Brandon Wu

Reading List for Blockchain Game Developers, Feb 2022

Sharing 6 of my favourite web3 content in recent weeks — content that is insightful for game developers exploring blockchain gaming, and web3 developers interested in game development: Blockchain Trading Card Games, Physical Collectibles Market, Running Games as a Service, Zero-knowledge Proof, and seeing NFTs via the art market.

Blockchain Trading Card Games (Ft. Gods Unchained) with @ChrisClayPlays on Metacast by @naavik_co

Chris from Gods Unchained has been incredibly helpful and supportive in my journey to understanding blockchain gaming, and I always learn new insights whenever we speak. I LOVE this interview where he looks at blockchain gaming as a seasoned game director and designer (previously on Magic the Gathering and Lord of the Rings MMO) - a very grounded approach to blockchain gaming + lifestyle games.

Token Distribution for Blockchain Games

To better understand how tokens are distributed in blockchain games, I looked at a handful of projects and recorded their token distribution for reference. You can find the table in the following Google Sheets doc and the games/sources below. (in no particular order)

Note: these games have different categories for the token distribution, and the terms to describe these categories weren’t always consistent. I created a summary table by putting the categories into 4 main groups; it is easier to digest but lacks the details of how each game has designed their tokenomics.

Edit (2022-01-03): added Crypto Unicorns

Go to: Token Distribution for Blockchain Games (Google Sheets)

Please let me know if there are games you’d suggest I add to this table in the comments (or tweet/dm me at @thebrandonwu)

What Crypto Brings to the Table for Games (part 2)

Part 2: Micro — Collectibles, Value, and Game Design

(also on mirror.xyz)

Now that we’ve explored crypto gaming on a macro level to the ecosystem around our games, let’s take a closer look at how crypto assets differ from non-crypto assets in games, where their value comes from, and how that might change the way we design them.

Collectibles

Collectibles is an exciting new dimension enabled by way of NFTs.

Collectibles have existed in games before, but it is an entirely different beast when the underlying assets are tokenised. With higher utility and optionality, they are inherently more valuable than off-chain collectibles.

What Crypto Brings to the Table for Games (part 1)

Part 1: Macro — New Participants, Permission-less Opportunities, and Communities

(also on mirror.xyz)

In the past few months, I’ve spoken to people up and down the ecosystem of crypto gaming - from game directors, designers, investors, blockchain operators, to platform builders, to understand what it is, and what the future holds.

I’ve had questions about crypto currencies in the past. Adding gaming and a huge hype cycle to the mix, it was tricky to sort out the signals from the noise. I hope this article helps clarify and strengthen our understanding of crypto gaming. It’s also the beginning of a conversation and I welcome your comments and thoughts (find me @theBrandonWu)

I’ve split this into two parts. In part 1, let’s look at crypto’s impact on the macro level around the games we build. In part 2, we’ll take a closer look at crypto assets themselves on a micro level.

Firstly: I am assuming you have a basic understanding of NFTs and the concept of digital scarcity, and have had some exposure to blockchain gaming.

Criteria for Deciding on Ideas

Mike, my co-founder at markd.ltd, and I are both the kind of people that has many random ideas, and often find ourselves diving right in after we’ve come up with something new or novel or just quirky.

A few months ago we decided we should have a process to help us think about our ideas. Building new ideas is all fun and game, but at the end of the day, we’ve got a company to build, one which I hope can continue to be creative, fun, and useful.

So this is the criteria we came up with. This is not meant to be a general purpose criteria for filter ideas, but one that we decide to use because of our skills, experiences, personalities, and resource limitations.

My New Favourite Toys (creative apps, web apps) August 2019

Unfollow tool

Tokimeki Unfollow is a fun web app that helps you trim down your Twitter following. Without showing you the bios of people you are following on Twitter, you have to decide to keep following someone or not based on their recent tweets. I liked the personality of the app (too few social media tools have a personality!)

Olive video editor

TalentSearch.cc bombed on ProductHunt

So TalentSearch.cc bombed on ProductHunt.

It didn’t get nearly as many votes or as much attention as ColdEmailTemplate.cc or Markd.co, both were featured on the front page. I was overly confident in how useful TalentSearch.cc is for people (who wouldn’t want a search bar to find talents on multiple social platforms?!) and how popular it will be for the PH community, which also meant I spent way more time on it than ColdEmailTemplate.cc.

Tidy Up Your Following — The 100-Following Rule

Why We should KonMari Our Social Follows

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A number of years ago I read Kevin Kelly’s essay on 1,000 True Fans. The idea that if you can find and grow an audience of 1,000 true fans that love what you do, you can be financially independent as a creative maker.

I liked this theory, and decided I will put it to practice by reducing the number of people I follow on Twitter.

Mensch Patterns

At Business of Software conference last month, I sat in a talk by Derek Sivers and learned about Mensch Patterns, his antidote to the inescapable Dark Patterns so prevalent on the web today (tricks that make users do things that they didn’t mean to).

Marketing Sucks

Marketing Sucks.

Marketing sucks, big time.

You push and pull and try to get known. You obsess over views and votes and all the likes you didn’t get.