Cardano NFT: ZiberBugs – The Cryptonomist

This week’s guest on the Cardano NFT Column is a Play 2 Earn NFT Autobattler on Cardano, reminiscent of the famous Axie Infinity: ZiberBugs.

Last week’s guest was a gaming project characterized by a fantasy world of adventure populated by humans, elves, goblins and orcs.

This initiative is a point of reference for NFTs on Cardano and every week or two we will invite someone to answer some questions and give us an update directly from within the Cardano community.

Considering that many of our readers are new to the crypto space, we will have a mix of simple and technical questions.

Cardano NFT project: ZiberBugs

Hi there, thanks for this interview. Please introduce your team, where are you from and what are your backgrounds?

We are three founders from Vancouver and Stockholm, putting together a team of 15 people for this initiative! Us founders are all successful entrepreneurs outside the crypto space, eagerly trying to get into crypto through this project. 

Two of us are engineers with a technical background, and the last is an artist who has worked with graphics design his entire adult life and is also the owner of Sweden’s most successful tattoo shop. Our team is global, and is composed of talent from the likes of Google, Amazon Prime Video and King.

What is ZiberBugs? Tell us something about the gameplay. And why have you chosen Cardano for your project?

ZiberBugs is a competitive, turn-based autobattler, designed by a true gamer-at-heart, with over 10,000 hours of competitive gaming experience. Games in the “competitive” category have limited-to-no progressional elements persisted between games, as they emphasize match fairness in their gameplay. The player’s skill should be the determining factor, not the amount of time played or money paid.

The base game revolves around taking turns to position your bugs on a hexagonal grid. There are no player sides, giving the game a very “boardgameesque” feel. Additionally, you build synergies, pick genetic boosters, earn and distribute promotions and fight for onyx buffs to build your power in the match and gain an advantage over your opponent.

A lot of variables went into our consideration when we chose our blockchain. The reasons why we chose Cardano are many. We wrote an in-depth article about it in our Medium, but some of the key aspects are community strength, security and stability, the much lower competition and the ease of implementation! But how is it easy to implement an NFT game on Cardano you ask? Due to the native support of tokens and NFTs, you don’t need a single smart contract for your entire game. You can just do it in your own backend.

A lot of current Play 2 Earn games in the crypto world require an initial investment to be able to play and have fun. What are your thoughts about this? Will your game be free to play? Where does the revenue come from?

Our game will not be free-to-play. The reason for this is our very rewarding play-to-earn model. We will reward people more the better they are at the game, and ZiberBugs’ grand purpose is to greatly increase the number of professional gamers in the world.

We want to be clear though, that we do not require any purchases to play – only investments.

For anyone who’d like to play our game, but may not be able to afford the initial investment, we have a scholarship concept native in our game, where people will be able to browse through guilds and sort on whether they provide scholarships.

Our revenue model is in breeding. Inspired by the great Axie Infinity, ZiberBugs has made its own more sustainable, sophisticated and intricate breeding system, allowing gene pools to be perfected and evolution to do its job. And although we only keep roughly 20% of all fees that are paid into the game, this will be our revenue. The remaining 80% are, in one way or another, re-inserted into the ecosystem.

We should mention too, that all our revenue will be in ZIBER – our own governance token.

At what point of the development are you? When will it be possible to play the game?

We have recently allocated resources to build a fully playable prototype of our game, consisting of one lineup of units and items. It has been made clear to us that as a brand new game studio, with founders brand new to crypto, it is essential to have something to showcase other than an idea, for the sake of gaining trust with both investors and followers. Therefore, we made this decision and are aspiring to have a prototype, not yet connected to the blockchain, ready to play in two months.

The prototype will be an offline, share-the-screen style game, but due to the nature of our game resembling chess in unit positioning, it will be playable with people from the chat of a stream, by relaying units and coordinates in writing. The software architecture will be well-planned and designed so that it can become the fundament of the actual final product, which will streamline the development stage significantly.

The development required beyond the prototype will commence when we close the seed phase. After that, we expect to launch the closed alpha test within 6 months, with handpicked alpha testers. The alpha test version of the game will be fully connected to the blockchain, and the players will be able to initiate the breeding and the NFT sale that they’re managing. 

Awesome. Any final thoughts? Where can people learn more?

First and foremost, check out our webpage! On it, you can read our Darkpaper, pitch deck and see a bit of what our game looks like. Secondly, we urge everyone to join our Discord, using the link at the bottom of our page. There we have all kinds of fun activities, games and airdrops, and we’re just about to release information on our upcoming NFT sale! Don’t miss it!

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of the people interviewed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Cardano Foundation or IOG. Moreover, this content is for educational purposes, it doesn’t constitute financial advice.