Axie shines again with Raylights
Land-based community mini-game is out
It’s always interesting to reconnect with game companies, so I was pleasantly surprised to catch up with Elina Arponen, the CEO of Finnish developer Quicksave Interactive.
I first encountered Arponen in 2015 when her then-company Tribe Studios was acquired by UK outfit Palringo to build out gaming on the messaging platform.
Post-Palringo, Quicksave was founded in 2017 with a similar focus of making simple-to-access experiences using HTML5, which eventually has led it into web3 and a deal to develop Axie Infinity: Raylights for Sky Mavis; a process that kicked off in early spring 2022.
A browser-based mini-game, Raylights is the first playable experience for Axie’s land NFTs, enabling owners to attempt to discover and grow different plants by randomly mixing up to ten minerals types in random sequences of up to six minerals to grow different plants.
This process also requires one Axie NFT, but the type of Axie doesn’t have any input in the plants grown. Once grown the plants can be placed on a representation of the owned land NFT as pure decoration.
In total, there are 355 plants, of which I’ve discovered a mere 15, with the entire Axie community having found 63.
One key factor is that while 3-ingredient plants only take 10 seconds to grow, 4-ingredient plants take one hour and I’m guessing the more complex combinations will take days.
Equally, it appears that most plants can only be grown on specific types of land NFTs: there are five of these: savannah, forest, arctic and mystic, with genesis being the most rare, so it looks like this will be a treasure hunt that continues for some time.
It’s also important to note that although it requires both land and Axie NFTs, the game is entirely off-chain.
This makes the development process more simple, particularly as the vast majority of Axie land NFTs are staked, earning daily AXS rewards, and so can’t interact with other smart contracts. To access Raylights, you connect your Ronin wallet but there are no on-chain transactions.
And it’s this simple approach to provide the first interactive utility for land NFTs that’s driven the development of Raylights.
“Land is a hugely ambitious project for Axie, but while we’re working on the Land Gameplay Community Alpha [due in Q4 2022], we wanted to demonstrate that these assets are interoperable and can be used in multiple ways,” Axie Infinity game project lead Philip La told me.
Arponen also stresses the deep co-operative element of the gameplay, which because of the large possibilities and long timeframes involved, will require a community-wide approach to solve the entire set of recipes for all 355 plants.
Indeed — in this context — La suggests Raylights could eventually involve on-chain rewards, probably based around who discovered which plants first. The game already fires up a notification if you’re one of the few 100 players to discover a plant, which I’ve experienced a couple of times.
Nothing like the joy of someone with a #1 status though.
But whatever the particular plan is for eventual on-chain rewards, the launch of Raylights is clearly just the beginning, with Arponen saying Quicksave plans to add new features over time.
And — more generally — it’s a project that’s demonstrative of the hard yards Sky Mavis has put in during the lows of 2022 to right a project many people have — wrongly — written off.
Such results can also be seen in Axie Infinity: Origins, which thanks to its redesign is now burning 12 times more SLP tokens than are being minted for in-game rewards.
Of course, this is not yet a significant figure as there are almost 40 billion live SLP tokens, but according to on-chain data, the game’s economic looks like it’s beginning to slowly tick over again.
So don’t be surprised if Raylights marks more than the green shoots arising from a simple gardening mini-game.
This Substack is sponsored by Hiro Capital: Specializing in oaks from acorns.
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