The Dripstone Caverns

The Dripstone Caverns is an upcoming adventure/exploration RPG game and game engine, utilizing blockchain tokens for game data objects. It is text and image based, and uses button clicks to navigate the game’s map. Users will collect game items in the form of a variety of types of Tokens. Some equipment tokens can be equipped to the characters, potion tokens will be consumed to heal hit points, and loot tokens will be given from defeated enemies to combine into new equipment or potions.

A room background from the game The Dripstone Caverns
Example Room Background Image

Technology Used

The Dripstone Caverns is being built with the following tech stack:

  • Node.js
  • Express.js
  • MongoDB
  • React
  • Redux
  • WAX Blockchain
  • Midjourney (For Graphics)

The game’s user interface is being built to be similar to old browser RPGs and text RPGs like gMUD I used to like playing. The map is built as an (X,Y) grid, and the map itself is a JSON file using the X and Y coordinates as the key to the room object. When the character moves from room to room, the character’s X or Y coordinate will change and the data for that room will be loaded into the user interface. Enemies populate randomly into the rooms laid out by the map, and the enemy data is being retrieved from enemy NFTs minted in the game wallet.

Flexibility

Designing the game’s world this way will allow for using this as a game engine. I will be able to create entirely different games and scenarios by simply changing the JSON file and minting different enemy NFTs. I intend to help make similar games with other people in the future in this way.

Users own their data

By tokenizing the users’ efforts in-game it allows them to keep their data for as long as they want it. As a token the user may trade their tokens with other players, or they may simply sell their tokens on a secondary market when they are finished with the item. Since equipment has been tokenized, I can add as many items as I’d like in the game with no change to the game’s code itself. I expect there will be limited rare magical equipment with a cap on the available supply, and even legendary equipment where only one token will ever be created.

Follow along with development

This is the first big blockchain project I have tackled, and am documenting my journey in my blog. Please visit it for more information on the latest developments