Whitepaper v6 Analysis

Key Points

Research suggests Hellsword, a Web3 card game in a voxel sandbox, can use Unity or Unreal Engine for the game client, with Hyperledger Fabric for a private blockchain and Moralis for Web3 integration.
It seems likely that the game will need robust server architecture with Node.js and MongoDB, and smart contracts for game rules like card minting.
The evidence leans toward using IPFS for off-chain data storage and implementing gas-less transactions for a seamless user experience, with anti-botting measures to maintain fairness.

Game Overview

Hellsword combines fast-paced card battles with a voxel-based world where players can own and develop land tiles, using blockchain for asset management and a native token for economy. It’s inspired by games like War Metal: Tyrant and modern Web3 titles like Gods Unchained.

Technology and Coding Frameworks

For building Hellsword, research suggests using Unity or Unreal Engine for the game client, given their support for 3D rendering and voxel worlds. For the blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric is a strong candidate for a private, permissioned chain, offering control and fast transactions. Web3 integration can leverage Moralis for backend services and The Graph for indexing on-chain data. Server-side, Node.js with MongoDB can handle game logic and data storage, while smart contracts will enforce game rules like card fusion and trading.

An unexpected detail is the potential use of meta-transactions for gas-less gameplay, ensuring players don’t need to manage cryptocurrency, enhancing accessibility for mainstream gamers.

Security and Economy

Security measures include robust authentication, rate limiting, and anomaly detection to prevent exploits. The token economy will balance faucets (e.g., mission rewards) and sinks (e.g., card upgrades) to prevent inflation, with off-chain resources like IPFS for storing heavy content like artwork, ensuring cost efficiency.

Survey Note: Comprehensive Design for Hellsword

Hellsword, a Web3-based collectible card game (CCG) set in a voxel sandbox world, represents a fusion of strategic card battles and player-driven world exploration, leveraging blockchain for asset ownership and a native token economy. This survey note outlines the detailed design, focusing on gameplay mechanics, blockchain integration, technology stack, and economic sustainability, drawing from inspirations like War Metal: Tyrant and modern Web3 games such as Gods Unchained and Ember Sword. The design aims to balance engaging gameplay with secure, transparent asset management, ensuring a seamless user experience without the typical blockchain hurdles like gas fees.

Game Concept and Objectives

Hellsword’s core concept is to combine fast-paced, strategic card battles with a persistent, player-owned voxel sandbox world. Players collect, fuse, and trade unique cards, recorded as tokens on a private blockchain, to build decks for PvE missions, PvP battles, and guild wars. They can also own and develop land tiles, integrating with the game’s economy through a native token earned via gameplay and spent on upgrades, trading, and land management. The objective is to create a game that is both fun and sustainable, leveraging blockchain for transparency and security while maintaining accessibility for mainstream gamers.

Gameplay Design

The gameplay revolves around two main pillars: card game mechanics and voxel world interaction, inspired by War Metal: Tyrant’s deckbuilding and automated battles, and enhanced with modern twists.

Card Game Mechanics

Deck Composition: Players build decks, potentially with 15 cards plus a hero, including distinct types like Commanders (leadership effects), Assault units (attackers), and Structures (support buffs). This mirrors Tyrant Unleashed’s 10-card decks plus a Commander, encouraging strategic deckbuilding.
Battles: Battles are fast-paced, possibly automated with player agency for targeting or positioning, ensuring quick resolution for high engagement. The voxel world could allow battles to play out on terrain, with environmental effects like swamp tiles boosting certain card types.
Factions: Cards belong to factions (e.g., Fire, Ice), with synergies for thematic decks, tied to regions in the world, encouraging exploration and specialization.
Progression: Players progress through PvE missions (e.g., 100+ quests like Tyrant, with capped rewards to prevent grinding) and competitive PvP, earning tokens and cards. Guild wars expand on Tyrant’s raids, with battles on world tiles for territorial control.

Voxel World Integration

Land Ownership: The world is divided into tiles, each a persistent, customizable area where players can build structures (e.g., Card Forges for better fusion rates) or host events. Ownership is recorded on the blockchain, potentially as NFTs, ensuring immutability.
Exploration: Players explore the map, encountering PvE challenges like dungeons, with rewards tied to region themes, encouraging diverse card collection.
Guild Territories: Guilds can control multiple tiles, forming kingdoms with bonuses, leading to sieges where battles chip away at control points, integrating card battles with world strategy.

