When I asked yesterday If any of you check the game mechanics  before investing in NFT Games was because It´s a BIG HINT about the game development and were It´s headed. The second big hint comes from asking the game moderators  or people from inside the project, in the different platforms that they provide for contact like Telegram or Discord,  some questions about what you noticed that it´s a little bit off in the mechanics and by the answer they give you so you can make your own conclusions.

I´ll make an example from  a real experience that I had with the NFT game: “My Neighbor Alice” and why I consider that in the end they are going against the basics of a successful game:

 ----A little extra info. you should know for the future:

 -What are game mechanics?

Game mechanics are defined as any action performed by a player that modifies the game state, that is, the position and specific characteristics of all objects and environments present in the game at a precise moment in time. The game state, or state of the video game, is modified due to one of the defining characteristics of games: interactivity.

They are essentially which greatly defines the experience of the players. When considering video game mechanics, it’s necessary to talk about gamification. This concept describes the use of mechanics or game techniques that can enhance MOTIVATION, improve PRODUCTIVITY, activate user learning,  EVALUATE users and HELP them achieve OBJECTIVES. Summed up, this, well made, turns a Player into a LOYAL PLAYER.

-The basics to make a game successful with gamification are:

* Creating habits, to build up LOYALTY.

* The PROGRESSION along the time so players can see how far they´ve got.

* Create REWARDS (and of course, that the players can keep them) because every effort has its prize.

*Allow for CHOICES (like allowing players to manage different challenges at the same time) and diversity, if I can´t do this now because I have to wait I have this other thing I can do and so on.

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🎮 I´ve played Season 3 in alpha because they lent free land for the whole season and for me it was a good way to test the game without having to buy land and to see if the game was worth investing in or not. In that last season, they partnered along with ELLE´S, so my first thought was: this looks promising. But what got my attention and no in the best way, was that the game was still in Alpha since July 2021. But maybe those were just numbers, sometimes that happens and that does not mean that it´s not a great game . So I gave it a chance.

📕 This is a resume of my game journey:

-I finished the main quests in a few hours of playing. It was time to start the crafting. The first resource that you needed were the ones that were looted from  the different kind of fishes, for that, you needed to fish in different areas of the map and use different baits (not every fish liked the same bait, so you had to try some baits, without knowing witch was the right one until you got the fish). On the other hand, there was no way to know where that fish was and in witch type of water to find it. That´s not bad, actually to discover the game on the go It´s quiet nice, but in this game, I hit a block road that I´ll explain further on.

- With the loot from the different kind of fishes you were able to craft seeds, of course, you needed a certain amount of that specific fish loot to craft certain seeds.

Then, after you had harvest the seeds, waited for them to grow, and watered them after an unknown period of time, because that was also something that you couldn't know ( even if they could die and you  loose the crop) and “play music” to them to help them grow to finally harvest a certain amount of resources that were essential to craft anything else, from furniture, to clothes, to fish bait. That itself takes a lot of time. Ok. Those were the game rules and timing so no problem with that.

By the time I got to the harvest part, it had found, in my opinion,

⚙️🚫3 huge game mechanics mistakes :

1-You start with 200 in game coins but you can´t buy more if you run out of it, according to the official web site, there are many ways to get more coins but the only ones that worked for someone who just started was with the amount of in game playing time and the quests because the game events and other things someone can do were once in a blue moon or nowhere to be found.

2- You have to fish a lot first, to get seeds and get other resources. They give you a few fish bites to start with that are from a quest, but then you have to buy them with the in game coins and they weren't cheap. Here is when I hit the blocked road that I was talking about earlier: I ran out of them in one day, spent coins only in fish bait and I couldn't craft more fish baits  because I had to wait for the crops to be ready, so there was nothing else to do (you can´t buy inside game coins with $Alice) so I get back to the first point.

3-There aren't  any kind of “crops timers” available like in other games, so you don´t know when It´s the right time to water them (they could die if I you don´t do it on time), how long it takes for the different kind of seeds to grow and be ready to harvest(even when you´ve already planted them). You get some seeds from the initial quests, I think those are basic seeds, the common ones that you can get initially in every game, the most common crops and It took me 2 days to harvest them.

The timers are quiet basic assets that it should have had from start. If the idea is making the game more difficult to play, that´s not the part of the game to do it or at least, from my point of view, the best strategy. You can always add bugs that eat crops, people can forget to water them if they have to wait 2 days  for them to be ready, etc. The list it´s long- So in the meantime the only thing you can do it´s wait (a lot) to be able to fish more, go around the game trying to find new stuff to do and other players (in my first 3 days I only saw 2 player) and pray for the crops not to die to get the elements to craft something.

4-Quest log and lag: not good for tracking properly the ongoing quest and lag, not good for fishing. 

➡️The biggest Clue, an in game item : the blueprints.

The blueprints are the basic items  for crafting anything, the pattern.Like in other games you can get recipes, blueprints for crafting armors, weapons, etc.  With some quests, I manage to get blueprints for special ELLE´S items, like clothes, patterns and furniture. To craft them,  I needed $Alice to do so, and a lot of items to craft the NFTs. Of course, I was exited to get an exclusive ELLE NFT. I just got to craft only 3  because Alpha season 3 ended. When you play a game, you usually keep everything in your account, your REWARDS and you PROGRESSION. In Alice, you can only keep the NFTs that you crafted. That is what I was told on the official Telegram chat. And so I said to the moderator: hey! but I want to keep the exclusive ELLE´S blueprints that I´ve got as a REWARD after so many days an hours playing, so I can keep make those items next season. And he said: no, they will be erased with everything else that you got into the account, except for the NFTs, by next season and we still don´t know if our partnership with ELLE will continue or not. .. That  made a lot a noise for me: Let´s go back to the term of gamification: my  motivation, the objectives I wanted to achieve, the purpose of why I played all those days and hours including the in game rewards that I´ve got,  was ALL GONE. For me, there´s no way I will invest 150usd in land if I can´t keep a progression while they develop the game, if every time a season ends I loose everything in it.In general lines, those things take away the players motivation from keep playing, they are the opposite to achieve success. And what I´m talking about it´s something that you learn in the first year of the career of game development, and what most of the games, for not to say all, are based on. Imagine that mixed up with years of experience that a Senior Game Dev. has, what´s going on then?Because If the amount of players goes down, it´s because the company is creating a game that has no engagement.  Also, and as the moderator told me,  they still don´t know if they will keep working with ELLE, but of course it´s likely that the partner will not stay if they don´t see the growth and the benefits they can get from it. 

That´s why I think that not only the investment part it´s important, the white paper, the partners, etc. The progression in the developement and the game machanics can give you a HUGE hint about it too.

Thanks for reading, I hope it helps to check for other NFT games in developement!! 👾