What is 2132: Uprising
Explaining an ambitious, expansive, on-chain gaming product in a string of tweets is difficult. A blog post, or even a blog series, seemed like a more appropriate format. And so, I introduce to you the 2132: Uprising series from Dark Castle Labs. In this series we’ll dive deeper into the products vision, the connected NFT series, and how it’s all going to work together. For today’s topics, we are going to start with the basic questions, and then dive in deeper into specific topics in future updates. So, let’s get to the questions we are most frequently asked.
What is 2132: Uprising?
2132: Uprising is an online, on-chain, multiplayer game set in Earth’s future. It will feature mission centred team/squad-based game-play, as well as MMO elements such as clan and player housing, mixed with a multi-character progression system that allows players to grow and specialize in multiple ways. Items and resources within the game will be on-chain assets in the form of NFTs. And, while it’s still very early in the process, we have a few items very high on our wish list as far as integrations go to make our players characters and items transportable outside of our game world and into full blown metaverses. We’ll dive deeper into those things in the future. For now, suffice it to say that building a player’s connection to their characters and what they build in game is probably the most important part of the experience to us.
Why do an NFT drop?
First, it allows community involvement from day 1. In our first phase drop, “The Machines”, future players (or even people who are just interested in the story) get to own some exclusive assets that they’ll be able to use in game in the future. Holding this first series of NFTs allows us to reward our early supporters with exclusive content, follow-up air drops, in-game bonuses, early access to newly released items, and many more mechanisms to give value.
The part that we’re most excited about in doing NFT drops leading up to the game release though, is the opportunity to use these as a way to collaborate with our community. We would really like to see our community start building stories around their Mechs and Pilots that we could feature in our story, and possibly even become features of our game progression.
Why a game and a graphic novel?
It’s ambitious to take on two simultaneous projects that intertwine with each other like this, we know. We feel that we have the structure of a really great story and we really want to tell the parts that don’t lend themselves directly to game-play. We see an on-chain graphic novel as a way to tell the story we have, but also build and shape that story with the involvement of our community. We’re still exploring what’s possible, but we’ve got some ideas around generative storytelling that we are looking at as well.
Why Solana?
Well, as much as we would love to do the drop on Ethereum that everyone is already familiar with, it’s just not viable for our kind of project. We’re not a PFP project, and we’re not a pure-play art collectibles project either. Utility is key to what we drop, and so is long-term affordability. Sending Solana to another wallet can cost less than $0.01, and the transaction completes almost instantly. Minting might cost a bit more than that, but it’s still affordable and fast. Fast forwarding to a game experience, if one of our players buys a skin for their character, or wants to trade an item to their friend, can we expect them to wait an unknown amount of time for the block to confirm? Or schedule their transfer around a gas war? Or pay 100x more for the transaction fee than they would for the item? So, even though Solana as an NFT ecosystem is not as mature and doesn’t offer all of the tools we’re use to from working with Ethereum, it’s worth the learning curve for us in order to bring our product to market in a way that’s going to provide the best possible user experience for our community long term.
Are you the right team for the job?
We believe we are. The core nucleus of our technical team brings together collectively 50 years of digital product building experience. Sure, the NFT market is a little different and the technology is young, so not all the more established product building principles will apply. However, the fact that we’ve worked on many aspects of enterprise level software across a number of different industries for a really long time means that we’re already well versed in the mechanics of building, delivering, and supporting a large-scale product. Even the idea itself isn’t new. Two of us came up with the core concepts of what we’re building in 2132: Uprising well over a decade ago. Technology wasn’t there to build what we dreamed up back then, the online gaming market was still in its infancy, and we lacked the experience to build something like this from scratch. But with blockchain adoption being what it is today, and play-to-earn models growing in popularity every day, we’re seeing an opportunity to build out our dream project. And that’s what brought us together at Dark Castle Labs.
What are you going to do with the proceeds from the first NFT drops?
Build bigger, better things. The profits from our early phase drops go directly towards building out the talent on our development team and bringing our full vision to life. The idea is bigger than can be built just with the team we have. Additional 3d artists, developers, community managers, and so many more things will go into this project along the way. We’d like very much to stay independent throughout this journey, and this is our path to doing that.
Hopefully this gives you, our early supporters, a better idea of who we are and what goals we are working towards. This, obviously, is still a very high-level summary, and there is a lot more information to give. We’ll keep dropping that in smaller content posts along the way, and we’re looking forward to giving more detailed deep dives into our plans. Right now we’re looking forward to our first drop in the 2132: Uprising series, happening this Thursday, November 25th. If you aren’t already part of our community, join us on Discord! We’d welcome any feedback to the post, and any questions that you’d like to see covered in any follow ups.