Blockchain Integration

Blockchain is central to Hellsword, managing assets and ensuring transparency, with a choice between private chains, public sidechains, or hybrids.

Choice of Blockchain

Private Chain: Offers control, fast transactions (e.g., 1-second blocks), and no gas fees, suitable for a permissioned environment where the game operator validates transactions. Hyperledger Fabric or Parity Substrate are viable frameworks, providing bespoke logic for game needs.
Public Sidechain: Options like Polygon or Immutable X offer high throughput and low fees, with broader compatibility for external marketplaces. Immutable X, used by Gods Unchained, enables gas-free trades, but requires public trust.
Hybrid Approach: Combining private and public layers, like Oasys, allows fast in-game operations with bridging to public chains for asset interoperability.

Research suggests a private chain for initial development, given Hellsword’s focus on control and user experience, with potential future integration with sidechains for broader reach.

Data Management

On-Chain Data: Critical ownership info (e.g., card IDs, land deeds) and transaction history are stored on-chain for immutability, ensuring provable ownership.
Off-Chain Data: Heavy content like 3D voxel data and card artwork is stored off-chain, using IPFS for immutability and cost efficiency, with hashes on-chain to detect tampering. Dynamic game data (e.g., inventory) uses traditional databases, synchronized via middleware like Hyperledger FireFly.
Implementation: IPFS pinning ensures data persistence, with tools like Pinata for management, reducing on-chain storage costs as noted by CurveGrid.

Smart Contract Design

Smart contracts, akin to Ethereum’s, enforce game rules on the private chain, such as:

Card minting requiring specific resources and prerequisites.
Fusion contracts burning input cards and minting new ones atomically, preventing exploits.
Trading contracts ensuring atomic, trustless transactions, with escrow for marketplace safety.

Contracts are coded in languages like Solidity (if EVM-compatible) or Go (for Hyperledger), with audits to prevent vulnerabilities like re-entrancy, ensuring security in a permissioned environment.

Token Economy Design

The native token, central to Hellsword’s economy, must be balanced to prevent inflation and exploitation, drawing lessons from Axie Infinity’s collapse due to oversupply.

Token Faucets

Players earn tokens by salvaging cards (e.g., 1 token for common, 5 for rare, inspired by Tyrant’s salvage points), completing PvE missions (first-time rewards, daily caps), winning PvP battles, and guild activities like sieges.
Limits on daily earnings prevent bot farming, with competitive events offering larger rewards, ensuring active, skillful play over grinding.

Token Sinks

Tokens are spent on card minting, fusion fees (scaling exponentially, e.g., 100 tokens for Level 4, 500 for Level 5), in-game purchases (packs, cosmetics), event fees, and land upgrades.
Sinks like burning a percentage of marketplace sales or event costs (e.g., world boss donations) create deflationary pressure, maintaining token value.

Inflation Control

Balance faucets and sinks, with early inflation to incentivize growth, stabilizing long-term. Off-chain resources (e.g., Flux-like untradeable points) limit exploitability, used for minor purchases, reserving tokens for pivotal actions.
Burning mechanisms and buybacks, possibly funded by game revenue, counteract inflation, with periodic sink events like token-donating world bosses.

Anti-Botting Measures

Gameplay design includes puzzles and adaptability, making botting harder (e.g., requiring strategic deck changes). Rate limits and diminishing returns (e.g., stamina systems) reduce bot profitability.
Detection systems use machine learning to flag suspicious patterns (e.g., 20-hour play sessions), with captchas or MFA for verification. Policy enforcement allows banning accounts, flagging bot-derived assets, balancing ownership with control.

Technology Stack

The tech stack must integrate traditional game development with blockchain, ensuring scalability and security.

Game Client

Unity Engine: Preferred for voxel rendering, with libraries like VoxelFarm or MagicaVoxel, supporting card battles and world exploration. Unity’s SDKs, like ChainSafe’s, integrate meta-transactions for gas-less gameplay.
Alternatively, Unreal Engine: Offers robust 3D tools, suitable for high-fidelity voxel worlds, with potential for VR integration.

