Ronin-based farming game, Pixels – the blockchain game just launched its big Chapter 2 upgrade this week, bringing many significant changes. But you won't notice it at a glance.
“People's day-to-day lives in the game change quite dramatically,” Pixels founder Luke Barwikowski told Decrypt ahead of launch.
Pixels retains the charming classic style that the game title brings. It can be said that the previous gameplay has attracted many players, with millions of users in the past few months. But for Barwikowski and his team, this is an effort to “basically fix some of the problems we've seen in two years of building a live game.”
All in all, Chapter 2 is an attempt to give Pixels much more depth. As he discussed previously in February, Pixels introduced economy-wide scarcity and added a sense of progression through the engine's "levels."
That would make this network-based blockchain game Ronin feel more like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), similar to Runescape or Ragnarok Online.
This combines with the differentiating factors between a free experience that anyone can participate in, and the increasingly valuable incentives of owning one of just 5,000 NFT plots. Owners can benefit from resources generated on their land, which will influence how player-run guilds play a role in the online game.
With Chapter 2, Barwikowski said Pixels will “start passing more earnings to players who have progressed far”—meaning those who have invested a lot of time in the game will have a better chance of earning PIXEL tokens than with new people.
At the same time, Pixels doesn't want to kill the game's initial appeal for newcomers, and there are also improvements for free users, like expandable "speck" farms. But it's all still a work in progress, as he wants to continue building publicly and tweaking the game based on player feedback.
“The interesting thing is we don't know what the metagame will be,” he said before launch. “This is also part of the test. The team is now fully focused over the next month or two post-release on a variety of live activities.”
Difficulties in development
Gamers are known for being passionate—and also very outspoken. In the hours after Chapter 2 launched earlier this week, Pixels received complaints about the amount of PIXEL tokens players could earn and the rate at which player energy was consumed. Since then, the team has released multiple patches to address common complaints while helping players adapt to the larger changes.
Barwikowski admits that solving problems on the fly and building in real time became much more difficult when Pixels saw explosive growth after moving to Ronin last fall.
He admitted that the game's unexpected success made him temporarily think that the startup needed to "professionalize" and take slower, more deliberate steps. But that was completely inconsistent with the way Pixels had operated before it exploded, and he quickly realized that it wasn't the right direction for the future—no matter how large the audience.
“I had the wrong idea for a little while that we needed to professionalize many aspects of the game and needed to be more like a larger company because we were getting so much attention,” he said. speak. “It's only in the past month that I've realized, 'Wait, that's actually the wrong view.'”
Pixels Chapter 2 came out “three or four months behind schedule,” which he—now in the right mood—said was “an unacceptable pace.”
To compensate, Barwikowski plans to keep his team as lean as possible—currently estimated at 19 full-time employees—and iterate even faster, trying to maintain his proclaimed “cowboy mindset.” announced as the startup continues to expand one of the most successful games ever built on blockchain.
“If it takes us a month to roll out a patch, that's too long,” he said before the launch. “We will lose the trust of the players. We need to release patches multiple times a week if we want to meet player expectations.”
Based on the past few days since Chapter 2 launched, it seems like Barwikowski and team are living up to that expectation of making constant adjustments. This is certainly frantic, but it keeps both creators and players entertained.
“That's a high standard we set for ourselves,” he said. “But I think this is actually what all of us on the team want because it's more fun, right? It's much less boring.”
Source: https://tapchibitcoin.io/game-blockchain-pixels-ra-mat-chapter-2-sau-three-thang-cho-doi.html
