The Skyweaver game is entirely blockchain-based and can generate crypto as players participate in it. Horizon Blockchain Games, a blockchain-based game development firm, managed to raise Rp65 billion in funding earlier in the year. The money will be used for the development of the Skyweaver card game.
Today, the total injection of funds that have been collected by Horizon Blockchain Games is around US$13M. This amount translates to nearly Rp. 187 billion. Horizon said that the money from the latest funding round came from several companies including Zyshan Kaba, CMT Digital, Khaled Verje, the Xchange Company, and BITKRAFT Ventures.
By description, the Skyweaver is a competitive digital card and trading game that is wholly based on blockchain technology. Hence, it is designed to enable players to get cards from the results of matches with other players. These cards can then be traded in the market.
Horizon has allegedly been developing two paths in the game. On one side, the team is creating an ethereum-based platform known as Arcadeum for in-game items. Once the player gets the item, it is wholly owned by this player and Horizon cannot take it. Thus, the item can be held or traded by its owner.
On the other side, Horizon is still developing its Skyweaver game. It means that Skyweaver and ethereum-based platforms will work for hand in hand. Later on, the company changed Arcadeum to Sequence, an integrated wallet to minimize complexity in the blockchain.
The developers want to enable players to readily buy or store their digital items on the blockchain. Michael Sanders, the Horizon founder, said that the rebranding aims to expand the general game development to enable players to manage an assortment of digital items including NFT.
Skyweaver is still in the beta stage. The team says that the game will be launched widely by the end of 2021. So far, the beta version of Skyweaver has been played by over 66,000 players.
SkyWeaver Gameplay
The Skyweaver game is free to play but the team is calling it play-to-earn. Moreover, there will be a revenue model for the firm, with players allowed to buy cards for the game’s constructed deck mode.
Notably, the primary format of this game is similar to many other one-on-one games that are played with a deck of spells and soldiers. But the main difference is that one plays with a lead character (hero) who is on the battlefield. The goal is to keep this character alive longer than the opponent’s hero within the turn-based format.
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As is the case with other CCG titles, players use a resource dubbed mana to play the cards and get one unit more of it to use for every turn. One difference in play that Horizon’s Sanders insisted on was the fact that some of the available cards have spells built into them. This design effectively makes them two-for-one.
Therefore, once a card gets played, one can also spend their resources to activate a one-time effect that is built into this card, which then supports entirely new gameplay dynamic, according to Sanders.
Palmer agreed with the opinion that the Skyweaver game has many elements that work simultaneously in a fun way. He mentioned:
It’s hard to really exactly explain what makes it so good, but there’s just a lot of good elements within the game design.”
Jonathon Loucks leads the game design. Loucks has helped build games at several major firms, including Wizards of the Coast that makes Magic: The Gathering. The SkyWeaver players can decide on one of the two available formats: constructed or discovery. They need to start by playing ‘discovery’ that offers a random deck of cards. At this level, the player does not keep the deck of cards.
SkyWeaver players earn cards for later use by playing and winning. After a player accumulates enough cards, they can use them to create a deck in the “constructed” setting. All 1,000 players that earn a gold card in Season 0 become the top 500 in each of these two categories.
Horizon did not commit to creating a software development kit to enable other developers to come up with new game formats. But, the company said that it will decide which other playing methods come next. Sanders said:
Once we’re in open beta we’re going to learn from the community in terms of what sort of game modes we want to build next.”
500 cards are available for learning, 100 in each of the five segments created within the Skyweaver game. Each deck has 20 cards. In case you pay ‘constructed’ and have inadequate cards in the category that you choose to play, the game gives random cards enough to play with for the round.
Most of the cards can attach a spell on the hero. Thus, players are advised to use their spells since any new spell destroys the prior one.
