working on the Influence vision.
How many members do you have in the Influence-team so far?
Eight full-time employees, with contractors that we hire for various outsourced projects. We plan to grow the team after launch.
Could you make a short introduction to the game? (game rules, assets, tokenomics and how to play)
Here is a fairly succinct guide to everything you need to know. English: (team produced)
Chinese version of the Introduction above: 🪖游戏简介(community created)
6. You mentioned an “unstoppable game” with a new gaming model. Could you elaborate a bit more on this new model? And how is this going to happen?
There are a few different common names used to refer to the concept of “Unstoppable Game” which are:
Unstoppable Game
Eternal Game
Autonomous World
Each of these words describes a piece of software that is a crafted and immersive experience that does not rely on a team to continue to run. Over time, these games will be sufficiently decentralized and, seeing that their code is on-chain, they can literally run without a centralized entity making sure that the Game remains in operation no matter what. This opens up an entirely new surface area for games to be built on and oit further increases the ability for game dev/designers to build on top of existing architecture. In these systems you merge the code to build a game with the economy of the game, while making it open for anyone to build on top of. In the future, these games will allow you to access and freely move across an entire ecosystem of games without having individual centralized entities and gate keepers.
Is Influence going to have a mobile version game? Any difference between mobile and web versions? And when are such versions coming?
Influence will be playable on all relatively modern devices (mobile and desktop, PC and Mac) as it is built on the browser. It should be noted that the mobile version will be less immersive than the desktop experience, at least shortly after the launch. However, we plan to support both options more heavily as time goes on. We currently like to think about Influence as a game you can pick up and play anywhere, and when you are outside, you can easily login from your phone, take some actions, and log off.
About DAO
How is the development of the game decided? How will the governance be structured in the future? (governance design)
Currently the game’s development is centralized by the Unstoppable Games team. We will continue to develop the game and all its core features until we release our last piece of the game currently planned which is called “conflict”. After this, we plan to decentralize the governance of the game and, if the community were to choose to utilize another developer team, they could even do so.
However, before conflict we will make efforts to decentralize the community treasury of the game, which will be utilized for funding additional features, game modes, add-ons, and other community vote endeavors.
How could developers and contributors make contributions to the game?
We encourage hobbyist and professional game devs to contribute within the Unstoppable Games ecosystem. We currently host a monthly creators collective competition, where community votes to reward projects created in that time some of the initial supply of SWAY. This will expand overtime. More info can be found here: https://wiki.influenceth.io/community/user-guides/ACC
Is there going to have another token in the game?
SWAY is our token. Any future token is not announced. Governance may have a token, but at this time, the specifics of this are not public or decided.
Roadmap
When will phase 4 launch? Are full features going to be released in the next phase?
Phase 4 does not have a date yet, but you can expect it relatively soon. In this next phase, we will have nearly all playable features in-game.
What’s your long-term goal on the game?
We are working to bring to life an incredibly immersive space strategy MMO that players LOVE. Additionally, we want to create an ecosystem that is teeming up with developers/designers that want to create and build new games and modes within the Influence ecosystem. In 5 years time, we hope to be a well recognized game within the game industry, with 1 million+ players enjoying the game.
If you got curious about the Influence Game, check their Twitter Account!
.