Game Servers

Node.js: For backend services, handling real-time communication and game logic, with scalability for thousands of concurrent players.
MongoDB: For storing game data, including player inventories, synchronized with blockchain via middleware.

Blockchain Platform

Hyperledger Fabric: For a private, permissioned chain, offering control and high TPS, with Go for chain code development.
Polygon or Avalanche: If opting for sidechains, for scalability and low fees, with EVM compatibility for existing tools.
Decision: Research suggests Hyperledger for initial control, with potential Polygon integration later, balancing performance and interoperability.

Web3 Integration

Moralis: Simplifies backend operations, with Unity SDKs for querying NFTs and triggering blockchain events, reducing development time.
The Graph: For indexing on-chain data, enabling fast queries like “cards owned by player X,” with custom instances for private chains.
Libraries: Web3.js or ethers.js for blockchain interaction, ensuring secure transaction submission.

Marketplace and Economy

Custom implementation using smart contracts for trading, with a user-friendly UI integrated in-game. Transaction fees (5-10%) fund the treasury, with potential for web interfaces for external trading, ensuring liquidity.

Security Measures

Robust authentication (JWT, MFA) and encryption for data security. Rate limiting and anomaly detection prevent spam and exploits, with blockchain immutability logging unauthorized actions for audits.

Monetization and Marketplace

Monetization ensures sustainability while maintaining fairness, leveraging blockchain for player-driven economies.

In-Game Marketplace

Players trade cards and lands using tokens, with fixed-price or auction listings, handled via blockchain for transparency. Fees (e.g., 5%) are burned or go to the treasury, inspired by Gods Unchained’s model (Support Gods Unchained).
NFT-style ownership ensures assets can’t be arbitrarily deleted, but trades are restricted to official channels, preventing scams, with escrow contracts for safety.

Primary Sales

Sell card packs, cosmetics (e.g., unique card skins), and land tiles for tokens or fiat, with limited-edition NFTs for high-value items, ensuring revenue streams without pay-to-win.

Subscriptions and Passes

Optional battle passes or monthly subscriptions, offering extra rewards (e.g., NFTs, token bonuses), integrating with Web3 for staking rewards, common in F2P models.

Fair Play and Anti-Exploitation

Matchmaking by deck power prevents pay-to-win, with skill-based counters ensuring strategy matters. Fusion costs level the field, as active free players can achieve similar progression, mitigating whale dominance.

World Tiles and Land Ownership

Land tiles add a meta-gameplay layer, integrating with the economy and gameplay.

Land Ownership

Each tile is a persistent, customizable area, potentially an NFT, with players building structures (e.g., Card Forges) or hosting events. Ownership is recorded on-chain, ensuring immutability, with co-ownership for guilds.
Individual and guild ownership: Small tiles for players, large territories for guilds, with leasing or occupation systems for sieges, respecting asset value (e.g., EVE Online’s station conquests).

Resource Generation

Lands produce resources (e.g., Salvage Materials) based on activity, tied to Proof-of-Play, preventing passive income. Upgrades cost tokens, balancing as a sink, with outputs used for card crafting, integrating with the economy.

Territorial Conflicts

Sieges involve multi-stage battles, with defenders using AI units and guild decks, rewarding winners with temporary control or plunder, ensuring dynamic world evolution without permanent asset loss.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Hellsword’s design balances engaging card battles with a player-driven voxel world, powered by a secure private blockchain and a sustainable token economy. Key decisions include using Unity for the client, Hyperledger Fabric for the blockchain, and Moralis for Web3 integration, with anti-botting measures and gas-less transactions for accessibility.

Next steps include:

Prototyping core mechanics in Unity, testing card battles and voxel rendering.
Developing smart contracts for initial asset management, with audits for security.
Conducting playtests to balance token economy and land mechanics, iterating based on feedback.

This comprehensive approach ensures Hellsword delivers a rich, engaging experience, leveraging Web3 for ownership while maintaining gameplay focus, potentially setting a benchmark for hybrid gaming models.

Whitepaper v6 Analysis Key Points