Author: FaultProofBen

Gm and welcome to the second-ever WASD Weekly!

I’m sure I’ll soon sound like a broken record - But It was another exciting week in the world of onchain gaming.

We had new game announcements, with Moving Castles revealing their upcoming title, The Cursed Machine.

Projects locked in funding, as Paima Studios was awarded a $1.4 million grant from Cardano. (Congrats to the team!)

And best of all, gamers gamed as Sky Strife wrapped up its highly successful playtest that saw more than 300+ players participate.

Onchain gaming is still in its infancy - But you can feel the energy and excitement building.

Without further ado:

Here’s the week’s biggest news, best content, my picks for three games to try out, and a look at Loot Royale from Blade DAO.

And of course…

…The S-Tier Meme Of the Week!!!

👇👇

The hottest news from the last week in onchain gaming and autonomous worlds.

• Moving Castles announces their upcoming game The Cursed Machine, with a November 2023 launch

• Paima Studios receives a $1.4M grant from Cardano to develop AW infrastructure

• Sky Strife wraps its 2-week playtest totaling 307 players and 355 matches

• Minters concludes the Rhascau pre-farming period and takes a snapshot for its upcoming $MINT airdrop

• Network States hosts their second playtest in as many weeks

Three onchain games to try out for yourself this weekend.

• Primodium on Caldera Testnet

• Roll Your Own On Starknet

• Pirate Nation on Arbitrum Nova

Catch up on WASD content and mints from the past week.

• Read & collect: 4 Onchain Games to Add to Your Watchlist

• Read & collect: Onchain Lore V: The Primodium Wars

The best non-WASD Content from around the ecosystem.

• Read: Brother, Can You Spare a 🔮- Vera and Kooshaza

• Read: On Business Models (Part 4) - Matt Dion

• Read: Thread on Horizontal Scaling for Onchain Games - Mohamed Fouda

• Read: MUD Core Devs Call - 9/28/23

Loot Royale is a turn-based battle royale game created by BladeDAO.

Inspired by IP from the NFT project Loot, in Loot Royale players compete on a 10x10 grid to be the last man standing in four-player PVP matches.

To help with this goal, players can open chests placed throughout the grid.

Chests play a special role in matches, as they can either increase players' fighting points (FT) to improve their odds in combat, or have the opposite effect by decreasing their FT.

Loot Royale utilizes a Stake-To-Play mechanism, as players can stake different amounts of $BLADE to participate in a match. At the end of a match, this BLADE is then distributed to the winner.

Loot Royale is built using Turbo, a framework created by AltLayer for developing custom, onchain gaming-optimized L2s, and live on testnet.

The game has managed to clean-up in recent community events, as it finished second in voting for the Realms Genesis Grants, and placed first in the AW Track at the HackZuzalu hackathon in September 2023.

I’m very eager to try out Loot Royale.

I think having chests strewn throughout the map that can influence the outcomes of matches is clever, as it helps spice up gameplay by adding more elements to it beyond simple combat.

As a degen, I’m also a fan of the incorporation of Stake-To-Play. I think that the ability to create higher stakes (pun intended) games should add intensity to matches without introducing any unsustainable financial mechanisms.

Finally, when the game launches on mainnet, I’m keen to see how the Turbo stack performs and the implementation details for Loot Royale’s integration with Loot NFTs, which a recent Medium post suggests will be used within the game to spawn matches.

Overall, I think Loot Royale looks like a very promising game – I can’t wait to play it and report back!

Unsurprisingly, Primodium dominated the WASD meme output this week.

Here’s my favorite from the ones I cooked up.

Thanks for reading!

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Have a great weekend, and see you all on Monday!